What happened? Posed as a rhetorical question, the title of Hillary Clinton’s election memoir manifests the confused anguish of the global expert class over the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States. Had Clinton lost to Bernie Sanders or a generic “alternative” Republican, the world would not have stood still. But it did stand still for President Trump. Experts of all kinds decry his lack of qualifications, recoil at his speech and behavior, and warn of the gathering threat to the future of democracy. Trump is crass, certainly. But a threat to democracy? Trump is a populist and a boor, but he is no dictator. And his time in office has been anything but a march to crush all opposition: the Republican Congress can’t decide whether to work with him or against him and a hostile judiciary routinely challenges his every order. If Trump is a dictator, he is not a very good one. Overall, his administration is probably best described as “beleaguered” rather than “tyrannical.”

The closest the United States has ever come to a true populist tyranny was the Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–1837). The modern Democratic Party was born in the election of 1828 with Jackson at its head. The Nashville patriarch Jackson, a war hero, Indian fighter, property developer, and largescale slave owner, won a landslide victory over the Boston patrician John Quincy Adams. The incumbent President Adams was like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all rolled into one: the son of a President, a Harvard professor, and a former Secretary of State. No one was more qualified to be President than he was. But Jackson had the charisma – and the votes.

Jackson portrayed himself as a man of the people, and the crowds at his inauguration really were the largest ever recorded at the time. After taking the oath of office, he rode his own horse to the White House, where he threw the doors open to the public. Once in power, he vetoed a bill that would have reauthorized the Bank of the United States (the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Federal Reserve), earning the wrath of the financial establishment. To maintain his popularity, Jackson forcibly dispossessed Native Americans, fought a proxy war with Mexico over Texas, and conspired to repress the freedom of speech of anti-slavery activists. Through such policies he won reelection with a second landslide victory in 1832.

It is hard to imagine Trump’s Mar-a-Lago ever becoming a site of tourist pilgrimage like Jackson’s former slave plantation, the Hermitage. Nor is it easy to imagine Trump riding a horse to work on his first day in office, even if his Secretary of the Interior did. Yet despite being labeled “King Andrew” by his opponents, Jackson respected the two-term tradition set by George Washington and did not run for the third term that he surely would have won (the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting Presidents to two terms was still more than a century in the future). The United States Constitution and system of government held firm, and Jackson’s hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren, was booted out after one term.

Jackson was vilified by the liberal “Whigs” of his day, but “Jacksonian Democracy” has come down to us as a byword for the idea that “government is controlled by the people” and “that a nation exists to serve its citizens,” in the words of Donald Trump’s inaugural address. Though such populist demands are often dismissed by political theorists as leading to a degenerate “majoritarian” form of democracy, ordinary people might be forgiven for assuming that the whole point of democracy is majority rule. Majority rule, the populist core of Jacksonian Democracy, does not imply any particular policy platform. It merely implies that the people be placed at the center of the political process. It is the demand of the disenfranchised that they be heeded and heard. As with Jackson, so with Trump.

Democracy is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, the government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Much repeated, Lincoln’s mantra is little understood. It encapsulates, in one slogan, the strengths of three different political traditions. Government of the people, of the whole people in a single unified nation, is at the heart of conservatism. Government by the people, ensuring all people their due share in their own government, is at the heart of liberalism. And government for the people, for the benefit of the great majority of the people, is at the heart of progressivism. In balance (and in tension), conservatism, liberalism, and progressivism all contribute to the health and vitality of democracy.

Out of balance, they can destroy it. Over time, liberalism has evolved from a philosophy of individual freedoms balanced by the freedoms of others into a philosophy of individual rights that take precedence over those of the democratic polity itself. Ensuring all people the right to share in their own government is certainly a good thing, but once a privilege is defined as a “right” it slips out of the realm of democratic decision-making and into the realm of personal entitlement. As the list of such unalienable rights grows, the power to govern for the people slips out of the hands of the people and into the hands of experts, the experts who through education, social status, or sheer rhetorical agility are able to gain for themselves the authority to define those rights. The authority to identify new rights in effect gives its holders the power to define the limits of democracy itself. This authority forms the basis for the “new authoritarianism” of the book’s title.

