Illiberal Social Democracy: Ireland's Populist Future?
The following first appeared on the Substack ‘Creeve Rua’ and is syndicated with the permission of the author.
Populism in free state history
‘The parties called "populist" by the media have not chosen that description of themselves. From France and Germany to Italy, Holland and Austria, from Brexiteers to Trumpists, they pursue causes within their own nations, and have in common only that they are opposed to the neoliberal establishments and worldview on cultural, ideological and economic grounds.’1
In the future, there may come a year where Fianna Fáil / Fine Gael’s post-Civil War 100 year stranglehold over the imagination of our nation finally began to crack. While the water charges protests, Republican movement and other instances of public outcry suggested a nascent populism within Irish society, the electorate’s compliance with the Anglocentric status quo in Leinster House has remained intact. Yet, the eruption of Independents and new parties in the local elections, the resounding NÍL / NÍL victory in the two referendums to this week’s General Election — there is at least some potential for change.
What shape this change will take, and how best to harness it in constructive ways are questions which remain unanswered, due to how early we are in the populist process. At this point, it is vital to build the intellectual infrastructure of what an alternative Irish political programme would look like, particularly one that can move beyond rhetorical populism, and actually institutionalise sovereignty as the essential policy-goal of the state once again.
Before outlining what exactly that could look like, it's worth noting what the worst case scenario is.
The catastrophic failure of Anglosphere populism
‘Since attracting blue-collar votes at the same time as support from the business community was the objective, it simply did not matter if the messages to different audiences conflicted. Workers were to be reassured that our sovereign borders remain unviolated by small boat-loads of asylum seekers, whilst businesses could fly in as many jumbo loads of temporary immigrants on 457 visas as they pleased. Concerns over urban congestion and rising house prices were to be waved away by Productivity Commission reassurances that business-induced immigration only serves to grow the national skills base and the national wealth.’ — labour economist on Australian populism.
With our Left taking from British Trotskyism, and Fine Gael adopting Thatcherite monetarism over the years, it's natural some Irish radicals will repeat the same mistake, and follow our perfidious neighbour's decade-long lead in establishing a national-populist alternative. The only issue with this, is that Anglosphere populism has been a monumental disaster.
From Brexit, Trump, Abbott in Australia and more recent Covid populism in Canada — the last ten years has seen a rise of sovereigntist resistance in English-speaking countries, but in every case the majority's righteous opposition to globalization has been channelled into supporting the same globalist neoliberalism which caused the original backlash:
The Tories in the UK for instance won an historic landslide in 2019, on a campaign of ‘hard-hat’ labour nationalism, only to form a totally internationalist, infiltrated and anti-worker regime which embraced mass immigration (increasing immigration from 184,000 in 2019 to a record peak of 764,000 in 2022), and flirted with planting the communities that voted for them with Hong Kong colonies.
Down under, the same trend had already been played out with the traditionally neoliberal Liberal Party, swinging to the rhetoric of hard-border populism with Tony Abbott's ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’. Soaking up all the country's nativist energy into opposition to ‘illegal trafficking of refugees’ with the government ending up maintaining historic-high levels of immigration.
This bait and switch pattern will most likely continue next year with the inevitable victory of Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party over Trudeau's mass-immigration regime in Canada. To be fair, Poilievre and the Conservatives do not even pretend to be concerned with sovereignty or nationalism.
While the examples could continue, the common trend here is clear: Anglicised conservative parties are particularly proficient in sucking all of a country's nativist, anti-globalization feelings, and funnelling it into further globalised deregulation and financialization. They also eternally associate nationalism with austerity, financialization and economic individualism in the public mind, making voters think that they have to choose between borders and welfare. Voters are promised sovereignty and economic nationalism, but they get soaring energy bills for the elderly, fuel tax hikes and overall austerity — as well as the mass immigration they thought they were voting against.
