In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it’s time to go after the “supply side” of populism – time, that is, to curb freedom of the press and the right of individuals to spend money on causes they believe in.

For a decade, you see, the European and British establishments have focused on quashing the demand side of populism. They have employed police, prison, censorship and shame to stop people from voicing anti-establishment opinions, demanding populist policies or voting for populist parties. They have formed preposterously broad coalitions to exclude populist parties from power. They have had law enforcement break down doors for Facebook posts about migrant hotels and they’ve had goons detain people in airports for tweets rejecting the transgender contagion. They have used social pressure to keep citizens quiescent while their economies are deindustrialized, their identities erased and their cities bedeviled by foreign rape gangs.

Despite their best efforts, the establishment is failing. Europeans don’t like what has happened, and what continues to happen, to their countries, and they want something different. So the demand side – or popularity – of populism is here to stay. So what’s needed now, Byrne says, is a choking off of the supply: i.e., the money, the press and the organizational muscle that enables anti-establishment politics to exist.

Of course, Byrne doesn’t word it that way. Rather, in a Financial Times piece promoting his book, he claims “we need to look at the web of commercial ventures and financial transactions behind Europe’s populists… These help to bankroll political parties, pay fat stipends to politicians and think tanks, and fund international conferences; they help to build a sympathetic media system.”

In the past, left-liberal politicians celebrated political pluralism – divergent parties, think tanks, conferences and media outlets were considered vital facets of an open society. But Byrne recasts them as the glue that holds together a giant conspiracy. Rich donors, he argues, aren’t backing populist politics because they think London has become unrecognizable........

© The Spectator