Populism, Punishment and the Threat to Democratic Order: The Return of the Strong Men 9781032202457, 9781032202495, 9781003262855

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Populism, Punishment and the Threat to Democratic Order

This book traces the rise of contemporary populism in Western democracies, marked by the return of would-be ‘strong men’ politicians. It seeks to make sense of the nature, origins, and consequences of their ascendancy—as expressed, for example, in the startling rise of the social movement surrounding Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK, and the remarkable spread of ideologies that express resistance to ‘facts,’ science, and expertise. Uniquely, the book shows how what began as a form of penal populism in the early 1990s transformed into a more wide ranging populist politics. This has had the potential to undermine or even overthrow the democratic order altogether. It examines the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on these forces, arguing it threw the flailing democratic order an important lifeline, as Vladimir Putin has subsequently done with his war in Ukraine. The book argues that contemporary political populism can be seen as a wider manifestation of the earlier tropes and appeal of penal populism arising under neo-liberalism. The author traces this cross over and the roots of discontent, anxiety, anti-elites sentiment and the sense of being forgotten, that lie at the heart of populism, along with its effects in terms of climate denial, ‘fake news,’ othering, nativism, and the denigration of scientific and other forms of expertise. In a highly topical and important extension to the field the author suggests that the current COVID pandemic might prove to be an ‘antidote’ to populism, providing the conditions in which scientific and medical expertise, truth telling, government intervention in the economy and in health policy, and social solidarity, are revalorised. Encompassing numerous subject areas and crossing many conventional disciplinary boundaries, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and criminal justice, sociology, political science, law, and public policy. John Pratt is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests are in the areas of the sociology and history of punishment, and criminological and social theory, and comparative penology. Professor Pratt has published extensively in these areas, including Law, Insecurity and Risk Control (2020); Contrasts in Punishment. An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic Exceptionalism (2013, with Anna Eriksson); Penal Populism (2007); Punishment and Civilization (2002).

Routledge Studies in Crime and Society

Immigration and School Safety Anthony Peguero & Jennifer Bondy Children, Care and Crime Trauma and Transformation Alison Gerard, Andrew McGrath, Emma Colvin and Annette Gainsford Technology and Domestic and Family Violence Victimisation, Perpetration and Responses Bridget Harris and Delanie Woodlock Crime, Criminal Justice and Religion A Critical Appraisal Philip Birch, Conor Murray and Andrew McInnes Demystifying Modern Slavery Rose Broad and David Gadd Fraud Examinations in White-Collar Crime Investigations Convenience Themes and Review Maturity Petter Gottschalk Populism, Punishment and the Threat to Democratic Order The Return of the Strong Men John Pratt Alcohol, Crime and Public Health Dorothy Newbury-Birch and Jennifer Ferguson For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Crime-and-Society/book-series/RSCS

Populism, Punishment and the Threat to Democratic Order The Return of the Strong Men

John Pratt

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 John Pratt The right of John Pratt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-20245-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-20249-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26285-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

‘We know that no-one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it’, —George Orwell

Finally, for Xiaowen

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 The Return of the Strong Men

viii 1

2 Penal Populism and Public Protection

18

3 The Rise of Populist Politics

37

4 COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism

55

5 Fragile Reprieve

73

References Index

89 105

Acknowledgments

This book began during a COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand, where I live, in 2021. At that time, I was asked by Routledge if I would consider turning a paper that I had given virtually to the Asian Criminology Conference in Japan into a book for their Focus series. I agreed to do this and would like to thank the Routledge team for the encouragement and guidance they have given me along the way. I would also like to thank the reviewers of my subsequent proposal for the book for their helpful comments. The book itself follows on from my previous work, particularly my 2020 text, Law, Insecurity and Risk Control. But while that book was mainly focused on the emergence of ‘risk’ as a dominant theme in the post-war development of the Anglo-American Western democracies, this one discusses one of the consequences of this: the rebirth of populism as a dominant political force and the threat it poses to the democratic order. As the book was being written, the challenges this mode of governance already faced from populism, particularly Trump and his supporters in the US, were magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the far-flung consequences of Putin’s war with Ukraine. On the horizon, fresh challenges to its viability are taking the form of new pandemics and climate change and its destructive capabilities. Writing the book against this background, Pat O’Malley’s (2000) article on ‘catastrophic criminology’ regularly came to mind. He was referring to the way in which a good part of the discipline of criminology had become preoccupied with ‘genealogies of transformation and rupture, usually pessimistic that imagine us to be on the brink of a general social and political watershed.’ Perhaps after all the false alarms variously sounded by critical criminologists that O’Malley had in mind, the democratic order has actually arrived at a precipice— with catastrophe certainly waiting the democratic order if it was to fall over. In addition to its own destruction, everything that we had

Acknowledgments ix long since taken for granted about our life within it—both freedoms and protections—until the renaissance of populism would also be destroyed. As it was, the democratic order survived the challenges of populism, for the time being at least. It was helped along the way by the incompetence of the populist strong men, and the way in which COVID-19 and Vladimir Putin inadvertently threw it lifelines. Its current fragility, though, should act as a warning to us. A good part of the book was written during a very pleasant Southern hemisphere winter stay at the Queensland Gold Coast: the New Zealand borders, closed for COVID reasons for some 16 months—it seemed much longer—finally opened and allowed me out and to travel to this haven. As the book was being written, Anne Holland worked with her usual diligence and efficiency on its formatting, chasing references, preparing the bibliography, etc. I am particularly indebted to Xiaowen Ma for her patience and support during the course of this project.

1

The Return of the Strong Men

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evaluation and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government (Fukuyama, 1989, p. 4) Democracy [is] in retreat. Liberal values such as transparency, the rule of law, accountability and respect for human dignity are being widely trampled. Autocrats and even some Western politicians openly traffic in fear, xenophobia and paranoia (Washington Post Editorial Board, 2016)

Two very different opinions, spanning less than 40 years, of the future prospects for the Western democratic order. How has the post-war triumph in the first come to be under such threat in the second? The first was written at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. That event symbolized the end of the rule of darkness and fear that lay behind it in the Eastern Bloc, in contrast to the bright lights of the West on the other side. It marked the end of a system of governance in which dissidents—there was no authorized opposition to government in those societies—were persecuted for speaking out about the reality of life behind the wall. It marked the end of a system that generated vast queues of citizens waiting in line to receive everyday necessities that had long been taken for granted in the West; it marked the end of a system that attempted to reverse reality—the wall was needed not to prevent Eastern Bloc citizens fleeing to the West, it was claimed by its protagonists, but to prevent a flow of Western imperialism into the East, thereby corrupting its pristine socialist purity (see Funder, 2003). Indeed, it had become a system that encouraged informers to DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855-1

2  The Return of the Strong Men report the slightest signs of subversion, with the secret police hunting down such ‘enemies of the people.’ What might then happen to them—often played out in show trials and confessions obtained by torture—could variously involve their public denunciation, disqualification, indefinite removal, disappearance, or worse. Vast organizations were built up, with their ostensible purpose being to protect and maintain totalitarian regimes by collecting mountains of detail on those who displayed the slightest signs of dissent. The Stasi, the secret police in what was then the German Democratic Republic, even more so than Russia’s KGB, provides the clearest example of the way in which massive state resources were being invested in putting fear into the hearts of citizens rather than promoting their well-being: ‘[the Stasi’s] job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasized through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub … In its forty years, “the Firm” generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long’ (Funder, 2003, p. 5). The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 thus seemed to represent the final act of the legacy of the Allies’ victory over the Axis powers in August 1945. It had been intended that Nazi demagogues and their associates would be firmly consigned to the dustbin of history, along with all their brutish stains of torture, mass murder, and genocide. As President Harry S. Truman had emphasized on August 16, 1945, the day after Japan’s capitulation, ‘this is the end of the grandiose schemes of the dictators to enslave the peoples of the world, destroy their civilization, and institute a new era of darkness and degradation. This day is a new beginning in the history of freedom on earth.’ Moving forward 40 years or so, President Ronald Reagan (1987a), standing on the Western side of the Berlin wall, urged Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 to ‘tear down this wall,’ insisting that ‘the wall cannot withstand freedom.’ A few weeks after its eventual collapse in 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance, in Berlin, of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in celebration. His international orchestra included musicians from both East and West Germany. The Ode to Joy title of the symphony had been changed to Ode to Freedom. The 1945 legacy, it seemed, had at last been fully realized.

The Return of the Strong Men 3

The meaning of ‘freedom’ Life in the Western democracies had indeed embodied ‘freedom’ from the end of the war to the end of the wall, but the nature of this freedom and how it was understood had undergone a great transformation between 1945 and 1989. When Truman made his pronouncement, freedom was a concept intended to mean the end of uncertainty and insecurity: not just from the terrors of war but from the chaos that adherence to the free market had brought during the 1920s and 1930s, with governments masquerading as mere croupiers at the roulette wheel in casino-like economies: it was that uncertainty and insecurity that had helped to bring pre-war demagogues to power. Post-1945, Western governments were committed to maintaining full employment. It would no longer be the market that would determine who would be society’s winners and losers; indeed, the metaphorical casinos in which every individual had previously been a player were largely shut down. As had been indicated in Britain (similar to the rest of the allies), ‘the Government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war’ (Home Office, 1944, p. 3). To bring this about, US statesman Averill Harriman acknowledged in 1946 that the free market needed regulation: ‘people in this country are no longer scared of such words as “planning” … people have accepted the fact that the government has got to plan as well as individuals’ (quoted by Maier, 1987, p. 121). Careful planning by government was also seen as an essential prerequisite to protect democratic freedoms: ‘it is no overstatement to say that the simple choice between planning and non-planning, between order and disorder, is a test-choice for English democracy … plan we must, to save and fulfil democracy itself’ (Sharp, 1942, p. 118). This then meant that individual liberties would have to be curtailed in the interests of realizing that particular understanding of freedom. As Karl Mannheim (1940, pp. 376–377), German émigré and London School of Economics luminary, put the matter, ‘the new conception of freedom creates the desire to control the effects of the social surroundings as far as possible. This is no mere daydream, it is based on the fact that enormous advances in social technique allow us to influence the conduct of social affairs from the key positions, according to a definite plan … [to do so] we must be willing to forgo our former liberties … From now on men will find a higher form of freedom in allowing many aspects of their individual liberties to be determined by the social order laid down by the group.’ As an example of what this meant in practice,

4  The Return of the Strong Men new government compulsory purchase powers of land from individual owners in 1948 in the UK were addressed as follows in an editorial in The Times (1948, p. 5, my italics): ‘the British people almost without knowing it are embarking upon one of the greatest experiments in the social control of their environment ever attempted by a free society. They are putting old individual liberties aside for the common good.’ These guarantees of certainty and security that would cement the ‘common good’ into the social fabric of the post-war democracies ensured that commitments to full employment were accompanied by expanded welfare frameworks. Reliance on the provision of soup kitchens run by charities in times of hardship, as pre-war, was over. Now, it was intended that the state itself would take responsibility for and look after its citizens in need or in hardship. In the US, as President Kennedy (1962, p. 103) later proclaimed, ‘public welfare programmes … must strengthen and protect the vulnerable in a highly competitive world.’ The Food Stamp Act 1964, for example, in that country was intended to ‘raise levels of nutrition among low-income households’ by ensuring an ‘abundance of food.’ The Social Security Amendments Act 1965 created Medicaid—states were empowered to give financial assistance to those wanting medical assistance if they met its eligibility requirements. Claimants rose from 680,000 in 1960 to 4.4 million by 1975, an indicator then of successful governance. The administration of these state-provided welfare frameworks alone meant that public sector employment rapidly expanded (and in itself became a desirable safe haven, marked by annual increments of salary, promotion opportunities, and pension entitlements). Civil servants increased in Britain from 340,000 to 720,000 between 1931 and 1955. And in the initial post-war years, working in the public sector was accompanied by status and prestige—this was work that would help to remodel and rebuild societies that had been fractured by war. In 1957, Which Magazine in the UK reported that ‘nearly every occupation nowadays, whether the army, the police, the stock exchange or even advertising, likes to portray itself as a “social service”: they publicise and promote themselves … as being just as public-spirited as anyone else’ (quoted by Sampson, 1971, pp. 656–657). The rebuilding also involved material and physical reconstruction in forms intended to strengthen social cohesion. New housing estates took their cue from Ebenezer Howard’s (1902/1946, p. 44) aspirations for ‘the social city,’ with wide, tree-shrouded avenues, homes, public gardens, and parks that became central to government planning in the UK: ‘large public buildings would be at [its] centre: town hall, library, museum, concert and lecture hall, the hospital. Here, the highest

The Return of the Strong Men 5 values of the community are brought together—culture, philanthropy, health, and united cooperation.’ And it included the rekindling of family life. This would provide an important pillar of support for everyday security while at the same time help restore the nation’s strength and health through repopulation. Indeed, it was as if contributing to the goal of repopulation had become a civic duty and responsibility, with state support and guidance on hand if needed towards this end: ‘parenthood itself must become a central interest and duty; and the family and the primary group of workfellows and neighbours must become a vital core in every wider association’ (Mumford, 1945, p. 214). Meanwhile, government investment in science and expertise became one of the guarantors of the bright future thought to lie ahead for citizens in democratic society: ‘Great universities … engaged in federally funded research, and innovations first pioneered with defence spending were encouraged to find civilian outlets. The achievements were perhaps most remarkable in the emerging digital sciences and information and communications technologies, including computer science, transistors and integrated circuits, microprocessors, the Internet, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence’ (Sachs, 2018). Scientific achievements continued to advance the possibilities of human existence, while simultaneously curtailing risks to it: from the discovery of the Big Bang theory of the cosmos in 1961 to what was regarded as one of the greatest achievements in human history, the American moon landing in 1969, to the creation of test tube babies in 1979. And all along, the state’s commitment and support for science and expertise brought dramatic improvements to public health. The post-war era became one of mass immunization—against polio especially, with vaccine rates among children and infants from the early 1960s to the 1980s between 93 and 95 percent in the US. The success of vaccines was such that US Surgeon-General William H. Stewart maintained in 1969 that ‘the time had come to close the book on infectious diseases’ (Snowden, 2019, p. 385). The levels of taxation necessary to pay for the new array of state services also meant that this was an era of narrowed social divisions, with the effect that, as Galbraith (1958, p. 70) put the matter, ‘the display of purely ostentatious outlays … is now passé … it is much wiser to take on the protective coloration of the useful citizen, the industrial statesman or even the average guy.’ Meanwhile, the high levels of trust in the central state that existed for a good part of the post-war era seemed to confirm the general acceptance and legitimacy of this mode of governance. In the US, a 1964 opinion poll indicated that 77 percent of respondents trusted the federal government ‘always or most of the time.’1

6  The Return of the Strong Men Citizens were also to be protected from abuses of state power— another aspect of stability and security. Criminal law had been used extensively in Nazi Germany to legitimize the prosecution, punishment, and the elimination of those who, in some way or other, were brought to the attention of the Nazi authorities as ‘enemies of the people.’ To prohibit the operation of criminal justice to suit the political aims of the state, the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights had restated what amounted to fundamental principles of classical criminology. In particular, there should be no punishment unless a crime had been committed. Punishment should then be finite, fixed, and certain, which led, inter alia, to the steady phasing out of indeterminate prison sentences in the Anglo-American world by the 1970s (Bottoms, 1977). The main arguments for them were that such sanctions would prevent crimes that might be committed in the future rather than act as a retributory response to crimes already committed. Or they would protect the public against those who would otherwise put their well-being at risk if released from custody. Now, however, such flimsy justifications were torn up, in the name of protecting human rights. It was recognized that there was then no way of knowing whether or not future crime would be committed (see Baxstrom v. Herold [1966]). The US sexual psychopath laws— psychiatric detention until ‘cured,’ followed by legal punishment (in effect, two punishments for the same crime)—were thus declared unconstitutional in 1956. By the same token, status offences in that country were also largely abolished during the 1950s and 1960s (Pratt, 2020). The great sores of homelessness and begging that had previously been in place on the social body had anyway been largely removed by the new welfare measures. In the UK, the Home Office (1974, p. 19) reported that ‘with the advent of social security and unemployment benefits and other advantages of the welfare state, it is clear that begging is now on a much smaller scale.’ Meanwhile, the rehabilitation of criminals steadily gained momentum in penal policy over vengeful, excessive punishments that greatly exceeded the harm of the crime committed. But when, in the 1970s, rehabilitation was found to lead to abuses of state power (see, for example, Martinson, 1974), the emphasis shifted to penal policies explicitly guaranteeing the newly prescribed rights of lawbreakers in the form of the ‘back to justice’ movement (von Hirsch, 1976). The direction of the criminal justice reforms also reflects the connection between academic experts and government at that time. In the US, the country’s Model Penal Code of 1962, intended to standardize penal law, ‘brought the best and brightest in academic law into the process of substantive criminal law reform’ (Zimring, 1996, p. 253). A Harvard law

The Return of the Strong Men 7 professor became the executive director of the 1966 President’s Crime Commission. More generally, the combination of expert knowledge on the one hand and a dedication to public service on the other became a requirement for political and policy-making careers. At this juncture, ‘the idea of the nation being run by entrepreneurs or even of a businessmen’s Cabinet, was inherently absurd … no civil servant or politician should be allowed to practice the kind of risk-taking that could lead to bankruptcy [and] the aggressive and nomadic instincts of the entrepreneur would and should always be at odds with the protective territorial role of the state’ (Sampson, 1982, p. 330). Notwithstanding inevitable levels of discord and oppression that lay obscured behind these sepia-tinted windows on the past—racism and gross gender inequalities especially—the overwhelming sentiment in political and public discourse was that Western freedom, as this concept had been developed and understood post-1945, would indeed deliver a bright future for its fortunate citizens. A steady but seemingly inexorable improvement in their living standards become proof of this. In the UK, a Daily Telegraph opinion poll in 1961 comfortingly found that 91 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds agreed with the opinion that ‘the world will be a better place in 10 years’ time.’ Inevitably. Without a doubt. With the greatest certainty. For those living in democratic society, this was the only future then imaginable. How Western freedom had come to be understood when the Berlin wall fell By 1989, ‘freedom’ remained a concept that beckoned enticingly to citizens from the Eastern Bloc, but it was now understood in terms of individual liberty rather than state-provided guarantees of certainty and security. And it was further understood in terms of the ability of individuals to make vast fortunes for themselves rather than be content with the ‘slow lane’ pace of life Galbraith had inferred to be a characteristic of post-war society. In the late 1970s, the British periodical New Society had opined that ‘very few sincerely want to be rich. Most people in Britain neither want nor expect a great deal of money. Even if they could get it, the vast majority do not seem prepared to work harder for it: most of our respondents thought we should work only as much as we need to live a pleasant life. It seems clear that the British today prefer economic stability to economic growth’ (Forester, 1977, p. 158). Yet, in stark contrast, the 1980s saw the publication of the first ‘rich lists’ for the US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia: being rich had suddenly become a medal to be worn with pride. The celebration of wealth was

8  The Return of the Strong Men further reinforced in popular culture in television programs such as Dallas and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which ran from 1984 to 1995. Similarly, television quiz shows—such as The Weakest Link— now took on a winner takes all format rather than offering modest prizes to all contestants. These important changes in everyday life had their roots in the work of neo-liberal scholars such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Freidman. For them, the inevitable growth of the post-war state’s administrative responsibilities had blurred the distinction between the totalitarian East and the democratic, freedom-loving West. Hayek (1944, p. 10) had warned in advance that ‘for at least twenty-five years before the spectre of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which European civilisation has been built … We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.’ Thereafter, Friedman (1962, p. 201) argued that the threat to Western freedom was not restricted to the Eastern Bloc. What he saw as the insidious growth of non-accountable state bureaucracies also jeopardized this prize: ‘the one threat is obvious and clear … from the evil men in the Kremlin … The other threat is far more subtle. It is the internal threat coming from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us … they are anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident of their own ability to do so.’ From such quarters, there was an insistence on a much smaller, deregulated central state, lower rates of direct taxation and greatly reduced welfare provisions (increasing numbers of welfare claimants were now understood as an indicator of moral decay and dependency rather than of successful governance, see Murray, 1984). Individuals would be given greater freedom of choice, but would simultaneously have to accept greater responsibility for their mistakes and pay whatever the penalties might be for them. This new mode of governance was most vividly put into practice by UK and US governments led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In addition to urging Gorbachev to ‘tear down the wall,’ Reagan (1981) maintained that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ Rather than planning the economy, their program of government insisted that controls aimed at protecting its citizens from making their own choices about the course of their lives should be removed: individual risk-taking was to be welcomed rather than restricted. If economies were deregulated, it was thought that the ensuing freedoms would give rise to initiative, enterprise, and zeal, which post-war government restrictions had largely suppressed.

The Return of the Strong Men 9 Neo-liberal evangelists scorned what they saw as timorous fears and anxieties about the removal of state protection that the post-war mode of governance had put in place. The British economist Samuel Brittan (1973, p. 17) claimed that ‘nearly all the products of civilisation—arts, sports, and recreations, just as much as running water, telephones or labour-saving gadgets—have been invented and sold to people who were not spontaneously asking for any of them, but were glad to have them when they arrived. It is part of the function of a market economy to suggest new possibilities to people which they are then free to accept or reject.’ And for Charles Handy (1989, p. 7), author of The Age of Unreason, ‘discontinuous change is the only way forward for a tramlined society, one that has got used to its ruts and its blinkers and prefers its own ways, however dreary, to untrodden paths and new ways of looking at things.’ Certainly, the embrace of free-market economics during the 1980s did indeed bring about huge increases in personal wealth for some. And this was well-advertised in ostentatious displays of extravagance in the form of ‘individuality, self-expression, and a stylistic self-consciousness. One’s body, clothes, speech, leisure pastimes, eating and drinking preferences, home, car, choice of holidays, etc., are to be regarded as indicators of the individuality of taste and sense of style of the owner/consumer’ (Featherstone, 1991, p. 83). And yet, among such new found opportunities for personal enrichment, pleasure, and economic and social advancement that had become available in democratic society, the seeds were being sown for the growth of forces that would seek to undermine, erode, and, in some cases, destroy the democratic order altogether. How did this happen? While the return to free-market economics brought such alluring possibilities into existence, it also led to increased social divisions and tensions: there was very little for the inevitable losers that the economic reforms left behind. And it did not take long for many of them to become much more visible—it was during the 1980s, while ostentatious displays of wealth were becoming normalized, that homeless people and beggars at the other end of the social spectrum began to populate public space again. But, it was reasoned, individuals had been left free to manage their own risks; those who managed them badly had to live with the consequences, while the rest of the world passed them by, giving them disdainful looks as they came across them. Here, then, were some of the first signs of the results of government having a much more limited role in the management of everyday life, instead of one intended to build a society where modest prizes, but prizes available to all nonetheless, would be guaranteed.

