Book Review: The Road to Perdition: David Owen on Hubristic Mendacity in Contemporary Populisms

On the diminished value of historical knowledge

In our advanced and globalized contemporary world, critical thinking on history has become a rare commodity. True, a considerable quantity of studies and archival material on the history of the world and its principal decision-makers has long been accessible.

Yet, such unprecedented accessibility far from ensures its routine and wise review by those who govern contemporary advanced democracies. Democracies whose institutions and actors, as the spectacular case of the Trump-led United States amply illustrated, suffer from a deepening crisis of legitimacy. Indeed, never has such a considerable wealth of historical knowledge seemed so irrelevant to the evolution of the socio-political realities of our world, especially in the disenchanted West.

Why has crucial knowledge of the past and its actors lost its erstwhile social value? More specifically, why does oft willful and dangerous ignorance of the tragedies of history seem normal and widespread in Western democracies? For such dauntingly complex questions, David Owen’s book, “Hubris: The Road to Donald Trump,” provides a solid framework of phenomenological inquiry. Perhaps, it is also a revealing sign of our depressing times that not many analysts of contemporary politics in the West have bothered to explore the significance of the chief thesis of this unique volume of stimulating essays. That is to say, the growing danger of what Lord Owen lucidly terms “hubristic mendacity” in contemporary societies. In all fairness, one should note that the book’s hybrid and somewhat confusing format has somewhat contributed to its incomprehension by commentators.

For unlike Lord Owen’s milestone classic volume on the impact of illness on political leaders in the 20^th Century, “In Sickness and In Power,” ³ the former British Foreign Secretary’s last book on political leaders, as David Owen himself acknowledges, was the fruit of an effort at reviewing all that he had “written about past US Presidents and British Prime Ministers in relation to hubris.” This had to be done in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s fateful election in November 2016. The volume’s expanded 2020 version also includes an insightful chapter on Boris Johnson’s populism.

Hence, it could be read as a collection of historical studies (“Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George”) and an analysis of the socio-political metamorphoses of hubris in the wake of Trump’s rise to power (“Donald Trump’s Populism”) as well as the 2016 referendum which led to Britain’s eventual departure from the EU.

Its dual character constitutes a clear advantage for the reader. Yet, it also presents the theorist of history with a dilemma. Whilst David Owen’s definition of populism appears helpfully fluid, the domain of its analytic use is restricted. As the author himself acknowledges, the book is chiefly concerned with British and American leaders of the last hundred years. This is understandable given Lord Owen’s political career and previous publications. Yet, it seriously undermines his sweeping claim that: “populism can be reasonable, it is not always damaging.” To make matters even more difficult, David Owen focuses on two significant American “populists,” namely, Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, who were also notorious practitioners of nationalist demagoguery and imperialism. In the book’s subtitle, mention is made of “popularism” whilst on its cover the noted term “populism” appears. This conveys the unmistakable impression that the author is acutely aware of the protean character of the socio-political phenomenon in question. That is to say, “populism.” David Owen thus displays his laudable unwillingness to squeeze its complex reality into some rigid conceptual cage. Nonetheless, when it comes to the definition of “populism,” he opts for one which is highly questionable, if not downright contestable:

“The definition of a populist used in this book is not as dismissive a term as in some people’s vocabulary, particularly among elites in Europe where populism is said often with a curled lip and a derogatory meaning. A populist, I believe, is better defined as someone who wants to make decisions on the basis of the people’s wishes but does not exclude acting against the popular will. Yet, a populist is someone who wants to give a very high priority to following popular opinion. That less censorious definition fits with Presidents Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Reagan, Clinton, Trump and Boris Johnson.” ⁴

On defining populism

Aside from the fact that many in European “elites” talk about populism not by “curling their lips” but by raising their eyebrows when they face “populist” slogans, David Owen’s definition seems too broad to the historian and too narrow to the political theorist. Historically, every popular political actor has had to heed the people’s wishes before rising to power. Those who subsequently acted against the popular will were either far-sighted statesmen who rejected demagoguery or tyrants of different stripes who oft abused their power by styling themselves the people’s “protector” from its “enemies.” Simply making decisions in accordance with the people’s wishes does not invariably make a “populist” out of a political actor. Woodrow Wilson involved the United States in the first World War. This was not, at first, a popular policy. How does Wilson’s European policy resemble Reagan’s Afghan strategy, Clinton’s Bosnia policy, or Trump’s embrace of the North Korean and Turkish autocrats? None of these policies was, at first, popular but became more accepted as popular opinion shifted. What role did these “populist” leaders play in such a process? David Owen never explicitly addresses this issue. In 2021, President Joe Biden implemented an economic policy which was popular with most Republican voters. But this alone did not make him a “populist” even though he was, for quite a while, more popular than his pathologically mendacious predecessor could have ever hoped to be. The simple fact that a political actor wishes to prioritize popular opinion is not sufficient to classify him or her as a “populist.” Even David Owen grants that there is a distinction, however fine, between being “popular” and being a “populist.”

