For decades, Western politics has resembled a dull dinner party. Everyone politely agreed on the menu; no one told loud off-colour jokes about gays or religious or racial minorities or preferred pronouns.
Then, without warning, a group of uninvited guests gatecrashed – eyes blazing, sleeves rolled up, all of them loudly insisting that all sacred and not-so-sacred cows ought to be slaughtered and blaming “those people” for, well, everything. Their names? Trump, Orbán, Wilders, Le Pen, Milei, Meloni, Erdoğan, Malema and, most recently, Japan’s Takaichi.
Welcome to the age of populism, where the old rules are shredded, good manners are considered a weakness and soft voices a surrender.
Not so long ago, centrism was the height of political fashion. It offered sensible shoes and incremental progress – policies that neither thrilled nor frightened anyone. But over time, centrism began to look like a tired brand of toothpaste: technically effective, but nobody could taste the difference between one variety and another. After decades of globalisation, technocracy and managerial politics, the middle ground became less a meeting place and more a no-man’s-land of handshakes and rictus smiles.
People got bored. Worse – they got angry. The respectable consensus of the post-war West had delivered peace, prosperity and mobile phones, but it had also delivered stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, soaring health costs and a political class fluent only in PowerPoint and lofty words. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the mask slipped. The bankers got bailed out, ordinary citizens got austerity, and the polite dinner party began to dissolve into a food fight.
Populism is one of democracy’s undisciplined children – loud and whiny and convinced that the grown-ups are lying. It thrives when people feel ignored or patronised by “elites” who assure them that things are “under control”. But lately, the voters no longer believe that. They look at the cost of living, the immigration crises, the wars on the horizon and the sense that some distant bureaucracy – whether in Brussels, Washington, Davos or Silicon Valley – is quietly making the real decisions.
Intoxicating
Enter the populists, stage right (and sometimes stage far-right). They offer what the centrists cannot: passion, conviction and the intoxicating sense that someone, finally, is listening.
Donald Trump told Americans that he would “drain the swamp”; Viktor Orbán promised to defend Hungary from the cosmopolitan cabal. Marine Le Pen rebranded nationalism as “patriotism with lipstick”. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni spoke without filters about the dangers of Muslim immigrants, while Javier Milei – Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding libertarian – screamed about “the political caste” until voters screamed with him. Even Japan, a country famous for its consensus politics, recently joined the party: Sanae Takaichi, elected just days ago, a conservative firebrand who has been reported to make Margaret Thatcher seem gentle, rose to power by promising to revive national pride and tell the bureaucrats to shove it.
From Trump’s “I alone can fix it” to Meloni’s “Our time has come” to Milei’s “I will destroy the political class”, populism’s call for revenge and comeuppance have fallen on eager ears.
Of course, this revolution didn’t happen in the town hall – it happened on your phone. Social media turned every populist into a rock star and every voter into an outraged producer of content. The attention economy rewards outrage, not nuance. A carefully argued essay about fiscal responsibility will never trend on X; a three-word slogan will.
What’s striking is how universal this shift has been. From Washington to Warsaw, Buenos Aires to Budapest, Tokyo to Turin, the themes repeat: nationalism over globalism, identity over ideology, emotion over expertise. Populism is not a coordinated movement – it’s a mood, a kind of global protest against a world that feels too complicated, too fast and too controlled by people no one elected. People on the outside want a warrior who will lay waste to their problems. And so we now watch the deeply distressing sight of masked men snatching people off the streets in the US and bundling them into cars.
Is this the end of negotiated politics? Perhaps. The old ideal of political debate assumed that opponents were merely wrong, not evil. But the populist era thrives on moral combat. Every issue becomes a battle for the soul of the nation; every opponent is a traitor or fool and every dissenter an “enemy of the people”. These people love the conflict, even when it spills from conflict to real violence.
Mastered this theatre
Trump mastered this theatre – politics as professional wrestling. Milei turned it into performance art. Orbán perfected it as governance: rule by perpetual outrage. Civility, in this context, is not just outdated; it’s suspicious. If you’re being polite, you must be hiding something.
Yet it’s worth noting the old gentle politics was often just a velvet glove over an iron fist. The polite political order that centrists defended so earnestly wasn’t especially civil to those outside it: ask the laid-off factory worker in Ohio, the indebted graduate in Paris or the Argentine pensioner watching her currency melt. Populists didn’t invent anger – they discovered it lying in the rubble of liberal promises. The grievances exploited by the populists are very real.
There’s something faintly comic about the new populists. They’re all self-styled saviours railing against a system they promptly take over. Trump railed against “the establishment” while appointing billionaires. Orbán defends “Christian Europe” while building a crony capitalist state. Milei rages against “the caste” but then went on to try and enrich himself via a fraudulent crypto scheme.
But the joke is on the moderates, too. Every time we mock the newcomers’ hair, their grammar, their bluster or their political naivety, they grow stronger. The populist thrives on contempt – nothing feeds them faster than being called stupid by polite society. The more absurd they appear, the more authentic they seem to those who feel ignored by polished politicians in suits.
So what happens next? Perhaps this is a necessary correction – a reminder that democracy, by design, belongs to the people, not to panels of experts. Perhaps it’s a dangerous flirtation with authoritarianism, or perhaps both. The populists may eventually implode under the weight of their contradictions or incompetence, but until then, they’ve redrawn the political map.
One thing is certain: the old politics of civility, moderation and competence now look quaint, like rotary phones or powdered wigs. In their place we have the politics of spectacle. The voters, it seems, would rather be entertained than reassured.
Collective midlife crisis
In the end, populism isn’t just a political movement – it’s a collective midlife crisis. The West is staring into the mirror, not liking what it sees, and electing people who promise to smash the glass. Maybe this will lead to renewal; maybe it’ll just make a terrible mess. But you can’t deny it’s more exciting than another panel discussion about monetary policy.
Democracy, that old and weary institution, has reinvented itself once again, this time as a reality series. And like all good reality shows, it’s equal parts comedy, tragedy and spectacle.
[Image: John Tyson for Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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