Those who can, do; but all too often they cannot resist pontificating as well. John Lukacs is a historian of Hungarian origins and conservative inclinations with a number of important if idiosyncratic books to his credit, including biographical studies of Churchill and Hitler. His aim in Democracy and Populism, however, is more far-reaching. He seeks to do nothing less than provide that ‘new science of politics’ for the ‘new world’ of democracy which Tocqueville called for over 150 years ago but which has not yet been forthcoming.
Lukacs believes that the old categories — socialist, liberal, conservative, even perhaps Left and Right — have lost their meaning. The real political conflict in the modern world is between two alternative variants of the Right — a populist and nationalist Right represented by George W. Bush, and a traditional conservative Right, which, taking its cue from Burke and Tocqueveille, retains a healthy suspicion of the popular will.
Popular sovereignty, so the French conservative, Joseph de Maistre, believed, was ‘a principle so dangerous that even if it were true, it would be necessary to conceal it’. The populist Right, by contrast, is wary not of the people but of the elite, of those who in George W.’s words, ‘think they’re all of a sudden smarter than the average person because they happen to have an Ivy League degree.’
The younger Bush is not, Lukacs insists, a real conservative at all. His foreign policy derives, not from John Quincy Adams, who famously declared that America does not go abroad ‘in search of monsters to destroy’, but from another president, Woodrow Wilson. For it is the principle of national self-determination which has transformed the history of the 20th century, and it was Wilson, not Lenin, who was the ‘great revolution-maker, the effective destroyer of an old order’. Wilson has indeed outlasted Lenin, and remains our contemporary as Lenin is not. It was he who asked the question, which George W. echoes — how can the world be made safe for democracy? Lukacs thinks that it would be more sensible to ask a quite different question, one that Tocqueville would have understood — how can democracy be made safe for the world? How can it be purged of its demagogic and populist excrescences so as to become once again a restraining rather than a radical political force?
Lukacs is by no means hopeful. For him, populism and nationalism are but symbols of the burgeoning postmodern age, an age in which the liberal decencies will be forgotten. Wherever he looks, Lukacs finds ‘the signs of a new barbarism’, in the form of crime, euthanasia, sex education, untrammelled immigration and the cult of celebrity. The walls are crumbling and the barbarians are about to break in. There is only one answer, Lukacs believes. It is to return to traditional values, to religion, and preferably the revealed truths of Catholicism. For it is the Catholic Church which may become ‘the last, embattled and tattered but, still, here and there visible bastion and inspiration of personal integrity, decency and, yes, of liberty and hope.’
Some may think that it is perhaps a bit late in the day to appeal to the New Testament for political salvation. Interpreters of history tend to shape it in their own likeness, and the tale of woe which Lukacs outlines is both distorted and overdrawn. The argument that we have but one choice in politics, between alternative variants of the Right, applies, if at all, primarily to the United States. The thesis of the two Rights seems of little relevance to modern Europe. It would be difficult to regard Gerhard Schroeder or Tony Blair either as demagogues of the populist Right or as old-fashioned conservatives. In Europe, the traditional ideologies, social democracy, liberalism and conservatism, seem alive and well; and Americans are worried that the Continent is not patriotic or nationalist enough, not that it has surrendered to the forces of demagogy.
Lukacs overstates his case when he argues that the principle of popular sovereignty is now universal. On the Continent, this principle has been severely qualified since the second world war by the growth of judicial review and the greater role of the courts, a response to those very abuses of popular sovereignty under fascism and national socialism whose resurrection Lukacs fears. Even in the United States, a demagogue — if that is what George W. is — can be contained by the Supreme Court and by the other checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers.
Lukacs, however, sees little of this. He is a merchant of gloom for whom progress is meaningless and the pursuit of happiness a delusion. Yet if those living in the bourgeois 19th century which Lukacs so much admires could have known what their descendants would achieve — the conquest of disease and, in advanced societies, of mass poverty — they would have been incredulous with delight. In addition, communism is now dead and dictatorship in retreat, partly as a result of the activities of those very populist demagogues whom Lukacs so deplores: Ronald Reagan and George W.
Lukacs is a stimulating writer, but Democracy and Populism is less a work of history than a collection of pessimistic reflections on the 19th and 20th centuries, designed to persuade us to return to ancient verities. Instead of increasing our understanding of the past, it moralises about it in the light of the present. Yet knowledge of the past cannot of itself provide us with morality; indeed, there may well be some degree of conflict between genuinely historical thinking and the spirit of revealed religion, whose message is that human nature, at bottom, does not change.
It is worth remembering, however, that history is a capricious mistress. She often, it is true, spurns the advances of secular prophets, but she has even less time for harbingers of doom. Perhaps it is the disenchanted reformers, idealists without illusions, who have the best chance of gaining her favours.