10  The Return of the Strong Men But notwithstanding the annoyance and offence the homeless, the beggars, and the like might give to passers-by, they remained outside the grasp of criminal law during the 1980s. Neo-liberal politicians were certainly prepared to use criminal law to provide stronger protection from lawbreakers, especially those involved in robbery and mugging (see, for example, Wilson, 1975). Criminal law would also be used when necessary to protect individuals from organizations such as trade unions that tried to impose uniformity and conformity across the workplace rather than allowing them to choose their own courses of action over matters such as salaries, union membership, and strike action. But while adherence to the rule of law was central to this neo-liberal polity, the scope of criminal law was intended to be narrow. Its role in democratic society was as a reactive rather than a preventive force. ‘Status offenders’ were now beyond its scope, as, indeed, were some of society’s most dangerous criminals who might reoffend in the future. Indefinite sentences had been taken off most penal agendas: it would be unethical to punish crime that had not yet been committed, as well as impossible to predict if it ever would be. Hayek (1960, p. 206) had insisted that ‘while the chief means of coercion at the disposal of the government is punishment, the principle “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege” [“no crime, no punishment”] must be respected.’ To extend the rule of law beyond such limits— to extend it to again criminalize street people, for example—would transfer too much power and authority to the state, as had been regularly demonstrated in the administration of justice in Eastern Bloc societies. The rule of law was an indissolvable characteristic of the Western democratic order, an inviolable guarantor of the rights of individuals against those who would otherwise oppress them, but one operating within a carefully restricted orbit. It must also be applied independently of the state rather than being used to extend the power of the state. Brittan (1973, p. 92) thus maintained that law was not a plaything for governments, to be shaped and manipulated for party political purposes: ‘laws [should not] be changed at a moment’s notice whenever a particular effect displeases some ruler … The more fundamental the laws, the more difficult they should be to change.’ Meanwhile, Western freedom had come to be understood much more as allowing its citizens the right to make their own choices about the course of their lives independently of the state rather than the state directing their lives for them. And the deregulated economies of the West now offered alluring tantalizing possibilities of riches and pleasures for their fortunate citizens. Was there anyone mourning the dramatic fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 other than Stasi officials and their equivalents elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc?

The Return of the Strong Men 11

The 2016 Washington Post editorial: democracy in danger Moving on to the 2016 Washington Post editorial, all the previous optimism that had been synonymous with the triumphs of Western democracy has disappeared. The collapse of the Berlin wall did not represent ‘the end of history’ after all. Indeed, the 2016 editorial was signposting the shape of a new political era—one where the democratic order itself was in danger of being torn down, amidst dramatic realignments of the political map. New, right-wing political parties had emerged across Europe, while US Republican and UK Conservative parties had been taken over and transformed by their far-right members. Those rancorous seeds sown in the 1980s had come to noxious fruition. Whatever the local differences and points of origin, what runs through these political realignments is a suspicion of immigrants, hostility to supra-national organizations, espousals of economic protectionism, and a disdain for the previous dedication to public service that had been associated with post-war political aspirations. Furthermore, these new political forces proclaim that the very act of channeling a career through some form of public service that interchanges with politics inevitably leads to corruption and inefficiency. For them, it has been this that has created a self-serving ruling ‘Establishment’ of mainstream politicians and others involved in the administration of government—civil servants and officials from the judiciary, state broadcasting organizations, and so on. And as this Establishment has embedded itself in political power, these new political forces claim, so the safety and security of both individual citizens and the nation state itself have been endangered: by seemingly uncontrolled immigration, the free movement of labor, and the globalization of trade amidst the primacy given to market forces. Here is the way to destroy local industries or allow local wages to be undercut while simultaneously undermining the cultural identity of the nation, these angry voices shout. Weak responses on law and order from the Establishment are thought to have further jeopardized the well-being of the nation and its citizens. In his bid for the US presidency in 2016, Donald Trump thus proclaimed himself to be ‘the law and order candidate … we must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent … [while his opponent Hillary Clinton was] weak, ineffective, pandering’ (Nelson, 2016). The way out of this quagmire thus necessitates power being entrusted to strong leaders who usually present themselves as anti-politics politicians who display contempt for the values and norms of the democratic order. This makes them appear as outsiders, seemingly untouched by the corruption and incompetence of their Establishment opponents.

12  The Return of the Strong Men Before striving for political power, some have had backgrounds as comedians (as with Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Star Movement in Italy), real estate magnates, and media celebrities (such as Donald Trump) or are otherwise able to demonstrate their non-Establishment credentials through maverick careers not involving any form of public service (Boris Johnson in the UK was a journalist who was sacked for fabricating a report for his newspaper and who also made regular appearances on political satire television programs). The more these would-be leaders and ‘strong men’ (men in nearly every case) can demonstrate their difference from elites in the Establishment, the more this then secures their legitimacy to rule, at least in the eyes of their supporters. Where do these supporters come from? Many bear the marks of the divisions that neo-liberal polity exacerbated but largely left unattended. They include those who are attracted by promises to re-route their nation away from the multi-cultural consequences of large-scale immigration, to have it based again around the dominance of white, Christian masculinity; those threatened by a growing lassitude given to sexual orientation and prominence of gender equity and those who want law and order to be more forcefully addressed. And they include all who have been left behind in the course of restructuring, such as those working in sunset industries; and those who have become suspicious, through their regular perusal of internet sources, of all the members of the Establishment supposedly involved in ‘deep state’ enterprises; and so on. The new strong men on the political stage of democratic society vow to listen and attend to such grievances. They offer remedies that move beyond the boundaries of the rule of law and other trappings of democracy that they say failed to prevent the nation’s decline. Where they gain political power, democratic norms and conventions that would otherwise restrain their authority can then be pushed aside. Demons from the 1930s, thought to have been expelled forever, have thus resurfaced. Demagogues once again claim that only they can be the saviors of their nation, at a time when it faces maximum peril from enemies both within and beyond its borders. They are at the forefront of what has become, in the early twenty-first century, a sustained populist assault on the democratic order.

What is populism? Populism refers to the moods and voices of distinct segments of the population who see themselves as worthy, authentic citizens but who feel aggrieved because of their perceptions that they have been ignored

The Return of the Strong Men 13 by governments and their officials while other, more undeserving or unwanted groups—such as welfare claimants or undocumented migrants—have been allowed to flourish at their expense. Their angry voices, or those who claim to speak on their behalf, are usually heard on talk-back radio, in the tabloid press, or on Fox News television and like stations: channels of communication far beyond the reach of the Establishment and the mainstream media but which provide fuel for conspiracies that then become a rallying cry for more direct action against the supposedly corrupt democratic order. As such, populism represents ‘an ideology of popular resentment’ (Shils, 1956, p. 100) against the ruling Establishment. And it challenges the legitimacy of the existing framework of political power in democratic society. As Ernesto Laclau (2005, p. 177) observes, populism is not a reform movement, nor one which seeks to preserve the status quo through modifications to the electoral process. Instead, ‘populism presents itself as both subversive of the existing state of things and as the starting point for a more or less radical reconstruction of a new order.’ That said, the extent of this new order will be dependent on the particular scope and extent of populist forces and the field in which these emerge and operate. A narrow brand of populism—penal populism— that became a precursor to the full assault of populist politics on the democratic order primarily sought to radically reconstruct the penal system. Beyond this terrain, the status quo remained largely untouched. Indeed, it will be argued in this book that the intended function of penal populism was exactly that: leave the status quo untouched and allow the neo-liberal restructuring of those societies that brought it into existence to continue. And so it did until it became subsumed within a more general populist politics. The nature of this resurgent populism then confirms Laclau’s argument. The populist political parties that have emerged across democratic society in the early twenty-first century are indeed intent on at least subverting and undermining, if not bringing down altogether, the democratic framework of their particular society. It has no sacrosanct value for them. Of course, it could be argued that at almost any time in modern history it might be possible to find such dissent. But for populism to be a prominent political force rather than a collection of sad and angry forces on its fringe, then, as Laclau (2005, p. 85) argues, the most important prerequisite for this is a breakdown in social cohesion, on a national scale. This is usually reflected in unfulfilled demands from a significant section of the population that is met by unresponsive state power or rather a significant and vociferous section of the population who then claim to speak for the general public, as if this then

14  The Return of the Strong Men gives them an exclusive mandate to challenge the existing structure of political power: ‘it is a partial component [of the social body] which aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality’ (Laclau, 2005, p. 81). On this basis, populism can be a characteristic of both the political right and the left. Indeed, its associations with the latter have a lengthy history. For example, the US People’s Party was launched in 1892. This was principally an agrarian movement formed to oppose the growing power of urban corporations in that country. Words from its founding document would not be out of place in contemporary populist discourse: ‘we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized …’ (quoted by Laclau, 2005, p. 201). Contemporarily, left-wing populism has also enjoyed electoral success in Greece (the Syriza movement) and Spain (the Podemos party). It remains, though, that the manifestations of populism across the Western democracies in the early twenty-first century veer overwhelmingly towards the political right. Why should this be so? The main reason for this lies in the nature of the grievances that populism currently feeds on. There is considerable antagonism towards those who make up the political Establishment, that is, mainstream political parties, and the economic consequences of the neo-liberal politics they have been associated with. In addition, though, there is opposition to the cosmopolitan reordering of everyday life that is contemporaneous with this economic trajectory. And it would seem to be this cultural dimension that now leads populist politics to the right. One of the main populist criticisms of the EU, for example, is that its rights of settlement for citizens within this Bloc fuel unwanted immigration, thought to threaten both individual and national identity. Contemporary populism is also pushed to the right by the way in which crime and punishment issues have become central features in its discourse. For populists, the dangers posed by crime and the weakness of criminal justice elites in responding to it now necessitate pushing criminal law beyond its democratic safeguards and limits: only by so doing, will it be possible to protect the public from the catalog of enemies that now threaten them. Even so, the criminal justice system is only one modality of control being used against the concentration of public enemies that populism has in its sights. Penalties, barriers, threats, inducements, disqualifications, and cronyism—appointing the loyal but under-qualified or the unqualified to positions of power—have variously severed

The Return of the Strong Men 15 and undermined the very structure of government in democratic society. Thus, civil servants can be tested for their allegiance to the strong man—if they fail, they can be weeded out; walls can be built to keep out unwanted asylum seekers, while those who do find their way across borders can be rounded up and shipped out to distant countries with highly suspect democratic traditions that are paid for assisting with this removal service. Demonstrators against the strong man’s regime can be variously outlawed or have their protests broken up by military force if necessary. And the credibility of political opponents is no longer merely criticized and undermined; by virtue of them being opponents, they may be threatened with prosecution and imprisonment. At the same time, there is a constant tension between populist politicians and liberal elites working to maintain democratic norms, rules, and values in the operation of the criminal justice process. This is more than long-standing disagreements between the political right and liberal elites about how much punishment is needed for crime. Indeed, there is recognition among these elites that these new modalities of governance and control for hunting down or silencing enemies are not only outside the democratic framework but also are part of a more general movement to dismantle it. Judges and ‘liberal lawyers’ regularly find, as a consequence, that they too have been added to the growing list of populism’s ‘enemies of the people.’ All this is in the name of the ‘cleansing’ that is apparently needed to restore the nation’s sovereign purity—but in reality, firmly cementing the power of the strong man. One of the great ironies of this new era is that populists often claim to be protecting democracy when corroding its very fabric themselves. ****** The remainder of this book addresses the question of how all those triumphal notions of freedom in 1989, guaranteed by our commitment to the democratic order, have come to be under such threat from these populist forces. It focuses primarily but not exclusively on the emergence and development of populist politics in the Anglo-American democracies that have been in the forefront of this renaissance (particularly the UK, the US, and New Zealand). It also shows the interconnections and overlaps between developments in this cluster of societies and the rise of populist politics in other Western democracies. Again, while local contingencies shape the specific form populism takes in a particular society, there are common threads as well.

16  The Return of the Strong Men As Chapter 2 shows, those Anglo-American democracies that moved furthest down the route of neo-liberal restructuring during the 1980s and beyond set in train divisions, anxieties, and insecurities that populism has since been able to feast on. These tensions, brought about or exacerbated by the restructuring, created the conditions for the emergence of what has come to be known as penal populism. Governments were prepared to accede to populist demands in relation to crime control, tearing punishment loose from its democratic moorings, while in so doing reaffirming their own political legitimacy. This then allowed them to continue with their restructuring agenda across the rest of the social field. Chapter 3, however, shows that penal populism was unable to sustain its task of bolstering social cohesion to a sufficient level of stability. The twin consequences of the 2008 global fiscal crisis and growing immigration from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America shattered faith not just in neo-liberal restructuring but in the democratic order itself. As a consequence, penal populism came to be absorbed within the much broader canvas of populist politics that has since emerged. The tumultuous year of 2016, which saw a majority in favor of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president, signaled the growing international momentum that populism was gaining. Nonetheless, Chapter 4 shows how the democratic order came to have an unlikely savior, in the form of the COVID-19 virus. While the pandemic brought devastation to individuals and societies, the very strategies necessary to counteract it all helped to undermine fundamental pillars on which populism had been built. And when risks to public health began to outweigh crime risks, making the law-and-order issues that populism thrives on largely redundant, the politics of hate and destruction that it espouses suffered important political reversals. Chapter 5, however, argues that the democratic order remains fragile, notwithstanding an additional lifeline thrown to it by Vladimir Putin. His war on Ukraine has met the remarkable courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, himself, ironically, an anti-establishment figure, but one who was elected to take his country out of autocratic corruption and towards the values of democratic society. The war has strengthened the forces of the Western democratic order, as Putin vividly demonstrates what the alternative to this is likely to involve. But while such contingencies have given it protection, given it protection, its

The Return of the Strong Men 17 fragility will remain so unless the structural inequalities that paved the way for contemporary populism are addressed, in the face of new challenges from further pandemics and climate change.

Note 1 In Australia, 51 percent of those polled in 1969 ‘trusted government to do the right thing,’ and in Canada, the result was 57 percent in 1965 on the same issue. In 1964, 50 percent of the British public thought their leaders were ‘honest.’

2

Penal Populism and Public Protection

Populism is an expression of public resentment against existing political processes that are thought to allow elite groups—civil servants, bankers, academics, and the liberal clergy and such like—to influence government in the development of policies which favor either the already privileged or the undeserving (or both) against the interests and wishes of ‘ordinary people.’ Penal populism, however, addresses the way in which lawbreakers are thought to have been favored in policy development at the expense of crime victims in particular and the law-abiding public in general by elite groups working in the criminal justice arena. This brand of populism feeds on expressions of anger, disenchantment, and disillusionment with criminal justice elites—liberal judges, lawyers, and academics are seen as responsible for inverting what, commonsensically, should be the priorities of any criminal justice system: protecting ‘ordinary people’ who do not break the law and punishing those who do, or who otherwise put public well-being at risk. These sentiments are then represented as ‘public opinion’ (even though they are manifestly not so in any social scientific sense of this term) in outlets for them such as the tabloid press and talk-back radio and, from the early 2000s, social media. The populist renaissance began after a decade or so of the restructuring of economic and social life during the 1980s. Governments in Anglo-American societies, especially in the UK, US, and New Zealand (Roberts et al., 2003), were prepared to embrace and follow these supposed representations of ‘public opinion’ on crime and punishment. This was because issues of crime control had become one of the most obvious illustrations of a legitimacy deficit between governments and their electorates. If not arrested, this was likely to lead to a serious threat or challenge to the rules of political power in the form of a legitimation crisis (Beetham, 1991). To prevent this, governments began moving penal policy in the direction of the demands from DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855-2

Penal Populism and Public Protection 19 populist forces, sometimes working in conjunction with them, sometimes working in collaboration with them, notwithstanding that the hitherto inexorable rise in post-war crime in the Western democracies was coming to an end (Tonry, 2014; Zimring, 2007). A new axis of penal power began to shape policy, at the expense of the previous one between governments and influential elitist advisers, but with the new reality of declining crime largely missing from this discourse. Zimring (1996, pp. 253–254) thus observed that in the US, ‘there is now a large gap between law professors and the legislative process … Most of the problem is that there is no demand for what experts have to offer, which is information about the implications and consequences of policy choices … when citizens come to believe that no special expertize is implicated in criminal justice decision-making, then separation of power will no longer allow the expert deference.’ Nonetheless, not all members of the ‘professoriat’—certainly not in the US—lost the influence they might previously have had on penal development. James Q. Wilson, a Harvard professor and adviser to the Reagan governments on penal policy, became a notable exception, leading a cluster of similar others who championed populist demands for tougher and more extensive sanctions, usually based on common sense and anecdote rather than research.1 Thus, for Wilson (1975), the most reliable source of information about crime was not rigorous social scientific inquiry but, instead, the opinion of ‘taxi drivers’— they knew local streets best and saw and heard what was happening in them much more clearly than comfortably cloistered experts.

Five causes of penal populism There were five characteristics (explained below) to the legitimacy deficit that had opened up between governments and their electorates. It was their convergence that made possible the emergence of penal populism. Growing public anxiety and insecurity The program of neo-liberal theorists, ideologues, and politicians involved individuals having more freedom of choice, with the trade-off being that governments would no longer run to their rescue in troubled times. Indeed, it was thought that learning from mistakes would actually spur on risk takers to success: ‘entrepreneurs, the successful ones, have on average nine failures for every success … getting it wrong is part of getting it right. Change is now more chancy, but also

20  Penal Populism and Public Protection more exciting’ (Handy 1989, pp. 7, 69). Indeed, risk takers, rather than public servants, now became role models: ‘successful entrepreneurs … are innovators, because they spot possibilities that others miss, or take on risks that others decline, or both. A society that doesn’t encourage entrepreneurial culture won’t generate the economic energy that comes from the most creative ideas’ (Giddens, 2000, p. 75). And the more successful one’s risk-taking, the more this could herald entry to a world of fabulous wealth and fame, riches that neo-liberal economics made possible for those prepared to chase success. The emergence of entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Donald Trump during the 1980s was emblematic of the changing values of these societies: celebrity status was more desirable than conformity; individualism was more important than social cohesion. The greatest opportunities for enterprise and wealth creation were to be found in the expanding financial sector. Buying and selling shares, for example, had become an opportunity for wealth creation that had been opened to all in the course of deregulation rather than a privileged few: ‘most people bought shares in privatized companies because the shares were easy to buy, and because they were known to command an instant premium’ (Vinen, 2009, p. 199). At the same time, there were important shifts in employment patterns—away from a progressively downgraded public sector to consumer, leisure, and financial services. The neo-liberal restructuring of economic life had provided new aspirations and possibilities for members of these societies: from greater choice in the supermarket to purchase of exotic holidays: even if, for most, their share of these enticements would represent only a tiny fragment of what all those enjoyed who had reached the top of the escalator of success that had been constructed in the process of deregulation.2 But to maximize these opportunities, it was best to be free of ties and encumbrances that might otherwise impede travel in the new fast lane to success. As Zygmunt Bauman (2002, p. 62) characterized this era, ‘individuals who are untied to place, who can travel light and move fast, win all the competitions that matter and count.’ Former pillars of stability, support, and assurance—family life, civic duties and responsibilities, loyalty to employers and longevity in the same employment—came to be seen as restricting the onward march to individual advancement. Handy (1989, p. 28) wrote disparagingly of those who preferred the safety and security of the previous slow lane existence: ‘some people, however, do not want to keep moving. Change for them means sacrificing the familiar, even if it is

Penal Populism and Public Protection 21 unpleasant, for the unknown, even when it might be better.’ For successful entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson (2017, p. 7), ‘a risky life is a successful life …. [taking risks] didn’t put me off at all. [My business ventures] had all been fun to get stuck into, and we’d learned a lot of important lessons.’ However, setting risk free had come at a high cost. While there were certainly winners in the casino economies being created, there were always going to be many more losers. The growth of bankruptcies in the Anglo-American societies between 1980 and 2010 left many permanently disqualified from the neo-liberal race to the top (Pratt, 2020). Dreams of accumulating wealth in an instant by pressing computer buttons instead of a lifetime of physical drudgery that would only bring modest rewards were often brutally interrupted by severe financial shock—which governments could neither predict nor had any control over. The market now controlled such events, not governments. When asked about the first of the great post-restructuring stock market crashes at a press conference in October 1987, President Reagan’s (1987b) response was: ‘I think everyone is a bit puzzled … I have no more knowledge of why it took place than you have.’ Similarly, the response of British Chancellor of the Exchequer to ‘Black Wednesday’ on September 16, 1992 to the effective devaluation of the pound sterling (after a failed attempt to keep its value above the lower rate necessary to participate in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism) was to say, ‘that’s capitalism.’ But now, while those old familiar pillars of support had been happily discarded by many in the chase for rewards and riches, this also meant that they were no longer available to provide reassurance and security as chronic uncertainty, sometimes punctuated by acute disaster such as bankruptcy, imprinted itself on everyday life. The permanence of employment and all that comes with this began to disappear for many, in the name of initiative, enterprise, re-branding, and restructuring (Standing, 2014). Organic community life had largely dissolved as mobility of labor became paramount (Putnam, 2000). Family life had also become much more tangential, with increased likelihood of divorce amidst the growth of more impermanent de facto relationships, and dramatic increases in people living alone.3 Overall, the restructuring had meant that an individual’s horizons and how far it was possible to travel toward them had greatly expanded, but the journey toward such distant points had become increasingly lonely and uncertain, with formal and informal networks of security shrinking and shredding.

22  Penal Populism and Public Protection The decline of trust in government and existing electoral processes Whatever material advantages it had produced for its citizens, neoliberalism had also brought a much more precarious society into existence, compounded by the sense that ‘the established political class is no longer able to resolve the most basic problems and that politicians generally are too absorbed with themselves to be able to adapt to a rapidly changing world’ (Betz, 1994, p. 41). While cuts to direct taxation obviously favored the already well off, there had been the expectation, in the minds of neo-liberal ideologues at least, that ‘trickle-down economics’ would then percolate their riches among the rest of the population (see, for example, Romer, 1994). In so doing, it would be possible to maintain legitimacy for this program of government. But economic inequalities continued to grow. And when a guiding hand was needed more than ever to steer the ship of state, governments seemed to have vacated any such responsibility. Disenchantment that followed post-1970s stock market crashes, recessions, and the growing likelihood of spells of unemployment, sometimes prolonged, led to increasing disillusionment with the central state. Opinion poll research in the US indicated a remarkable reversal from the high levels of trust in the 1960s: 74 percent of those polled in 1994 no longer trusted the federal government. While the 9/11 event subsequently gave levels of trust a boost, by 2005, mistrust had increased again to 65 percent of those polled. In the UK in 2000, only 16 percent trusted the government. In Australia, the figure was 32 percent. In Canada, in 1995, ‘three out of four Canadians agree with the statement, “I don’t think that the government cares much what people like me think”, up from 1 in 2 in 1965’ (Nevitte, 1996, p. 26). In addition, there was increasing antipathy toward electoral processes, with growing numbers disinclined to vote at elections.4 To illustrate what the consequences of these levels of distrust could lead to, opinion poll support for the two New Zealand mainstream political parties, both of which had been committed to a mid-1980s economic restructuring program, had fallen to catastrophically low levels by the early 1990s: the Labour Party polled 12 percent and the National (i.e., Conservative) Party polled 19 percent (see Pratt and Clark, 2005). This lack of legitimacy for the political mainstream and the neo-liberal program of government associated with it brought about a change to the electoral system: from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation, in a bid to bring broader citizen representation to parliament. It took effect in 1996. Meanwhile, there

Penal Populism and Public Protection 23 was a surge of support for the populist New Zealand First Party, formed in 1993. It promised to place ‘control of New Zealand’s resources in the hands of New Zealanders, by restoring faith in the democratic process,’ alongside ‘common-sense decision-making in the best interests of all’ (New Zealand First, 2014). The new electoral process made it very likely that this party would now have a regular place in parliament—all that was needed was 5 percent of the total vote to be assured seats. In three general elections thereafter, New Zealand First became a ‘kingmaker’ in the formation of coalition governments. This allowed it to put its populist stamp (anti-immigration, law and order) on government policy: to win political power, both Labour and National were prepared to accede to their demands, incorporating these in their governmental programs. Crime, disorder, and discredited criminal justice elites In an era when security had become a commodity to be bought and sold rather than an obligation on government to provide (Garland, 1996), many began to invest in architectural design specific to it— the gated community or derivatives of this that had the ability to shut out undesirables and would-be intruders. In contrast to the idea of the post-war ‘social city’ premised around inclusivity, the selling point of the gated community is its ability to exclude. From the early 1980s, the growing presence in public space of beggars, the homeless and others trying to use innovative zeal tailored to their reduced circumstances—‘squeegee merchants,’ for example—seemed to confirm the decay and decline of social order and the need to keep private space secure from such people. But ventures into public space also had become more threatening because of the presence of sinister new figures that seemed to flit in and out of its shadows—sexual predators, paedophiles, and terrorists. Having had minimal existence in political and public discourse before the 1980s (Pratt and Anderson, 2016), these monsters now became perpetual threats to public safety. They were capable of inflicting irreparable harm on their victims—at a time when special value had come to be attached to the bodies of those most likely to be victimized in such attacks. Children were not only much scarcer commodities, but had become imbued with a great emotional value: ‘At a time when very few human relations can be taken for granted, the child appears as a unique emotional partner … Unlike marriage or friendship, the bond that links a parent to a child cannot be broken. It is a bond that stands out as the exception to the rule that relationships

24  Penal Populism and Public Protection cannot [now] be expected to last forever’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 120). Women, by virtue of spending more time in public space with the new economic and social opportunities provided by consumer-driven economics, also became more vulnerable to attack. And while the risk of victimization from a terrorist attack was very small, there was no available defense if one did eventuate. On such occasions, the result was likely to be devastating. As British Prime Minister David Cameron observed, after an incident at a holiday resort in Tunisia where 30 British tourists were murdered by a lone terrorist, ‘[these] attacks can happen anywhere … this is a threat that faces all of us’ (Dearden, 2015). Criminal justice elites seemed to have no answer to the problem of these new forms of disorder, menace, and destruction. Having presided over rising crime rates from the 1950s, their attempts to argue that, post-1980s, these were now in decline simply became proof of their own irrelevance and duplicity, demonstrating how remote and detached they had become from the concerns of ‘ordinary people.’ Rising crime had become a taken for granted ‘social fact,’ irrespective of the evidence provided in crime statistics. Meanwhile, the post-war trajectory of the criminal justice reform program had meant that there was no ability to detain those who seemed certain to commit more crime on release from prison, nor any ability to move on those whose presence, even if they were not breaking any laws, seemed to threaten public safety. Crime news, deregulation, and technological change One of the reasons why rising crime had indeed become a taken for granted social fact was because of media changes that coincided with or had been brought about by restructuring. These meant that the criminal justice establishment was no longer able to control the parameters of public and political debate and knowledge about crime and punishment, as it had been able to do so previously. Technological advances in conjunction with the deregulation of broadcasting made for a greatly expanded television network, privately funded, through the provision of satellite stations that provided for a much greater diversity of opinion. And after the internet became available for transmission purposes during the 1990s, these had a 24/7 global reach, further undermining the hegemony previously enjoyed by state broadcasting corporations. A sensational story about crime— its menace, not its rarity and decline—would beat off competitors, attract the public, and thereby generate more advertising revenue (Jewkes, 2004). In New Zealand, Cook’s (2002, p. 140) study of the evening primetime One Network News program between 1984 and

Penal Populism and Public Protection 25 1996 demonstrated that the average length of a news item had been reduced by 20 seconds and the maximum length had fallen from nine to 4.5 minutes: ‘the faster paced news is cheaper to produce, requiring less time per item and so less research and background information, and appeals to advertisers who prefer a fast paced programme on many subjects rather than one consisting of lengthy analysis of fewer issues.’ The same research also showed that political news had declined while crime news had increased. Furthermore, the repeated news cycles, across the spectrum of television channels, meant that sensationalized crime reports would be consistently replayed to viewers, with obvious messages about both the menace and extent of crime. On talk-back radio programs, those with grievances about what they saw as the growth of crime, the inadequacies of law enforcement and over-lenient judges, could be given a platform to sound their views, spark debate, even become national figures, however detached from the realities of crime and punishment their opinions were. Greater emphasis given to victims’ accounts of their experiences in the media The new structure of the mass media also meant that the personal experiences of victims began to outweigh the detached, objective analysis of experts (Garland, 2001), especially when there was an ‘ideal victim’ for these purposes. One such was Polly Klaas, murdered in California in 1993: ‘Klaas was an innocent. A sweet-faced twelve-yearold suburban white kid—America’s child, as People Magazine would dub her. Her surreal abduction tapped into every parent’s deepest fear and into the public’s thirst for twenty-four-a-day soap operas’ (Domanick, 2004, p. 116). On such occasions, their experiences were presented as something that could easily happen to anyone at any time: banal everyday events before the attacker pounced—going to work or coming home from school, for example—became the starting point for a catalog of horrors that were then inflicted on these unsuspecting victims. When such catastrophes could befall respectable, ordinary citizens, it was as if what had happened to them became a universal experience and a universal danger. In such ways, the ‘democratization’ of the media made it possible for anecdote and personal experience to become cues for policy development and initiative, independently of the opinions of criminal justice elites. It has also meant that, in much of the media, attempts to discuss crime on the basis of abstract statistics and crime rates have

26  Penal Populism and Public Protection been greatly discredited. To win back legitimacy, governments would have to go some way to provide for emotive and expressive punishments that more adequately reflected public anger and revulsion at such crimes and give opportunities to victims to express their anger over the suffering, in contrast to the carefully measured tones of court room professionals.

Penal populism and policy development The extent to which penal populism could begin to reshape policy can be seen in the example of the US ‘three strikes laws.’ The first of these came into force in California in 1994 (28 states now have their own versions of this measure, as well as the federal government and jurisdictions such as New Zealand, the UK, and some Australian states). The California law mandates a sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes defined as ‘serious’ or ‘violent’ by the California Penal Code. This provision came about through a citizen’s ballot (receiving 67 percent support) rather than any provision from the state government. It had been promoted by Mr Mike Reynolds, whose own daughter had been murdered, and was then given further impetus by the sexual murder of Polly Klaas: her youth, the circumstances of her death and those of her murderer (a man with many previous convictions), seemed to make her the perfect victim to inspire and prolong media interest, even though the child’s father disassociated himself from what Reynolds was doing. But, as it was, he had secured powerful enough support for his proposal from extra-Establishment forces such as victims’ groups, the Prison Officers Association, and the National Rifle Association. The draconian impact of this measure was deliberate: it could sweep minor recidivist offenders from the street (for this reason, Reynolds named the law ‘the street cleaner’), whose presence might give offence but whose criminality posed little serious threat. Its legality was upheld by the California Appeals Court in the case of a homeless man sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for stealing four cookies from a restaurant (Campbell, 2002). Caught up in the flow of public sentiment embodied in this measure, the costs of the expansion of the prison population it would lead to were discarded by legislators. In the new framework of knowledge in which policy of this nature could now be developed, increases in prison numbers were suddenly regarded as justifiable expenditure. The Governor of California insisted that ‘even if the costs are huge, the price will be worth it.’ He compared the

Penal Populism and Public Protection 27 construction of new prison building to the building of the University of California and the state water project, two very different endeavors from an earlier era. Like those projects, he claimed that ‘“we’re producing … capital improvements for future generations, and they can be rightly called upon to help pay for it.” … The public in recent polls has placed crime at the top of the political agenda’ (Weintraub, 1994). And the impact of penal populism can be seen in the New Zealand ‘law and order’ referendum in 1999 (such procedures had been introduced in 1993 as a further attempt to regain legitimacy for the electoral process) and its consequences. It was organized by a Christchurch shopkeeper, Mr Norm Withers, whose mother had been assaulted while attending to his business. Having secured the necessary 10,000 signatures from the electorate to allow it to proceed, the referendum question asked: ‘Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?’ It received the support of 92 percent of the electorate. And although such provisions were non-binding on government, the Labour-led coalition chose to follow this representation of public mood rather than attempt to lead it. It later transpired that the question had been written for Withers by the leader of the right-wing Christian Heritage Party, who was subsequently sentenced to a nine-year prison term for sexual offences against minors. Nonetheless, the Minister of Justice cited public concerns reflected in it as a justification for the cluster of criminal justice legislation the government introduced in its wake—the Sentencing Act, Victims’ Rights Act, and the Parole Act, all in 2002. The Sentencing Act reactivated the indefinite preventive detention sentence, removing previous age restrictions (offenders had to be at least 25 years old) and necessary previous convictions (three) before it could be imposed. It is now available for all sexual and violent offenders, 18 years and over, on first offence, making it a much more central feature of the sentencing process: from 11 such prisoners in 1981, there were 300 in 2020. As regards the Parole Act, one-third remission of sentence for good behavior had been a fairly automatic provision for generations of prisoners. This was abolished for all inmates serving a sentence of one year or more in the 2002 Act. They would now have to apply for, and be granted, parole for early release. Meanwhile, the Victims’ Rights Act places victims rather than their offenders at the center of court proceedings and subsequent parole hearings. Victims or their relatives can also apply for legal aid to be represented on these occasions, the money being diverted from that which offenders had

28  Penal Populism and Public Protection previously been able to apply for. Going through the detail of their victim impact statements has since necessitated a spatial and emotional reorganization of these proceedings. However, it remains that judges have very limited discretion when sentencing and the emotion of victims cannot undo this. The disjuncture between their hope for punishment and the realities of the sentencing tariff can then become further evidence of how out of touch criminal justice elites are from everyday life, a story that can be retold over and over on talk-back radio and similar outlets. Even so, the flawed assumptions of the referendum galvanized the formation of the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST) in 2001 by a farmer, Mr Garth McVicar (‘our main goal is getting tougher sentences for repeat violent offenders … for these people life has to mean life’) (Booker, 2001, p. 4). From its inception to around 2015,5 the Trust and its representatives (particularly McVicar) became prominent media spokespeople on crime and justice (Bartlett, 2009)—their outpourings of law and order talk had become a gift for journalists in their more competitive working environment. They also had regular meetings with government ministers, sometimes bringing the relatives of murder victims with them to these occasions—obviously intending to increase pressure on government to listen to their demands. But despite their avowed concerns for crime victims, their public statements usually centered around the need for longer sentences and harsher prison regimes. The pressure that Trust and its allies were able to put on government led to the Prisoners and Victims Claims Act 2005. This allows victims of crime to claim any ‘windfall’ monies, such as a win from a national lottery draw, from their imprisoned offenders. The legislation was in response to the payment of NZ$150,000 in damages to a group of prisoners who had been unlawfully held in conditions akin to a US super-max regime. News of the damages award, not the prisoners’ conditions of confinement, prompted public outrage which the Trust capitalized on. It was similarly instrumental in the inclusion of a ‘three strikes’ law in the Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010 (although its parliamentary sponsor resigned with immediate effect when it was later revealed he had previous convictions himself).

Punishment as public protection These examples of legislative changes that captured the public mood of their societies, irrespective of the flawed backgrounds of some of their proponents, are illustrative of the way in which governments were prepared to strengthen their ties with extra-parliamentary

Penal Populism and Public Protection 29 forces demanding stronger, more dramatic punishments. In so doing, it seemed, here was a certain way for them to win back public approval and popularity. The new axis of penal power formed in this alignment was then prepared to move punishment beyond its previously accepted framework in democratic society and the guardrails that had been placed around it by criminal justice elites. This new axis variously shifted the emphasis hitherto given to protecting the rights of individuals from excesses of the state’s power to punish to that of protecting the public from those who would otherwise put them at risk of victimization—and by using excesses of state power to do so if necessary. In so doing, it became possible to use criminal law as a preventive rather than a reactive force: a utilitarian form of public protection against crimes which the public could not insure themselves against and which were likely to cause irreparable harm if they were committed. In effect, in this era when individuals had otherwise been exhorted to take care of their own risks (private rather than state pensions, private health providers rather than state care etc.), governments had narrowed their obligations to provide security to their citizens. However, protection from risks of particular types of crime—crimes against the human body (particularly crimes against women and children) and crime risks that would further undermine social cohesion and public order—became one area where these obligations increased—even though this would override neo-liberal strictures that criminal law should only be a narrow, limited, and reactive force. As it was, attempts to control crime risk, not merely crime itself, took two forms. Expanding the reach of the prison Once inside prison, it has become more difficult to get out. Previously existing indefinite prison sentences have been rekindled, as in New Zealand (vs), alongside new forms of this sanction. Following the separate sexual murders of minors by two ex-prisoners after their release, the Washington State Community Protection Act 1990 made ‘civil commitment’ (that is, continuing imprisonment) available to the courts at the end of a finite sentence for sexual and violent offenders. The criteria for this measure are the original offence and that the prisoner is suffering from a ‘mental abnormality or personality disorder making them likely to reoffend unless confined in a “secure facility” (in reality, prison). The legislation was introduced after pressure from the Tennis Shoe Brigade, a local crime victims social movement, with the legislation subsequently being named Jacob’s Law, memorializing

30  Penal Populism and Public Protection one of the murdered children. By 2011, another 20 US states had introduced similar laws. Such provisions have also been introduced in some Australian states and New Zealand, in the form of public protection orders, usually prompted by isolated but very high-profile sex offender cases (see Pratt and Anderson, 2016). In the UK, the back to justice/‘just deserts’ trajectory that had been set out in the Criminal Justice Act 1991 was reversed by the Criminal Justice Act 1993. This gave sentencers more powers of imprisonment, with the Home Secretary proclaiming that ‘prison works,’ at least in terms of providing the public with protection from criminals. He went on to say that: ‘this may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in the prison population’ (quoted by Cavadino and Dignan, 2002, p. 338). Restrictions on parole were also introduced (‘no more half-time sentences for full time criminals,’ the Home Secretary boasted). Thereafter, under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, ‘indeterminate sentences for public protection’ were introduced for all offenders convicted of a range of sexual and violent offences and judged to represent a significant risk of serious harm to the public at the end of their prison term. After an initial finite prison sentence, they could then be detained indefinitely: ‘offenders were held until the Parole Board determined that the risk was sufficiently reduced that they need no longer be detained for public protection’ (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014, p. 158). While this range of measures made getting out of prison more difficult, getting into prison became easier, with the injection of risk control considerations to remands in custody laws. This has brought substantial increases in remand populations across the AngloAmerican democracies, most spectacularly in New Zealand, with a 300 percent rise from 730 remandees in 2000 to 2,306 in 2015. Here, the Bail (Amendment) Act 2013 reversed the existing burden of proof, the purpose of the legislation being to ‘improve public safety’: instead of the prosecution having to prove a risk to the public if bail was granted, the accused now has to prove on the balance of probabilities that they should be granted bail. Controls on movement in public space At the other end of this spectrum of risk control, measures have been put in place to restrict, surveil, and limit movement in public space. In 1996, community notification procedures were introduced in a US federal statute after the sexual murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in

Penal Populism and Public Protection 31 1994 by a recently released sexual offender who had become a neighbor of her family. This law—Megan’s Law, as it was styled—set up a compulsory registry for such offenders on release, which the public would be able to check. Legislators hoped that ‘armed with knowledge of the descriptions and whereabouts of sex offenders and pedophiles, community members will be in the best possible position to protect their children and themselves’ (New Jersey Attorney General, 1998, p. 1). By 2000, all US states and the federal government had registries and provisions for community notification in place. There are also additional controls and checks on the movements in public space of released sex offenders. These ordinances seem to have their most extensive reach in Florida, where they are banned from living within 2,500 feet of anywhere that children gather (schools, playgrounds, beaches, etc.). The intent to provide formal levels of public protection in the absence of more informal levels of social cohesion in the community also allows penal controls to be placed on those who spend their lives in public space—the homeless, beggars and ‘squeegee merchants’ and similar others whose status has come to be thought of as being a precursor of crime. The ‘broken windows’ thesis of Wilson and Kelling (1982) has been particularly influential in this regard: ‘Many citizens are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack. This risk is very real … but we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor necessarily, criminals but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed’ (Wilson and Kelling, 1982, pp. 29–30, my italics). They then went on to claim that ‘The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window’ (ibid.: 34, my italics). It was as if disorder (not just crime) and the lack of effective governance this demonstrated was corroding community life and social cohesion. Being accosted by ‘aggressive beggars’ and similar instances of threat and annoyance were regarded as harbingers of serious crime to come, unless swiftly brought to an end. The public’s right to protection should thus override the rights of those who threatened public safety. In the US, ‘sit-lie’ laws have since been introduced prohibiting sitting or lying on sidewalks or in other public spaces, enforced through

32  Penal Populism and Public Protection civil law injunctions backed up with criminal law penalties. For Santa Ana’s police chief in 1990, for example, rounding up homeless people was a means of ‘fixing the public’s broken windows’ (Walters, 1990). Judge Altimari in the US Appeals Court, in relation to the New York ban on begging on the subway, claimed that ‘whether intended as so, or not, [this conduct] often amounts to nothing less than assault, creating in the passengers the apprehension of imminent danger’ (Wolff, 1990: A1). In the UK, the Home Office (2003, p. 3) White Paper Respect and Responsibility had a foreword from the Home Secretary that had strong echoes of Wilson and Kelling: ‘communities spiral downwards once windows get broken and are not fixed, graffiti spreads and stays there, cars are left abandoned, streets get grimmer and dirtier, youths hang around street corners, intimidating the elderly. The result: crime increases, fear goes up and people feel trapped.’ Anti-social behavior orders in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 had already been introduced in that country, again taking the form of proscriptive civil injunctions backed up by criminal law penalties for breach, including imprisonment. Proscriptive behaviors were extended in 2004 to include dog-fouling, littering, graffiti, and night-time noise. Public space protection orders were then introduced in 2014 in the Anti-social Behavior, Crime and Policing Act and enforced in the same way: ‘local authorities have told us that they might want to use public spaces protection orders to restrict drinking in town centres … that seems a sensible way to reduce the problems that we see too often in towns and cities on Friday and Saturday nights’ (Green, 2013). Warning signs, posted by the local state, listing what forms of conduct are prohibited in that locality (the deliberate vagueness of the legislation allows for this kind of adaptability) and what the penalties for non-compliance with these regulatory powers are, have been put in place across the UK. In Oxford, for example, a sign reads ‘no person shall aggressively beg. Aggressive begging includes begging near a cash machine or begging in a manner reasonably perceived to be aggressive or intimidating.’ Another informs the reader that ‘no person shall remain in a public toilet without reasonable excuse … council staff are put at risk when having to remove people and drug related paraphernalia from the toilets.’ The 2014 legislation also introduced criminal behavior orders to deal with those occasions where ‘the offender has engaged in behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress and that making the order will prevent more such behaviour … The balance of probabilities civil law evidence requirements would again apply’ (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014, p. 77, my italics). It similarly introduced sexual risk

Penal Populism and Public Protection 33 orders, sexual harm orders, and sexual offences prevention orders for the purpose of protecting the public or any particular members of the public from serious sexual harm from the offender. These can be invoked when such individuals are thought to be participating in or about to participate in a ‘trigger event’ (for example, waiting outside a children’s playground). The order requires registration as a sex offender, even though no specific crime has been committed. Failure to comply with the terms of the order then becomes a criminal offence that is likely to bring imprisonment. In one of the first reported cases of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order, The Guardian noted that ‘[a] sex offender, a man of 44, was banned from living in or visiting the same house as a child, and from filming or photographing any child … He cannot go within 100 metres of a school or play area … The judge stated that “it is necessary to make a prevention order to protect the public”’ (Travis, 2004). Public protection measures have also been extended to potential terrorists. The UK Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 introduced the control order, to be imposed where ‘(a) there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the individual is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity’ (§1(1a)); and ‘(b) the court considers it necessary, for purposes connected with protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism, to make a control order imposing obligations on the individual’ (§1(1b)). This measure allowed the courts ‘to restrict the activities of individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity but for whom there is not sufficient evidence to charge’ (Hanman, 2009, my italics). Meanwhile, a new ethics of prediction made possible by advances in computer technology has been instrumental in justifying these forms of immobilization. Predictive powers, based on computer algorithms, are thought to provide much more certain knowledge about the future likelihood of criminality from the cohorts that individuals are ascribed to for testing purposes and thereby, in the face of such calculations, allow rights that had previously been protected to be overridden. Controlling the risks such individuals are thought to pose has become the paramount objective of the criminal justice process in these cases.

