portrayed as being childish, they would never be taken seriously enough to gain actual power.
‘I will tell you one description that everyone [in the White House] gave – that everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child.’
Almost a year after the Brexit referendum, Americans were exercising the same ‘adult strategy’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published in January 2018, its author Michael Wolff repeated this punchline in several TV interviews. The concerned nods of the composed presenters, together with Wolff’s expression of someone bringing bad news, created the impression of a parent–teacher meeting being held to discuss a problem child. Each interview emphasised Trump’s infantile behaviour, providing a comfortable underestimation of the situation for worried adult Americans. He’s just a wayward child, you know, and we are grown-ups. We know better.
For any country experiencing the rise of populism, it’s commonplace for the populist leader to be described as childlike. Reducing a political problem to the level of dealing with a naughty infant has a soothing effect, a comforting belittlement of a large problem. On 5 January 2018, the New York Times published a reader’s letter that included the sentence: ‘Looking at Thursday’s headlines [on the war of words between Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon] makes me wonder whether we have a government or a middle school student council.’ The confidence of being the only adult in the room must have made the letter writer feel somehow secure. Just as the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, must have felt on 15 November 2016, when he said, ‘This is like giving a chainsaw to a child,’ in response to Nigel Farage’s name being put forward as someone who could help boost trade relations with Trump’s America.
Portraying populist leaders as infantile is not the only trap that is all too easy to fall into. Scrutinising their childhoods to search for the traumas that must have turned them into such ruthless adults, and by doing so bandaging the political reality with some medical compassion that the populist leader didn’t actually ask for, is another common ploy used by critics to avoid feeling genuine political anxiety. Poland’s former populist prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Turkey’s Erdoğan have both undergone such examinations in absentia by prominent psychiatrists, and have likewise been described as broken children. Elżbieta Sołtys, a Polish social scientist and psychologist, diagnosed Kaczyński as a traumatised child. In one interview she said it was probable that his low emotional intelligence was connected to his loveless and strict upbringing, adding that his current fury was an explosion following years of suppression. Erdoğan’s diagnosis was similar. His father used to hang him by his feet in order to stop him swearing, and as a result an entire country now has to suffer his volatile mood swings.
The primary consequence of calling these leaders infantile, and psychologising their ruthlessness, is simply to make their critics feel more adult and mentally healthy by comparison. It attributes childish politics entirely to the populist leader and his supporters. As if everyone else (including the writer of this book, and its readers) were completely immune to an infantilised perception of the world. Well, it’s not like that. You know that, right?
‘Why do you watch these films? These are just fairy tales for kids. You’re grown men, goddamn it!’
It is 2016, and my friend Zeynep is talking to some Turkish male friends of ours in Istanbul. We are all in our forties, and the men she is reprimanding are all successful, upper-middle-class, well-educated. They have just finished playing fantasy football on the PlayStation, and are now trying to choose which movie to watch. Although they are the same age as the prophets and the revolutionary leaders of the last century, with their backpacks dumped on the sofa they look like adolescents just back from school. Their political activity is limited to voting, mostly because they consider politics beneath them. Of course they are not as infantile as the people who believe a bigot who keeps repeating the fairy tale of ‘making Turkey great again’. However, they do have a soft spot for fairy tales; it’s just that theirs involve vampires, superpowers and Cristiano Ronaldo. As Zeynep refuses to make light of the situation, the men first try to fend off her attack with laughter, just as boys would. But Zeynep insists: ‘I mean, seriously. Why?’ They then choose to watch The Hunger Games, perhaps as an attempt at conciliation, but she’s still waiting for a substantial answer, some sign of self-awareness or self-criticism, as girls do. The men quickly move to hawkish diplomacy. One of them, not jokingly, says, ‘Well, you watch cartoon movies, don’t you? You’re no better than us, Mom!’
Zeynep and I take our adult discussion into another room. She talks about how infantile this generation of men are, as millions of women surely do in countless other countries. And I start going on about Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, the ethical hegemony of ‘That’s the way the world is,’ and the depressive hedonia that comes with it. But then we start talking about how the new Lego movie is actually hilarious. Later that night I think about the question of whether the image of the ‘good’ leaders of our times is more adult than the ‘evil’ ones’, or not.
‘I drive an old Volkswagen because I don’t need a better car.’
It’s November 2015, and the former Uruguayan president José Mujica is speaking on stage. I’m chairing what will come to be remembered as an almost legendary talk to an audience of five thousand people, most of them not actually inside the congress building in Izmir, but outside watching on a giant screen. Mujica wants to talk about how Uruguay needs meat-cutting machines (because in order to be able to export its meat the country needs to be able to cut it in accordance with the regulations of other countries), but the audience seems to prefer the fun stuff: the cute old Beetle, his humble house, and so on. The next day, Mujica is described the same way in all the newspapers: ‘The humblest of presidents who drives a Volkswagen Beetle and lives in a small house …’ There is no mention of him being a socialist, no ideological blah blah, none of the boring adult content. He is like Bernie Sanders, portrayed as the wise, cool old man during the Democratic primaries, or Jeremy Corbyn, whose home-made jam and red bicycle got more attention than his politics. These are the dervishes of our time, reduced to the kindly old men of fairy tales: fairy tales that attract those who see themselves as the adults and mock the ‘infantile’ supporters of populist leaders.
Much of the literature on populism and totalitarianism interprets the infantile narrative of the populists, as well as that of the ‘deceived’ masses who support them and choose to think in their fairy-tale language, as a political reaction that is specific to them. However, it would appear to be neither a reaction, nor specific. Rather, it’s a coherent consequence of the times we live in, and something that contaminates all of us, albeit in different ways. Although it may seem that the current right-wing populist leaders are performing some kind of magic trick to mesmerise the previously rational adult masses and turn them into children, they aren’t the ones who opened the doors to infantilised political language. The process started long before, when, in 1979, a famous handbag hit the political stage and the world changed.
That was the year a woman handbagged an entire nation with her black leather Asprey and said: ‘There is no alternative.’ When Margaret Thatcher ‘rescued’ a nation from the burden of having to think of alternatives, it resonated on the other side of the Atlantic with a man who perfected his presidential smile in cowboy movies. As the decade-long celebration of alternativelessness turned into a triumphalist neo-liberal disco dance on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the mainstream political vocabulary became a glitterball of words like ‘vision’, ‘innovation’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘motivation’, while gradually distancing itself from sepia, adult concepts like ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. Because ‘That’s the way of the world.’
Meanwhile in Turkey, such terms, along with two hundred other ‘leftist words’, were officially banned from the state lexicon, and removed from the state TV channel, after the military coup in 1980. Whether through violence or neoliberalist persuasion, the mainstream vocabulary used globally to talk and think about the world and our place in it – regardless of what language we speak – was transformed into a sandpit for us to play safely in: socialism