We live in an age of populist demagogues. This is not a new phenomenon. Plato used the word “demagogue” in his critique of democracy in The Republic. He was correct that demagogy is the Achilles heel of democracy. We are seeing this threat in many countries today. Donald Trump, the US president, is a classic rightwing populist demagogue.
As my colleague Joel Suss noted recently, populism is economically, as well as politically, damaging. How damaging is illustrated by the fate of Argentina, a country that has been plagued by populism since the rule of Hipólito Irigoyen in 1916. Since then its real GDP per head has halved relative to that of the US and gone from five times Brazil’s to one and a quarter times. (See charts.)
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