The Shill of the People

With apologies to Steven Pinker, who (correctly) keeps telling us that this is the best time to be alive: it sure doesn’t seem like it sometimes, at least not when we scan the bleak social and political landscape of the past year. But hope we must. In that spirit, the recent mid-term elections in the United States may be a source of some optimism for the future. On November 8, 2022, the voters of the world’s most important liberal democracy took a good look at the pack of populists hand-picked by the former president Donald Trump — the election deniers, the moralists, the hate-mongers — and, for the most part, said, “No, thanks.” So has the recent wave of far-right populism crested?

Populism — an anti-establishment political stance that positions the assumed will of “the people” against the supposed interests of “the elite”— is not the exclusive domain of the right. Think of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or the Syriza Party in Greece, both on the left. However, it is the...