Richard C. Holbrooke Lecture

Populism in the Age of Depopulation

Democracy manages political disagreement by encouraging voters dissatisfied with current incumbents to channel their frustration into the next election. Today’s populists, however, seem bent on heading backwards. The contrast with twentieth-century ideologies—liberalism, communism, fascism—which organized around competing visions of the future, could not be starker. In this talk, Stephen Holmes examines three cases of what he considers to be political stagnation: the United States, because of Trump’s assault on the country’s capacity to confront the future; Russia, because of Putin’s obsession with his country’s demographic collapse; and Hungary, because of Orbán’s warnings of “Hungarian extinction” despite having virtually no immigrants. In all of these cases, Holmes argues, collapsing fertility rates among historical majorities worldwide stand out as a primary driver of the war against the world the Enlightenment built.