Immobilization as a means to restoring social cohesion and government legitimacy These powers of immobilization have been variously implemented by means that include retrospective legislation (the sexual predator laws), hybrid laws (public space protection orders), and reversals of

34  Penal Populism and Public Protection the law of evidence (as with the New Zealand bail legislation). Due process of law and its requirements have simply become inconvenient impediments to the priority given to controlling risk, to be maneuvered out of the way as necessary, rather than act as impenetrable barriers to these immobilizing initiatives—in the face of the forebodings and misgivings of some of the most eminent legal and criminological scholars. For example, the US jurist Lon Fuller (1964) described retrospective legislation as a ‘monstrosity,’ objectionable both in terms of its morality and efficacy. Professor Anthony Duff (2010, p. 93) has referred to hybrid legislation as ‘a subversion of criminal law … using a non-criminal procedure and supposedly non-penal restrictions to deal with conduct that, if it does constitute a public wrong, should instead be dealt with through the criminal law; and a perversion of criminal law, in that they impose criminal conviction and punishment on those who break the supposedly non-criminal orders that are imposed.’ Sir Leon Radzinowicz (1991) presciently warned of the displacement of a ‘socio-liberal’ model of criminal justice by an ‘authoritarian’ model that, in turn, encourages imprecise definitions for many crimes, with the enforcement of criminal justice likely to be exercised not only by the courts but through administrative and police agencies. Nonetheless, eager governments and pliant judiciaries have largely ignored or rationalized away such concerns. The US Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) held that ‘civil commitment’ in that state’s sexual predator legislation was not punitive and therefore did not constitute a double punishment and did not violate the US constitution. It has also been claimed that preventive laws merely constituted a ‘rebalancing’ that was necessary for a system of justice that had become too skewed toward the rights of the accused. As then British Prime Minister Tony Blair (quoted in Porter and Blair, 2006) acknowledged, anti-social behavior laws ‘disturb the normal legal process [but] if the practical effect of the law is that people live in fear because the offender is unafraid of the legal process then, in the name of civil liberties, we are allowing the vulnerable, the decent, the people who show respect and expect it back, to have their essential liberties trampled on.’ Equally, these measures are only going to be deployed against ‘the worst of the worst.’ Therefore, these relatively few breaches of the rule of law were nothing for ‘ordinary people’—non-threatening, nonlaw-breaking people—to be concerned about. Another ruse has been for governments to claim they are simply fulfilling their democratic obligations through these provisions. This is the way to protect the weakest members of their communities from those who prey on them. The British anti-social behavior legislation was justified in parliament

Penal Populism and Public Protection 35 on the grounds that it was an attempt to ‘safeguard the vulnerable in our society, those who have their lives made a daily misery. I regret to say that at the moment our law does not protect them … at present [the vulnerable] have no protection. They cannot afford to look for civil injunctions … [the law] offers the shield of the Government … you assist people … who may need [this] because they are old, disabled, vulnerable, poor or from a particular ethnic minority group’ (Williams, 3 February 1998). These measures have also become a means to allow governments to demonstrate that they are back in charge of the ship of state, steering it away from the most serious risks to its passengers. In so doing, they are prepared to position themselves on the side of ‘the people’ against the discredited criminal justice establishment. In contrast to the neoliberal dictum that there should be as little law as necessary, it is as if the more criminal law legislation that governments pass, the firmer their control of the ship of state seems to be. Tony Blair’s Labour governments from 1997 to 2006 thus introduced 40 new criminal justice bills and ‘created more than 3,000 new criminal offences … The flood of Bills compares with one criminal justice Bill per decade for much of the 20th century’ (Morris, 2006). And the more spectacular the rescues from the dangerous or the risky that these measures involved, the more governments could demonstrate their willingness to break through previous barriers the democratic order had put in the way of making ‘public protection’ central to the operation of criminal justice. Outside of this sequestered area of governance, neo-liberal restructuring could then continue apace. Embracing penal populism to achieve this end might bring short-term gains in the form of political popularity. But in so doing, governments had set the unravelling of the rule of law in motion.

Notes 1 Similar scholars include Ernest van den Haag (1975), Punishing Criminals; Freda Adler (1975), Sisters in Crime; and Patricia Morgan (1978), Delinquent Fantasies. In the area of social policy, see also Charles Murray (1984), Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980. 2 As regards holidays as an illustration of the way in which restructuring had broadened the possibilities of everyday existence, visits abroad increased by UK citizens from 11.6 million in 1980 to 38.5 million in 2014; in 2006, 600,000 owned a holiday home, up 65 percent in two years; in 2012, 1.6 million of the population of England and Wales owned a second home, 60 percent of which were outside the UK. In the US, while eight million people went overseas in 1980, this had increased to 15.7 million by 2014; in 1954, Americans flew, on average, once every four years; by 2005

36  Penal Populism and Public Protection this had increased to 2.5 times per year. In Australia, 706,000 went overseas in 1980, compared to 8.2 million in 2015; 270,000 New Zealanders to one million over the same period. Canadians made a record number of 28.7 million overseas visits in 2010, an increase of 9.4 percent on the previous year. 3 The numbers of people living alone increased from 19 percent of households in 1986 to 24 percent in 2016 in Australia; from 11 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 2016 in Canada; from 16 percent in 1981 to 24 percent in 2018 in New Zealand; from 22 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 2017 in the UK; from 23 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 2017 in the US (Pratt and Miao 2019: 403). 4 In the US, voter turnout in US presidential elections fell from a high of 62.8 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 1996. In UK general elections, voter turnout fell from a high of 83.9 percent in 1950 to 59.4 percent in 2001. In Canada, voter turnout fell from 79 percent in 1963 to 58.8 percent in 2008. In New Zealand, there was a high of 97 percent voter turnout in 1946 to a low of 74.2 percent in 2011. In Australia, voting is compulsory in general elections. 5 The impact of the SST peaked around 2016. Thereafter, McVicar’s decision to stand in the 2017 election as a Conservative Party candidate (he was unsuccessful) showed that he wanted to be part of the political establishment himself. He then retired and without his charismatic appeal the movement lost direction and identity. It was also wounded financially after losing court cases where it was held to have defamed completely innocent citizens, confusing them with convicted sex offenders in its publicity.

3

The Rise of Populist Politics

As it was, penal populism was unable to maintain the role that had been anticipated for it. But it did then not disappear as a governmental strategy, as if crushed by its own inherent contradictions, nor did it dissolve in the face of prolonged, agonizing cries for reason and restraint from the liberal criminal justice establishment. Instead, it was absorbed within the much broader canvas that represented the scope and thrust of a resurgent populist politics. While the task of penal populism had been to uphold the neo-liberal status quo in those societies where it had taken hold, this new politics was intent on radically changing the nature of democratic society, if not bringing the edifice down altogether. It was a politics that seemed to provide a route out of the bargain basement existence for populism’s supporters; it seemed to offer them the chance to demolish that gilded escalator of success ascending beyond its locked doors, while watching the elites it had carried tumbling ignominiously to their doom. The 2008 global fiscal crisis in conjunction with growing hostility to mass immigration, primarily from east to west and from south to north, provided the momentum for the populist resurgence.

The 2008 global fiscal crisis The crisis itself was the product of the very means by which success and upward mobility had become possible for many, through constant borrowing and the building up of debt. In the US, low interest rates and cheap credit meant that even subprime borrowers—those with poor or no credit history—were able to realize the dream of buying their own home as banks gave them mortgages. It was as if the journey toward wealth, property accumulation, and financial well-being had been made available to all—an affirmation in itself of the legitimacy of the neo-liberal program of government. It had not been anticipated, DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855-3

38  The Rise of Populist Politics though, that with a fall in house prices from 2006, many quickly became worth less than what had been paid for them; nor that many of the jobs that paid the mortgages would disappear in the course of the economic crisis and the recession that followed. The crisis further stretched social and economic divisions. The collapse of investment banks such as Lehman Brothers in the US and Northern Rock in the UK in 2008, with desperate investors queuing outside to withdraw their savings, became a symbol of the extent of the devastation. But the consequences of the crisis were also spread very unevenly. Some were able to continue with their accumulation of fabulous wealth. US billionaire Warren Buffet—similar to many other experienced investors, no doubt—was able to increase his fortune by buying millions of shares when the stock market hit rock-bottom. He could then sit back in resplendent luxury and watch their value rise. Indeed, over this period, the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) index made its biggest ever one-day gain, rising 9.84 percent on November 24, 2008. Risk-taking entrepreneurs could still thrive: the wealth of Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, increased from $8.7 billion in 2007 to $12.6 billion in 2010. For many others, though, all those previous expectations of betterment, of an inexorable progress of living standards that had come to be seen as one of the rewards of living in democratic society, had evaporated. While governments intervened to bail out failing banks, thereby stabilizing stock markets, ten million people in the US alone lost their homes as a result of having to default on their mortgages (while their properties could simultaneously be bought up cheaply by developers). They then found that this was only the beginning of their problems rather than the end of them: ‘Many Americans are discovering an unfortunate twist to the housing crisis: even after selling a home and moving away, they might have to keep paying on it for years, even decades. With home prices tumbling, [about 10 million] people owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth … In August 54.2 percent of Californians who sold their homes suffered a loss, a sharp rise from 16.8 percent in August 2007’ (Streitfeld, 2008, p. C1). For all those already consigned to a bargain basement existence, and for all those who now joined them there, what they had lost continued to haunt them: ‘This thing we’re in doesn’t yet have a name. It is variously called … the global financial meltdown, the financial crisis, the credit crisis, the recession, the great recession, the disaster, the panic, or the bust … It is a persistent state, like the weather, or a chronic illness … this thing is, in its various incarnations, pretty much the only subject of conversation. The loss of a job, a home, a

The Rise of Populist Politics 39 college fund, or one’s dignity is both a symptom of the collective disaster and a contributor to its deepening’ (Paumgarten 2009). The crisis also accelerated major changes occurring in employment patterns. Work in the public sector, squeezed during the course of restructuring anyway, shrunk further. In the UK, from 2010, ‘public spending fell as a proportion of GDP from 45 percent to 39 in 2017 … It is planned to fall to 36 percent by 2021 … Government employment fell by 1.1 million between 2010–11 and 2018–19, to about 4.5 million. At a fifth of total employment, the state is already a smaller presence than at any time since the early 1960s’ (Toynbee and Walker, 2017, p. 67). These kinds of cuts were deemed a necessary response to the 2008 crisis by the Conservative-led coalition government. The blame for it, they claimed, lay on profligate public expenditure that had created ‘a national crisis of benefit dependency.’ The Conservative’s solution—in a further bid to reward individual zeal and initiative while penalizing supposed welfare fecklessness—included cutting the top level of taxation by 10 percent in 2011 while restricting child benefits paid by the state to the first two children of any union. By this reasoning, it was not that the return to market rule under neo-liberal governance had caused the crisis: rather, neo-liberalism had been held back by outmoded commitments to maintain inefficient public services and a welfare state that created dependency. The effects of technological change and the decline of industrialization on the labor market were also accelerated by the crash. The meaning of employment no longer carried with it status, a sense of well-being, a firm footing on a steady route toward always improving living standards, a fixed identity, and a certain routine. Work habits in place for generations came to be replaced by participation in the ‘gig economy’—employment with no regular hours, pensions, bonuses, or holidays. By 2010, there were 1.4 million people working on ‘zero hours contracts’ in the UK (Clark, 2014). A steady decline in living standards followed over the next decade, even hitting many of those who were still in work: ‘nurses, care home staff and police officers … will be thousands of pounds worse off than a decade ago as a result of wages failing to keep pace with prices’ (Elliott, 2021). Meanwhile, the Governor of the Bank of England warned that ‘Britain is experiencing its first “lost decade” of economic growth for 150 years [and that] real incomes had not risen in the past ten years’ (Chang and Foster, 2016). Now, home ownership rates for young adults, one of the first steps to take in getting aboard the escalator of success, went into dramatic decline, the rate halving for 26- to 28-year-olds in the UK between 1997 and 2017.

40  The Rise of Populist Politics Local high streets were also being transformed. The growth of online shopping and the concentration of attractive, high-brand stores in exclusive urban areas drained the economic life out of many localities. Previously thriving shops and businesses were replaced by charity shops, bookmakers, pawnbrokers (another return from near extinction in the post-war era), money lenders, video stores, and, simply, boarded up spaces. Food banks, resonant with pre-war soup kitchens, became another feature of increasingly desolate landscapes, growing from 25,899 users (i.e., people receiving three days’ emergency food) during 2008–09 to 2,537,198 in 2021 in the UK. Against this backcloth, how were all the bargain basement dwellers and their associates expected to have loyalty to the democratic order when it seemed to trap them forever in the dark, even as they watched the winners in the re-opened casino economies continue gliding upwards in the light? Further declines in trust in central government and the political establishment showed that many more had indeed begun to lose faith in the existing democratic order’s ability to allow their escape from that trap. Trust in the federal administration was down to only 20 percent in the US by 2010; in the UK in 2009, only 20 percent of those polled said they trusted politicians ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount.’ In Australia, trust in politicians had declined to 26 percent in 2016. Furthermore, this decline of trust extended beyond national governments to include supra-national governmental organizations, such as the EU, the World Bank, and the UN. In populist discourse these bodies were seen as either powerless to prevent the 2008 crash, or helplessly caught up in it, or responsible for it, while simultaneously undermining national sovereignty through their supposed remedial measures: ‘the heads of the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF either imposed austerity measures in financially distressed EU countries to cut government expenditure or … bailed out countries [otherwise] incapable of overcoming the crisis’ (Prosperi, 2020, p. 944). Donald Trump, after being elected as US president, stated that the UN ‘is just a club for people to get together and talk and have a good time’ (Eilperin, 2016). Fired by such disenchantment and disillusionment, the populist solution to the economic crisis would be to restrict and limit the influence of the supra-nationals and give priority instead to national interests that economic protectionism would then safeguard.

Hostility to immigration The sense of national decline, loss of sovereignty, and individual precarity in the course of the economic crisis was compounded by continuing rises in seemingly out of control immigration. Rising

The Rise of Populist Politics 41 immigration had been welcomed by left and right governments during the course of restructuring. It was seen as both a desirable and necessary adjunct to neo-liberal influenced frameworks of governance. Tony Blair (2004), for example, maintained that ‘population mobility and migration has been crucial to our economic success … stopping migration altogether would be disastrous for our country and economy.’ For George W. Bush (2006), ‘we must honor the great American tradition of the melting pot, which has made us one nation out of many people.’ Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd hoped that immigration would increase the size of his country’s population from 22 million in 2010 to 36 million by 2050, creating what he referred to as a ‘big Australia’ (ABC News, 2009). New Zealand Prime Minister John Key also favored growing immigration: ‘We welcome tourists that come from overseas; we welcome people that are going to come and study at our schools and universities; we welcome people who want to invest in New Zealand, and we welcome people who want to make their home in New Zealand … And yes, we welcome people who want to buy a home here and raise a family. That’s what a multicultural, confident society is about’ (Young, 2014). Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau personally welcomed Syrian refugees at Toronto airport to ‘their new home’ (Austen, 2015). But there had been early warning signs of public hostility to rising immigration. From the 1990s, concerns had initially been raised about Asian immigration in Australia and New Zealand. The Australian One Nation Party, founded in 1997, promised to drastically reduce immigration, in conjunction with a protectionist economic program to prevent ‘the Asianisation of Australia.’ In the words of One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson (1996), ‘Asians have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate … a truly multicultural country can never be strong or unite.’ Then, with Muslim immigration increasing during the 2000s, she claimed that ‘Islam cannot have a significant presence in Australia if we are to live in an open, secular and cohesive society. Never before in Australia’s history have we seen civil unrest and terror associated with a so-called religion, or from followers of that faith’ (Hanson, 2016). In New Zealand, the leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters, claimed that ‘we are being dragged into the status of an Asian colony and it is time that New Zealanders were placed first in their own country’ (NZPA, 2004). He, too, then decried increases in Muslim immigration: ‘New Zealand has always been a nation of immigrants [but] … New Zealand has never been a nation of Islamic immigrants’ (Peters, 2005). Here, again, anti-immigration posturing has been linked with economic protectionism: ‘immigration should not be used as a source of cheap labour to undermine New Zealanders’ pay

42  The Rise of Populist Politics and conditions … [we will] ensure that Kiwi workers are at the front of the job queue’ (New Zealand First, 2022). In Europe, the flow of immigration was mainly from ‘the East,’ understood as a region with a dark, threatening, and long-standing history by many in the West. It seemed to represent the antipathy of the civilized way of life that Westerners had come to expect and enjoy. Flight from civil war in the Balkans in the early 1990s marked the beginning of a much more regular influx of immigrants from that direction, amidst growing local antagonism. The Nordic region, which represented one of the main routes out of the East because of the comparatively liberal approach to resettlement there, illustrated the way in which populism could flourish even in societies among the best known for their commitment to liberal values and the democratic order. Here, a very marginal right-wing politics that had campaigned around shrinking the state and lowering taxes in the 1980s, switched to campaigning against immigration, now wanting to preserve extensive state welfare provisions for ‘authentic’ citizens only. The Swedish Democrats were formed in 1988, and the Danish People’s Party (DPP), the Norwegian Progress Party (NPP), and the True Finns (now The Finns party) were all formed in 1995: mercurial electoral success came to all of them when they began to pursue these latter ends. The share of the vote of the Swedish Democrats in parliamentary elections rose from 0.1 percent in 1991 to 20.54 percent in 2022; that for the DPP from 7.4 percent in 1998 to 21.1 percent in 2015; that for the NPP from 6.3 percent in 1993 to 22.9 percent in 2009; and that for the True Finns from 0.9 percent in 1999 to 17.48 percent in 2019. Similar political realignments followed by sharp increases in popularity and electoral successes occurred elsewhere in Europe—the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, formed in 2004, along with its namesake in Austria in the same year; the Northern League (1989), the Five Star Movement (2009), and the Brothers of Italy (2012) in Italy; the Flemish Interests Party (2004) in Belgium; the AfD (2013) Alternative for Germany- in Germany. The new democracies in Central Europe also experienced the rise of right-wing populism. These countries had successively joined the EU and were steadily granted rights of accession that included free movement of labor within it. But joining the EU also meant that there were none of the previous state guarantees regarding employment, food and power subsidies, and so on. In addition, conformity to EU regulations came to be seen as eroding national identity and culture—something that it had been hoped would be regained and allowed to flourish after these countries became free from the Soviet Union (Haney, 2016). In Hungary, this has led to

The Rise of Populist Politics 43 the ‘illiberal democracy’ proudly espoused by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His government was the first to erect a fence on its Eastern border in 2015 to keep out new waves of immigrants from civil wars in the Middle East, contravening EU directives that this influx should be shared around member countries. As EU membership continued to stretch further toward the East, growing immigration from this region set off a wave of anxieties in the UK. Polish immigrants to the UK, for example, increased from 58,000 in 2001 to 676,000 in 2011. The regular message from the rightwing media was that the British way of life had been endangered by the growth of immigrants from that country and beyond: ‘Gypsies will be warned not to come to Britain to live on [welfare] benefits … Britain is the only major EU economy to throw open the doors to the Czech Republic and nine other countries which will join the union in May, including Hungary, Slovakia and Poland’ (Doughty, 2004); ‘40 Immigrant Gangs Taking Over UK’s Crime … run by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe the gangs are understood to be involved in people trafficking, prostitution, money-laundering, extortion and drugs’ (Knapp, 2007); ‘Four Eastern European men were arrested … after a 17-year-old was murdered … [He] was beaten to death under a bridge after being ambushed by two men as he walked with two girls’ (Wilkes, 2009); ‘Polish gang trafficked more than 200 people to Britain to claim two million pounds in illegal benefits’ (Miller, 2011); ‘Tens of thousands of Romanians plan to swarm into the UK once visa restrictions are dropped [at the end of 2013]. Romanians can earn higher wages in this country compared to other EU states, and also get access to Britain’s welfare state and social, housing system’ (Dawar, 2013). The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), formed in 1993 to campaign against British membership of the EU, was the initial beneficiary of the growing sense of anxiety and grievance at this influx. It saw its share of the vote rise from 0.3 percent in the 1997 election to 12.6 percent in that of 2015. Its leader, Nigel Farage, regularly spoke of ‘a Britain that has been rendered “unrecognizable” by mass immigration: Britain’s open borders with the rest of the E.U. had “left a white working class effectively as an underclass. And that, I think, is a disaster for our society”’ (Witte, 2014). His strategy to win votes revolved around joining economic concerns and fears of cultural decline generated by immigration with contempt for the self-serving machinations of the British establishment and their entanglement with the EU: ‘it’s the rich who want to stay in [the EU] … they keep coming out with claims the economy will suffer if they pull out. They are in danger of being seen as crying wolf, and people won’t believe them … I think it’s

44  The Rise of Populist Politics pretty disgraceful the way voters are being bullied. But I think people are used to politicians not telling them the truth’ (Kaniuk, 2016). But after the Arab Spring in 2011, it was no longer merely Bulgarians, Romanians, and others from the supposed ‘East’ who were on this westward march, with the UK as their final stop. They had been joined by countless thousands from the Middle East, fleeing conflict, civil war, and the rise of the ISIS terror group. As if in confirmation of the warnings of populist politicians such as Farage, it seemed that when they were welcomed en route, these highly suspect migrants took this as an opportunity to terrorize the local population. The Daily Mail reported that ‘more than 200 women have now come forward to say they were sexually assaulted [by Muslim refugees] during Cologne’s new year festivities’ (Hall and Tozer, 2016). In addition, an unknown number of jihadi terrorists were thought likely to be hidden in this throng—looking no doubt only for opportunities to inflict the most appalling atrocities, as they did in other countries they came to: ‘France in State of Emergency as Terrorist Attacks in Paris Kill at least 128’ (Walt, 2015). But as with the 2008 financial crisis, the British government seemed powerless. Prime Minister Cameron promised to reduce the numbers of immigrants from 212,000 in 2013 to tens of thousands per year but proved manifestly unable to do so. Meanwhile, in the US, after the election of President Obama in 2008, there was the emergence of the ‘Tea Party,’ on the far right of the Republican Party. It was largely mobilized around the concerns of racially and financially apprehensive whites. It attracted those who felt otherwise abandoned by a Republican leadership with its emphasis on federal government, welfare state bailouts, along with international trading agreements and military alliances operating far beyond the US borders. Hate conduct, speech, and crime markedly increased, the latter doubling in 2015, with Islamophobic incidents rising to their highest level since 9/11. At one end of the scale there was everyday suspicion and insult, such as ‘South West Airlines [in the US] criticized after incidents involving Middle Eastern passengers: “Philadelphia man says gate agent asked him to step aside because another passenger was worried after hearing him speak Arabic”’ (Gambino, 2015). At the other, there was mass murder, as with a Charleston church shooting by a while supremacist that left nine African Americans dead in 2015.

