In 399 BC, an old man stood trial in the Athenian Agora for corrupting the youth and failing to honour the city's gods. Athens had just lost a war it should have won, survived a brutal coup by its own oligarchs, and was frightened — properly frightened — that its democracy might not survive another shock. It needed somewhere to put that fear. It put it on Socrates.
He hadn't lost the war. He hadn't run the coup. The men who had — Alcibiades, who'd defected to Sparta and back again, and Critias, who'd led the Thirty Tyrants in a purge of his own city — had either died or made themselves untouchable. Socrates had simply talked to them once, in his stubborn, irritating way, asking questions nobody in power wanted asked. That was enough. The city couldn't punish its actual betrayers. It could punish him.
This is the oldest trick in politics, and it has never needed an empire, a printing press, or a television studio to work. It needs three things: a real fear, someone willing to point, and a target too weak to point back.
In April 1968, Enoch Powell stood up in Birmingham and read out a letter. Not his own words, he was careful to say — the words of "a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman," a constituent who'd written to him in despair. The country he'd grown up in, the letter said, would not exist in fifteen or twenty years' time. "The black man will have the whip hand over the white man." Powell's trick wasn't the sentiment. It was the device. He didn't say it. He just happened to be holding the letter of a man who did, and who could possibly object to him reading out his own constituent's post?
It is a small, mechanical thing, that move, and it is also the entire mechanism in miniature. Real anxiety — about housing, about jobs, about a town changing faster than the people in it — gets picked up by someone with something to gain from it, pointed at people with no power to answer back, and handed a borrowed voice so the someone doing the pointing can deny they ever pointed at all.
Sixty years later nobody needs the letter. Nigel Farage doesn't quote the ordinary bloke down the pub — he performs him directly, pint in hand, on whichever channel will have him that week. Powell smuggled his argument in through someone else's mouth because saying it in his own would have cost him his career. It did anyway. Farage discovered that, performed often enough, the bloke down the pub doesn't need smuggling in. He can stand for Parliament. He can reshape what every other party feels safe saying about immigration, year after year, without ever needing to win a seat to do it. Powell needed a letter. Farage just needed a camera.
Germany in 1923 had a currency you needed a wheelbarrow to carry. By 1932 it had six million unemployed and a peace treaty that had spent a decade explaining, in writing, that the whole catastrophe was Germany's fault and Germany's alone. That is an extraordinary quantity of real grievance sitting around unclaimed. Hitler didn't invent the humiliation. He simply offered to explain it — not as the predictable consequence of a war, a blockade, and a vindictive settlement, but as the work of a people who didn't belong, who had been undermining the nation from within all along. The explanation was monstrous and it was also, to a frightened and humiliated population, an answer. An answer is worth a great deal to people who feel they've been given none.
The American Rust Belt had its own unclaimed grievance: factories that didn't come back, an opioid crisis with a devastating body count, wages that hadn't moved in real terms in decades. None of it was caused by an immigrant crossing the Rio Grande. Trade policy did that. Automation did that. Decades of a tax and labour settlement that moved the returns on growth from wages to capital did that. But "decades of bipartisan trade and tax policy" doesn't fit on a hat, and it doesn't give a frightened, humiliated population anyone to blame who can't blame them back. An invented invasion does. Hitler had the Jew and the Bolshevik. Trump has the migrant and the cartel. The underlying device — real loss, false cause, safe target — is the same device Powell read out of someone else's letter, just turned up until it's no longer deniable.
In 1917, Lenin offered a starving, exhausted, autocracy-strangled country three words: peace, land, bread. It worked because it was true — the war was pointless slaughter, the land hunger was real, the bread genuinely wasn't there. But a revolution needs an enemy to justify itself by, and Lenin had one ready-made: the bourgeoisie, the kulak, the wrecker — the man hoarding grain while his neighbours starved. Some of that was real. Soon, almost none of it had to be. The category survived long after the famine, the civil war, and the Tsar himself were gone, because a state built on having an enemy doesn't know how to stop needing one.
Stalin inherited the category and removed what was left of its content. By the late 1930s "enemy of the people" didn't describe a class position or a hoarded grain store. It described whoever the purge needed it to describe that month — a factory manager who'd missed a quota, a neighbour who'd been denounced first, an old Bolshevik who'd simply been in the wrong photograph a decade earlier. The Five-Year Plans failed by their own brutal arithmetic, and the failure was discharged downward, onto saboteurs and wreckers who existed mainly on paper, rather than upward onto the plan or the man who'd set its targets. This is the same mechanism running past the point where it needs a reason at all — fear looking for somewhere to land, manufacturing its own targets once the real ones run out.
