How to beat the radical right: “Stop doing stupid shit!”

The Lowdown interview with Yascha Mounk

Anyone thinking that populism would discredit itself has learned one hell of a lesson.

In 2021 Donald Trump urged his supporters to storm Congress. “Whatever else happens, at least that thug’s finished,” I thought at the time.

Now he’s back in power and smashing up the West.

In 2016, Nigel Farage helped drive the UK out of the EU. A majority of the country now realises Brexit was a mistake. But the failure of his project has in no way inhibited Farage.

If there were an election tomorrow in the UK, Farage could win it.

For the latest Lowdown podcast, the political theorist Yascha Mounk joined me.

Yascha is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persuasion, he has his own Substack (which is well worth reading) and is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time on the anti-democratic roots of woke politics . He is also Professor of Practice at the School of Advanced International Studies of John Hopkins University in the U.S.

You can listen to our conversation here on Apple

On Spotify

On Amazon and on all other platforms via this RSS link

We emphasised two points

Populist movements will not disappear and there is no going back to the world of the early 2000s.

Meanwhile, if they want to beat them, centre-left politicians and voters must stop handing the Trumps and Farages of the world such easy wins.

The second point is more controversial, and one I return to repeatedly. In effect it tells left-wingers that they must throw out ideas they believe to be moral because they strike swing voters as crazy.

They must then campaign for “moderate” politicians they deplore for the greater good of stopping the radical right.

As Yascha said in the interview,

“I think professors and journalists and many members of liberal professions have too little awareness of how their willingness to impose their values on society backfires spectacularly.”

As I am so often critical of the right, here is a change of target.

To go with the interview is a hard but I hope fair critique of the roots of American woke politics, which explains why it so easily degenerates into witch hunts, purity contests and sloganeering.

The piece is paywalled, so I must give you the hard sell and say that paying subscribers allow me to write without pressure from advertisers or owners. Annual subscriptions work out at £1.15 ($1.45) a week, which is a pretty good deal, even if I do say so myself!

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The roots of wokeness

Signage in Los Angeles during protests against the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. (waltarrrrr//Creative Commons)

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right “woke” is now a synonym for “anything I can’t abide”. Overuse has made the insult meaningless.

On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists.