This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
At the very heart of the populist right — its thrumming, animating core — is anti-elitism. If there is one thing that unites Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, Aleksandr Dugin and Dominic Cummings, Marine Le Pen and a Western nationalist on the internet lavishing praise upon Vladimir Putin, it is a hearty and deeply felt contempt for the incumbent “elites” who have brought us to our current state of high immigration, falling trust, rising budgetary deficits and a pending demographic crisis.
That contempt is well earned, if for no other reason than that it is so obviously lustily and eagerly reciprocated. Whilst fearing his intentions, Whitehall and the organisations it funds might better empathise with the worldview of the aggrieved Islamic extremist who sees the West as an oppressor entity with a long list of cultural and historic sins it must answer for, than relate to the grievances of a lavishly bellied, generously tattooed, white-van driver who feels “threatened” by multiculturalism — a viewpoint that it considers ignorant and plain wrong.
This mistrust between the populist right and the institutional ruling class in the countries where it is growing is the essential fuel of the existential culture war that engulfs most of the West. No resolution to the crisis we’re living through will be congenial to any of us, unless and until we resolve this division.
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In their desperation to prevent anti-elitist populists from taking office, extraordinary measures are being employed across Europe by those who already hold power: in Germany, the state has announced that it will formally spy on the largest opposition party. In Romania, the leading populist candidate was barred from contesting the election. In my native Ireland, the state’s most feverish obsession — and one even it can deliver results on — is the regulation of speech and information and journalism in the name of clamping down on “misinformation”, which can be defined as “information which might lead you to consider voting against the politicians lying to you”.
On the Saturday after Easter, tens of thousands of mainly working-class Irish men and women took to the streets of Dublin in a sea of tricolours. They had come to protest against the government’s immigration policies, both to register their discontent and to hear speeches from the main stage. The press waited keenly for the first hints of far-right extremism which could be used to cast the protest in a properly disapproving light.
Sceptical scribes hungry for a little bit of colour had already received a delicious morsel by way of an appetiser. In the middle of the mass of humanity marching down Dublin’s main thoroughfare, an enterprising protester had come armed with an enormous, unmissable banner. It depicted Conor McGregor, Ireland’s MMA star turned alleged rapist turned right-wing populist, smiling beatifically whilst flanked by those two other heroes of a particular kind of right-wing nationalist: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. “The Unholy Trinity,” sneered one joyous hack.
Back on the main stage, the man who had called the protest got up to speak.
Malachy Steenson is a Dublin city councillor — narrowly elected in last year’s local elections to the horror of Ireland’s media and political establishment — having campaigned relentlessly on the subject of immigration. His has been a long political journey, much of it spent in the murky ponds of fringe Irish left-republicanism.
He was once a member of the 32-county sovereignty movement, which was at the very least sympathetic to the dissident “Real” IRA. He was also a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, a Marxist-Leninist outfit that was once the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army — the thinking communist’s equally blood-stained alternative to the Provos.
Steenson has been reinvented as a leader of the Irish populist right, and his election last year was hailed as a “triumph for the far right” by various Irish media outlets.
To the thousands who had come to answer his call for protest, Steenson somewhat incongruously declared that he was proud to be there at the birth of what he called “a workers’ revolutionary movement”. Some in the crowd must surely have been a little confused, having spent so much time denouncing communism, to find themselves the face of it.
Yet none of this is new or unique to Ireland.
To study the nascent populist right across the Western world is to spend time confronting these contradictions; it is to look at a strange beast, with a large and growing body from which multiple heads and gangly limbs protrude, each one of them trying to pull the creature in a different direction. It can be too dazzling to decipher: look over here and you will see a conspiracy theorist who can recite (and will insist on reciting) the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Look over there, and you will see an admirer of Putin. Look to the stage, and you will see the whole orchestra being conducted by an ex-communist revolutionary.
And yet, look to the great mass of attendees, and you see something much simpler, and much more recognisable: a public that is entirely disenchanted with the direction of the post-cold-war liberal consensus, has solid grounds for being so, and demands an alternative. The body is healthy, but the limbs and the brain are primitive and give the whole creature a monstrously deformed appearance, as if it were an elephant with the head of an anteater and the legs of a crocodile.
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In part my country is where it is because the “officer class” of the Irish right is missing in action. Such people exist in Ireland as they do in other countries likewise afflicted: conservative-minded, well-educated, capable citizens whose connections and ability and power, should they choose to deploy those gifts, could give leadership and focus and direction to a discontented public.
