In his address to the nation last Wednesday night, President Biden declared that America was at an “inflection point,” at which people would have “to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.”
He might have added that the entire Western world stands at the same “rare moment in history.”
Biden was referring to the growing threat of populism, which has been on the rise in Europe and the United States for several years.
Like most political ideologies, populism is more easily described than precisely defined.
Broadly speaking, populism is an ideology that pits ordinary people, often led by a charismatic leader, against elites (political, economic and/or intellectual), whom it accuses of governing in their own interests. Populist leaders usually construct a narrow, often ethnically based definition of national identity and rely heavily on scapegoating those they deem a threat to that identity.
Authoritarianism — the concentration of power in the hands of a small group or a single individual — often goes hand-in-hand with populism. Populism thrives on fear, which can lead otherwise rational people to follow a leader who promises to deliver them from perils, real or imagined.
The crisis of European democracy after World War I followed by the Great Depression allowed populism to thrive from 1922-1945. It reached its fullest expression in the fascist dictatorships of Italy, Germany and Spain, but also spawned far-right movements across Europe.
Even traditional bastions of democracy faced the threat.
At its peak in 1934, the British Union of Fascists had 50,000 members. Broadcasting from his church in Detroit during the 1930s, the rabid antisemite and Nazi sympathizer Father Charles Coughlin attracted thousands of listeners to his weekly radio broadcasts. On Feb. 20, 1939, the neo-Nazi German American Bund held a rally in Madison Square Garden attended by 20,000 people.
Today, the Western world is experiencing another wave of far-right populism, stoked by fear and based on identity politics.
Neither the U.S. nor any country in Europe is facing a crisis remotely like the Great Depression, but all have experienced significant demographic change and economic transformation. The uncertainty and anxiety these changes produce have made voters susceptible to populist leaders promising a return to “the way things used to be.”
European and American populists see immigrants as the greatest threat to their well-being and identity. For decades, a declining native population left many European nations dependent on the labor of immigrants and guest workers.
The 2011 Syrian refugee crisis followed by a steady wave of desperate people crossing the Mediterranean from Africa has increased the percentage of non-native Europeans. This demographic change fueled anger at the cost of caring for refugees and led to acrimonious debates over how many newcomers Europe could absorb. Populist politicians capitalized on this fear and anger.
The poster child of the new populism in Europe is Viktor Orban of Hungary.
Orban first got elected in 2010 with an appeal to Magyar (the Hungarian majority group) nationalism. Once in power, he curtailed the independence of the judiciary, limited freedom of the press and rigged the electoral system so that he could win large parliamentary majorities in the next three elections without ever garnering a majority of the popular vote.
MAGA-supporting Republicans greatly admire Orban, who has spoken several times at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
With its experience of dictatorship under Benito Mussolini, Italy should have been wary of a populist leader, but in 2022, voters gave Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, which has historic ties to Italian Fascism, a plurality of parliamentary seats, paving the way for her to become prime minister.
In a speech before the election, she summed up her political philosophy: “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.” She also said “no” to “Islamist violence,” “mass migration,” big international finance” and “the bureaucrats of Brussels, and “yes to secure borders.”
With a similar anti-immigration, anti-European Union message, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party won the largest block of seats in the Dutch parliament in November.
In June, the far-right Alternative for Germany party polled second in the country’s European Union parliamentary elections.
A hastily assembled leftist coalition prevented the far-right National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, who shares the xenophobic views of Meloni and Wilders, from winning the Fench national election. Nonetheless, it won 140 seats, up from 89 in 2022.
Although Labour won the United Kingdom general election on July 4, its immigration policy promised to “reduce the reliance on overseas workers, address home-grown skills shortages and ensure that hard work is rewarded with proper wages and conditions.”
British politicians across the political spectrum remember that anti-immigrant sentiment encouraged the 2016 vote to leave the European Union.
Donald Trump’s movement embodies contemporary American populism. Like his European counterparts, Trump exploits identity politics.
For many of his followers, “Make America Great Again” means “make America white and Christian again.” This ideology appeals to white working-class men who have lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs and blame their misfortune on people of color and women (both of whom they consider privileged by affirmative action) and, above all, foreigners.
Like Orban, Meloni and Wilders, Trump has made migrants the essential scapegoats of his populist movement. He has accused people entering the country illegally of stealing American jobs and committing crimes. He has called some immigrants “animals” and “not human.”
Populism is the worldview Biden called on Americans to reject; pluralism is the alternative he wants us to embrace. Pluralism is the belief that racially, religiously and culturally diverse groups can peacefully coexist in a democratic society.
In the contest between populism and pluralism, the United States has a distinct advantage. The country is far more diverse than any in Europe, and it is becoming even more so.
Census projections indicate that, by 2045, the U.S. population will be 49.7 percent white, 24.6 percent Hispanic, 13.1 percent Black, 7.9 percent Asian and 3.9 percent multiracial.
With wisdom based on his 50 years of public service, Biden calls on us to celebrate that diversity, not reject it.
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat .”