Right-wing populists traffic in certainty. When they seize power, they swear transformation is imminent: immigration will stop, waste will vanish, national greatness will return, and bureaucratic delays will evaporate. What takes conventional politicians years to fumble, populists claim they will accomplish decisively and fast.
The record tells a different story. Trump's tariffs crumble under court pressure. His Iran conflict backfires. His Gaza peace plan barely exists. Boris Johnson promised 40 new hospitals and delivered hollow gestures. Brexit piled on red tape rather than cutting it. Reform-controlled councils have raised taxes, not slashed them. Over the past decade, right-wing populists in office have repeatedly done the opposite of what they promised, or dramatically less.
Yet they face remarkably little political cost for these reversals. Part of the reason lies in sheer volume: when failures pile up fast enough, each one drowns out the last. Trump launches projects with maximum confidence, delivers minimum results, then pivots abruptly to something new. Voters and the media catch the impression of motion rather than the reality of abandoned initiatives. Speed itself has become a political commodity, often valued more than actual completion.
Populism's real business, however, is not governing but controlling discourse and accumulating power. When Nigel Farage proposed mass deportations of asylum seekers this week, he proved uninterested in logistics. Would his party actually deport hundreds of thousands of people once confronted with the machinery of government? That question hardly matters to him. The announcement twisted the immigration debate's ratchet tighter. When pressed on whether children would be deported, Farage shrugged: "We will come to the detail closer to the time, but this is about establishing the principle."
A decade ago, such vagueness would have been politically catastrophic. Tony Blair's government faced voter expectations of tangible results. Today, after four chaotic Conservative administrations, an embattled Labour government, and years of HS2 fiascos, large swaths of the electorate believe a messy, populist regime cannot be worse and may prove more dynamic.
Joe Biden's incoherence in office lowered the bar further for Trump. His erratic second term seems almost routine now, as though the presidency routinely attracts fading, stubborn men. Britain, the United States, and France will soon share a common condition: none has recent memory of stable government. That is excellent cover for populist recklessness.
Breaking this cycle demands a different political strategy. Opponents must build sustained campaigns highlighting not populism's rhetoric or threats to democracy, but its simple incompetence in office. Make voters feel the weight of abandoned projects, broken commitments, and botched governance. Connect these failures to populism's core fantasy: that foreigners caused national decline and simple solutions exist.
This approach would be harder than attacking extremism, but far more effective. Powerful interests benefit from chaotic populist government: oligarchs securing state contracts, traders profiting from instability, media outlets hungry for clickable content. Still, entrenched systems have been discredited before. Postwar critics hammered state planning so relentlessly, connecting it so thoroughly to white elephants and waste, that the entire model became tainted.
A similar, patient offensive against populist governing failures could shift perception dramatically. Trump's tariff debacle offers a template. Two months after the Supreme Court ruled he had no authority to impose them, the administration finally opened applications for refunds. More than 300,000 companies could receive reimbursement from a $160 billion pool. The court defeat has already vanished behind the Iran disaster in the news cycle, but the costs will run for years.
Most media and voters have stopped noticing such complicated failures. Without systematic attention to them, populism will continue to escape accountability and collect more chances to cause worse damage.
Author James Rodriguez: "Populists have mastered the art of moving fast and breaking promises even faster, but the moment their opponents start tallying the actual wreckage instead of debating their threats, the game changes."
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