Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters.

A sense of deep economic exclusion across the Western world has fomented populist political backlashes like Brexit, Trump, and Marine Le Pen – and, now in Canada, the Freedom Convoy and the rise of Pierre Poilievre.?In?Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters , Canadian scholars Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville provide highly-original, data-driven insight to show why populism has steamrolled political parties of the centre and left, and how policymakers can adjust course before it’s too late.?

Reclaiming Populism?argues citizens are not in fact angry at unequal economic outcomes, but rather at economic unfairness that violates the rules of meritocracy.??That is a key reason why voters routinely reject economic equalization measures: the recent French Presidential Election was a contest of the political right, Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left platform led to disaster for the UK Labour Party, and even US Latinos swung toward Trump in 2020 on fears that Democrats were becoming “socialist.”??

The authors demonstrate that, incredibly, inequalities of income and wealth badly fail to predict the geography of populism. Instead, populism is closely associated with a different factor – low social mobility. Citizens are fed up with a rigged system where success is unfairly influenced by what family you were born into, when it should depend fairly on hard work and good ideas. But these disenchanted voters do not want to eliminate the possibility of success through aggressive redistribution; they want to make success fair again, because they want a shot at it for themselves and their children.??

The concrete stories of citizens whose economic opportunities have been unfairly stymied are tragic. Some have lost their jobs in an environment of breakneck globalization without the supports in place to find new employment. Other have been bankrupted by medical costs, or cannot start a career because of overbearing labour regulations.?Reclaiming Populism?contends that these injustices are doubly appalling because, in many instances, the political mainstream had the chance to address them but did not. This feeble response worsened the winds of illiberal populism, when it could have strengthened confidence in liberal democracy.?

One key problem the book exposes is the way ‘woke’ politics refuses to take populist complaints seriously – a trend embodied by Hillary Clinton when she called a quarter of American voters “deplorables,” and more recently by Justin Trudeau when he told a Jewish Member of Parliament she could stand with “people who wave swastikas” during the Freedom Convoy crisis. This tendency is an enormous mistake,?Reclaiming Populism?argues, because populist voters have legitimate economic grievances that will boil over if left unaddressed.?

The authors also contend that the reigning political paradigm of big versus small government has hampered decades of policymaking because it is insufficiently nuanced to address social mobility. Small-government countries like the US and UK have rock-bottom social mobility due to missing policy inputs needed for equal opportunities like affordable and high-quality healthcare, education, and transport infrastructure. Yet notable big-government countries like France and Italy also have abysmal social mobility because they focus too much on equalizing outcomes. Overzealous labour regulations and excessive taxes hold back economic competitiveness; citizens thus face low wages and mass unemployment, with too few opportunities to move up the income ladder.?Reclaiming Populism?summarizes these problems with the framing that mainstream politicians must embrace “equal opportunity and fair unequal outcomes.”?

All this is highly relevant for the political challenges Canada faces today.?Reclaiming Populism?notes that Canada has one of the highest rates of social mobility in the world, which is why it has yet to elect someone like Trump. Yet the book also emphasizes that economic fairness is a continuously moving target. Canada now faces the breakdown of the public medical system, escalating housing costs, unfair?tax policies that favour capital over labour, and the difficulties blue-collar workers have experienced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.??

If these trends continue to worsen, perhaps Canada could slide into economic unfairness and US-style populism.?Reclaiming Populism?stands out both for its insight on these mechanisms, and uniquely as a how-to policy guide to responding effectively.

By Mark Borkowski is president of Toronto based Mercantile Mergers & Acquisitions Corporation.