People are to be found wherever you look, but “the people” is a different matter entirely. It’s a concept, not a reality: rather like “the masses”. Most men and women don’t see themselves as part of this faceless mob, but they might well regard others as part of it. As the cultural thinker Raymond Williams put it, masses are other people.
In ancient Athens, democracy meant government by the people, but the word demos had a resonance of the common people, what some might see as the rabble or riff-raff. In a similar way, the term “the people” might include William Hague and Lady Gaga, but it has a more specific reference to people who don’t usually count, the extras or background artists of human life, individuals who fall outside the official social framework. Mick Lynch is more authentically part of the people than Stephen Fry, but not because he’s “uneducated”. Jeremy Corbyn is “educated” but part of the people. (In the 19th century, “uneducated” meant often enough “didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge”.) In the New Testament narrative of the birth of Jesus, the angels are countless, the people are counted (there’s a census under way), and the shepherds don’t count. 1
Things are defined partly by what they exclude. All the individuals, or a nation taken together, constitute the population, but you arrive at the idea of the people by subtracting from this unwieldy mass. Some of them — slaves or “aliens” for example — may live in the country but not be citizens. What other people don’t belong to the people? Intellectuals, for a start. The intelligentsia has no loyalty to any particular place or set of national institutions. Because the mind can roam restlessly over the globe without local constraints, these cosmopolitan figures are thought to constitute a threat to both piety and patriotism. They represent what has been called “the view from nowhere”, and such bloodless abstractions are far removed from the living, breathing reality of the common folk.
This is why the phrase “conservative intellectual” has a mildly oxymoronic ring to it. Conservatives are enamoured of the local and parochial, of family, region and nation, whereas intellectuals are supposed to subject all that to a critique governed by reason rather than affection, logic rather than partisanship, universal principles rather than local allegiances. People who seem to come from nowhere in particular have a sinister, slightly alien quality about them, which accounts for the spooky music of the TV programme Mastermind. The music of University Challenge, by contrast, is a jolly little jingle, but this is because students aren’t exactly intellectuals, in fact sometimes not even intellectuals in the making, and in any case nobody finds them creepy.
The stereotypical intellectual, then, is really a Jacobin: cerebral, emotionally anaemic, eager to impose his abstract schemes on the messiness of human reality. Both Swift and Shakespeare were aware that ideas which have come unstuck from reality have a touch of madness and violence about them, and the great “English” antagonist of this deranged condition was Edmund Burke (he was of course Irish). In the English empiricist tradition, ideas must be rooted in the senses in order to be real. This is one reason why the novelist Anthony Trollope has always been popular among the British middle classes (Harold Macmillan once remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope), yet hasn’t an idea in his head. Once the Jacobins had passed into history, the stereotypical intellectual became the Marxist. The emotional anaemia of these outlandish creatures, not least their lack of humour, is clear enough to everyone who reads them.
Can aristocrats be part of the people? In one sense obviously not, since populism is nothing if not anti-elitist. In this respect, an essentially Right-wing ideology overlaps with a Left-wing one. Yet, successful elites aren’t those which maintain an aloof distance from ordinary people, but those which seek to sink their roots into the common soil and draw their energy from this source. The cultivated landowner admires the honest-to-goodness peasant. Hence the Wooster/Jeeves syndrome so central to English culture. Master and man must keep a certain respectful distance, to be sure, but beneath this they maintain a bond almost as intimate as that between man and wife. My Cambridge tutor had a civilised distaste for clichés but referred to his gardener as “the salt of the earth”. In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot tries to reconcile the minority culture of patricians like himself with the broader life of the nation. The poet W.B. Yeats saw shrewdly that if the Anglo-Irish landowning class to which he pledged his allegiance had managed to assume political leadership of the people, they might not have ended up having their grand houses burnt to the ground or being wheeled around Bournemouth in bath chairs.
Populism, then, can trade on the little man’s admiration for the great man. In the case of Nazi populism, the great man in question was of course Adolf Hitler. But Hitler was also a little man, morally as well as physically. No more commonplace incarnation of the destiny of the nation smirches the pages of history. The Spirit of the people shouldn’t have floppy hair and speak in a hoarse rasp. It was as though Jesus Christ had appeared on earth with a badly fitting wig and a wooden leg. As far as size goes, Nigel Farage has a similar advantage to the Führer. So the little man — the thrifty, industrious, aspiring member of the petty bourgeoisie, to whom both populism and fascism make their appeal — could look up to the Leader while at the same time finding in him a reflection of his own banality.
“Populism trades on the little man’s admiration for the great man.”
By pitting the people against the elite, populism aims to achieve an important political goal; but it does so only at the price of running into self-contradiction. It hopes to homogenise the people, and in doing so to suppress a number of vital conflicts within this supposedly unified body. Grotesque disparities of wealth, power, respect and recognition are brazenly papered over. Merchant bankers and garbage collectors share a common front against conventional liberal politics. The contradiction is that denouncing the elite also involves denouncing the faceless corporations on which populism ultimately depends. Despite their much-flaunted radicalism, populist politicians are no more eager to challenge the material interests underpinning the Western way of life than is the liberal metropolitan establishment they despise. The CEO of Tesco is part of the elite, but populists show a marked reluctance to send him packing. Deporting George Monbiot strikes them as a more attractive proposition.
In populist eyes, the people is self-identical — a single organism free of divisions or potentially subversive differences. Individuals may squabble over this or that, but the people itself is never wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God, as Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked (in Latin, no less). His tongue was, of course, lodged firmly in his cheek: populists believe in the people, but this isn’t the same as having faith in what actual men and women do and believe, such as chucking Rees-Mogg out in a general election.
Far from being self-identical, however, the people is always incomplete. In order to be itself, it needs an Other, whether you call it Jews, immigrants, Arabs, illegals or some other theatrically demonised bunch of aliens. You need to be reminded of who you are by contemplating the fearful sight of who you are not. Where would Farage and his cronies be without a regular supply of small boats?
Sometime towards the end of the 18th century, Europe was gripped by a peculiarly bad idea. The idea was that every ethnic group had a right to its own political state, a notion which lies at the heart of Romantic nationalism. One nation, one Reich. For democrats, people have the right of self-determination; for populist nationalists, the people, ethnically defined, have this right. The distinction turns on the definite article. Ethnicity had been introduced into the argument about whether we should be ruled by ourselves or others. People, in all their conflicts of ideas and clashes of interests, had been transformed into a homogenous entity by virtue of being Poles or Slovenes. This proved from time to time an effective way of shaking off colonial oppression, but in some circles it also made being a Pole or a Slovene more important than anything else about you.
And this proved highly convenient for those governing powers who didn’t want men and women to go around describing themselves as socialists or feminists, Christians or Hindus, traditionalists or modernists. The problem was that if you looked far back enough, ethnic identities tended to disappear. Everyone turned out to be an outsider, interloper, carpetbagger, migrant or blow-in. Exile seemed natural to the human condition. No piece of land was the intrinsic possession of a specific tribe. Like Robinson Crusoe, what you find when you land on an apparently unoccupied island is a human footprint.
