Niall Ferguson, Columnist

Progressives Are Beating Populists Yet Again, But Don’t Celebrate

History shows that builders of big government have a bad habit of getting into big wars.

January 15, 2023 at 5:00 AM UTC

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

Bolsonaro’s buffoons.
Photographer: Sergio Lima/AFP/Getty Images

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Six years ago, populism was on a roll. It has since hit a rock. This should not have surprised anyone.

Back in 2017, I argued that populism had an inherently short half-life (though I wrongly thought it might be as brief as 12 months). The slogans devised by political strategists like Dominic Cummings in the UK and Steve Bannon in the US — “Take back control,” “Make America Great Again” and the rest — were politically potent, but their effect would be ephemeral.