Populism has given the elite more power than ever

Get free populism updates

we will send you one myFT Daily Digest Latest Email Rounding populism News every morning.

The trailer suggests that Ridley Scott’s Napoleonic biopic will entertain, inspire and completely miss the point. But then there were also paintings of the same subject by Jacques-Louis David. Napoleon was not, or was not, a conqueror. He was, above all, the greatest bureaucrat in history.

What he is left with is not the French Empire (which he left smaller than he had found it) but the Banque de France, standardized education, prefects keeping French territories in line with the orders of Paris, and a civil code that is still in use around the world. Affects the jurisdictions of , To this day, the adjective “Napoleon” describes something centralized and perhaps aggressive, not something martial.

Well then, prepare for a Napoleonic world. The most important government trend today is the rise of protectionism. In America, Europe, China and India, the state is turning from open trade to the cultivation of domestic industries. One justification is strategic: Don’t rely on weak or hostile regimes for essential goods. The second is progressive: Give skilled manual labor a break. Both are based on the arguments that won Donald Trump the election in 2016.

And so we have some irony to chew on. Populism, which pits itself against the elite, against the “deep state”, is going to make it more powerful, not less. The technocrat, who was recently maligned, will be the string-puller of our era, the one who will provide subsidies, guide this economic sector, stay away from that sector. Corporate leaders will have a tighter and more collusive relationship with the government, not as a corrupt byproduct of the system but as a central feature of it. The aim of populism was to take the ruling class down a notch or two. Its main legacy will be somewhat the opposite.

When would you like to be a politician or civil servant: now, when you can shape an entire industry, or in pre-populist times? When would you prefer to be a lobbyist in the “swamp”: during the laissez-faire era, when government and business were at least nominally separate, or a protectionist, when neither sector wanted to miss out on public generosity? (If chip-making is strategic, why not agriculture?)

As elites grow stronger and more anachronistic as a result of populism, this movement is dedicated to their downfall. Perhaps we should have seen the paradox coming. The style of the populists is rebellious but the agenda is patriarchal. They hate the so-called blob, but want it to shape the majority of the private sector. They are angry with elites, but more often for relinquishing power – over markets, across national borders – than for hoarding it. He has a thing for direct democracy as well as Singapore. It is a movement that was always divided on the question of faceless power.

The contradiction is most apparent on the American right. Trump’s apparitions dream of taming the deep state if his man is reelected. The so-called Schedule F appointments will make it easier to fire civil servants. In an executive branch version of what the right wing has done to the judiciary over several decades, cadres of partisans are being groomed for bureaucratic positions all over Washington.

At the same time, the Trump world demands a more industrial strategy. Is there any record of doing it well, anywhere on earth, without a permanent, independent bureaucracy, without a license to plan and invest regardless of the churnings of elected administrations?

At some point, Democrats will have to choose which they hate more: free trade or the Blob. Curbing one has a tendency to empower the other. Note that, although Trump initiated the move toward industrial protection, it has acquired real substance under a center-left government. The Right has never been able to take its anti-business argument to its natural conclusion, which is officially an extension of power. Trump managed to get out of the national security state, of all things. The idea that he could follow the American version of Japan’s former, and dominating, Ministry of International Trade and Industry is fanciful. Yet that’s the kind of technocracy that populism has inadvertently created, through his successor, Joe Biden.

I fear, though I cannot know it, that we are in the midst of the greatest wrong turn in government policy of our lifetimes. A decade into this protectionist era, we may regret waste, pork, high consumer prices (don’t “workers” pay for it?) and fragmentation of the West’s business sectors. But the mistake of this trend is another pillar. For now, what emerges is its unlikely winner. Imagine being told in 2016 that elites will have more influence, not less, and that they owe it to their own oppressors.

janan.ganesh@ft.com