Liberalism is not some kind of problem or necessary evil. Liberalism is a good thing. But conservatism and progressivism are good things, too. The danger in today’s liberalism is that many liberals no longer accept the fundamental legitimacy of these other ways of thinking about political society. Worse, liberals are apt to use their control over elite political discourse to delineate those ideas that are acceptable from those that are not. This is no idle power. Internet search providers, social networks, and even web hosting services are increasingly acceding to liberal pressure to control speech in much the same way as traditional publishers and broadcast networks have always controlled access to audiences. The freedom to speak only to yourself is no freedom at all. This is the tyranny that threatens Anglo-American democracy: the “tyranny of the expert class.”

The simple fact is that Donald Trump is not the leader of a white supremacist revolution that is sweeping America. The Stormtroopers in the street are more likely to be Star Wars fans than neo-Nazis. But the only way to know that is to talk to people, not to vilify people. Blocking people on social media – or worse, demanding that internet companies censor what people can hear – is no way to go about fostering political conversation. Tolerance is what fosters conversation. For many years, tolerance was the watchword of the liberal intelligentsia, and education its default strategy. Over the last three centuries of Anglo-American history, this gently-gently approach to political change has proven remarkably successful. People in the United States, United Kingdom, and much of the rest of the world are now less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, and more liberal-minded than ever.

Today’s liberals seem determined to throw away that noble record in the pursuit of an ideological authority that puts them at odds not just with national electorates, but with democracy itself. Populism, if not a positive alternative for setting politics on a new and better course, is at least a powerful force for breaking the tyranny of the expert class. It is the old antidote to the new authoritarianism. People looking for a political savior in this age of unbelief might have hoped for a more plausible paladin than Donald Trump. But there are reasons to hope that we will have a better politics after the Trump Presidency than we could ever have had without it.

I am an American academic living in Australia. That gives me both a personal stake in and a strategic distance from the tumultuous events of the Trump era. On January 20, 2017, I watched President Trump’s inaugural address with the interest of a citizen and the eagerness of a social scientist. Along with everyone else, I expected to hear a speech like no other that had ever been delivered from the Capitol balcony. But the speech I heard was very different from the speech heard by the rest of the expert class. Where others detected reverberations of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, I recognized the long-silent call of old-fashioned American populism – and I liked it. I have colleagues who marched out on January 21 to organize neighborhood self-defense associations. I sat down to write a book.

I would like to thank John O’Sullivan, CBE, for reading that first manuscript and strongly encouraging its eventual publication; Dr. James Kierstead, for his insightful advice on the further development of the book; Aija Bruvere, for reading and discussing repeated working drafts; Melinda Mitchell, for expeditiously returning draft chapters with overwhelming praise and well-targeted corrections; Chris Weston, for his valuable suggestions about the fallibility of experts; and Heather E.G. Brownlie, Esq., AICP, for her detailed comments on the text and enthusiastic support for the project as a whole.

Moving closer to the final draft, I must thank my literary agent, Peter Bernstein, for believing in me and in the book. My Polity editor, Dr. George Owers, made important intellectual contributions to the development of the manuscript, calling to mind a lost golden age of publishing in which editors were true collaborators in giving birth to great books. Two anonymous reviewers chosen by Dr. Owers provided positive and even transformative feedback that contributed to a much improved text. And Fiona Sewell provided (non-authoritarian) expert copy-editing, offering many welcome improvements to the language of the text.

Finally, I dedicate this book to Michael Falsetta in recognition of thirty years of friendship. Thanks, Mike. An expert of great authority once proclaimed that you are “worth nothing.” And yet I always seem to find reasons to disagree.

Salvatore Babones
January 7, 2018