Both those who oppose populism and those who look at it with favor seem to broadly agree that populism is engendered by rapid and deep changes in a society. One way or another, change is supposed to trigger a sense of insecurity. This is the common ground of the left’s and the right’s account for the global rise in populism. The difference lies in their prescriptions for alleviating this insecurity. The left thinks insecurity can be alleviated by strengthening the perception that the government is ready to redistribute riches, ultimately lowering those inequalities seen as a product of the developments that triggered insecurity in the first place. The right bets on nostalgia for a better and safer past and sometimes flirts with protectionism as a means to slow the pace of change. Both tend to consider “individualism” as a problem, to equate it with consumerism or to see it as evidence of the coming apart of social structures. Walking this line you end up arguing for systems in which distribution of wealth aims to be independent from individual efforts (like communism, or a caste system) as the best way to temper the anxiety of change.

　　The problem with both of these visions is that they locate the problem in change itself, not in the society that meets it. If the issue lies in society, we could try to address it with the imperfect means we have. If instead we frame it as an all-powerful force against which society is merely passive, the almighty power of the state is required.

　　The work of Eric Hoffer, the twentieth-century longshoreman-philosopher (he worked on the docks in San Francisco before starting to write) is sometimes used to explain the rise of populist parties. Hoffer wrote The True Believer to explain mass movements. The book brought him national fame; President Eisenhower considered it his favorite essay and distributed copies to his officials and advisers.

　　Twelve years after, Hoffer published The Ordeal of Change in 1963, now largely forgotten. Yet this book may speak to our times of transformations on one hand, and populism as a reaction to them on the other.

　　In some ways, Hoffer was uniquely experienced to speak on the concept of economic change. Totally self-educated, he lived in a federal camp in the Great Depression while picking oranges to survive. After Pearl Harbor, he became a longshoreman in San Francisco. Accordingly, his experience with economic harshness was more personal than your average intellectual’s.

　　Hoffer did not deny that change could be unsettling. But he also thought that a society’s response need not be defensive or reactionary.

　　He understood the psychological challenge change poses to people. He quoted Dostoyevsky that “taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.” Hoffer wrote, “Even in slight things, the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.” In 1936, Hoffer wrote that he was picking peas. But in summer he had to pick string beans. “I still remember how hesitant I was the first morning as I was about to address myself to the string bean vines. Would I be able to pick string beans? Even the change from peas to string beans had in it elements of fear.”

　　This sense of being tested and having to adjust to the unknown is all the more stressful when we are to cope with radical change. When we do not simply leave a job for one that somehow resembles it, but we are faced with new machinery, new habits, new ways to learn from scratch, the change is much more difficult to accommodate. A population undergoing drastic change is, for Hoffer, a “population of misfits” who discover their skills to be anachronistic and feel themselves out of place. This would indeed make them “unbalanced, explosive, and hungry for action.”

　　So far Hoffer’s diagnosis of how change impacts people is not that different than the one we hear every day. People no longer feel comfortable, hence they are ready to do anything, including things that are dangerous. But these things are “collective” in that they pertain to the realm of politics: vote for this or that tribune, join a protest against globalization, perhaps even flirt with political violence. Hoffer knew the sentiments behind politics very well, as he analyzed them in The True Believer.

　　Most of us—including relatively successful people and failures alike—tend to think our fortunes are spun by external forces. In the face of difficulties, we tend to locate solutions outside of ourselves. It is not enough to be discontented, to be a future revolutionary. One wants to encounter some leader who is able to nourish the most exalted hopes. These hopes are not for our own improvement: Hoffer stressed over and over again that mass movements are not practical organizations, aiming at offering better education to the workers’ children or better wages. Mass movements win hearts offering the hope of nirvana, not the satisfaction of petty needs. In times of desperation, we cease to seek out a solution, but place our hopes in messianic figures. “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

　　If people do not believe in themselves, they are bait for charismatic leaders and intellectual hucksters. But society can present such conditions that people moderately believe in themselves and their ability. Under these conditions, change can be a force people choose to cope with constructively. He pointed to the example of immigrants in the United States:

　　The millions of immigrants dumped on our shores after the Civil War underwent a tremendous change, and it was a highly irritating and painful experience. Not only were they transferred almost overnight, to a wholly foreign world, but they were, for the most part, torn from the warm communal existence of a small town or village somewhere in Europe and exposed to the cold and dismal isolation of an individual existence. They were misfits in every sense of the world, and ideal material for a revolutionary explosion. But they had a vast continent at their disposal, and fabulous opportunities for self-advancement, and an environment which held self-reliance and individual enterprise in high esteem.