Mussolini didn't start with race. In the early 1920s his Blackshirts hunted socialists and trade unionists — strikers, organisers, anyone associated with the factory occupations that had frightened Italy's landowners and industrialists half to death. That's Lenin's register, just inverted: instead of a revolutionary state inventing a bourgeois enemy, a counter-revolutionary movement inventing a Bolshevik one. The violence was real, the targets were chosen, and the beneficiaries — the men who'd funded the Blackshirts to begin with — stayed comfortably out of the photographs.
Then, in 1938, with the Manifesto of Race, Mussolini changed lanes entirely and adopted Hitler's register wholesale, stripping Italian Jews of citizenship and office without so much as a change in personnel at the top. Nothing about his method had to change. The crowds, the rallies, the performed authenticity of a man of the people — all of it carried over intact. Only the target moved. That should be the most unsettling thing in this essay so far: the tool doesn't care which fear it's loaded with. The same machinery that hunted socialists in 1922 hunted Jews in 1938, run by the same man, cheered by largely the same crowd.
Jeremy Corbyn worked from the same material as Farage. The same decade of austerity, the same stagnant wages, the same housing crisis, the same food banks where there hadn't been food banks before. The same fear, in other words — economic precarity, decline, the sense that something had been taken. But Corbyn pointed it somewhere else. Not at immigrants. At landlords, at a tax system built to reward capital over labour, at the banks that broke the economy in 2008 and were never made to pay for it. Same grievance pool Farage was drawing from in the same years. Opposite direction of blame.
It worked, as far as these things can be measured. In 2017 Labour took 40% of the vote, the largest increase in vote share since 1945, enough to cost the government its majority. In 2019 the vote share fell to 32% — still higher than Starmer achieved in his landslide of 2024. The difference wasn't that people stopped turning out for an upward-blame argument. It's that first-past-the-post and a Brexit-split coalition turned a respectable vote share into a parliamentary rout, and a hostile press did the rest. Punching down isn't the only thing that can mobilise people at scale. Punching up can too. It's just that the people you punch up at have considerably more capacity to punish you for it than the people who get punched down.
Sixty years before any of this, Bismarck had already found the other way out — not redirecting the fear, not even mobilising it, just removing its fuel. Faced with a working class that the socialists were organising around real grievances, he didn't invent an enemy for them. He gave them health insurance, accident insurance, a pension. The world's first welfare state, built by a conservative aristocrat for the explicit purpose of making revolution unnecessary. It is the least romantic political move in this entire essay, and it is also the only one that actually solved the problem it was responding to, rather than just relocating it.
Between Corbyn and Bismarck sits the whole available alternative to everything that came before them: you can answer real fear with material change, aimed up or administered from above, or you can answer it by pointing it at someone too weak to point back. Only one of those leaves the fear in the room afterwards.
Athens did not need Hitler's propaganda ministry or Powell's letter or Farage's camera. It needed an Assembly, a frightened citizenry, and a man skilled enough at reading the room to point it somewhere useful. That is the entire infrastructure populism has ever required, and every century since has just been an argument about delivery method — pamphlet, wireless, newspaper column, rally, push notification. The fear is the constant. The fear is always available, because the fear is usually true. Something has been lost, something is being lost, something might be lost next. What's never constant, what always has to be supplied fresh by somebody with something to gain, is the explanation for where to put it.
Socrates went to his death still asking the question that should have been asked of him instead of by him: not "is this man corrupting the youth," but "who actually lost us the war, and why does it feel so much safer to blame the old man who talks too much?" Nobody in the Agora that day had a satisfying answer, because the satisfying answer — Alcibiades, Critias, the men who'd actually done the damage and made themselves untouchable doing it — wasn't available to punish. The old man was.
Two and a half thousand years on, the city has better technology and the same vote. It can still discharge its fear downward, onto whoever's nearest and weakest, and call it justice. Or it can do what Bismarck did, what Corbyn tried to do — answer the fear honestly, at its actual source, and accept that this is less satisfying, slower, and almost never gets you cheered in the street the way pointing does. The mechanism doesn't need a tyrant to survive. It only needs someone willing to point, and a city frightened enough to let them.
Figures, dates, and vote shares above reflect my best recollection and should be independently verified before being treated as settled fact.