This essay sets out to determine that the rise in populism is the most troubling ongoing challenge to the current world order. This essay will endeavor to place elitism as instrumental in fueling this rise in populism, by first clarifying how the prevalence of elitism in world politics has exacerbated inequality in recent years, then explaining how inequality is the root cause of the rise in populism. For clarity’s sake, the essay will focus mostly on the UK.
In 1939, Walter Schellenberg, a member of the Nazi High Command, wrote a handbook on the German invasion, in this he advised his fellow senior officers of the SS: “The one half of a per cent of children who attend public schools will eventually occupy about eighty per cent of all important social and political posts” (Schellenberg 1939, quoted in Darlrymple, 2000).
The story is no different today, all the great institutions of state – government, judiciary and military – are dominated by an elite who have attended private schools. The figures speak for themselves, only 7% of the population attend private school. Yet these pupils represent 74% of senior judges, in fact one in seven judges attended one of five independent schools (Eton, Westminster, Radley, Charterhouse and St Paul’s) (Verkaik, 2018, p.9). Private school students also account for 71% of senior officers in the forces, 36% of cabinet ministers, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 33% of vice-chancellors of Russell Group universities. Even our national newspapers which often set the political climate are led by this elite, 43% of columnists were educated privately (Sutton Trust, 2017, p.22). The elites have long understood that an Oxbridge degree is pretty much a guarantee of success, 42% of Oxbridge recruits are from privately educated backgrounds (BBC, 2018).
This link between an Oxbridge degree and influence was skillfully exposed in Andy Beckett’s analysis of how one degree is instrumental in securing a top job in running Britain (2017): “Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labor party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticized by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labor shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls”. Beckett goes on to expose how subtle networks created in private school enable a system of self-perpetuating advantage which propels social immobility.
These figures can only be properly appreciated, once we see the damage this unrestrained privilege is doing to countries. The elite have long used their wealth and connections to tightly control access to education leading to have the biggest gap between the rich and poor in history creating resentment and disenfranchisement. Since the recession, British billionaires have seen their network more than double, the wealthiest families now own around £547 billion. Whilst, four million UK citizens are deemed to be in persistent poverty, various studies have shown that if you are born poor in Britain, you are likely to die poor (Wells, 2016, p.6). House prices have risen by over £4 trillion, half of which has been amassed by the richest 10%. Whilst 15% of adults in Britain have either no share of the nation’s record £11.1 trillion of wealth or have negative wealth. (Savage, 2017).
On the most basic level this system is in complete opposition to the principle of equality of opportunity, which is the foundation of any democracy. It is also corruption, in a sense, because it allows individuals to sidestep the rules of professional advancement essentially by paying membership fees to an elite school. Unhindered, this system works against meritocracy and perpetuates a socially divided society where a small elite increasingly control a lion’s share of the national wealth, earned by the work of the majority. The litmus test for any working democracy is how much trust people place in it. When citizens no longer subscribe to the belief that the system serves everyone fairly and, no matter how hard they try, they will never escape the life they were born into, then the glue that holds society together starts to come unstuck. This system also creates a set of ‘leaders’ completely out of touch with the public. Diane Reay, emeritus professor of education at Cambridge University said: “They (the leaders) are making decisions for the rest of us based on a very slim knowledge base about what the rest of us are like: what our attitudes are, what our values are, what our needs are and how we live our lives. That is deeply problematic… because where you have people who have been segregated from the rest of the community there clearly is a lack of empathy and understanding” (Reay, quoted in Verkaik, 2018, p.238). She went on to describe how even her own students who had been privately educated revealed an unconscious bias against families they had had no contact with. She believes this is largely due to these children having little social experience amongst the working class.
Reay’s assertion that the wealthy lack empathy towards the working class is one supported by a scientific study undertaken by Cote, et al. (2012), after a series of experiments the Berkley professors were able to demonstrate that more affluent individuals were less likely to report feeling compassion towards others on a regular basis and are far more likely to engage in unethical behavior.
This is troubling, especially as the wealthy hold the vast majority of power in society, if social class influences how much we care about others, then the most powerful amongst us may be the least likely to make decisions that help the poor. It is hardly a surprise then that the established political parties no longer understand their own membership, let alone the wider electorate. This disconnection between the political elite and the public is a direct symptom of the elitist education system in place currently and it has worrying effects. Trust in politicians is at an all-time low, a recent Ipsos MORI report (2019) showed that only 14% of the British public trusted politicians to tell the truth. Voter turnout for general elections has been on a steady decline, in a recent study (Phillips and Simpson, 2018, p.1) less than 50% of those surveyed engaged in any political action other than voting.
A recent report looking into world inequality (Piketty, et al., 2018) found that growing inequality, particularly economic inequality was making Europeans susceptible to populist rhetoric. In Germany, the underlying motivation for many voters to vote for the far-right party AfD was the fear of declining socio-economic status (Gagne, et al., 2017). These existential fears are directly connected to inequality: this study revealed that the bottom 50% of Germans have as much wealth as the top 45 households (Diekmann, 2018). The large amounts of private wealth relative to public wealth limits the ability of governments to tackle inequality. This mass privatization and lack of public investment is directly visible to the population and breeds resentment towards the political elite. Electorates are disenfranchised and despairing it is no surprise then that they look to demagogues who promise simple solutions to complex problems (Verkaik, 2018, p.518).
This rise of populism is the most significant ongoing challenge to the current world order as it threatens the values that make up the ideological backbone of the liberal international order (Osada, 2018, p.1). Jan-Werner Muller (2015) supports this when she argues that populism carries a specific inner logic that threatens the very basis of democracy, as it undermines the idea of pluralism: populists claim that they alone represent the people. This allows them employ authoritarian ploys to dismiss critics as ‘enemies of the people’, Turkey’s President Erdogan asked his critics, “We are the people. Who are you?”. Populists also treat human rights as a needless hindrance preventing the ability of a nation to protect itself from perceived threats. Instead of accepting rights as protecting everyone, they favor the interests of the majority, encouraging people to embrace the dangerous belief that they will never themselves need to assert rights against an overreaching government claiming to act in their name. This populist prioritization of rights for certain individuals has allowed the world to ignore or even perpetuate the human rights violations of refugees (Roth, 2017). The liberal world order also heavily relies upon international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Union (EU) to function successfully. These have been facing the ire of populism, Brexit pulled the UK out of the EU whilst trotting out the slogan that the country was wresting back control from ‘unelected officials in Brussels’ and Trump has lambasted the WTO on many occasions and crippled its ability to act as intermediary and deescalate trade wars.
Ultimately, unless the drivers of inequality are urgently tackled and the well-established networks of advantage for the wealthy are dismantled, there will be no true equality of opportunity. Disenfranchisement has already seeped into society, breeding resentment and grievance amongst the poor, leading to the protest movements that have seen the rise of Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and brought us Brexit (Verkaik, 2018, p. 522). These are merely the symptoms of a much deeper malaise and so the rise in populism can be effectively countered if the causes of these reactions are appropriately addressed. Piketty, et al., (2018) found that in Europe, the region with the most pronounced history of welfare statism, inequality is growing slowest.
So, in theory inequality could be reversed by stronger regulatory mechanisms which in turn would dim the appeal of populism and so the liberal world order would remain unchallenged.