What he never acknowledges in an explicit and coherent manner is that a “populist” does not simply follow popular opinion. Rather, he or she strives to refashion it within a specific narrative of his or her own making. Only the refashioning of public perceptions of reality distinguishes “populist” rhetoric from ever shifting popular opinion. No edifying analysis of “populism” could afford to neglect this aspect of the phenomenon since it accounts for the considerable difference of magnitude between the mendacity of contemporary “populists” and that of past or contemporary popular actors. Lord Owen himself seems aware of this sociocultural reality when he writes:

“When leaders believe in their own truths and believe they are entitled to distort the truth to achieve policy ends, by whatever means, then society itself is endangered.” ⁵

This was written before the Trump-incited storming of the Capitol building in Washington, D. C, on January 6th, 2021. Yet, it lucidly anticipates an event that shall go down in infamy in American history. An event which shall be evoked in all future critiques of “populist” ignorance and intolerance. Despite all this, David Owen never analyzes the cultural and the psychological underpinnings of what he terms the “endangerment of society.” Writing against the historical backdrop of his curious tactical alliance with the ideologically UKIP-influenced and Tory-dominated Leave campaign in the UK, he oft seems at pain to sideline the fundamental role of demagoguery in the “populist” refashioning of popular opinion. But setting aside what Teddy Roosevelt called “demagogy” makes it difficult for the reader to grasp David Owen’s lucid emphasis on the fatefully novel character of contemporary “populism.” In other words, the fact that it is an oft damaging political expression of unprecedented “hubristic mendacity” ⁶ in technologically advanced societies.

On theorizing hubristic mendacity

The “hubristic mendacity” in question is of a unique sort. It does not just presuppose but also manufactures dangerous ignorance of the past and its tragedies. Obviously, analyzing this disconcerting historical novelty concerns practitioners of many disciplines in social sciences and not just political scientists. If mendacity, as David Owen rightly underscores, has become visibly hubristic in contemporary societies, this could only mean that those who resort to it know that they can get away with it rather easily. Indeed, contemporary “populists” know that lying would not automatically undermine their political standing with their constituencies. They know their followers do not attach great importance to what they say since they identify with how they say it. Of course, what contemporary “populists” say is not unimportant. Yet, it derives its ultimate political significance not from a factual referent but from its “populist” formulations with which their “base” identifies. As dishonestly misleading or ignorant as such formulations might indeed be.

In our postmodern age, “populists” could indeed lie and yet command the loyalty of a specific segment of the electorate so long as they say certain things in a certain way. Trump’s infamous remarks on the electoral immateriality of shooting people on New York’s Fifth Avenue perfectly illustrate this psychological reality. His ludicrous “Big Lie” according to which he won the 2020 presidential election in the US has also come to exemplify such “populist” mendacity. Contemporary “populism” bears on no less than the psycho-social identity of a loud populace which frequently fancies itself to be the “people.” Even if such a populace constitutes no more than a clear minority of the entire electorate as were Trump voters in 2016. A convincing analysis of “populism” and its increasingly hubristic variants must therefore be able to account for its two chief attributes. First, its function as an identity-generative narrative which serves to distort complex social realities to the point of discrediting the very notion of truth. In this respect, David Owen’s emphasis on the culturally disastrous assassination of the “truth” in post-Soviet Russia is both instructive and demoralizing to the theorist of history. Secondly, one must account for the impact of “populist” rhetoric as a discursive tool, one which enables the contemporary “populist” demagogue to consolidate his or her psychological grip on his or her “base.” In a 2010 essay on the elastic notion of “hubris syndrome,” I emphasized that hubris has both historical and trans-historical roots. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s conceptual vocabulary, I argued that hubristic behavior emerges when a falsely idealized image of the self, the Idea-Ego, eclipses the structuring principle that governs the sphere of socio-political reality. That is to say, the Ego-Ideal. David Owen’s “hubris syndrome” is thus a phenomenological concept which denotes the fateful overshadowing of the Ego-Ideal by the Ideal-Ego in specific social actors. Such actors frequently exhibit both incompetence and mendacity.

More ominously, they equally seek to normalize such behavioral defects in an unprecedented type of society. One in which a falsely idealized image of the self could easily displace the ethical ideals of knowledge and transparency to which a socialized self is normally expected to aspire. To better grasp this phenomenon in a specific historical context, one must read David Owen’s detailed analysis of Tony Blair’s “hubristic incompetence” in the context of the former British PM’s involvement in the Iraq war fiasco ⁷ . Therein, reference is made to the prevalence of “groupthink” among Blair’s advisers. Only such “groupthink” could account for the astonishing ease with which a culturally hegemonic and idealized conception of the supposedly “smart self “eclipsed the healthy awareness of our constitutive inadequacy to the transcendental ideal of truth. A truth which can never be phenomenally exhausted, especially by the “smartest” of decision-makers tasked with making politically crucial choices.