Yet in Ireland, as elsewhere, such people tend to keep their heads down and focus instead on their lucrative careers in Ireland’s law library, or in its booming financial sector. A few lurk discreetly and silently in the halls of academia, terrified that their own students might uncover their wrongthink and deploy some Maoist cultural re-education upon them.
Such careers and comfortable lives make protesting and political activism a risk in a way it simply is not for working-class communities who feel they have nothing left to lose. And so, the foot soldiers take to the streets, feeling abandoned, whilst the officer class keeps its head down, and the protestors march on, as good as leaderless, becoming even more convinced in their anti-elitism and ever more hostile to those who would try to shape their passion towards ultimately productive ends.
When the elite class stays off the field, the leaders who emerge become an eclectic, oddball bunch lacking in discernment. Thus liberals and those who fear the populist right can take comfort, because the very anti-elitism that fuels that movement is also — arguably — its single most imposing barrier against long-term success.
No government or state in history has functioned without a committed and ideologically aligned elite class that both administers its institutions and imposes its ideological vision. When the Roman state was transforming from Republic into Empire, a new class of civil servant emerged: the Greek freedman. The Emperor Claudius was both emblematic of this process and critical to its advancement.
In Robert Graves’s re-telling, Claudius was a cripple enthroned not by the Senate, who considered him unfit to rule, but by the Praetorian Guard, an elite class of soldier whose purpose was to defend the Emperor and whose livelihood depended on there being an Emperor.
Once that coronation had taken place, the power of the Senate to “elect” an Emperor was broken, de facto if not de jure, forever. Claudius proceeded to reform the state into a facsimile of a modern administrative regime, with Greek ex-slaves given power in his name over huge swathes of public administration. Thus, even in the bloodshed and civil war that followed, whether emperors were good or bad, the essential structure and ideology of the Roman state was secured for centuries.
This is the same pattern that we see today. Thanks to progressives’ triumphant long march through the institutions, the essential DNA of liberalism has been so deeply embedded in the state that it can withstand the occasional buffeting headwinds of electoral discontent. Untold tens of thousands of people across the West are now tied to progressive liberalism not just ideologically, but economically.
This modern Praetorian Guard, an entire class of elite cultural soldier dependent upon the existence of the state ideology for their livelihoods, gives you your rulers. These people range from equality officers in small taxpayer-funded NGOs to the head of creative diversity in programming for the BBC.
Dissident right-leaning members of the elite — house Tories, if you will — are tolerated, barely, in small numbers and as long as they toe the line. But even they are vanishing.
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The most successful of the American right-wing movements — bar none — is also its most elitist. The Federalist Society has devoted itself for almost half a century to identifying, educating and advancing the careers of judges and lawyers who will influence society over generations, rather than at the whims of an electoral cycle.
It has produced judges and decision-makers at every level of American law-making who have — according to their enemies and supporters alike — tilted judicial outcomes and constitutional questions in favour of a deeply conservative interpretation of the law. But the Federalist Society is an exception, not the rule.
Perhaps this is because the courtroom and the lecture theatre are the natural habitat of the elite conservative? Debating in obscure courts constitutional points of law has been less threatening to one’s career, after all, than arguing front of house political cases for more deportations or tighter border control, for example. Arguing about what a constitution permits allows one to hide behind the façade that what may be done is different from what you think ought to be done.
Whatever the reason, the new populist right’s elites — even in America — have long eschewed the field of political battle in favour of more doctrinal conflicts. Yet the final, fundamental, purpose of elites is to serve as an officer class.
Search the ranks of the populist right today in many Western countries, and you will find that such a class is disastrously absent. In its place is a parliament of mugs: vaccine-sceptical hucksters selling their snake oil in one corner of the right-wing square; believers in chemtrails in another; whilst oddball anti-Semites, perennially believing that their time has come, lurk by the fountain dropping poison into the water.
All movements have freaks and circus acts, but only one — congenitally, self-harmingly hostile to elites — has its bearded ladies posing as the ringmaster. These are the people the right’s enemies want to face, and they are a gift to them.
Present conservative elites are sadly capable of Hillary Clinton-like cultural disdain towards “the deplorables”, wishing, none-too-secretly, that they could replace some of their current, déclassé voters with rather more palatable people.
Without a new right-wing officer class getting onto the pitch, the cause of the populist right is, in the long term, hopeless. What’s more, the cause of the conservative elite is also hopeless. It is to the credit of the so-called deplorables that they can see a problem, even if they cannot perhaps articulate a compelling or coherent solution to it.
It is to everybody’s misfortune that the right’s elite class, by contrast, too often seems to be waiting for the right kind of voters to come along before it will deign to provide leadership. Without each other, both the fringe populist and the sober conservative are doomed.
