Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Of course the cohorts of the present say nothing about the politics of the future if people change their values as they age. Perhaps if you are a populist at twenty-five you have no heart, and if you are not a populist at forty-five you have no brain (to adapt a meme that has been said about liberals, socialists, communists, leftists, Republicans, Democrats, and revolutionists and that has been attributed to various quotation magnets, including Victor Hugo, Benjamin Disraeli, George Bernard Shaw, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and Bob Dylan). But whoever said it (probably the 19th-century jurist Anselme Batbie, who in turn attributed it to Edmund Burke), and regardless of which belief system it’s supposed to apply to, the claim about life-cycle effects on political orientation is false.⁴⁵ As we saw in chapter 15, people carry their emancipative values with them as they age rather than sliding into illiberalism. And a recent analysis of 20th-century American voters by the political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman has shown that Americans do not consistently vote for more conservative presidents as they age. Their voting preferences are shaped by their cumulative experience of the popularity of presidents over their life spans, with a peak of influence in the 14–24-year-old window.⁴⁶ The young voters who reject populism today are unlikely to embrace it tomorrow.

Figure 20-1: Populist support across generations, 2016

Sources: Trump: Exit polls conducted by Edison Research, New York Times 2016. Brexit: Exit polls conducted by Lord Ashcroft Polls, BBC News Magazine, June 24, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36619342. European populist parties (2002–2014): Inglehart & Norris 2016, fig. 8. Data for each birth cohort are plotted at the midpoint of their range.

How might one counter the populist threat to Enlightenment values? Economic insecurity is not the driver, so the strategies of reducing income inequality and of talking to laid-off steelworkers and trying to feel their pain, however praiseworthy, will probably be ineffective. Cultural backlash does seem to be a driver, so avoiding needlessly polarizing rhetoric, symbolism, and identity politics might help to recruit, or at least not repel, voters who are not sure which team they belong to (more on this in chapter 21). Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals. Part of the problem, over the long term, will dissipate with urbanization: you can’t keep them down on the farm. And part will dissipate with demographics. As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.⁴⁷

Still, a puzzle in the rise of authoritarian populism is why a shocking proportion of the sectors of the population whose interests were most endangered by the outcome of the elections, such as younger Britons with Brexit, and African Americans, Latinos, and American millennials with Trump, stayed home on election day.⁴⁸ This brings us back to a major theme of this book, and to my own small prescription for strengthening the current of Enlightenment humanism against the latest counter-Enlightenment backlash.

I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them. “Charge the cockpit or you die!” shrieked a conservative essayist, comparing the country to the hijacked flight on 9/11 that was brought down by a passenger mutiny.⁴⁹ “I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,” flamed a left-wing advocate of “the politics of arson.”⁵⁰ Even moderate editorialists in mainstream newspapers commonly depict the country as a hellhole of racism, inequality, terrorism, social pathology, and failing institutions.⁵¹

The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: “What do you have to lose?” If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question. Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.