Kemi Badenoch and the spirit of 2022
J. Sorel
Once set to dominate the decade, the personal credos of Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch already feel like historical curiosities. Like the New Life Movement of Chiang Kai Shek both will be remembered as an odd interlude between distinct epochs, of interest only to specialists.
But Badenochism is worthy of study because it represents a common failure-mode of populism, one that we now see well in evidence in the doings and undoings of Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and the figure of ‘Bongino’. As a credo Badenochism belongs to the period from 2021-2023, those quiet years during which the established right, now freed from Trump, could try its own hand at populism. The era of Chris Rufo, the Free Press, ARC, NatCon, and the University at Austin.
Unlike Trumpism its business really was the culture war. 2022ism was the idea that populism was about the west’s moral revival, if not individual moral revival. It didn’t offer to do anything for the masses so much as it demanded things from them. There were the campaigns against DEI and critical race theory, true, but it was in the main a dour austerity programme of social media bans, natalism, and rearmament; needless to say nothing was ever said about the southern border. There was a nasty self-interested side to it as well; often it all seemed to be about the interests and the uninteresting travails of professors who were defrocked over things like trans. Rhetorical references to the Common Man disappeared almost entirely. Although styling itself as an intellectual movement it was more truly ‘populist’ than MAGA, in that it combined rhetorical maximalism with a noticeable flakiness about actual solutions. It never evolved a signature demand on a level with ‘build the wall’. It was hysterical in a way that MAGA never was, something that we can still see in the pointless frenzies of Jordan Peterson and Eric Weinstein. It tried, in an inept, establishmentarian way, to play the game of populism, mostly through ‘fighting words’, but it was never actually prepared to offer anything to the mob it called on to rise in its name. That you have to give people something if you want them to go out on a limb for you: this is an insight that has eluded almost everyone except for Donald Trump. 2022ism was the idea that the masses should come to the rescue of ‘Kathleen Stock’ in exchange for nothing at all.