Jacobites and Modern Populists

Touring Britain, Ross Douthat sees memories of the Jacobite rebels everywhere, and ponders their connections to modern populism:

Among a certain kind of conservative nerd the Stuart cause has long been a secret handshake or an inside joke. But the normal way to discuss the Jacobites is to portray them as a political anachronism, royal absolutists backing a Catholic king in a Protestant and liberalizing Britain, whose rebellion became a cultural phenomenon as soon as its political chances went extinct. Doomed but glamorous, the Jacobites were destined to be rediscovered by romantics in every generation, from Sir Walter Scott’s novels in the early 19th century to the “Outlander” saga in the early 21st.

But nowadays the Jacobite era should feel a bit less distantly romantic and a bit more relevant to our own divisions and disturbances. This is true in a straightforward way for Britain itself, where the 17th and 18th century’s religious and ideological conflicts are long gone, but the not-entirely-United Kingdom finds itself once more divided along the geographic and cultural fault lines of the Stuart era. . . .

This specifically British story, in turn, is a type of the larger pattern of politics in Europe and the United States, where the gap between thriving capitals and struggling peripheries, between a metropolitan meritocracy and a nostalgic hinterland, has forged a right-wing politics that sometimes resembles Jacobitism more than it does the mainstream conservatisms of the late 20th century.

It’s not that today’s populists (a few intellectuals aside) favor the restoration of an absolute or Catholic monarchy. Rather, like the original Jacobites, they represent a hodgepodge of somewhat disparate causes, unified mostly by their oppositional and outsider status, their distance from and defiance of the Whiggish metropole. As Frank McLynn points out in his history of the Jacobites, whatever specific designs the Stuarts had in mind, their movement always included a variety of competing ideological and religious tendencies.

This is exactly what I think about the Jacobites. They did not rebel for anything in particular, just against the way Britain was going. Which was the way the whole Atlantic world was going: away from small farmers and country gentlement toward big business and big cities, away from localism and toward centralized states and homogenous cultures.

Douthat seems to think that the Jacobites might have won, but I find that laughable; by 1745 the British state was a globe-spanning power not likely to be undone by a few thousand Highlanders and their cranky intellectual friends. The forces that defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie were a small part of what the government could call on if need be. But I think he is right to compare those rebellions with certain aspects of modern populism. Modern populists are the people unhappy with the way things are going: with racial change, cultural change, economic change. Even if they win elections, though, they are not likely ever to have much power, because they have no idea how to change the direction of the world. Sure, they could make small changes: less immigration, tighter zoning laws against big box stores, etc. But the world of all white neighborhoods, rigid sexual mores, shopping at the corner store, and small farmers earning decent livings is not coming back.

Until someone comes up with an actual alternative to modernity – constant economic and technological progress, globalization, moral turmoil – its opponents will keep losing, just like Bonnie Prince Charlie and the QAnon Shaman.