For well over a decade now, the most repeated cliche in advertising and marketing circles has been the word ‘disruption’. It implies breaking away from the norm to generate a new way of understanding consumer behaviour and, more so, using jarring ways to attract the attention of potential consumers towards a product or a service. 

Although this concept had been developing since the 1990s, it began to peak in the mid-2000s. But, as with most post-modernist ideas, this idea too became what it had set out to ‘disrupt’ — an automated norm that lost its meaning beyond being just an exciting word to throw around. Postmodernism, after all, has often been about providing profundity to pop kitsch. 

Nevertheless, American author David Von Drehle explains this idea of disruption in an October 16, 2019 op-ed for Gulf News as being part and parcel of a mindset that eventually aided the rise of neo-populism. 

He sees ‘disruption’ as a glorified recklessness which may excite and even enrich hip young entrepreneurs, but isolates those whose livelihoods are still dependent on what is wrecked in the name of such disruption. 

Von Drehle equates this with the nature of populism ruling various countries, especially the US, India, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, the UK, the Philippines, Venezuela, Pakistan, etc. 

Populists are good at peddling fiction as fact, especially during times of their failing. And so it is during this pandemic

Populism gains currency in times of major economic and social changes. Such changes can trigger an optimistic outlook, as they did with the rise of science and brand new economic and political ideas, which aided the growth and influence of the middle classes from the 18th century onwards. But these changes also leave behind a trail of failures which can dramatically transform an optimistic outlook into a more paranoid one. 

This is the scenario in which populism thrives. When these changes grow roots, they establish their own elites. And it is these elites that are targeted by the populists. In his book The Populism Explosion, John B. Judis writes that things remain in check as long as elected and unelected political elites both work to deliver sustained prosperity to the masses and steadily improve the nation’s living standards. But if this process is severely dented by an economic downturn, things can get rather ugly. 

In a September 3, 2019 essay, political analyst Patrick Liddiard writes that populism emerges when political and economic elites leave out vast sections of the polity from the decision-making process. The reaction to this gets compounded during an economic crisis. He adds that, whereas the entry of new players in a democratic process should bode well for a democracy, it in fact ends up shattering it when this process is initiated and enforced by populists. 

According to Drehle, in times of disruptive changes that have complex and overlapping reasons, populists tend to boil it down to just one or two explanations. For example, during the early decades of the 20th century, when revolutions were erupting, wars were being waged among dying monarchies, new political ideas were being shaped, and western societies were rapidly shifting from rural to urban, “the typical populist boiled it down to a problem of corrupt railroad barons and Jews.” 

Drehle adds that it was the widespread impact of World War II which suddenly eroded populism’s appeal. He writes, “(the war) sharply focused the minds of most people on clear and present dangers.” This, followed by competent leadership, broke the back of early 20th-century populism. 

Many political analysts are now predicting that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to play a similar role in eroding the appeal of neo-populism. In an April 2, 2020 op-ed for Forbes magazine, Daniel Linsker writes, “Populist governments, reliant on their need to constantly convey positive messaging that bolsters their support, have struggled to take the decisive, forward-looking action that the Covid-19 crisis demands.” 

According to Linsker, the Covid-19 crisis has not only robbed neo-populists of the spotlight that they crave so much, it has also soiled the kind of talk that they so much depend on. He adds, “More than ever, populist leaders now face a credibility problem. Obsession with the spread of the virus is leading the public to seek answers from experts and specialists, and self-isolation provides people with more time to look for information.” This is exactly the opposite of what populism seeks from the polity. 

The glorified disruption peddled as something revolutionary and anti-elite is likely to devour the disrupters themselves, as the pandemic wrecks economies and lives. Yet, true to form, some populists are trying to win back the initiative by doing what they do best: create a scapegoat. In this case, it is China. 

Various websites operating from the US, India and some European countries have begun to invade the daily news cycles by publishing so-called ‘leaked reports’ about how the pandemic may have been the result of a Chinese experiment gone wrong. Or that maybe China actually ‘created the virus in its labs’. This is a classic populist counterattack. 

This isn’t the first time an attack on China of this nature has been launched. Perpetrators have simply revived the tactics of a time when the US spent billions of dollars to portray China as an evil entity out to destroy humanity. 

Failing to stop the communists from taking over China in 1949 — and after fighting a gruesome war with the Chinese army in Korea — a book appeared in 1951 by Edward Hunter. Called Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Mind, it quickly became a bestseller. So much so that Hunter soon produced a sequel. In the book, Hunter claimed that the Chinese had invented an elusive brainwashing technique to create a slave race. 

Hunter was neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. But he still managed to impress the US government. Julia Lovell, in her book Maoism: A Global History, writes that Hunter’s tomes smacked of ‘rank amateurism and ignorance’ and, yet, they inspired the US government to spend billions of dollars to ‘understand’ this (non-existent) ‘brainwashing technique’. The US government also brought in a host of psychologists to study the files of American POWs in China. Lovell writes that experiments to recreate the ‘technique’ were also conducted by using LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug. 

All this amounted to nothing. There was no such thing as a Chinese brainwashing technique. Even though this was soon established, it did not stop the US from allowing literature on the subject to continue pouring out, at least till Mao Tse Tung’s death in 1976. 

There is no doubt that the current authoritarian Chinese set-up bungled the outbreak of Covid-19 in China in its delay to report it. But to anti-China populists, such as Trump and Modi, this mistake can be transformed into meaning something a lot more insidious. Because populists are good at peddling fiction as fact, especially during times of their failing. 

For pro-China populist regimes, however, such as the one ruling Pakistan, the guns have been turned towards a provincial government (in Sindh) that is not headed by the ruling party. Thus far, the Sindh government seems to be substituting for China as a scapegoat.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 26th, 2020