Brexit and the 2016 US election The way in which populist politics was able to thrive by linking economic anxieties with the cultural dangers posed by apparently unchecked immigration came to a head in 2016. That year saw the success of the

The Rise of Populist Politics 45 Brexit campaign in June and the election of Donald Trump as US president in November. In the UK, UKIP’s ability to draw support from the Conservative Party with its opposition to EU membership led Prime Minister Cameron to offer a referendum on this issue. Despite his own expectations of a strong vote to remain, Vote Leave won 52 percent of the votes cast, and the Conservative government then ratified this result. In the US, Trump’s victory further demonstrated populism’s growing appeal and ability to achieve political success. Both the Brexit campaigners and Trump had been seen as underdogs in their campaigns, which meant that they could then position themselves as fighting for national rejuvenation on behalf of ‘ordinary people’ against the elite, corrupt Establishments of their countries. Take the Brexit referendum. ‘Leave’ campaigners used the slogan ‘Take Back Control,’ as if by voting to leave, it would be possible to retrieve all that had been lost or stolen as a result of EU membership. And it would be possible to restore national identity and rid the country of corrupting and ‘un-British’ foreign influence. It would be a gesture of defiance against the Remain-favoring British establishment. A vision of a mostly mythical and anyway irretrievable past of security and cohesion when British people were masters of their own destiny, with the country’s borders firmly controlled, was conjured by prominent Leave campaigners, in particular Farage and then Mayor of London and Conservative MP Boris Johnson: all aspects of this national heritage, they maintained, had been damaged by EU membership. Thus, one feature of the pro-Brexit campaign was the claim that the EU was continuing to extend its immigration magnet still further toward an East that was increasingly frightening: now it was on the verge of inviting Turkey to join—palpably false, but with the implications, as Johnson put the matter, that ‘77 million … Turks and those of Turkish origin can come here without any checks at all’ (quoted in Shipman, 2016). For Farage, ‘the EU and uncontrolled immigration are synonymous with each other … the EU will share borders with Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Turkey would dominate the EU parliament’ (Hall, 2016). And take Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America Great Again.’ The Republican Party became increasingly radicalized to accommodate the Tea Party faction and sympathizers, demonstrating a growing sense of detachment from the democratic process as a consequence (Milbank, 2022). Trump spoke to the concerns of these groups during his 2016 campaign. He conjured images of a sense of a disordered country, amid fears of random criminal assaults on the streets of major cities while successfully elevating the perceived threat of undocumented immigrants in the national consciousness. He variously blamed the US malaise on corruption in central government, international financiers,

46  The Rise of Populist Politics Muslims, Mexicans, globalization, and the infamy of wicked, elitist individuals such as ‘Crooked Hillary Clinton.’ Hence the need to ‘drain the swamp,’ ‘build a wall,’ ‘lock up’ Clinton, and so on. As shown by Brexit and the Trump victory, populism’s appeal was its promise to recreate a past that, as it were, had been stolen and wrecked by Establishment elites. It would do this by protecting the racial purity of the nation and ensuring that all would be permanently fixed in its rightful place—jobs, gender identity, sexual and religious orientations, and racial homogeneity. Just prior to the Brexit referendum vote, Johnson thus proclaimed that ‘our campaign is about self-belief. It is about trusting the instincts of the British people, trusting in our democracy, trusting in the institutions that have evolved over a long time. Our campaign is about accountability … This is our one and only chance in our lifetimes to restore democracy in this country … If we miss it we will be locked into a structure that is completely against our interests and our instincts and is going in the totally wrong direction’ (Dominiczak, 2016). But what was also needed to lead the nation back to greatness was a strong man, standing above and apart from mainstream politics, a savior who would not allow themselves to be held back by the antiquated checks and balances that democracy had hitherto placed on the leader’s powers: it was these checks and balances that had allowed the Establishment to ensconce themselves in political power, while bringing about the nation’s decline. Trump identified himself as one such savior. He professed no qualms about ‘locking up’ his political opponents, simply because they were his opponents rather than any association they might have with criminality—as if his power as president would unproblematically override previous limits to criminal law in democratic society. Thus, while it was the case, he claimed, that ‘Our country is in a mess. We don’t even know what to look for anymore folks. Our country has to straighten out. And we have to straighten out fast’ (Federal News Service, 2016), he also maintained that ‘I alone can fix it.’

Populism, pageantry, and the reassertion of national greatness The emphasis given to the reclamation of national identity has become one of the most important themes of this new populism. In a video address to the nation broadcast an hour before the UK’s exit from the EU in 2021, the now Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed ‘a moment of real national renewal and change … The most important

The Rise of Populist Politics 47 thing to say tonight is that this is not an end but a beginning … We will rediscover muscles that we have not used for decades—the power of independent thought and action’ (Reuters, 2020). He pledged to use the UK’s ‘recaptured sovereignty’ to control immigration, create freeports, liberate the fishing industry, and negotiate trade. Confirmation that the nation’s innate greatness is indeed being restored has since been affirmed in a pageantry of pompous, self-important, grandiloquent boasts, and extravagant promises amidst ostentatious displays of grandeur. The opportunities this provides to celebrate the nation then ensure that the strong man leader is simultaneously feted—as if this restoration has been the product of his own innate greatness. In these ways, the nation state and the strong man become, as it were, one and the same entity. Thus: Trump ‘would like to put himself at the center of the nation’s most prominent Independence Day celebrations—moving the fireworks to a new spot in Washington, D.C., and making a speech as part of the occasion’ (Bruni, 2019). He also wanted a military parade in Washington (without any wounded military in attendance because ‘that wouldn’t look good’) after witnessing one in France to celebrate the 75th anniversary of liberation from the Nazis. He thought it would be a ‘good idea’ to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore, alongside the four greatest presidents of this country. As for his promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico which he also insisted that Mexico would pay for, ‘the truth is that the wall has always been so much more than a physical structure. It’s a vessel into which Trump asked his supporters to pour all their hopes, their fears, their resentments, their anger and their disappointments. It would be the instrument of their spiritual restoration, a way to not just keep out immigrants but to bring back the dignity Trump voters felt they had lost. Not only would we build it, high and wide and strong, but we would use it to make Mexico kneel down before us in subjugation’ (Waldman, 2018). Johnson, during his UK premiership, showed similar interest in vanity projects, such as a projected tunnel or bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. A feasibility exercise that cost £900,000 then rejected any such possibility. He also encouraged a ‘Festival of Brexit,’ the idea of his predecessor as Prime Minister, Theresa May. This would take the form of ‘a celebration of the British weather and the largest grow-your-own food project of modern times will be among the events being staged for a nationwide festival of creativity aimed at bringing the UK together in 2022’ (Brown, 2021). Equally, pageantry in the form of a new royal yacht, or a warship emblazoned with the national flag, could become symbols advertising the nation’s

48  The Rise of Populist Politics noble lineage and strength, as well as being unifying symbols for its citizens. The restoration of other cultural identifiers has also been asserted, ranging from Trump’s claims about US citizens being able to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again (rather than the non-religious ‘Happy Holidays’ greeting), to Johnson naming the return of crown stamps on pint glasses in pubs and scrapping a ban on selling goods in pounds and ounces – this was on his list of the ‘key successes’ of Brexit in 2021. The triumphalism offered by such displays of pageantry overrides concerns about costs and further drains on public expenditure. Under populism, the principles of the free market can be jettisoned as and when necessary, along with previous neo-liberal commitments to balance budgets and reduce national debt. Instead, protection is given to sunset industries such as coal mining while barriers to free trade that had hitherto allowed immigrants to undermine the economic and cultural well-being of ‘authentic’ citizens are imposed. Under populism, it is the strong man who regulates the economy, not the market.

From penal populism to populist politics These impressions of nationalistic grandeur encouraged by populism have been complemented by some of the trademark characteristics of penal populism, now deployed on a much wider plane. Anti-expert and anti-science Responding to the criticisms of Brexit from the overwhelming majority of university economists, the Bank of England officials and the like, Conservative MP, Cabinet Minister and prominent Leave campaigner Michael Gove dismissed these with the claim that ‘the British people have had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). He was rejecting such expertise not only because it presented an institutional challenge to many of populism’s common-sensical assumptions, but in so doing lent support to the same Establishment that populist politics wants to bring down. Common sense and anecdote are the basis for populist policy; research and scientific expertise must be kept at arm’s length (unless there are fellow travelers of the James Q. Wilson variety whom they can harness to their claims). This has meant that the populist suspicion of and hostility toward criminal justice experts continues. Plans for penal policy are justified on the basis that ‘many people say that …’; ‘most people think that …’; ‘I’ve heard that …’; ‘everyone knows that … ’; and so on. And there is no retreat from the way in which penal programs had been used to

The Rise of Populist Politics 49 immobilize those who constituted a particular type of risk to the rest of the public, as with the UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. One of the main features of this legislation is to impose restrictions on what are deemed to be ‘unacceptable protests,’ creating a statutory offence of ‘public nuisance’ punishable by a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment in the process. Meanwhile, in a further bid to push expertise out of the criminal justice process, probation officers, psychologists, and parole officers are no longer allowed to give their opinions on release at parole board hearings in England and Wales. But now the rejection of experts goes much further than this arena. Trump, for example, ‘downplayed or ignored science to weaken environmental health and global warming regulations, marginalized key scientists, disbanded expert advisory boards and suppressed or altered findings that make clear the dangers of pollution and global warming’ (Friedman and Plumer, 2020). Populist politicians and their proselytizers advise people to ‘do their own research’ rather than relying on scientific expertise: as if expert qualifications now carry no special status or value. By the same token, international collaboration has been reduced, and long-established scientific understandings simply discarded. Trump even physically moved scientific institutions—from Washington to Kansas—to weaken their influence, while simultaneously reducing their staffing: ‘By the end of September [2017], all Cabinet agencies except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and the Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January—with most shedding many hundreds of employees’ (Rein and Tran, 2017). Another reason for this antipathy toward scientific research is related to the way in which the extraordinary powers of the strong man are somehow thought to be beyond science: their genius is of an innate quality, beyond book learning, reasoned debate, and scientific evidence. Thus, the Johnson administration had an initial preference for the charismatic ‘guru’ Dominic Cummings as its Chief Adviser. He was independent of the civil service and could override any opposition from this area and from Johnson’s own party that was placed in the way of his plans, while restructuring the civil service from within by appointment of political sympathizers.1 Similarly, discarding qualities of knowledge and diplomatic and institutional experience, Trump appointed 30-year-old Avi Berkowitz as his Middle East envoy, and his former ‘bag man’ John McEntee as Director of the White House Presidential Office at the age of 29. McEntee’s main task seems to have been to check the loyalty of all those employed there to Trump (Karl, 2021).

50  The Rise of Populist Politics Anti-mainstream media The mainstream media is usually eschewed by populist politicians because, in democratic society, these strong men are not in a position to control it. As a consequence, it can expose their shortcomings and inadequacies, holding them accountable for their catalog of lies, fabrications, and fantasies. Johnson and members of his government were hostile to the BBC, as might be expected from right-wing politicians to such a large, publicly funded organization. But their hostility went far beyond economics. They attempted to limit its funding and emasculate it, or corrode it from within by appointing their own supporters to pivotal editorial positions, because it dared to objectively scrutinize their policies (thereby fulfilling the conditions of its charter). Its presenters ask awkward questions rather than simply act as a mouthpiece for government. Johnson attempted to justify the attacks of his government on the BBC as a bid to restore public trust in government and politics: as if by not uncritically accepting the claims made by Johnson and other ministers, this simply showed how biased the BBC had become, thereby justifying funding cuts. Similarly, journalists’ demands that truth be told, as some tried to insist during the 2016 US election, were dismissed with rejoinders by the Trump campaign that this was simply evidence of ‘bias’ against him. For Trump, the journalists at CNN and the New York Times, who stood by the standard of truth, were ‘the lowest form of humanity’ (Burns and Corasaniti, 2016). In attacks on the media, he is the one defending democracy while its journalists undermine it: ‘It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions, and to challenge the media for their role in fomenting divisions. And yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage’ (Time, 2017). Furthermore, Trump’s approach to mainstream journalism has been mirrored by populist politicians around the world. Any reporting that contradicts their view of reality could be summarily dismissed as ‘fake news.’ The UK Times had 58 mentions of this term in 2016; in 2017, there were 628. Trump and other would-be autocrats invent their own version of the truth to suit them and then peddle this on social media. There, they are free to both make their own news, provide a commentary on this, and distribute it among like-minded others. This allows them to live in an altogether different reality by ascribing to the numerous conspiracy theories that proliferate in these spaces, conspiracies supposedly consisting of the establishment, of civil servants, of the mainstream media itself, of Jews and other ethnic minorities, while denying the existence of what they do not want to

The Rise of Populist Politics 51 see. For Trump, the crowds in Washington to witness his presidential inauguration in 2017 were the biggest ever, rather than being significantly smaller than those for Barak Obama, while the crowds in London to protest against his state visit in 2019 did not exist, rather than being the hundreds of thousands who did actually march against his presence there. Populism’s need for enemies Populist politics voraciously searches for new enemies. The presence of such enemies in itself establishes the need for the strong man and his savior-like abilities. Indeed, by virtue of them being ‘saviors,’ there have to be enemies that the nation can be saved from. It then follows that the more security seems endangered, the stronger the authority of the strong man savior becomes. There are familiar figures who can be paraded for these purposes, of course: despised lawbreakers such as pedophiles and sexual predators; and those whose presence seems to pollute public space—beggars, the homeless, and the like. But the enemies targeted by populist politicians extend much further than these clusters of law breakers. Their list includes immigrants, both documented and undocumented. In the run up to the mid-term elections in 2018, Trump drew attention to a ‘caravan’ of immigrants heading north to the US border, collecting more and more would-be migrants as it passed through one Latin American country to the next. He referred to it as ‘an invasion … I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country’ (Scott, 2018). Having alerted his supporters to this approaching, menacing mass of the unwanted, this then justified enhancing border policing, tightening rules of entry, and building the Trump wall right across the US/Mexican border. The racist component of the search for enemies has also meant that white nationalists feel vindicated by Trump. His presidency was marked by further incidents of hate crime, speech, and conduct, ranging, again, from everyday insults: ‘Trump “will get rid of all of you”: … Man attacks Muslim airline employee at JKF’ (Bever, 2017); to mass murder, as with 11 dead in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack, where the assailant blamed Jews for ‘invading’ the US in Central American migrant caravans. And white extremists beyond its borders inspire each other through the internet and social media, with Trump seen as a heroic figure to follow. The Christchurch terrorist in New Zealand, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019, wrote in his ‘manifesto’ that Trump was a symbol of renewed white identity and

52  The Rise of Populist Politics purpose, maintaining that his killings showed ‘the invaders that our lands will never be their lands.’ The list of enemies also includes those exercising the democratic right to protest—this can be broken up, by military force if necessary, banned altogether if necessary. And it includes Establishment figures who stand in the way of the strong man or who would otherwise hold them to account for their extra-legal activities. The response of the British Daily Mail to the Court of Appeal judges who ruled that the vote to leave the EU following the 2016 referendum had to be ratified by parliament rather than given effect by the administrative fiat of the prime minister, was to label them ‘Enemies of the People’ and ‘out of touch judges’ who ‘had declared war on democracy’ (Slack, 2016). Supra-national institutions are also on the list of enemies. In the UK, the European Court of Human Rights became one of the most prominent signifiers of the imposition of unwanted European difference on British values and understandings. It was as if it had the power to insist that Britain should be ‘Europeanized’ as it saw fit, with its intervention in criminal justice matters symbolizing such dangerous intrusion. Notably, the Court’s ban on ‘whole life sentences’ (Vinter and Others v. United Kingdom, 2013), a decision that reflected, it was claimed, a European ‘rights madness,’ as opposed to British common sense (Hastings, 2013). Victimization Populist politics makes great play of speaking on behalf of victims: but not simply victims of crime. Fear of victimization from crime has been conflated with more general fears and intolerance of difference and otherness: as if the social structure of such societies has become so fragile that any presence of strangers, foreigners, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and the like further pulls it apart. All those representing such ‘differences’ are thought to be pose incipient threats to the well-being of ‘authentic’ populations. At the same time, populists sound fears of their victimization from the Establishment forces who stand against them: ‘In his 2016 campaign, Trump taught all Republicans the power of the victimization narrative. He told voters they were the victims of a “rigged” system, of immigrants, of outsiders, of racial minorities, of “elites.” Your hate and resentment is not ugly and shameful, he said; you’ve earned it by the injustices visited upon you. Be proud of it, wield it like a weapon, and know that you’re in the right’ (Waldman, 2022). In the UK, the Brexit storyline regularly changes from that of a great nation valiantly tearing off the

The Rise of Populist Politics 53 shackles that the EU bureaucrats had placed on it to one of ‘poor little Britain as the victim of abuse by the dastardly foreigner … Self-pity has always been the dominant emotion in Brexit’ (O’Toole, 2022). In fact, despite their pose as invincible strong men, populist leaders regularly project themselves as victims, and by so doing cement ties with their supporters who similarly and variously see themselves as victims of Establishment conspiracies and the machinations of the ‘deep state.’ Trump projects himself as a victim—of clandestine FBI investigations, of the Washington elite who try to exclude him from their circles, of corrupt journalists peddling fake news about him, of ‘so-called’ judges who rule against him, of congressional committees who investigate him, and so on. Indeed, for Trump, the more probes and enquiries into his conduct, the more this confirms his view that he is ‘the most persecuted person in the history our country’ (O’Connell, 2022). This then makes him all the more qualified to lead a host of other victims—individuals and communities left behind, along with racists, conspiracy theorists, and such like whom he picks up along the way—in their march against the litany of enemies that he conjures.

Populism and the threat to democratic order Populism’s apparent affinity for law and order does not mean adherence to the rule of law and all it conveys—its neutrality, independence from government, and adherence to essential democratic limits to its scope. In reality, the criminal justice process is simply seen as a weapon that can be used or discarded as and when it suits. Previous restraints on the use of criminal law and penal control for these purposes are thus easily abandoned. Once they have possession of this ‘weapon,’ it is also as if rules and unwanted obligations do not apply to such politicians. International agreements can be torn up at will, as some sort of minor inconvenience to be flushed away amidst more strong man bravado rather than treated as a legally binding document between nations—as with that relating to Northern Ireland Brexit arrangements: ‘on a question as vital as the UK’s willingness to observe international law, there is confusion at the highest levels. Earlier this week, the Conservative frontbench voted for the internal market bill that repudiates aspects of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, thus reneging on a ratified treaty’ (Guardian Editorial Board, 2020). Johnson’s response to the agreement was to grudgingly admit that ‘I sort of signed it’—as if the EU should now acquiesce in his puerile attempt to detach his government from its consequences. Echoing Johnson, the Northern Ireland Secretary acknowledged that

54  The Rise of Populist Politics reneging on the protocol would indeed break international law, but it would only do this in ‘a very specific and limited way’ (McClafferty and Simpson, 2022, my italics). Meanwhile, populist politicians remain innately suspicious of the power of the state—or at least state power that has not been reconstructed along the lines they set for it. In the UK, Johnson attempted to limit judicial review of government policies and also wanted to give ministers a say in judicial appointments rather than continuing to allow this to be done through the auspices of the legal profession and the civil service. In populist discourse, duty is owed to the uncorrupted strong man rather than the state and its officials. Trump thus sees his power and authority extending beyond the state, to include paramilitaries and vigilantes that he boasts he can call on, if needed, should he find himself in conflict with state authorities: ‘I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have tough people …’ (Reich, 2019). As, indeed, in the course of the 1/6 insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington DC, Trump ‘draped his autocratic behavior in the American flag. Surrounded by Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, FDR, MLK and monuments to our war dead, this coward whipped up a horde of conspiracists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and gullible acolytes to try to steal an election for him’ (Dowd, 2021). As the rule of law is constantly attacked, subverted, and undermined in these ways, so the democratic order itself is corroded and imperiled.

Note 1 Cummings eventually resigned his position on November 13, 2020, after he was accused of plotting and briefing against Prime Minister Johnson.

4

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism

Given the propensity of populist leaders to challenge and sometimes break down democratic modes of governance altogether, it might be thought that the arrival of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in early 2020 would be a welcome gift for them. Here was another enemy bringing incalculable harm to individuals and nations. Before vaccination against COVID became possible in December 2020, many governments in Western democracies resorted to immediate ‘state of emergency’ declarations when introducing their anti-virus regulations (travel restrictions, obligatory mask wearing, and so on). This was ‘rule by decree’, in effect, and a blueprint for would-be autocrats wishing to subvert democratic processes and extend their powers of control and surveillance. In the UK, The Guardian (2021) editorialized, in relation to Johnson announcing new controls imposed by administrative fiat rather than being approved by parliamentary vote, that ‘even in the most extreme emergency, the prime minister does not have the power to make law by himself, live on television. The pandemic [however] has sometimes created the impression that something along those lines is happening.’ However, unlike most other enemies targeted by populists, COVID-19 is one that is real rather than imaginary. And because it exists in microbe form, it cannot be blocked by a wall or scared away by the presence of the National Guard. It cannot be detained. It cannot be shamed out of existence by a Twitter outburst. It cannot be defunded or disestablished like some sort of errant, troublesome institution of government. And it cannot be immobilized by recourse to extra-legal, para-penal measures. But in their responses to it, the populist strong men demonstrated that they were much more accomplished in conjuring imaginary enemies rather than fighting real ones. Initially, they tried to deny the existence of the virus, as if to acknowledge it would cast a dark shadow across the national rejuvenation they had promised their citizens. At a White House briefing in DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855-4

56  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism March 2020, Trump (with Center for Diseases Control (CDC) staff in Beijing reduced from 47 to 14 during his presidency) maintained that ‘within a couple of days [COVID] is going to be down to close to zero.’ Notwithstanding that he knew about the virus soon after its discovery (Woodward and Costa, 2021), he later mentioned that he did not want to alarm the US public about this real enemy, even though he had had no qualms fabricating imaginary enemies with whom he could deliberately alarm them—the Latin American ‘caravans’ of immigrants, for example. Johnson, meanwhile, stated that ‘the best thing for the U.K. “would be to ignore” the COVID-19 outbreak in China’ (Ray, 2021). Similarly, President Bolsonaro in Brazil claimed that COVID-19 was just ‘a little flu’ (Phillips, 2020). When the virus did not decline to ‘zero’ infections and proved impossible to ‘ignore,’ they then put forward their own snake oil cures, most famously, Trump suggesting that injections with disinfectant might be a remedy. Johnson told British citizens to merely ‘wash your hands’ while singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice. These approaches, in part at least, reflected the innate suspicions of such politicians of further enlarging the power of the state that nationwide controls and regulations would lead to. It had been the avowed intent of leaders such as Trump and Johnson to free ‘the people’ from a supposedly too powerful and corrupt/inefficient central state. Now, though, the vast majority of the medico-scientific community was insisting that these powers be extended over the whole population, with new limitations on its freedom of movement. However, until the arrival of the vaccines, falling prey to the virus was a risk that individuals could not fully protect themselves from; and it quickly became obvious that it posed intolerable risks to all. As is the case when faced with such levels of risk in democratic society, citizens still looked to governments for reassurance and protection, but found very little from populist leaders. The result was that, despite the promises of the strong men to restore certainty and security to everyday life and rid the public of the enemies who menaced them, everyday life became much more uncertain and insecure as COVID infections—the new ‘public enemy’—rapidly multiplied. Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro and similar others thus failed in their democratic responsibilities and obligations to their citizens. The large numbers of deaths per head of population caused by the virus in these societies revealed the levels of their incompetence and malfeasance.1 At the same time, the virus also demonstrated that Trump et al. did not have magical powers, after all, to wish bad things away; and their quack remedies made them an international laughing stock.

