I listened to a fascinating debate on the BBC’s The World This Weekend about the ideological origins of that thing, populism. The agreeably thuggish Javier Milei had just taken the reins of Argentina and, perhaps a little late in the day, the TW2 (as it is known in BBC circles) production team had noticed that almost every election held anywhere these days – except perhaps Australia and here – tends to result in a win for a party which is either overtly populist, as in Argentina, or is called populist by its opponents and the BBC. What the hell is going on, they wondered, only ten years too late.

Who did they choose to ‘debate’ the issue? Prince Harry and Wolf from Gladiators? The suave game-show presenter Ben Shephard and Herbie the Skateboarding Duck? Both would have offered greater illumination than the two people actually roped together – a left-wing professor from the University of Cardiff and the hunky left-wing Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis.

All ideologies end up grotesquely overreaching and thus sowing the seeds of their downfall

And so we heard what populism actually was, according to them and the programme’s presenter, Jonny Dymond. Here is a list of some of the phrases I heard during this admirably consensual debate: far right-wing, neo-fascist, xenophobic, racist, anti-Islamist, Goebbels, global financial collapse, rise of Hitler, hatred of foreigners. All were agreed that populism was the redoubt of the far right, despite the fact many of those elected have been Social Democrats (Slovakia), libertarians (Argentina) or Thatcherites (Italy).

I wondered, listening to Varoufakis’s self-serving Keynesian drivel, if that production team might have thought, at any point, of perhaps engaging the services of someone who represented one of these newish and supposedly populist victors, rather than just shove together two clowns who wished only to call them fascists. I’m sure Geert Wilders, from the Netherlands, would have been up for it. But then the thought occurred that they couldn’t possibly do that. What they call populism is a dagger in the heart of many things, not least institutions such as the BBC which embodies that rapidly evaporating and discredited creed, neoliberalism.

The governments elected under a heading imposed by their opponents as populist may indeed differ on many issues. They may be technically left-wing or right-wing or even centrist. But one thing they have in common is that they all dislike the BBC, which they see, quite rightly, as the voice of a middle-class establishment which has a dog in the fight and therefore will never take seriously the aims of such governments and the aspirations of the people who elected them.

Crudely, these beliefs are: patriotism, a respect for the nation state, a yearning for strong borders, a disaffection with the middle-class liberal elite which previously ran them, usually a hefty genuflection towards religious faith, a mistrust of supranational organisations such as the EU and the UN, a further distrust of untrammelled capitalism and an adherence to the traditional cultural values of people like them, which they see – rightly – as being under threat.

They do not wish to establish a thousand-year Reich or invade Poland or goose-step in unison, and still less to victimise impoverished incomers. The aversion is to globalisation and mass immigration, not immigrants per se – excepting those who wish to change the character and nature of the country in which they have latterly arrived and make it resemble more the violence, stupidity and tribal chaos of the countries they have left behind.

You can pick your own date as to when neoliberalism and its blithely absolutist evangelism was at its global peak and therefore about to decline. Perhaps when Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. Or ten years later when Tony Blair and George W. Bush were assuring us that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which might obliterate us all in 45 minutes. Or Blair, again, loosening the borders so we might all benefit from untrammelled mass immigration and thus rid us of our woeful xenophobia. Whatever, the past two decades have seen neoliberalism in retreat on every front.

The counter-revolution has been, in historical terms, rather swift – and 2023 has been the year when the neoliberals suddenly roused themselves from their torpor, looking quite aghast, wondering what was happening: your end-time, is what. Hell, when even Switzerland gets in on the act, as it did in its federal elections in October when the ‘populist’ Swiss People’s party topped the poll, you know that something is afoot.

Lowered income as a consequence of cheap overseas labour, the incompetence and arrogance of the banks, the migration into western countries of people who hate us, the promulgation by unelected elites of cultural programmes antithetical not only to the population but also to logic – all of these are somewhere in the mix when we talk about populism. But the main unifying factor is an epic weariness with that most illiberal of dogmas, neoliberalism.

All ideologies end up grotesquely overreaching and thus sowing the seeds of their downfall. I campaigned against racism in the 1970s because I thought it was morally foul to discriminate against an individual because of the colour of his or her skin. I did not campaign in favour of inculcating a corrosive victimhood culture among non-white people, nor to take upon myself the mantle of chief oppressor, as critical race theory insists I should. I campaigned against the discrimination faced by homosexuals, but did not sign up to giving kids puberty blockers, blokes running in women’s sprint races or, for that matter, gay marriage. I was in favour of equality between the sexes but never bought into the idea that the two genders had identical goals and aspirations and talents. All of that was overreach, the shrill signal that an ideology is devouring itself. Long may it continue – bring on 2024.