There are many explanations for why the Anglicised right suffers this poverty, but the main explanation is simply that the essence and origin of post-war Anglo-conservatism is the economic liberalism of the Mont Pelerin Society. Unlike Ireland (with its neutrality and affinity with corporatism, and the French right's Gaullist tradition), the heroes of English-speaking conservatism such as Thatcher, Reagan and Canada’s Mulroney all grew out of Hayekian Liberalism, and its assault on the ‘closed’ nation-state. Being the genealogical origin of Soros’ concept of the Open Society, this ideology seeks to liberate commercial and creative classes from the confines of all forms of organised social constraint, culminating in the total elimination of tradition and society itself (There is no such thing as society).
Unfortunately for Neoliberals, anti-society politics is thoroughly unpopular with, well, society — and so the electoral strategy usually adopted is that of appealing to social conservatism, nativism and sovereignty, no matter how little they mean it, and how nonsensical of an alliance this is. If Ireland’s anti-establishment forces follow in adopting an alien, liberal-individualist variation of nationalism, we can expect decades of righteous populist energy used up to further a false-nationalist alternative, that not only blows potentially our only chance of victory, but could also further worsen our global enslavement.
Thankfully, there is another path populism can follow.
Take the Danes for example
‘For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration, and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.’ - Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark.2
While perfect comparisons will never exist, Denmark is an extremely well-educated, highly developed Northern European EU service economy with a population of just over 5 million, and for the past half decade, it has had one of the most radical populist governments in the West. Well before the popularisation of the ‘remigration’ meme, the Danish state has institutionalised a shift from integration and liberalisation to explicit repatriation and cultural nationalism. Most striking however, is that this has all been done without the contribution, or existence of, a centre-right conservative movement. Instead, it has actually been the Left, lead by Mette Frederiksen of the Socialdemokratiet party, who have whole-heartedly implemented these policies. Why? Because of the overwhelming success of the Danish People’s Party and their strategy of welfare chauvinism.
Setting a vital example for other populist parties, the DPP grew out of the naïve and disorganised anti-establishment populism of the Progress Party, much more akin to the right-wing neoliberalism spoken of before. Founding members of the DPP sought to escape the ‘anarchistic conditions’ of nascent Danish populism3, and instead embraced an intellectually coherent programme of social and economic nationalism, steeped in the philosophical theory of the Nouvelle Droite, as well as Danish religious traditionalism (such as the Lutheran movement Tidehverv).4
This unique nationalist programme, particularly in the late 2000s and early 2010s, emphasised economic sovereignty from Brussels, the strengthening of labour unions and a welfare policy most similar to that of Danish socialists. While an egregious heresy from the perspective of most ‘right-wing’ nationalists, this platform was an overwhelming success, especially when working class voters were given the choice between expansive welfarism, with a reduction in immigration — and neoliberal austerity, with an influx of mass immigration. Explaining the Social Democrats shift toward nationalism, the 2015 election saw the DPP winning one fifth of the vote, forcing the change in thinking.
Poetically, since the overwhelming success of Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, the DPP have gone full circle under Morten Messerschmidt, recently returning to the economic liberalism and globalism of the traditional Western right-wing — only to face their worst ever election result, with 2.6% of the vote. It seems nationalist social democracy is here to stay in Denmark.
The wider trend away from economic liberalism
‘No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed, deliberately, to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose. To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders. Global Britain – remember that slogan. That is what they meant.’ - British social democrat Keir Starmer, several days ago.5
‘Far too many corporations have chosen to abuse our temporary measures employed in exploiting foreign workers while refusing to hire Canadians for a fair wage. Businesses should no longer rely on cheap foreign labour. My message to them is that there is no better time to hire and invest in Canadian workers.’ - icon of social democracy, PM Justin Trudeau.
It’s worth noting also, that Denmark is not alone in this seemingly syncretic platform of illiberal economics and populist cultural politics. Firstly, all the catastrophic anglosphere examples I gave earlier have far older and more sophisticated schools of thought, which tended to dominate Nationalism prior to the coup of globalist neoliberals in the West, and have had rumblings of a renaissance in recent years.
In Australia, prior to (and still in part today) ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ there was the economic nationalist and protectionist, Hansonism. In both Canada and England, there was the paternalistic and anti-capitalist Red Toryism. Even the United States, the bastion of globalised, individualist and financialised conservatism, the pre-Goldwater ‘Old-Right’ was lot more corporatist — reflected in what Sam Francis referred to as the Socialism of the ‘Middle-American-Radical’.
