The DUP is a nationalist populist party.
This is not news exactly – it’s been described as such before – but not that often. In scholarship, it’s usually an ‘ethnic nationalist’, or ‘religious nationalist’ party. In journalism, it’s just a ‘hardline unionist’ party. ‘Populists’ are found elsewhere – Latin America perhaps, or at least in places more exotic than East Antrim.
But when I was reading about populism in Europe and around the world recently, it hit me how alarmingly well the DUP fits the definitions and descriptions that are more often applied to the likes of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Vicktor Orban, or Marine Le Pen. In fact, the Democratic Unionists were populists long before populism, at least its contemporary wave.
Cas Mudde, a leading scholar of populism, defines it as ‘an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’.
It can be left wing or right wing, but either way, it has this binary, moralising world view. It’s the opposite of pluralism, in which there are many legitimate interest groups who deliberate and find a way to move forward. Populism sees only the good and the bad – the people and the establishment.
Anyone with a vague knowledge of the DUP’s history will recognise how the party slots into this mould. The civil rights reforms, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Good Friday Agreement, the NI Protocol, were all cast by the DUP as conspiracies of the corrupt elite against the guiltless people. That ‘people’ is, of course, unionist. Nationalists – who have made up one third to one half of the actual people – are not part of ‘the people’. They are in on the elite conspiracy. The DUP’s religiosity has bolstered the party’s moral analysis with fervour and urgency, while its fundamentalist anti-intellectualism matches the suspicion of elites and ‘experts’ that we’ve seen in Brexit/Trump-era populism.
So the DUP (DUP-TUV?) is populist, but does this matter? Viewing the party this way is at least helpful, for four reasons.
First, I’m a fan of anything that connects Northern Ireland with what happens in the wider world and undermines the idea that the region has unique(ly bad) politics. The idiosyncrasies of Ulster loyalism, Orangeism, etc. have obscured how unionists have practiced a style of politics found to some extent in probably every country.
Second, populism, as defined above, captures DUP thinking better than other labels. For the party, it has never simply been about ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ as in Protestant vs. Catholic, but about ‘us’ – ordinary, honest Protestants – vs. ‘them’ – a corrupt conglomeration of the ‘enemies of Ulster’ comprising the unionist elite, IRA, ecumenists, Dublin, London, Alliance Party, Europe, America, the Vatican… This remains the case.
Third, as Mudde points out, populism feeds off a degree of reality that elites really don’t listen to the people. Reforms like the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Good Friday, and the NI Protocol were rejected by the DUP because they downgraded unionist influence – doing so for good reason, given unionists’ previous dominance. But legitimate criticisms can be made of the reforms’ complexities and side-effects. Meanwhile, unionists were subject to the same undemocratic neo-liberal capitalism which has fueled populism in other places. Yet instead of trying to reenergize democracy and build social justice, unionist populism responds with fear and paranoia.
Lastly, understanding the DUP as a populist party clarifies why Northern Ireland will struggle to survive with such a party in control. Despite a few hints of change over the last 15 years, the DUP has consistently fallen back into its moralising, populist mode, finding new elite conspiracies like the ‘culture war’ on Britishness and new improbable villains like Maroš Šefčovič, a Slovak diplomat. If the Protocol was wiped away tomorrow, the logic of unionist populism means that another mortal threat would appear the day after.
For this election, the DUP are doing the tricky dance of populists in power– basically, trying to convince America they need to Make America Great Again after four years of Making America Great Again. The DUP wants to condemn the influence of nationalists at Stormont and the Protocol, while sweeping under the carpet its role in both. Without real solutions, the party relies on fear of a Sinn Féin First Minister, and fake news which blames everything on London, Dublin, Brussels, and Washington. At an anti-Protocol rally last week, what struck me was the almost comical juxtaposition of the mundane, technocratic NI Protocol, with the speakers’ melodramatic, life-or-death rhetoric. But in populist paranoia, that’s the whole point. The most sinister conspiracies are the ones that appear the most banal.
Sinn Féin, I should say, has also been described as populist. But this has been more evident in the South where it has set itself against the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael ‘establishment’. In the North, it has been in government and currently appears to want Northern Ireland to work, unlike, bizarrely, the DUP. One of the biggest cheers at the anti-Protocol rally followed a call for the DUP to not go back into Stormont until the Protocol was removed.
Northern Ireland is a plural society. Single-identity populism which disregards anyone outside ‘the people’ can only be destabilising, as it always has been. And ultimately, it’s a dead-end for unionism, since the entire people will get the final say – in a border poll.
David Mitchell 