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    The trouble with anti-populism: why the champions of civility keep losing

    With rightwing demagogues gaining power and public debate getting nastier, many are calling for a return to a more sensible politics. But this approach has its own fatal flaws. By Benjamin Moffitt
    by Benjamin Moffitt Feb 14, 2020 12 minutes
    (Clockwise from top left): Tony Blair, Pete Buttiegeg, Donald Trump, Victor Orban Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Emanuel Macron and Hillary Clinton. Photograph: Various

    You’ve probably heard some version of it in recent years. Maybe you’ve even said or thought it yourself. “Politicians are always fighting!” “Politics has become totally irrational!” “Why can’t politicians just compromise, find some consensus and solve our problems?”

    For many people, these views have come to seem like basic common sense. In this era of extreme partisanship, the argument goes, what we need is more unity and moderation to bring us together. And if there is one group of politicians who have been blamed for the sorry state we find ourselves in, it is populists.

    Since the twin shocks of 2016 – the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump – a cottage industry of authors, pundits and organisations has emerged with the shared goal of fighting populism. Books with names such as The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How Save It, and Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy have been published on both sides of the Atlantic. Tony Blair has set up his Institute for Global Change to find “an answer to the new populism of left and right which exploits the anger and drives the world apart”.

    Elsewhere, two of the most prominent politicians defeated by populist competitors, Hillary Clinton and Matteo Renzi, have offered their tips about how to stop populists (too little, too late). And in a truly remarkable bit of chutzpah, populist extraordinaire Silvio Berlusconi has tried to reinvent himself as a pro-EU unifier, here to save Italy from populism. Even the pontiff has warned against populism, with Pope Francis stating that “populism is evil and ends badly”.

    What unites these self-styled defenders of democracy, ready to roll up their sleeves and take the apparent populist scourge head-on? It’s certainly not a clear ideology. Nor is it opposition to a particular variety of populism. It is something far more disparate than that. So how about we just call this phenomenon, simply, anti-populism?

    While populism itself has received an

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