Beat modern populism by learning from the 17th century: Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Historical crises offer insights for navigating today's social unrest.17th-century revolts show anger against corrupt elites and courts.Reforming power structures, not just opposing, ensures lasting peace..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Adrian Wooldridge.One way to cope with our confusing times is to look back at the past. Studying history does more than provide us with perspective on the rush of events. It suggests how they might unfold in the future and how we can shape them to our advantage.We are currently awash in analogies with the 1930s — de rigueur in progressive circles but also favored by neoconservative “Never Trumpers.” The most exotic analogy, made by the historian James Hankins, is with the mid-fourteenth century, when transnational institutions, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, weakened; the Black Death raged; bands of “sturdy beggars” tormented cities; and a “forever war” tore Europe apart. The 1930s school argues that we must fight populism tooth and nail — compromising with it is tantamount to compromising with Hitler or at least Mussolini. The 1330s school argues that we must revive the politics of virtue to cope with cultural decline and despair.I would like to suggest a third historical comparison: with the spate of civil wars in the 17th century. This comparison has two benefits other than being strikingly accurate: It suggests a solution to our current problems that is less absolute than the “never compromise” solution of the 1930s comparison and less exotic than the “cultivate virtue” solution. And it gives me a chance to talk about one of my favourite historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius professor of history at Oxford when I studied there several decades ago..Read more:.Britain’s economic past offers insights for America’s future: David Fickling.The mid-17th century saw a succession of revolutions and revolts across Europe. “These are days of shaking,” declared an English preacher in 1643, “and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germania, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England.” The English cut the head off the king, Charles I, abolished the House of Lords and disestablished the court, establishing a Puritan Republic under Oliver Cromwell. The mighty Spanish Empire was convulsed by regional disturbances. The largest state in Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, temporarily disappeared. While the political world was convulsed, the world was seized by an overwhelming sense of doom — the Antichrist was surely on the march again! — and weird sects such as the British Diggers demanded that society should be turned upside down.Most historians explained these developments in national terms. The only people to find links between these national revolts were the Marxists, who trotted out their all-purpose explanation of the clash of capitalism with feudalism. But then Trevor-Roper came along with his 1959 essay “the general crisis of the 17th century” which provided a much more compelling transnational explanation: the clash between the “Court” and the “Country.”The Court became increasingly bloated and self-indulgent in the 16th and the early half of the 17th century. Monarchs sold offices to support their extravagant lifestyles. Courts adopted foreign values and looked down on the people who paid their salaries as bigots and backwoodsmen. The corruption of the court spread to the wider society: The universities were turned into hatcheries of courtiers, or at least public servants, companies were offered monopolies so long as they became servants of the crown, and lawyers became agents of the state. Ambitious young men aimed for a career in the court, or at least the government, but there were more candidates than offices available.The result was an explosion of anger across society. The Country got sick of paying for the lifestyles of people who contributed nothing to the Commonweal but nevertheless looked down on the more productive organs of society. Frustrated office-seekers turned against a system that had condemned them to years of pointless study.Trevor-Roper’s thesis provided a remarkably neat explanation of both the social composition of the rebels and their ideological fervor: Far from being “capitalists” (the Marxist explanation), they were “backwoodsmen” who lived in the provinces or else over-educated young men who had not found a role in life. The English Puritans differed from the French Jansenists and the Spanish Catholic reformers on points of theology, but they all agreed on hating the magic roundabout of Court life and calling for a return to an earlier age when the Court lived within its means and people lived a more restrained life.The similarities with our own time are remarkable. Once again, we are confronted with a “general crisis” rather than a series of local ones (the great revolt arguably began in 1994, with Italy’s election of Silvio Berlusconi, rather than America’s election of Trump in 2016). And once again, we have a disparate movement united by its hatred of the corrupt elite and its conviction that society is headed in the wrong direction.The geography of today’s populist revolts mirrors the revolts of the mid-17th century. Brexit Britain, for example, was an almost exact reproduction of Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead Britain: the small towns and the countryside. Even more striking is the similarity of grievances. Populists rail against elite organisations (big companies, universities, professional service firms) for the same reason that Cromwell and company railed against the Court: because they are bloated and self-satisfied, using their political connections to extract wealth from the rest of society, and because they espouse globalist rather than national values. Wokery plays the same role as Anglo-Catholicism did in the 17th century as a symbol of sophistication, and university degrees play the same role as Court connections. Populists also argue that the only solution is to abandon the politics of compromise and tear the Court apart: Replace the “Uniparty” with a people’s party, unravel the knot of corrupt institutions and return power to the provinces.Historical parallels are never perfect, of course. Donald Trump makes a poor Oliver Cromwell — the Puritan revolutionary who despised gaudy displays and demanded that his portrait should display him “warts and all.” Mar-a-Lago looks like nothing so much as a new court to the MAGA king. Yet I suspect that Trump’s monarchical tendencies may well prove to be his downfall, just as Cromwell’s downfall was sealed when he tried to make his son his successor. What unites populists across the world is not Trump’s idiosyncrasies but an inchoate anger against the Uniparty Court..Read more:. The Economist – House price super cycle is just starting; why it could last for years.A look at the mid-17th century also suggests a way out of our current problems: shrinking “the Court” and creating a healthier long-term relationship between the center and the periphery. European Courts responded to the general crisis in two ways: either by carrying on as if nothing had happened or else by reforming. The members of the first group stagnated like Spain, with the courts leaching the life out of the country, or else headed toward a bloody revolution, like France. The members of the second group, most notably Britain and the Netherlands, created a sustainable compromise between court and country that guaranteed social peace and economic prosperity: cut the court down to size, stop lavishing rewards on a narrow section of society, curb the hatcheries that produce too many would-be courtiers and clergy and treat the nation-state with respect rather than aristocratic disdain.The lessons of history are surprisingly clear. The great question is whether we possess the political will to learn from them..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Beat modern populism by learning from the 17th century: Adrian Wooldridge

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