THE PRINCIPLES OF POPULISM

Populism does have consistent features, which scholars cannot recognise due to their own bias.

By Daniel Jupp at Jupplandia.

A few days ago the former British Thatcherite minister Norman Tebbit died. In the 1980s Tebbit was noted as perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal ally in government. He was also a man noted for forthright bluntness and a very old fashioned rightwing contempt for the smooth politics of avuncular deception. Tebbit was always a stern figure, a steely eyed warrior in the perception of those who admired him, and a fanatical Gradgrind of Thatcherite economics in the minds of those who didn’t. There was nothing coddling or comforting about Tebbit. The satirical puppet show Spitting Image depicted him as an aggressive skinhead, appealing to the metropolitan leftist conception that anyone firmly and unapologetically rightwing had to be an ignorant thug, but also played on his somewhat cadaverous appearance and sepulchral reserve to suggest that he was ‘a creature of the night’, an undead or vampiric figure in the manner of Christopher Lee, but stripped of the aristocratic trappings.

In reality, of course, and very much like Thatcher was, Tebbit was far from the unfeeling monster that leftist scriptwriters depicted him as being. The fundamental misapprehension of Thatcherism from the Left was that it was a politics of greed and emotional indifference, that the Right acts out of coldness or incapacity to feel love or kindness or empathy. As with many such charges, and as something more obviously exposed in modern times where US Democrats in particular preach empathy while celebrating assassins, the charge of emotional coldness placed on Tebbit and Thatcher was an act of psychological projection. Because their leftist critics had no empathy for them or understanding of their motives, they presented them as inhuman monsters incapable of empathy.