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  57

An antidote to populism Until vaccines became available, the only recourse that governments had to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was to return to restrictions that date from the Middle Ages in times of an epidemic (Snowden, 2019): mask wearing, social distancing, and the immobilization of entire populations rather than individuals—on the grounds of public health risks now rather than crime. However, while there was no antidote to COVID before the availability of vaccines, COVID quickly became an antidote to populism in the following ways. Public reliance on the mainstream media/public broadcasting organizations for COVID information The virus undermined one of populism’s central claims that ‘mainstream journalists’ are simply purveyors of ‘fake news’—deliberately so, as part of Establishment plots to harm Trump and other would-be saviors of their nations. Their supporters should look instead to sites where there were ‘alternative facts’—outlets such as Fox News in the US or the Daily Mail in the UK. Or they should go to hideaway places on the internet that peddle conspiracy theories as they ‘conducted their own research.’ When undertaking such ‘research’ on COVID-19, they would be informed that the virus was deliberately unleashed on the rest of the world by China; or that it did not exist at all but was a plot fashioned by Democrats/international bankers/George Soros/ Bill Gates/the mainstream media, with international paedophiles involved somewhere along the way, to destabilize Trump’s presidency; or that Dr Tony Fauci, the Director of the US Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the world’s leading authorities on infectious diseases, adviser to every US president since Reagan and one of the leading members of the Trump government’s Coronavirus Task Force, had been involved in creating the virus in a Chinese laboratory. In these nether regions, there is the pretence that ‘truth isn’t truth’ anymore, as Trump’s sometime personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has put the matter. But despite the availability of all these ‘alternative facts,’ despite the attempts to discredit the mainstream media, the general public, in greatly increased numbers, looked to it for their knowledge and comprehension of the virus. In New Zealand in April 2020, it was reported that 18 percent of respondents to an opinion poll said that they checked for news about the virus almost constantly, 7 percent hourly, 52 percent several times per day, with the state broadcasting organization RadioNZ regarded as the most trustworthy

58  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism source (Brain, 2020; Murphy, 2020). In the UK, it was reported that ‘the BBC was the most popular source of news and information about COVID-19—used by 82% of adults during the first week of the [March 2020] lockdown’ (BBC News, 2020). In Australia, in August 2021, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was recording ‘the biggest news audiences in its history’ as Australians sought trustworthy sources to help them navigate pandemic conditions (ABC News, 2021). In the US, in 2021, CBS, NBC, and ABC were the three most popular news channels, with a combined daily average of 15 million viewers, compared to the 2,394,000 of Fox News—down 34 percent on the previous year. As the pandemic accelerated, it was recognized by a large majority of viewers and listeners that truth was truth after all. It was not something to be discredited or falsified if it happened to be inconvenient. Their recourse to, reliance on, and trust in the mainstream media undermined populist attempts to construct alternative realities where strong men leaders could simply deny or trivialize the existence of the virus and then attack anti-COVID restrictions (even when put in place by their own government) as part of some sort of Establishment plot or international conspiracy. The return of the expert And because of the virus, it was no longer the case that ‘people have had enough of experts.’ Although unknown to the vast majority of the public before the pandemic, important figures in science and medicine suddenly became household names as regular media commentators providing the public with informed but accessible information. Dr Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist at Auckland University, won the award of New Zealander of the Year in 2021 for her work as one of the most prominent public commentators there. In addition, many became involved in taskforces set up by their governments that gave (often daily) press conferences or otherwise issued updates about the spread of the virus, alongside leading members of government. In this way, it appeared that the state, its officials, and the scientific community were working cohesively to secure public safety and well-being. As Karl (2021, p. 24) observed in relation to the US, ‘it’s almost impossible to overstate the level of public interest in these briefings as they became a daily affair in mid-March 2020. Every cable news network and all the major broadcast networks carried them live. With schools closed, professional sports shut down, and with no place to go, almost everybody was watching television, looking for the latest news on the virus and guidance on how to protect themselves and their families.’

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  59 Nonetheless, there were exceptions. Populism’s strong men were reluctant to share the limelight with their own appointed experts, as exemplified by Trump’s performance. His attempts to demonstrate that he, as leader, knew best and was the one who was really in charge of events, became the main theme of the US press conferences in the first weeks of the virus. He was sharing these occasions with members of the CDC and his government’s taskforce, in particular Fauci. However, ‘the first press conference set the tone for those that followed. The president was joined by the experts, but he did most of the talking. And he spent most of the time boasting about what a great job he and his administration had done. He waved around a piece of paper that he said was a study showing the United States was “the number one most prepared country in the world” for a pandemic’ (Karl, 2021, p. 20). Despite his inability to engage with Fauci on any kind of coherent intellectual level, Trump was determined not to be outdone by him and other medical experts and claimed to have a ‘natural ability’ to understand infectious diseases and related matters. However, the press conferences Trump attended only demonstrated how little knowledge he had—as when he suggested people might inject themselves with disinfectant—and how much he was out of his depth in trying to match his knowledge with that of world-renowned authorities. In addition to his other gaffes, Trump stated that he was a ‘big fan’ of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine because ‘he felt good about it,’ even though there was no scientific evidence to suggest that it was an effective cure against COVID. His own intuition on this meant that there was no need for scientific evidence to back up his claims. After the press conference when he brought up the possibility of bleach injections, he made no further appearances. Instead, he began to undermine the authority and capability of his own government’s appointed experts, calling for states to be ‘liberated’ from lockdowns and supporting state governors who moved in this direction: ‘The president is increasingly chafing against medical consensus. He has found support from a chorus of conservative commentators who have cheered his promise to get the US economy going again as well as his decision to tout possible virus treatments not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.’ (Haberman, 2020). Following his lead, a congressional hearing ‘questioned the integrity of the medical community, suggesting scientists were part of some “deep state” conspiracy to deny Americans access to lifesaving therapies … Trump accused doctors of inflating COVID-19 cases for profit’ (Jha, 2020). He then appointed officials with no expertise in infectious diseases but who shared his understandings of the virus,

60  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism such as they were: ‘[Trump] has repeatedly tried to muzzle and side line scientists and health officials who disagree with his sunny assessments, often replacing them with less qualified people willing to sing his praises …’ (New York Times Editorial Board, 2020). Scott Atlas, for example, was a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious disease outbreaks, but was appointed as a Trump aide and argued that it was not the government’s responsibility to stamp out the virus. Meanwhile, as an inadvertent rival on this national stage, Fauci became another public enemy in the eyes of Trump supporters: ‘[his] family received death threats following his appeals to Americans to take the public health crisis from the coronavirus pandemic seriously’ (Woodward, 2020). In the US, then, the renewed prominence of experts, in stark contrast to Trump’s own boastful ignorance and suspicions of them, added to and exacerbated social divisions: ‘Trump has chosen to go to war with the idea of testing, with Dr Anthony Fauci and with “experts” in general at precisely the moment when the fall wave they’ve been warning about seems to be showing up—which is also the moment when the two-thirds of Americans who describe themselves as “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the virus will be going to the polls’ (Douthat, 2020). But despite such chaos and ignorance, the opinions of epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists and the like were eagerly awaited by most of the public. Rather than the magical cures proffered by populist strong men, they were prepared to put their trust in scientific knowledge and expertise. A New York Times poll in June 2020 showed high levels of trust in medical scientists (84 percent), the CDC (77 percent), and Dr Fauci (67 percent) as opposed to Trump (26 percent) (Sanger-Katz, 2020). More generally, scientific expertise was also validated by exceptionally high rates of double vaccinations, at least, against COVID (the rate for booster injections is a good deal lower)2 across the democratic world. These levels of vaccination—Australia 96 percent of the eligible population in August 2022, Canada and New Zealand 95 percent, the UK 75 percent—are on a par with or even surpass previous vaccination rates for infectious diseases such as polio, diphtheria, and smallpox. The US at 66 percent lags behind these countries, despite being one of the first countries to have vaccines available, another demonstration of the way in which distrust of scientific expertise had taken a more significant hold on sections of its population. Nonetheless, it remains that by putting their trust in science and expertise rather than in conspiracy theories and the magical cures of populist strong men, most of the public helped to keep the virus at

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  61 bay and simultaneously challenged populism’s anti-science crusade. Vaccination, not the strong man, became the most important savior from COVID. High levels of public compliance with anti-COVID regulations There was well-publicized dissent against COVID regulations (including vaccine mandates) that governments put in place. This was at its loudest and most aggressive in the US. There were shooting incidents over disputes regarding compulsory mask wearing in shopping areas. There were a record number of disruptive passengers flying in the US, with 70 percent of the incidents related to mask mandates in 2021. Restaurant workers were attacked on occasions when they asked clientele for vaccine proof that was mandatory for admission. Fourteen men were charged with a plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan and put her ‘on trial’ because of the lockdown she imposed on her state in 2020. As she later explained in her victim impact statement, ‘kidnapping plots and death threats endanger not just individuals but democracy itself’ (Boucher, 2021). The response of Trump, the law and order president, to members of this militia, was to say that ‘these are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal’ (Greve, 2020). Outside the US, there were widespread public disturbances in Australian cities, particularly Melbourne and Sydney, in protest against lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations for some workers. Canadian truck drivers protested about cross-border vaccine mandates with the US and blocked the streets of Ottawa for three weeks before being forcibly dispersed by the police. In New Zealand, there was an encampment in the grounds and surrounding areas of parliament of up to 2,000 people for 23 days against that country’s vaccine mandates that was then forcibly broken up by the police. It remains, though, that the overwhelming majority of citizens readily complied with anti-COVID regulations, despite these taking the form of unparalleled peacetime restrictions on their movements. Opinion poll surveys even indicated high levels of support for still stricter lockdowns than most governments were prepared to introduce, as well as support for travel bans and other restrictions on movement. During the first lockdown period in the UK in April 2020, one poll ‘found that 87% believed the lockdown should continue for at least another three weeks … When asked their opinion on whether the UK’s plans over the next few weeks were “not firm enough with restrictions on people” or were “putting too many restrictions on people” … 56% felt

62  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism they were not firm enough’ (Recchia, 2020). In the US, Brooks (2020) reported that ‘America is pretty united right now. In an ABC News/ Ipsos poll, 98 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans supported social-distancing rules … nearly 90 percent of Americans think a second wave of the virus would be at least somewhat likely if we ended the lockdowns today … 89 percent support the bipartisan federal aid packages.’ There have also been high levels of support for mandatory vaccinations against COVID-19: Australia (77 percent) and the UK (70 percent). What this points to is that despite the levels of publicity given to protestors against COVID regulations, incomparably larger sections of the community demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice individual liberties to support the public good of virus control. The importance given to community safety and compliance with regulations in support of this vastly exceeded the populist insistence on defending individuals from the forces of a supposedly corrupt, over-powerful central state. The restoration of trust in central government and their governing bureaucracies In those societies where governments and their administrations were manifestly working in harness and seemed to have succeeded in controlling or restricting the virus, public trust in the authority of the central state greatly increased. Thus, in some Australian states and New Zealand, societies that initially seemed to be successfully pursuing a virus elimination strategy, there were approval rates of government of 80 and 83 percent, respectively, in July 2020 (Goldfinch et al., 2020). This compares to levels of compared to 58 percent in the UK and 53 percent in the US (Dalia Research and Alliance of Democracies, 2020), low even at that time when the full extent of the level of fatalities brought about by COVID in those two countries especially was not yet apparent.3 Where there was clear, effective leadership from governments that were prepared to give both good and bad news—but news which was true, accurate, and understandable—this then generated high levels of public trust. On the other hand, COVID led to further declines in trust in the state in those societies where governments fell palpably short of public expectations in managing this risk to public well-being; or where expert advice had been ignored in favor of giving priority to the national economy and respect for ‘individual freedom’; or where government policy was inconsistent, shifting its approach according to news headlines and soundbites, as with Johnson’s bid to call a one-sided truce with COVID in December 2020 with a relaxation of

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  63 restrictions to avoid ‘spoiling Christmas’ (a decision which he then reversed, following public consternation at his plan): a familiar populist strategy, this, where its leaders like to be associated only with good news; in contrast, the public were hoping for consistency and clarity. As such, pandering to happy memories of Christmas past only further undermined trust in Johnson and similar vacillating politicians—as if only perpetual pleasures and triumphs are in their lexicon. Overall, despite the populist attempts to undermine the governing Establishment, COVID had given it the opportunity to reassert its authority. Where it did do this, levels of trust improved. Reversing the Reagan aphorism, it was as if, once again, governments could be the solution rather than the problem—and the general public wanted and expected it to act in this capacity. The web of lies and about-face policy changes intended to maintain popularity by populist leaders then helped to bring about catastrophic declines in their levels of public support: in the UK, that for the Johnson government’s response had fallen from 72 percent in March 2020 to 34 percent by November 2020 (Smith, 2020). Stronger social cohesion The lockdowns and their immobilizing consequences were part of the terrible price that COVID-19 exacted, with the poorest and most vulnerable members of communities likely to be the worst affected. In the UK, ‘the COVID-19 crisis has given rise to an awful imbalance: the state increasing its power to sow mistrust and punish, while failing on the more nurturing and protective responsibilities that are a much better answer to the pandemic. The police have endless new powers, but it has taken more than six months for the government to offer half-decent financial help to poorer people who have to self-isolate’ (Harris, 2020). The virus also prompted racist attacks against those of Asian ancestry, no doubt encouraged by frequent Trumpian references to ‘Chinese flu,’ ‘kung flu,’ and so on. Indeed, The Independent reported that ‘Hundreds of Asian Americans have been violently attacked over the last month because of “China virus” racism, activists say’ (Buncombe, 2020). But at the same time, lockdowns and related restrictions also had the effect of strengthening social cohesion. The New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern referred to the ‘team of five million’ (the whole population of the country) being involved in the fight against COVID. And there were innumerable instances of the way in which local communities came together to provide care and assistance for those in need during the lockdown

64  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism periods, even if they were complete strangers to each other. In the UK, 1,500 people signed up to the Oxford Hub initiative ‘to build community responses to the virus, helping to protect and support our most vulnerable’ (Moran, 2020); and ‘hundreds of the nation’s top restaurants … pledge their support to a charity focussed on feeding the most vulnerable after the pandemic left them in urgent need of support’ (Roberts, 2020). Doctors and nurses came out of retirement to help with medical services. In the US, ‘the Auntie Sewing Squad, which has sown more than a hundred thousand cloth masks to distribute to frontline, vulnerable and devalued groups from farmworkers to former prisoners’ (Solnit, 2020). Celebrities, too, campaigned for equity and social justice during the lockdowns. English Premier League footballer Marcus Rashford proposed that the government ‘offer a guaranteed “meal a day” to all school pupils in England in financially struggling families’ as part of his campaign to end child food poverty (Butler, 2021). This succeeded in making the Conservative government reverse its policy of denying such assistance, for fear of further declines in its popularity. New role models also emerged in the initial stages of the virus. Risk-taking entrepreneurs found that even they were now immobilized, while those providing medical and health care became national heroes, despite periodic attempts of Trump and others to undermine them.4 They were joined in this recognition by other essential workers, such as those employed in supermarkets, pharmacy, retirement homes, and public transport, amidst public awareness that it was these types of largely unheralded occupations that helped their society to continue functioning. Globalization rather than jingoistic nationalism In populist politics, the interests of the nation state take priority over and above any international commitments or obligations. However, during the pandemic, there were high levels of public recognition that the solution to the virus involved the development of national strategies that were part of a global response. Max Boot (2020) thus reported a survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs: ‘most Americans reject Trump’s isolationist, protectionist policies. Sixty-two percent say that the lesson of COVID-19 is that we need to “coordinate and collaborate with other countries to solve global issues.” Sixty-eight percent said it would be better “for the future of the country of we take an active part in world affairs.” Sixty-five per cent say that globalization is “mostly good” for the United States.’

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  65 The fight against COVID was thus not an issue of simply winning the race to be first with a vaccine, or to have the most effective ‘test and trace’ system, and then celebrating such achievements in a form of jingoistic nationalism. The successes of ‘Operation Moonshot’ in the UK and ‘Operation Warpspeed’ in the US—terms used by the Johnson and Trump administrations in relation to the development of a test and trace system in the former, and the development of a vaccine in the latter—were intended to become the latest illustrations of national greatness that Johnson and Trump had made possible (notwithstanding the latter’s own public ambivalence toward the vaccines and outright hostility to them among much of his base support). As such, the remarkable work of the medico-scientific community in developing COVID vaccines in an exceptionally short timeframe for a virus that had claimed 6.6 million lives globally by November 1, 2022 was reduced, in the UK, to another ‘celebratory story to distract from the incompetence and cronyism that have marked the Johnson administration’s overall response to the pandemic … It is striking, for example, that the phrase “world beating” was hardly ever used in the Westminster parliament before 2020. In all of 2019, it appeared 21 times. But since 1 July [2020], it has been brandished 148 times … It is also part of the Brexit narrative of a British greatness that has no need of European normality’ (O’Toole, 2020). As regards ‘Warpspeed,’ Antony Fauci quipped that ‘it can imply by warpspeed that you’re going so fast that you’re skipping over important steps and are not paying enough attention to safety’ (Weixel, 2020). The general public anyway had been disinclined to participate in such jingoistic nationalism. Rather than welcoming still more vacuous pageantry, public opposition meant that Johnson’s plans for ‘Freedom Day’ on July 19, 2021 that would have ended most COVID restrictions, including mandatory wearing of face masks on public transport and in hospitals, came to nothing. In contrast, 73 percent of those polled ‘believed wearing masks on public transport should continue’ (Helm and Savage, 2021). It was clearly the case that the overwhelming majority of citizens in democratic society had not denied the existence of the virus, nor its dangers, and they had looked to their governments to provide them with what protection they could from it, certainly before vaccines became available, rather than endanger them with an eagerness to return to celebrating the nation’s greatness (and that of the strong man leader). Even in the US, despite Trump’s malfeasance and the loud voices of COVID deniers, by late March 2020, ‘2/3 of Americans—including majorities in both [political] parties and

66  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism across all major democratic groups—saw COVID-19 as a significant virus’ (Deane et al., 2021). What had become obvious to most was that the way to limit COVID’s destructive path was through the reaffirmation of a strong state authority, in conjunction with effective government bureaucracies informed by expert knowledge; all this, rather than rely on the intuitions of some self-styled populist genius. The way to become informed about the virus was to look to news and information given out by experts on mainstream broadcasting organizations rather than rely on ‘alternative facts’ available in cesspit conspiracy theories on the internet. The way to help communities through the pandemic would be by a resurgent commitment to the performance of civic duties and responsibilities that strengthened social cohesion rather than further sow division in the hunt for populism’s enemies.

Public health and the decoupling of risk from crime Another central feature of the populist agenda—the menace of crime and the need to extend penal control well beyond its previous limits in democratic society in response—lost much of the purchase it had previously enjoyed with electorates. During the pre-vaccine era of the virus, concerns about public health largely supplanted the concerns about crime that had helped populism to flourish. And unlike crime concerns, it was not the case that public health risks were simply confined to dangerous or unwanted outsiders. Before vaccines became available, everyone was both at risk of becoming infected with the virus themselves and at risk of infecting everyone they encountered. The immobilization of entire populations, rather than a dangerous few, in response to COVID, no doubt played a role in this decoupling: rather than sites for disorder and threat, streets were empty. There were no sinister figures lurking in the shadows because movement of nearly everyone had stopped for weeks, sometimes months. Public attention became much more focused on the risks to public health posed by COVID rather than crime. In New Zealand, despite the way in which penal populism had been so influential (Pratt, 2007; Pratt and Clark, 2005), a Horizon public opinion poll found 54 percent of respondents chose health as the most important issue in the 2020 election. This was followed by ‘Pandemic Economy Recovery’ (51 percent) and ‘Pandemic Management’ (48 percent). ‘Law and Order’ (30 percent) and ‘Crime’ (29 percent) were ranked 19 and 20, respectively (Horizon Poll, 2020). The new

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  67 preoccupation with health risks left little public enthusiasm for or interest in the kinds of penal excesses that had been responsible for the growth of the prison estate. Indeed, the urgency of the pandemic even allowed penal affairs to be governed through a public health rather than a security gaze during 2020 and 2021 in some societies. From the beginning of the pandemic, both health and penal experts called for the release of prisoners most vulnerable to COVID. It was recognized that prison conditions— often poorly ventilated, dirty and with little adequate healthcare— provided breeding grounds for it. And, of course, overcrowded prisons meant that social distancing was near impossible. This awareness led to some US states and Canadian provinces releasing inmates early. The US prison and jail population fell by 11 percent, primarily due to mass release in this period (So et al., 2020). Similarly, Canadian correctional institutions saw a 16-percent drop in inmate populations due to early releases (Bradley, 2020). Furthermore, the American Medical Association recommended that inmates should be prioritized for vaccines, as US data collected by the Associated Press and the Marshall Project showed that ‘prisoners are four times more likely to contract COVID-19 than the general population’ (Schwartzapfel et al., 2020). Inmates then even took vaccine priority before elderly populations in a dozen US states (Rabin, 2020). Similarly, the Australian government promised that prisoners would be among the first to receive the vaccine, with their Health Department attributing this decision to the advice from medical experts and the World Health Organisation (Hendry-Tennent, 2020). That said, these new possibilities of governing prisons and thinking about punishment were by no means uniform. In the UK, following public health recommendations, the Ministry of Justice established the End of Custody Temporary Release scheme in April 2020, with the aim to release up to 4,000 low-risk prisoners. However, the scheme was indefinitely ‘paused’ in August, after only 275 prisoners had been released. The Ministry of Justice reasoned that they now had coronavirus under control in the prisons (Grierson, 2020). Despite having ‘stopped coronavirus taking hold in prisons’ the number of infected inmates had increased to 10,354 in its first year (Ministry of Justice, 2021). Thereafter, rather than being granted early release, the User Voice and Queen’s University of Belfast reported that 85 percent of inmates were locked up for 23 hours per day—an indefinite lockdown and torture by UN (Allison, 2022). Furthermore, Zeveleva and Nazif-Munoz (2021) found that 47 Council of Europe countries limited

68  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism visiting rights during the pandemic, as opposed to 18 countries that introduced early release initiatives or pardons. Nonetheless, in some democratic societies at least, the concerted attempts to reduce the prison population and to prioritize inmates in the vaccine queue demonstrated the urgency and importance being given to public health risks, in contrast to the emphasis previously given to prison security. And prior to the availability of vaccines, local and central states were prepared to use social measures for some problematic populations rather than resort to penal control. This could mean, for example, that the hitherto chronic problem of homelessness suddenly disappeared. In New Zealand, the government provided subsidized accommodation in hotels. Thereafter, a Mayoral Relief Fund was set up in Wellington, the capital city, for those in need of food, shelter, and clothing. In the UK, the ‘Everybody In’ scheme was launched in March 2020, providing funding to ensure the homeless were housed in hotels and hostels. The Canadian government spent C$157.5 million on its homeless strategy in the light of the virus (Government of Canada, 2020). Governor Newsom in California allotted US$30 million to organizations that offered transport, quarantine housing, and health care for people released from prison during the pandemic (Servick, 2020). New York state set up hotel-stays for homeless ex-prisoners. Needless to say, such interventions represented only the beginnings of a solution and they were not always successful5 —but, again, their very existence illustrates the different possibilities of responding to this problem that emerged as the pandemic surged. Rather than street gangs, rather than the homeless and the beggars, rather than ‘caravans’ of immigrants massing at the border, rather than hordes of refugees and asylum seekers heading Westwards and Northwards from the depraved and broken East and South, rather even than sexual predators and paedophiles, COVID microbes suddenly became the most important public enemy: all others had been immobilized.

