Command Is a Mountaintop

Populism is probably the most misunderstood political concept with the possible exception of Democracy. The press, the political establishment, and even those who brand themselves as populists treat it as a force with its own will. To its detractors, it is a disease spreading across the West, the pressure behind the surge in “Far-Right” and “Far-Left” candidates. To those who use the term, or at least accept it, it is a liberating force, throwing off the vestiges of the ancien régime and bringing people into a new age of self-determination.

What must be accepted is that populism is not its own movement but rather a tool. Furthermore, populism has never once transferred power to the people; rather, it transfers power through the people to whoever mobilizes them. The underlying argument behind this explanation comes from the political theories of Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book On Power, and their modern synthesis by C.A. Bond in Nemesis.

Jouvenel, writing in occupied France, asks only the question: “How does power grow?” He treats power as an organism that seeks only to expand its realm and is indifferent to the carrier. The mechanism by which it does this is by facing subsidiaries, which during the medieval era were minor nobility, the church, and anyone in independent standing between the centre and the people. The whole of political history is a duel between the centre and these subsidiaries, and the weapon in this duel is the people. The monarch, who occupied the centre for most of history, could not subdue barons with his own power, but rather would go over their heads–down to the commoners–by offering them protection from their local lord. This was the high and the low against the middle.