　　These immigrants could “plunge into a mad pursuit of action.” Instead of marching on the Capitol, “they tamed and mastered a continent in an incredibly short time.” In the 1960s, Hoffer—who was becoming more concerned about America’s future—could write that America was “still in the backwash of that mad pursuit”.

　　Change may well be inevitable, by and large outside our control. It can be technological, or come from different sources.Yet, for Hoffer, change qua change does not trigger major upheaval, nor do the anxiety and the fanaticism change may breed in enthusiasts and enemies. The decisive factor is whether people can themselves start acting in their private and personal capacity, or not.

　　A society that breeds opportunity unites vibrant economic growth and a widespread sense of personal responsibility and self-reliance. One without the other won’t do it.

　　In other words, look not at deindustrialization or inequalities, but at how a culture breeds opportunities or it doesn’t. For Hoffer, the West became rich because it witnessed “the mass emergence of the autonomous individual.” Hoffer continued, “Whether he willed it or not, the Western individual … found himself more or less on his own. … The separation of the individual from a collective body, even when it is ardently striven for, is a painful experience. The newly emerging individual is an unstable and explosive entity.” Her existence is “beset with fears” but happily the Western individual’s “most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. … The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.”

　　Out of these more traditional social structures, the individual must search for meaning. Where can she find it? In work. The longshoreman-philosopher did not think that everybody enjoyed work. But work provided people with a sense of usefulness, if not of meaning. It was a “balancing” device in the “unbalanced” life of the autonomous individual.

　　Hoffer did not sing the praises of the autonomous individual as the eccentric genius or the man who makes his liberty his cause. His autonomous individual was the average Joe in America, a “business civilization” that was deprecated for its “worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination of the trivial.” But it also showed “a superb dynamism, and unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility which makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, an unbounded capacity fo fraternization.”

　　Was this all stripped away by supply chains becoming more complex? Or by the alleged increase in inequalities?

　　Perhaps we should look somewhere else—to a culture of opportunity. It is true the frontier has already been mastered, but this was the case in the 1950s as well. Change and technology are constantly creating frontiers anew, where adventurous people can find meaning, or at least something with which to busy themselves.

　　Hoffer thought “the masses made America,” which was in a sense a capitalist society because it was a mass society, a place where Mandarins and scribes exercised a limited influence. In such mass society, capitalism not only benefited people, but provided them meaning through work. Such mass society was not ill-fit to face change, nor did it need to borrow traits of aristocratic ones, in order to temper the anxiety of the new. All through the Western countries, these days, we see something different: bureaucratic micro-management, on one side, and on the other widespread cultural hostility towards “rugged individualism.”

　　Shall we embrace challenge, instead of fearing and trying to slow it down? If change is embraced by elites, or society is brought to swallow it top down, no matter what, the results will be miserable. What is needed is a culture of individualism and opportunity. How can that be restored? The United States of Hoffer’s times, which he praised so convincingly, is no more. Government intervention, often conceived to mitigate economic change, breeds dependence. Well-meaning welfare policies may have the very same effect.

　　A society that breeds opportunity unites vibrant economic growth and a widespread sense of personal responsibility and self-reliance. One without the other won’t do it. Efforts at improving the economy, these days, are for the most part based on this or that mix of increased government interventions. Efforts at healing many social problems (crime, dysfunctional families, poverty) very seldom try to avoid creating further dependence. Policy is always made by the insiders and the establishment. They are both self-interested and paternalistic. Hence it is easier for them to pledge to protect the underdogs than to recognize them as individuals who deserve to have their go.

　　To revive a society of individuals, we should concentrate on economic dynamism and opportunity. Stop worrying about the consequences of change. Let there be uncertainty, insecurity, alienation even.

　　Sure, change creates misfits, Hoffer reasons. Some societies allow these misfits to scrabble but ultimately flourish as individuals. Others make them champions of a political cause. A society that protects the misfits is more likely to end up in the second camp and will see the need for protection escalate, the more people stop believing they should be making it on their own and economic dynamism fades as their self-reliance.