The decline of populism as a political force In such ways, the emergence of COVID inadvertently helped to at least arrest the momentum that populism had enjoyed. This largely came to an end during the first two years of the pandemic. Trump’s attempt to make his own version of law and order the central issue of the 2020 US election was a manifest failure. Even large-scale public disorder in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 was not enough to make law and order the central theme of

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  69 the US election later that year. Without such armament, he had little tangible to offer the electorate. Indeed, Trump became populism’s biggest political loser. His public ambivalence to vaccines and his attempts to deny or disregard the virus may have solidified his base support which probably expanded to include anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. Nonetheless, COVID enlarged his faults and his total unsuitability for presidential office: ‘they became too frightening to miss. It showed him lacking even the most rudimentary empathy … it showed him to be dishonest, insisting that the virus was likely to “disappear” … and it showed him to have contempt for facts and science, regularly contradicting and undermining the US response’ (Freedland, 2020). While Trump attracted 74 million votes in the 2020 election, a record 81 million votes were against him, sounding his presidency’s death knell. And he was not the only such loser. As Bobba and Hubé (2021) show, populist parties, for the most part, lost support in Europe as the pandemic raged. Opinion polls in Italy in May 2021 showed declining support for both The League and Five Star Movement: from 21 to 16 percent during 2021 and from 17 to 13 percent, respectively. In Finland, The Finns declined from 21 to 15 percent. In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party made no further advances and remained unchanged at 8 percent. In addition, there were declines in the percentage of adults who said they believed that ‘the will of the people’—a key populist tenet—should be the highest principle in their country’s politics in 2021 in Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, and Poland and the UK (Henley, 2021). In German regional elections in 2021, the AfD polled 9 percent, down from 12.6 percent in 2017. In the Portuguese general election of 2021, 42 percent of the vote went to the Socialist Party, 28 percent to the Social Democrats, and 7 percent to the populist Chega [Enough]. In the Chilean presidential election in 2021, the center left candidate comprehensively beat one from the populist right. The Czech Republic populist Prime Minister lost the election in that country in October 2021 amidst scandal and corruption. In the 2022 Brazilian elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID malfeasance caught up with him and contributed to his defeat. In Australia and New Zealand, the successes of central and state governments in controlling the virus were reflected in dramatic falls in support for populist parties in these countries in 2020 general elections. New Zealand First won only 2.6 percent of the vote (a decline from 7.2 percent in the 2017 election), which lost them all nine seats they had previously held. A similar pattern occurred in Australia. One Nation won only one seat in the Queensland state election, previously

70  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism its strongest area of support, having received 7.12 percent of the vote— down from 13.7 percent in the 2017 election. Government successes in controlling/defeating the virus in conjunction with the way in which immobilization halted immigration and the priority given to public health over law and order meant that both these parties had little fuel to feed the grievances on which their electoral support had been based. These election results are also likely to mean that the respective governments will be reluctant to pursue populist penal props themselves: a large measure of control of the virus gave them legitimacy, without the need for law and order measures to shore this up (indeed, the New Zealand government repealed the country’s ‘three strikes’ law in 2022, and its rate of imprisonment declined from 214 per 100,000 of population in 2018 to 150 in 2022). In other respects, COVID was central to the termination of the premiership of Boris Johnson on July 7, 2022. He resigned in the aftermath of mass resignations of his ministers to force him from office, amidst revelations of corruption, cronyism, and multiple breaches of his own COVID regulations. He had stipulated that he wanted ‘stronger enforcement of the rules’ and proposed local ‘COVID marshals’ who would ensure the sanctioning of any miscreants. There would be fines of up to £10,000 for people judged to have breached self-isolation rules, and police would be checking compliance in ‘the highest incidence areas’ and among ‘high risk groups,’ based on ‘local intelligence’ (Butler, 2020). But from November 2021 to May 2022, a series of media reports emerged of him regularly breaching his own regulations at his Prime Minister’s residence for which he and others were subsequently prosecuted and fined. Overall, ‘the populist loudmouths, the braggarts whose stock in trade was railing against the experts, imagining themselves to be free of the laws of factual reality, fared badly against a threat as a real as the virus, a menace that could not be talked away with a rally, an insult or a joke’ (Freedland, 2020). And rather than longing for a return to a post-pandemic free market, opinion poll surveys reflected a yearning for government to provide adequate health care rather than leaving this as another consumer product to be purchased: this should be prioritized over economic growth, according to 60 percent of UK respondents (Harvey, 2020); in the US, 63 percent of respondents thought that the government had a responsibility to provide health care for all (Jones, 2020). It became possible to think in terms of security, once again, being provided through social cohesion and informal measures of protection rather than penal power, and reinforced by government economic and social policies. In effect, as mobility, hitherto so essential if success was to be enjoyed in the neo-liberal world, declined for all, immobilization

COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism  71 actually provided opportunities for the major shifts in values that represented the antithesis of populism. A strong desire for post-pandemic personal and social change was reflected in a UK April 2020 opinion poll, indicating that only 9 percent of Britons wanted a return to their pre-pandemic lives. What had these been like? Each individual would have a different story to tell; but, nonetheless, given what the virus brought about before vaccines became available—lockdowns and restrictions—it can be surmised that all that previous movement, the endless striving for individual success at the expense of family, community relationships, and so on, was being rejected (Wood, 2020). Instead, there was greater recognition of the importance of environmental improvements (cleaner air, more wildlife) and more appreciation of family and community belonging. Similarly, a global survey by the World Economic Forum and Ipsos found that 72 percent of respondents wanted their personal lives to change, and 86 percent wanted the world to be more equitable and sustainable after the pandemic (Broom, 2020). The general picture, then, is that while COVID was able to rage unchecked by vaccines, it simultaneously checked populism and in so doing demonstrated the possibilities and necessities for effective government: government could be the solution after all, not the problem. Narrowed horizons in the course of lockdowns along with empty streets seemed to bring a frozen sense of calm and tranquility to many— notwithstanding high levels of stress, anguish, domestic violence, alcoholism, and drug use that others experienced in this time—hence all the hopes in opinion polls for a different kind of post-pandemic life. Most citizens, before vaccines became available, were happy to see governments assume responsibility for the risks COVID posed. The more governments were able to take away the prevailing sense of insecurity that it caused, not just through assuming levels of control over the movements of their population but through generous subsidies and so on to keep businesses going, the more faith in government was restored. And while COVID risks were managed by governments, it was as if individuals were living in a form of suspended animation, often leading to bucolic dreams of post-pandemic lives.

Notes 1 The US (1,065,841 deaths as of October 19, 2022) and Brazil (687,000) have some of the highest per capita death rates from COVID-19. The UK (208,000) has the highest death rate among Western European democracies. 2 Booster take up of COVID vaccines has been much lower, at something around 50 percent of eligible populations.

72  COVID-19 as an Antidote to Populism 3 UK deaths from COVID are at 205,000 on August 29, 2022; those in the US are 1.04 million. 4 Trump complained about the ‘medical deep state’ conspiring against him, after anti-COVID vaccine was confirmed one week after the 2020 US election. 5 In the UK, ‘The government’s efforts to house rough sleepers during the pandemic became “nuanced” from May 2020 and no longer included all rough sleepers’ (Heath, 2021).

5

Fragile Reprieve

In his book Epidemics and Society, Frank Snowden (2019) noted that every previous pandemic has brought extensive cultural, political, and social change. One of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it inadvertently threw a lifeline to the flailing democratic order. And the catastrophic mistakes and blunders that were regularly made by populist politicians in their responses to it further strengthened this lifeline. But how secure would this prove to be as the pandemic gradually abated during 2022? Rather than threatening to be an agent of death for those who came into contact with it as in its first iteration, it has since been claimed by medical authorities that ‘COVID-19 [has] become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage … After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not’ (Murray, 2022). That this is so is almost wholly because of the mass availability of vaccines, greatly reducing COVID’s potential for harm. This in turn has meant that the period of ‘suspended animation’ created by the lockdowns and other restrictions—air travel, for example, had declined by 90 percent in the UK by April 2021 compared to a year earlier—has been brought to an end in most democratic societies. Time is no longer frozen for their citizens. In response, some have willingly adhered to the new routines that COVID had forced on them. They continue to work from home for at least part of the week, with great reductions in the organization of their lives around commuting. This allows them to continue chasing those dreams of a better life that they began to have as COVID restrictions took effect—those plans for self-improvement, being more in touch with family and friends, visiting parks, doing physical exercise, socializing with neighbors, eating more healthy food, and pursuing self-sufficiency which in turn would help to nurture and restore battered environments. Many others, in contrast, have returned to a pre-COVID timetabling of their DOI: 10.4324/9781003262855-5

74  Fragile Reprieve lives. Even so, it is apparent that what they value and appreciate has changed in the meantime. It is as if COVID brought—and continues to bring with its disruption to travel, shipping, absenteeism among staff, depleted supermarket stocks, and so on—still more contingencies and uncertainties to everyday life. When will it be their turn to be struck down by the virus, or the next one that emerges? To what extent will it incapacitate them? Might it still be able to kill them, penetrating the vaccine protection? Wood (2022), writing of the UK, observes that these concerns have led to a ‘moments economy.’ This is where smallscale achievements and successes, or points of recognition, are celebrated in preference to plans for future majestic extravaganzas which a resurgent COVID or the like might force them to abandon: ‘Britons spend smaller amounts on enjoying day-to-day life—from having a dinner party to celebrating a dog’s birthday—rather than splurging on set-piece events such as foreign holidays.’ It has been the vaccines that made possible these individual adaptations, saving at least 20 million lives in the process (Joi, 2022). In addition, though, their availability has changed the way in which the pandemic’s risks to public health are managed. Prior to the vaccines, governments in democratic society had assumed responsibility for this task. Where they demonstrated competence in checking and controlling the advance of the virus, this then had the effect of increasing levels of public trust and confidence in their authority—helping to undermine the populist momentum. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff (2020) observed, ‘countries with complex liberal democratic governing systems, multiple power centers, lively oppositions, and active judicial checks performed remarkably well, … They also fared better than several autocracies [that] introduced more stringent lockdowns and relied on more intrusive contact tracing … While consistent and transparent leadership is in high demand in times of crisis, intrusive governance and curtailed freedoms seem not to be. Social trust and a civic spirit, a sense of individual responsibility combined with a competent state apparatus and credible leadership, have been the characteristics of governance that have led to impressive performances in suppressing the virus.’ Such governments stood out as shining beacons of success—triumphs of the democratic order whereby so many citizens’ lives were saved in the process—in contrast to the ineptitude of the rule of populist strong men. However, with the availability of the vaccines, the burden of managing COVID’s risks shifted from governments to individuals, with the onus placed on them to protect themselves from this public enemy— primarily through vaccination but assisted by mask wearing in particular locations and social distancing. In conjunction with this shift,

Fragile Reprieve 75 governments have gradually stripped away their own anti-COVID restrictions and regulations, further making COVID’s risk management a matter of individual responsibility. But these shifts have also meant that such governments and their leaders are no longer seen as the solution to the pandemic’s risks—and their citizens no longer owe them a debt of gratitude and loyalty for keeping them safe. Even the most successful of them have lost significant public support in the process. The New Zealand Premier, Jacinda Ardern, widely lauded internationally for, inter alia, leading her government’s response to the virus, has seen her popularity with the electorate fall (in opinion polling) from 59.5 percent in May 2020 to 29.5 percent in November 2022. Her descent coincides with the shift in that country in September 2021 from a COVID elimination policy through government controls to one of suppression by individuals now taking responsibility for their own well-being through vaccination.

Cuts to COVID’s lifeline This New Zealand illustration also points to the way in which the change in risk management—all the more stark and sudden there — undermines the boost to the authority of the central state that successful management of COVID had previously provided, making a cut in the lifeline that had been given to the democratic order at the same time. Nor is this the only cut to that lifeline that has been made. The return of the expert seems to have ended just as quickly as it began. Those who came to public attention (almost reverence in some cases) at the height of the pandemic have since lost much of their prestige and prominence. As the status of COVID itself has been reduced to that of ‘just another recurrent disease,’ media interest in the advice and opinions of the medico-scientific community has greatly reduced. While its members may occasionally resurface in conjunction with the production of updated COVID data, they are only likely to use that opportunity to forlornly demand that borders should be closed again, that tests on those entering the country should not be abandoned, while warning that more lockdowns might be necessary in the future—long after public support for and toleration of such controls has dissipated, along with the enthusiasm of government for them. Their diminished standing and utility also allows the right-wing media and populist politicians to turn on them and avenge themselves for the status they had gained as the pandemic raged. In the UK, the Daily Mail reported that the ‘Independent SAGE Group (of 26 medicoscientific experts that was formed during the pandemic) famously

76  Fragile Reprieve lobbied for a Christmas lockdown when Omicron burst onto the scene—but quietly softened its stance after the [latest] milder variant subsided naturally … It also only abandoned its controversial Zero COVID stance earlier [in 2022]. The group had [also] heaped praise on China for its draconic attempts to suppress the virus’ (Matthews and Ely, 2022). Equally, prominent Conservative politicians, rather than promising to ‘follow the science,’ as their government had previously insisted it was doing in its COVID response, assure their supporters that this will not be so in the future: a disavowal that also declares that the renaissance of the expert that COVID had heralded is over as far as they are concerned. In the US, populist reaction to the medicoscience community has become particularly vengeful. A Fox News host compared Dr Fauci to the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. Republicans in the US Congress have vowed to investigate Fauci’s role during the pandemic, implying some sort of criminal culpability on his part that will then require punishment: ‘[he] lost the trust of the American people when his guidance unnecessarily kept schools closed and businesses shut while obscuring questions about his knowledge on the origins of COVID. He owes the American people answers. A @HouseGOP majority will hold him accountable,’ House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (2022) tweeted. And while COVID had provided opportunities for strengthening social cohesion, usually at a local level, but occasionally at a national level as well, as horizons shrank due to immobilization, this barrier against populism has also been undermined. Local initiatives may continue to assist needy and infirm citizens independently of the central state, but, more generally, gratitude and respect for those who had become the heroes of the pandemic seems to be evaporating.1 The levels of public support for the health workers who saved so many lives, at great personal risk to themselves before the availability of vaccines, as well as the schoolteachers, supermarket workers, pharmacists, and the like who over the same period managed to maintain some coherent level of public life and services have not resulted in any demonstrable show of interest in joining such professions and occupations. Recruitment levels remain low, with innumerable vacancies unfilled in all sectors. But not only this. The stretching of these services that the virus has caused, the depleted services that are often available as many such workers still fall prey to it, has led to public frustrations, anger, and aggression being taken out on them. In the UK, ‘Nurses and shop staff face tide of abuse since end of lockdowns … Half of all shop, transport, restaurant and hotel workers and others dealing regularly with the public have experienced abuse in the past six months’

Fragile Reprieve 77 (Tapper, 2021). Members of Parliament, footballers, social workers, and teachers—all of whom have some interface with the public—have also been abused. It is as if a new kind of intolerance has emerged, born out of the frustrations that the life and the expectations of it that were possible in the pre-COVID era have not yet re-materialized—and may never do so. The urgency of COVID and the attendant restrictions on movement and human contact smothered divisions, tensions, and frustrations. The reduction of anti-COVID controls, the hesitant return to mobility rather than immobilization, has allowed them to resurface. In the US, social cohesion became more fragmented and divided anyway during the collision between COVID and Trump’s presidency: ‘the pandemic has caused nearly two years of collective trauma. Many people are near a breaking point … many Americans are profoundly tense. They’re snapping at each other more frequently, suffering from physical symptoms of stress and seeking methods of self-care. In the most extreme cases, they’re acting out their anger in public—bringing their internal struggles to bear on interactions with strangers … Almost everyone has sacrificed an important aspect of their lives: a job, the ability to safely gather to mourn a death or celebrate a marriage, or any degree of certainty in the future’ (Iati, 2021). One indicator of this collective trauma has been the rise in gun sales: 2020 was a record-breaking year with 22.8 million; 2021 was second only to 2020, with 19.9 million sales, a reflection of anxieties related to COVID, economic well-being, and more general insecurities about feeling safe. Meanwhile, the reopening of borders inevitably provokes a resurgence of hostility to ‘foreigners’ and nationalist sentiment, further fraying the COVID lifeline. While net migration to the UK, for example, averaged 200,000 per year between 2011 and 2020, in 2021, the figure was 239,000. Furthermore, the need for immigrants has become all the more urgent because the immobilization caused by COVID has left very large gaps in labor forces. In the US in September 2020, there were 11 million unfilled vacancies with about one quarter of these the result of immigration restrictions (Eberstadt, 2022). Labor shortages have been further exacerbated in the UK by the way in which Brexit restrictions have dramatically slowed movement of labor between that country and the EU. Many governments have found it necessary to encourage more documented immigration. However, the Brexit legacy in the UK is likely to cause further resentment among those who continue to see immigration as a threat to the dominant culture and local employment. The Home Secretary thus insisted that ‘we have got to definitely substantially reduce the number of students, the number of work visas and in particular the number of dependants on those sorts of visas’ (Syal, 2022).

78  Fragile Reprieve Meanwhile, undocumented immigration continues to increase. In the US, the number of migrant arrivals reported at the Mexico border in fiscal year 2022 surpassed two million in August, an all-time high driven in part by unprecedented levels of migration from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. In the UK, more than 20,000 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in the first eight months of 2022. By this point in 2021, just over 11,300 crossings had been made. In the whole of 2020, there had been only 8,000. The number of illegal crossings at the EU’s external borders in the first two months of 2022 rose 61 percent from in 2021 to nearly 27,000, according to preliminary calculations.2 In the month of February, there were 11,850 detections of illegal border crossings, around a quarter more than in the same month of 2021. The highest number of illegal crossings was registered on the Western Balkan route, totaling 11,700 in January and February. This was double the figure from the same period of 2021, with Syrians and Afghanis being the two main nationalities. The fraying of the lifeline that COVID had provided in these ways has meant that the conflict between populism and the democratic order has resumed. In Italy, immigration fears, particularly of undocumented immigrants from North Africa, played a large role in the electoral success of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party in the 2022 Italian election.

Law and order resuscitated As the coupling of risk and public health breaks down, so that between risk and crime and disorder is being restored as a priority for government. Certainly, if the lockdowns brought increases in some types of crime such as domestic violence, they also brought reductions in others. In the UK, there were decreases in knife crime (7 percent) and gun crime (18 percent)—both usually associated with attacks in public space—during 2020. Furthermore, while reported incidents of anti-social behavior increased during the lockdowns, much of this may have been due to a greater readiness to report lockdown breaches—another indication of the high level of public compliance with these controls and support for them (Redgrave, 2022). Since the end of COVID restrictions, however, UK football grounds have become regular sites for large-scale incidents of anti-social behavior: ‘arrests at football matches across the top five English leagues are at their highest levels in years, with fan disorder “getting worse”, according to the UK’s football policing lead … cases of anti-social behaviour among younger fans is a particular area of concern’ (Mann, 2022).

Fragile Reprieve 79 These increases have been attributed to the way in which such occasions provide opportunities for celebratory, carnivalesque behavior for many supporters, in contrast to the sterility of the lockdowns. It is as if their attendance allows them to indulge in their own adaptations of the ‘moments economy,’ building on local traditions and cultures in so doing. These occasions also provide opportunities for outbursts of mass anger and frustration at the way in which COVID had restricted their lives. Crowd control issues may be further complicated by the loss of trained stewards to COVID as well as increased cocaine use among supporters that began during the pandemic (Newson, 2021). In New Zealand, where lockdowns were more rigorously imposed and enforced than in most other democratic societies, the emptying out of streets and the shutting down of public life only slowly came to an end after these restrictions were lifted at the end of 2021. The reduced presence of the public in the cities was then accompanied by increases in gang-related crimes and shootings, particularly in Auckland, the largest. There have also been what may be forms of carnivalesque crime among young people, sometimes only ten years old. This involves ‘ramraiding’: smashing stolen cars into shops, usually jewelers but often off-licences, petrol stations, and convenience stores, then stealing whatever goods are available. This continues, even as the streets begin to be repopulated, with 254 such incidents from January to June 2022, a 518-percent increase on the first six months of 2018. In the US, there has been a rise in homicides caused by gun violence, especially in poor communities (which in turn leads to more citizens buying guns for the purposes of self-protection). During 2020, the murder rate rose by 30 percent, with more than 75 percent committed with firearms, the highest ever recorded. In 2021, 20,726 people died from gun-related homicides compared to 19,486 in 2020. In addition, there were 693 mass shootings with four or more injuries in 2021, an increase from 611 in 2020 and 417 in 2019. By the end of August 2022, there had already been 510 such incidents during that year. Furthermore, the increase in shootings includes incidents of white nationalist gun violence, such as that of an 18-year-old who used an AR-15 to shoot and kill ten Black people and injure an additional three people in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. It is evident that populist law and order campaigns can now resurface with fears of COVID abating and have stronger purchase with the public than during the pandemic. Conflating immigration, drugs, gang violence, and shootings was thus instrumental in the electoral success of the Swedish Democrats in 2022. In the Anglo-American world, as the pandemic has declined in urgency, homelessness can

80  Fragile Reprieve again be targeted as a penal rather than social problem, especially now that moratoria on evictions have largely ended. During 2022, there were half a million homeless people in the US, with rising costs, inflation, and the collapse of jobs in tourism and service industries contributing to this. More specifically, 69,144 people experience homelessness nightly in LA County, according to the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. This number marks a 4.1-percent increase from the last count in 2020, when the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that 66,436 experienced homelessness. Trump has proposed street sweeps and detention camps as a solution: ‘The only way you’re going to remove the hundreds of thousands of people, and maybe, throughout our nation, millions of people … and help make our cities clean, safe, and beautiful again is to open up large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities … and create thousands and thousands of high-quality tents’ (Walker, 2022). In the UK, where an extra 66,000 homeless people are expected by 2024, the public space protection orders have been used to move them out of urban centers to reduce the sense of threat and imminent criminality they are thought to give passers-by (Booth, 2022). Similarly, at the other end of the penal spectrum, Trump has claimed that the US ‘is now a cesspool of crime … We have blood, death and suffering on a scale once unthinkable’ (Al Jazeera, 2022): blood, death, and suffering, once again, from crime rather than COVID. And even when the attempts of populist politicians to enlarge the penal spectrum— either with the targets it chooses or the strategies it employs—are struck down by the courts, this further helps to sustain their crusades. In the UK, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) remains in this spotlight, having ruled against the Conservative government’s attempt to send asylum seekers to Rwanda in 2022. In response, the Attorney General insisted that ‘When people voted for Brexit, they expected us to take back control of our borders. It is unacceptable that a foreign court stopped the flight. The British people should be able to vote for their priorities and expect their government to carry them out…. Obstructing lawful deportations by going to the ECHR … does nothing for public safety, or the wellbeing of the victims of people smugglers’ (Martin, 2022): the place of this court and its members in the list of enemies of the people has been reaffirmed.