Far more pertinent however, are the other modern examples of nationalist social democracies, such as in Sweden and Slovakia. While more economically moderate, Sverigedemokraterna have positioned themselves as protectionist defenders of the welfare state (in an albeit classically liberal coalition government), as against the neoliberal globalisation of mass immigration. More convincingly, Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer–SD have dominated modern Slovakian politics on a platform of isolationist left-wing nationalism. There is also the Māori-led economic nationalist party New Zealand First taking part in 2 of its country’s last 3 administrations (the first of which with the Labour Party), and then there is nationalist Shinzo Abe of Japan’s alliance with the self-declared ‘humanitarian socialist’ Komeito party.
If any reader feels as though these examples are too disparate to demonstrate a trend, one need only look at some of the most prominent electoral headlines of the past 12 months to see the overwhelming momentum of (at least rhetorical) welfarist populism:
East Germany has exploded this year as a battleground between the national-populist faction of the AfD, as well as the explicitly patriotic socialist BSW.
Donald Trump won a landslide victory in vital swing states partially due to the vital support of Labourite Republican JD Vance.
The Labour Party and Keir Starmer in many ways reversed the historic landslide of Boris Johnson’s (rhetorically) Red Tory victory of 2019, with a rhetorical strategy of patriotic social democracy.
Of course, these may not be the most convincing, substantive or attractive instances of this trend (particularly the latter), but they serve to demonstrate that nationalist campaigns are heavily complimented by an attachment to proactive pro-family social policy; such as trade protectionism, labour cooperation and defence of the native welfare state. The same equally applies for anti-Capitalist campaigns being heavily complimented by a traditionalist cultural approach.
Is Patriotic Social Democracy Ireland’s future?
‘After the second World War, German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) wondered why ordinary Germans had carried out mass murder. He suspected that some/many people have personality traits that predispose them to submit to authority figures and to mistreat people they consider to be their inferiors….But now the study by Costello and others has confirmed the reality of left-wing authoritarianism’ - recent study on the psychology of non-conservative illiberalism.6
Thankfully for us, there are few countries where economic populism and cultural nationalism go so obviously hand-in-hand than in Ireland. For years, this exact point has been quietly warned about by the nation’s neoliberal intelligentsia — jealously guarding the Progressive Democrat model of a socially progressive, economically globalised and totally de-nationalised ‘knowledge-economy’ from the hoards of nationalist working and lower middle class rednecks, who do not share their cultural and economic liberalism.
Dubbed ‘the sleeping giant of Irish politics’, we are wholly due the emergence of an explicitly nationalist movement which is illiberal on economics and willing to use the nation-state to engineer a coherent, industrial and productive nation which puts the welfare and wages of the nation’s families first, against financial speculators, vulture funds and global special interests.
The lethargic lack of vision in this year's general election speaks to this point even more: the Irish people are crying out for a coherent, ambitious and forward-thinking national economic programme to counter homelessness, the emigration of our youth and the overwhelming reliance on foreign direct investment. Are populists up to the task, or will they will retreat into illusory confines of reactionary liberalism, deferring intellectualism and post-victory policy to others?
If Nationalists and Populists aren’t willing to take this opportunity head-on, then it will simply be taken by someone who is more deserving of seizing the electoral spoils that it offers.
Footnotes
1
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/desmond-fennell-in-defence-of-populism-1.2912713
2
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/11/denmark-election-matte-frederiksen-leftwing-immigration
3
Richter-Jørgensen, Christian Bjerre; Frøstrup, Freja; Abel Lytken, Louise; Gerion Johansen, Christina (2004). "Dansk Folkeparti - en succes" [The Danish people's party - a success]. Roskilde University Digital Archive (in Danish). p. 9.
4
Hervik, Peter. 2011. The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. Berghahn Books. p. 25.
5
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-migration-28-november-2024
6
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/left-wing-authoritarianism-mirrors-far-right-research-finds-1.4729300