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To judge by the trailer, Ridley Scott’s biopic of Napoleon will entertain, inspire and extravagantly miss the point. But then so did the paintings of the same subject by Jacques-Louis David. Napoleon wasn’t, or wasn’t just, a conqueror. He was, over and above all else, history’s greatest bureaucrat.
What survives of him isn’t the French empire (which he left smaller than he found it) but the Banque de France, standardised education, prefects who keep French regions in line with Parisian diktat and a Civil Code that still influences jurisdictions around the world. To this day, the adjective “Napoleonic” describes something centralised and perhaps officious, not something martial.
Prepare for a Napoleonic world, then. The most important governmental trend today is the rise of protectionism. In the US, Europe, China and India, the state is turning from open trade to the cultivation of domestic industries. One justification is strategic: don’t count on frail or hostile regimes for essential goods. Another is progressive: give skilled manual labour a break for once. Both trace back to the election-winning arguments of Donald Trump in 2016.
And so we have something of an irony to chew on. Populism, which sets itself against the elite, against the “deep state”, is going to leave it more powerful, not less. The technocrat, vilified so recently, will be the string-pulling figure of our age, dispensing subsidies, guiding this economic sector, shunning that one. Corporate leaders will have an ever tighter and more collusive relationship with government, not as a corrupt byproduct of the system but as a central feature of it. Populism was meant to take the governing class down a peg or two. Its main legacy will be something close to the opposite.
When would you rather be a politician or civil servant: now, when you might shape a whole industry, or in pre-populist times? When would you rather be a lobbyist in the “swamp”: during the laissez-faire age, when government and business were at least nominally distinct, or the protectionist one, when no sector wants to miss out on public largesse? (If chipmaking is strategic, why not agriculture?)
The elites are going to be stronger and more incestuous as a result of populism, a movement dedicated to their downfall. Perhaps we should have seen the paradox coming. Populists have a rebellious style but a paternalist agenda. They hate the so-called blob, but want it to shape much of the private sector. They resent elites, but more often for abdicating power — over markets, over national borders — than for hoarding it. They have a thing for direct democracy but also for Singapore. This is a movement that was always in two minds on the question of faceless authority.
The contradiction is most obvious on the US right. Trump apparatchiks dream of taming the deep state if their man gets to govern again. So-called Schedule F appointments would make it easier to fire civil servants. In an executive branch version of what the right has done to the judiciary over several decades, partisan cadres are being groomed for bureaucratic posts throughout Washington.
At the same time, the Trump world demands more industrial strategy. Is there a record of it being done well, anywhere on Earth, without a permanent, independent bureaucracy, licensed to plan and invest regardless of the churn of elected administrations?
At some point, demagogues will have to choose which they hate more: free trade or the blob. Curbing the one tends to empower the other. Notice that, though Trump started the move to industrial protection, it has achieved real substance under a centre-left government. The right could never follow its antitrade logic to its natural conclusion, which is the aggrandisement of officialdom. Trump managed to fall out with the national security state, of all things. The idea that he could abide a US version of Japan’s former, and lordly, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, is fanciful. Yet that kind of technocratic power is what, via the hand of his successor Joe Biden, populism has inadvertently created.
I fear, though cannot know, that we are living through the biggest wrong turn in government policy of my lifetime. A decade into this protectionist age, we might regret the waste, the pork, the higher consumer prices (do “workers” not pay those?) and the fragmentation of the west into squabbling trade zones. But the wrongness of this trend is another column. For now, what stands out is the improbable winner of it. Imagine being told in 2016 that elites would have more clout, not less, and owe it to their own tormentors.