Populism and the inversion of reality Beginning with penal populism, mainstream politicians shifted their program of government to try and speak to and win the support of the left behind/left out sectors of the population. They hoped to repair

Fragile Reprieve 81 social cohesion and maintain the status quo by doing so. But as cohesion continued to fragment, these attempts expanded exponentially in the form of anti-immigration discourses and policies and a resurgent nationalism, with the intent now of bringing down the status quo rather than preserving it. The election of Trump in 2016 was one of the most potent examples of the way in which these threads were drawn together.3 Whatever happens to him—whether criminal law eventually catches up with him, whether or not he is able to make a political comeback—his achievement in politics has been to smash the previously taken for granted legitimacy of the democratic order and its norms, conventions, and rules. He feeds on the already existing levels of rancor, disenchantment, and division present in American society; he then sculpts easily identifiable enemies from this swirling antagonism and relentlessly makes ad hominem attacks on them before his national and international audiences of devotees. In so doing, he provides them with scripts that obey the logics and morality of a different political order altogether—an authoritarian order, where the strong man will always triumph, where any criticism or investigation of him and his regime will not be tolerated, and any signs of decline in his support will be vehemently denied. As Klaas (2020) has noted, ‘much of the damage that Trump has done so far is intangible—yet still destructive. Democracy requires a shared sense of reality. He has subverted it by pumping lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories into our information pipeline. And chillingly, Trump has convinced millions of people to cheer for him as he attacks the very institutions that separate democratic governments from authoritarian ones.’ Thus, the strong man does not lose elections but is cheated of victory by the fraud of his opponents: if there is no evidence of this it can simply be made up (‘truth doesn’t mean truth’). Theories of how fraud might have been committed, rather than any evidence of fraud, are all that is needed to cast doubt on the previously inviolable sanctity of the electoral process itself—as if those who faithfully adhere to it must themselves prove absence of fraud when they meet such suspicions. In this inversion of reality, where democracies are seen as tyrannical and corrupt and its institutions of government are nothing more than components of the ‘deep state,’ it becomes legitimate to challenge and uproot them. Accordingly, as the scale of Trump’s corruption, malfeasance, and conspiracies became more publicly visible during 2022, the range and extent of the attacks by him and his supporters on the trappings of the democratic order broadened to include the FBI (the ‘Gestapo’), the Department of Justice (‘political monsters’), the Inland Revenue Service (‘engaged in a transparent political effort to embarrass the

82  Fragile Reprieve President’), and the National Archives and Records Administration (‘[we] have received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiring against the former president’ [Trump]) (Saric, 2022). By raging against them, Trump is then seen by his supporters as not only defending himself from their tyranny but defending them as well from subsequent corrupt persecution. His own legal struggles become a necessary conflict he must undertake on their behalf before leading them to an America that he alone can make great again. Hence the motivations of those involved in the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s encouragement of them in inflammatory speeches before the event and on the day itself: they were there, he claims, ‘largely to protest a corrupt and rigged and stolen election’ (Hurley, 2022). To the same end, his former adviser Michael Flynn insists that there is nothing unusual about declaring martial law in the US and that this should have been done to overturn the 2020 election: a rerun under appropriate supervision would no doubt bring not just the desired result, but the only result allowed. And in contrast to the inherent virtue of the strong man, those in government or related institutions and organizations who attempt to uphold the democratic order assume almost demonic qualities. If these enemies can then be met with spectacular elimination, this reinforces both the authority of the strong man and that of his supporters. Mere demands to ‘lock up’ such enemies have been transcended. For Carl Paladino, a Republican candidate for Congress in 2022 (before his defeat in the primary), the Attorney General Merrick Garland should be ‘executed’ (Bleau, 2022) because he authorized the search of Trump’s private residence on suspicion that he had unlawfully withheld documents that are the property of National Archives. The January 6 insurrectionists wanted to ‘hang’ Vice President Mike Pence on the gallows they had constructed for him. Furthermore, that kind of violent attack that was intended to culminate in a punishment extravaganza amidst the overthrow of the US democratic order has become a blueprint for related incidents elsewhere. Some of the 2,000 or so protestors encamped in the New Zealand parliamentary grounds in 2022 were carrying banners supporting Trump. They were similarly intent on overthrowing not just the government, but the democratic order itself: it was to be smashed down amidst vacuous demands for ‘freedom’ which, apparently, would be delivered to the whole country by empowerment of the variety of extra-parliamentary fringe organizations represented in the throng. The New Zealand government’s COVID vaccine mandate, covering much of public life, was seen by them as being on a par with forms

Fragile Reprieve 83 of Nazi tyranny rather than as a public health measure necessary to protect the population.4 Within this kind of logic, Premier Ardern became a ‘war criminal,’ whom the protestors intended to haul before a reconstituted Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal of their own—as if this would give some sort of authority and solemnity to their actions. Meanwhile, nooses that had been hung from trees in the grounds showed what some had already decided her fate would be, as with that of her parliamentary colleagues, her medico-scientific advisers and sections of the media (those—almost all of in fact—that were not sympathetic to the causes of the protestors).

Fragile reprieve And yet it remains that Trump himself was checked by the institutions of the democratic order and their attendant rules, norms, and protocols in his bid to hold on to the US presidency after his defeat in the 2020 election. These, or at least key individuals working in them, did not break, despite the intensity and extent of the attempted coup and the pressures that were placed on them. Furthermore, while many of the barriers that COVID had inadvertently built up against populist advances have fallen apart, one important element of that blockade may still be in place. References to ‘fake news’ have substantially declined in The Times since their peak in 2017: from 628 in that year to 278 in 2019, to 207 in 2020 and 226 from January 2021 to August 2022. Of course, this downward trend may simply be a reflection of media fashions—as if claims of fake news have lost their novelty value and public purchase. But perhaps, as well, in the aftermath of the realities of COVID, claims of fake news from Trump and his acolytes no longer cause the levels of consternation and doubt that they initially did. The failure of many Trump-backed Republican candidates to win in the 2022 US mid-term elections suggests that the real world portrayed in the mainstream media has more resonance with the general public than the various conspiracy theories and distortions of reality that these candidates usually espouse. The democratic order, it would appear, has been given a fragile reprieve. It has also been thrown another unanticipated lifeline—this time by Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine by his Russian armed forces. Most prominent populist politicians have since pulled back from previous deference and admiration they had shown the Russian strong man and have disassociated themselves from him. For Marine Le Pen in France, the invasion of Ukraine was ‘a clear violation of international law and absolutely indefensible.’ For the AfD the

84  Fragile Reprieve invasion represented ‘a clear breach of international law’ (McGee, 2022). The newly elected populist Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, has sought to soothe concerns about Italy’s unity with the EU and NATO on Ukraine, stating that ‘We will be guarantors, without ambiguity, of Italy’s positioning and of our uttermost support to the heroic battle of the Ukrainian people’ (Marsi, 2022). Hungary’s Victor Orbán has condemned ‘Russia’s armed offensive’ and has allowed NATO troops and weapons, destined for Ukraine, to pass through Hungary. Putin’s war with Ukraine and its people has vividly shown, in fact, what populism can lead to, when the protections given to the democratic order, and when the protections it in turn gives to its citizens, are removed: a form of autocracy appears with rigorous state control of the media, denial of free speech, ‘disappearances,’ the dreaded knock on the door by visitors from the state security services, the hunting down of ‘enemies of the people,’ and the overt politicization of criminal justice and the penal system to silence critics and opponents. It leads to a society where government lies become the truth, and where the truth is condemned by government as a lie. But, as with COVID, truth remains truth after all. The strength of feeling across much of the world against what Putin has done in Ukraine further helps to restore faith in democracy and its attributes: the rule of law, international cooperation, and supra-national organizations such as NATO, the EU, and the International Criminal Court that variously provide unity, cohesion, and the protection of human rights. The invasion has also led to a much greater willingness to accept Ukrainian refugees at least, even among those societies that had been most reluctant to open their borders for fear of weakening national purity. Putin has not only thrown a lifeline to the democratic order he wishes to destroy but has also provided the starkest reminder of its value and the inherent menace of populism to it.

New challenges The origins of the threats to the democratic order made by Trump and other would-be autocrats lie in the neo-liberal reforms that began in the 1980s. One of the consequences of those reforms has been to reduce the lives of many of its citizens to a bargain basement, food bank, and $2 shop existence. They have no reason to have much loyalty to the democratic order, but have good reason to feel attracted to autocratic populists who seem to speak to them and their concerns. That so many do live like this reflects the way in which such societies are still

Fragile Reprieve 85 paying for the bill that has accompanied the post-1970s restructuring. Traveling up a few floors on the escalator of success, as far as most were able to go, became an attractive and enticing option—but at the hidden cost of undermining the foundations of the democratic order: the social arrangements that made such journeys possible increasingly threatened its viability. This remained so even with increasing use of penal control to try and stabilize a sufficient level of cohesion, brushing past the restraints previously placed on it by the rule of law. If the democratic order cannot meet all the guarantees it is associated with, including protection from tyranny and the expectations of a life that stands out in contrast to the lives that are possible in totalitarian/authoritarian social formations, then its existence will continue to rely on contingencies such as COVID and Putin’s warmongering: a fragile existence indeed, as populist successes in elections in Italy and Sweden demonstrated in 2022. And the costs of all that restructuring keep mounting, bringing new challenges and risks to its authority and ability to govern. These include: Future pandemics Globalization and the rapid mass movement of goods and populations— cornerstones of the neo-liberal program of government—make future pandemics more likely: ‘the migration of people throughout history has been a dynamic factor in the balance between microbes and humans … By mixing gene pools and by providing access to populations of non-immunes, often in conditions under which microbes thrive, globalization gives microorganisms a powerful advantage’ (Snowden, 2019, p. 459). From the 1980s, mobility became everything, whether this be in the form of new opportunities for travel for personal indulgence as part of the pleasures that were an integral feature of the neo-liberal political equation, or whether this was in relation to the movement of labor. In 2000, 1.674 billion air trips were made. By 2018, this had increased to 4.4 billion. At that time there were also 47 conurbations of 10 million people or more. These trends mean that COVID-19 is likely to be only the first of such pandemics rather than a single, freakish occurrence. The huge conurbations that have accelerated in growth, alongside the disturbance of wildlife habitats, are ‘readymade for the transmission of disease’ (ibid.). Moreover, the spread of such diseases where there is close contact between individuals will only be assisted by the growth of imprisonment that has occurred in most Anglo-American societies, at least. This had been a necessary accompaniment to the restructuring and

86  Fragile Reprieve the divisions and fractured stability that accompanied it. Ironically, under these circumstances, the growth of imprisonment on the basis of public protection actually becomes a danger to public health. Climate change The Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, leading to melting ice sheets, different patterns of animal migration, the release of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, less predictable rainfall, less chance of frost, more chance of wild fires, and more acidic oceans. However, ‘the number of floods and heavy rains has quadrupled since 1980 and doubled since 2004. Extreme temperatures, droughts and wildfires have also more than doubled in the last 40 years … Average wildlife populations have dropped by 60 per cent in just over 40 years’ (Weiss and Reynolds, 2021). In 2021, the world had the fifth warmest April on record, intense heat waves in India and Pakistan, record breaking rain in South Africa; heat waves in the American North West and the Mediterranean; Hurricane Ida hit the US in August that year with a record speed of 240 km per hour; there was record flooding in Western Europe in July; and droughts in the US, Canada, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. But populists usually deny or suppress these realities, demonstrating similar anathema to climate science as to other forms of scientific expertise. Trump has thus claimed that climate change is a ‘hoax’: ‘in my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up, and you go down’ (Joyella, 2022). Furthermore, he maintains that global warming is good because it means more ‘seafront property’ (Tran, 2022). In Brazil, President Bolsonaro dismantled several government divisions dedicated to climate change and appointed cabinet members openly hostile to the concept (Escobar, 2019). Meanwhile, former Brexit campaigners in the UK maintain that ‘climate change has happened since time began not just the last 40 years’ (Barnett, 2022). Similarly for leading US Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz has stated that carbon dioxide (CO2) “is good for plant life,” that the planet “is greener right now” than in the past, and that … “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever” and that the current computer models used to understand global climate trends “are profoundly wrong … and inconsistent with the evidence and the data” (Mervis, 2015). Senator Rick Scott, when Govenor of Florida (2011–2019) forbade the Department of Environmental Protection to use the words ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ in any official documents. In Germany, the AfD challenges the scientific consensus

Fragile Reprieve 87 on climate change, describes climate policy as ‘hysteria,’ and mocks Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the  Fridays for Future  worldwide school strikes movement she has organized (Pötter, 2020). Populists also insist that national interests come before global attempts to contain the consequences of climate change. In response to the 2015 Paris Accord on Climate Mitigation, agreed to by all 195 members of the United Nations, President Trump withdrew the US in 2017, on the grounds that it was very unfair to its economy and put that country ‘at a permanent disadvantage’—he had pledged protection for sunset industries such as coalmining during his 2016 presidential campaign. Thereafter, ‘websites at the National Institutes of Health have been altered to drop the phrase “climate change” and remove access to a document titled “Climate change and human health.” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took down a website on climate science that … had been available for nearly 2 decades. Meanwhile, the EPA administrator has asserted the fringe view that that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming, and political appointees at the EPA have pressured scientists to change testimony about the dismissal of scientific advisers and  broken precedent  to intercede in the scientific grant review process’ (Sharfstein, 2017). In Hungary, Orbán dismissed European Union plans to tackle climate change as a ‘utopian fantasy’ and suggested green measures were pushing up energy costs in Europe (Reuters, 2021). And the Sweden Democrats do not view investment in the climate as worthwhile. Instead, ‘the party repeatedly emphasises the comparatively small role that Sweden plays in global greenhouse gas emissions and essentially divests itself of responsibility to play an active role in combating climate change’ (Klinkenberg, 2022). It is too late to return to a more temperate world climate—the damage that has already been done to it seems irreversible. But this makes it all the more important that expert knowledge, multi-national cooperation, truth rather than fake news and lies, where the central state is regarded as a solution rather than a problem and where its institutions are trusted—meet the challenges posed by this greatest of all ‘enemies of the people.’ As has been shown, populism possesses none of these characteristics. ****** Early on in this book, there was a reference to a 1961 opinion poll in the UK: 91 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds agreed that the world was going to be a better place to live in ten years’ time. The answer to that question in 2022 would be reversed, if anyone was foolish enough to bother asking

88  Fragile Reprieve it. This book has told the story of how all that post-war optimism and sense of social cohesion and achievement fell apart before the allurement of neo-liberal promises of riches and rewards, where the interests of the individual came before those of the community. The price that would be paid for this was not specified. Punishment and penal control had to become one of the props of this mode of governance, but its bill kept increasing. In this void, the return of populism’s strong men of populism became possible …

Notes 1 In the UK, this now includes the provision of ‘warm banks,’ that is the provision of warm places where local people who cannot afford to heat their homes can spend time. These are provided by local councils, charities, libraries, community centers, churches, and the like. 2 The total does not include the people who have been fleeing Ukraine since the country was invaded by Russian forces in late February. 3 Thus, in 2021, the website of the New Zealand Labour Party contained this statement about immigrants to this country: ‘We have always welcomed migrants to our country . . . But in recent years our population has been growing rapidly as record numbers of migrants arrive here. This has happened without Government planning for the impact immigration is having on our country . . . This has contributed to the housing crisis, put pressure on hospitals and schools, and added to the congestion on roads.’ 4 Mandatory vaccination in New Zealand, which was initially restricted to personnel within managed quarantine facilities and border settings, was extended to school and early learning staff and high-risk health and disa­ bility sectors on October 11, 2021. In November 2021, it was extended to the New Zealand Police and Defence Force (Wood, 2021). A vaccine pass came into force later in the year requiring workers in public-facing nonessential services (for example, hospitality, gyms, and hair salons) to be fully vaccinated by January 17, 2022. The pass was discontinued in April 2022 and all restrictions gradually came to an end in September 2022.

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104  References

Law Cases Herold, Baxstrom v. 383 U.S. 107 (1966). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/383/107/ Hendricks, Kansas v. 521 U.S. 346 (1997). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/521/346/ Vinter and Others v the United Kingdom, European Court of Human Rights, Judgement 9/7 2013 [GC]

Legislation 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/ universal-declaration-of-human-rights Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, c. 12. https://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/2014/12/ Bail Amendment Act 2013, Public Act 2013 No 66. https://www.legislation. govt.nz/act/public/2013/0066/latest/whole.html Crime and Disorder Act 1998, c. 37. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ 1998/37 Criminal Justice Act 1991, c. 53. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1991/53 Criminal Justice Act 1993, c. 36. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1993/36 Criminal Justice Act 2003, c. 44. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/44 Food Stamp Act of 1964 (P.L. 88–525). https://www.govtrack.us/congress/ bills/88/hr10222/text Model Penal Code 1962. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/08d77d/pdf Parole Act 2002, Public Act 2002 No 10. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/ public/2002/0010/latest/whole.html Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, c. 2. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ 2005/2/ Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act 2005, Public Act 2005 No 74. https://www. legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2005/0074/66.0/DLM350821.html Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010, Public Act 2010 No 33. https://www. legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2010/0033/latest/DLM1845314.html Sentencing Act 2002, Public Act 2002 No 9. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/ act/public/2002/0009/latest/DLM135342.html Social Security Amendments Act of 1965 (P.L. 89–97). https://www.govtrack. us/congress/bills/89/hr6675/text Victims’ Rights Act 2002, Public Act 2002 No 39. https://www.legislation.govt. nz/act/public/2002/0039/latest/DLM157813.html Washington State Community Protection Act 1990, RCW 71.09. https://www. dshs.wa.gov/bha/community-protection-act-1990

Index

air travel, air rage 71, 73, 85 Ardern, Jacinda 63, 75, 83 Australia 7, 17, 22, 36, 40–41, 58, 60, 62, 69, 89, 93, 94–95

fake news i, 50, 53, 57, 83, 87 Fauci, Dr Tony 57, 59–60, 65, 76 Floyd, George 68 Friedman, Milton 8, 49

Berlin wall 1–2, 7, 10–11 Bolsonaro, President 56, 86, 98 Brexit 1, 16, 44–48, 52–53, 65, 80, 86–87, 91–92, 94–95, 98, 100–101

Germany, AfD 2, 6, 42, 69, 84, 86 global fiscal crisis 16, 37 guns, gun sales 77–79

Canada 17, 22, 36, 60, 68, 86, 89, 93 casino economies 3, 21, 40 climate change viii, 17, 86–87, 95, 97, 98 Conservative Party 11, 22, 36, 39, 45, 48, 53, 59, 64, 76, 80 conspiracy theories 50, 53, 57–60, 66, 69, 81, 83 COVID-19 i, viii, ix, 16, 55–72, 73–85, 89–91, 94–95, 97, 99, 100–101, 103 crime, and disorder, law and order 3, 6–7, 10–12, 14–16, 18–19, 23–29, 32–33, 35, 43–44, 49, 51–53, 57, 61, 66, 68, 70, 78–80 criminal justice elites 14, 18, 23–25, 28–29 Danish People’s Party, DPP 42 Establishment, anti-establishment 11–14, 16, 24, 26, 35–36, 37, 40, 43, 45–46, 48, 50, 52–53, 57–58, 63 EU 14, 40, 42–43, 45–46, 52–53, 77, 84 experts 6, 19, 25, 48–49, 58–60, 66–67, 70, 75

Hayek, Friedrich 8, 10 homelessness, begging, street people 6, 10, 32, 68, 79–80 Hungary 42–43, 84, 87 immigration 11–12, 14, 16, 23, 37, 40–45, 47, 70, 77–79, 81, 88 immobilization 33, 57, 66, 70, 76–77 Italy, Italian populism, Giorgia Meloni 12, 42, 69, 78, 84–85 Johnson, Boris 12, 45–50, 53–54, 55–56, 63, 65, 70 Le Pen, Marine 83 lockdowns 59, 61–62, 63–64, 71, 73–76, 78–79 media 12–13, 18, 24–26, 28, 43, 50–51, 57–58, 70, 75, 83–84 moments economy 74 murder, homicide 2, 26, 28, 30, 44, 51, 79 neo-liberalism, neo-liberals i, 8–9, 10, 12–14, 16, 20–22, 29, 35, 37, 39, 88

106  Index New Zealand 41, 51, 57, 60–63, 66, 68–70, 75, 79, 82, 88 New Zealand First Party 41–42 Norwegian Progress Party (NPP) 42

strong men i, ix, 12, 50, 53, 55–56, 59–60, 74, 88 Sweden, Swedish Democrats 42, 79, 85, 87

One Nation Party 41, 69

Thatcher, Margaret 8 True Finns, The Finns 42, 69 Truman, President Harry S. 2–3 Trump, President Donald 11–12, 16, 20, 40, 45–47, 49–54, 56–57, 59–61, 64–65, 69, 72, 80–84, 86–87 trust, decline of 5, 22, 28, 40, 50, 58, 60, 62–63, 74, 76

pageantry 46–48, 65 Poland, Polish emigration 43, 69 populism, penal populism i, viii–ix, 12–17, 18–19, 26–27, 35, 37, 42, 46, 48, 53, 55, 57, 66, 68, 71, 76, 78, 80, 84, 87–88 prison 6, 24, 26–30, 67–68 protecting the public, public protection 28, 29–31, 33, 35, 86 public health 57, 60, 66–68, 70, 74, 78, 83, 86 Putin, President Vladimir i, ix, 16, 83–84 racism, racist attacks 7, 51, 63 Reagan, President Ronald 2, 8, 19, 57, 63 risk 6–8, 18–21, 24, 29–34, 38, 49, 56, 62, 64, 66–67, 70, 75–76, 78, 88 science, scientific achievements, anti-science i, 5, 48–49, 58, 60–61, 69, 76, 86–87 social cohesion 63, 66, 70, 76–77, 81, 88

UK i, 4, 6–8, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 22, 26, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 38–40, 43–45, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 55, 57–58, 60–65, 67–72, 73–78, 80, 86, 87, 88 Ukraine i, 16, 83–84, 88 UN, UN Declaration of Human Rights 1948 6, 40, 45, 67 US i, viii, 3–8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18–19, 22, 26, 28, 30–32, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 40, 44–45, 47–48, 50–51, 56–62, 64–65, 67–72, 76–80, 82–83, 86–87 vaccines, vaccinations 5, 56–57, 60, 65–69, 71, 73–74, 76 Wilson, James Q. 10, 19, 31–32, 48 Zelensky, President Volodymyr 16