Ortega y Gasset on the Convoy Protest on Parliament Hill, and today’s populism

The “people” – as it was then called [in the nineteenth century] – the “people” had learned that it was sovereign, but did not believe it.  To-day the ideal has been changed into a reality; not only in legislation, which is the mere framework of public life, but in the heart of every individual, whatever his ideas may be, and even if he be a reactionary in his ideas, that is to say, even when he attacks and castigates institutions by which those rights are sanctioned.  To my mind, anyone who does not realise this curious moral situation of the masses can understand nothing of what is to-day beginning to happen in the world.  The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be psychological state inherent in the average man.  And note this, that when what was before an ideal becomes a component part of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal.  The prestige and the magic that are attributes of the ideal are volatilized.  The levelling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions.

Now, the meaning of this proclamation of the rights of man was none other than to lift human souls from their interior servitude and to implant within them a certain consciousness of mastery and dignity.  Was it not this that it was hoped to do, namely, that the average man should feel himself master, lord, and ruler of himself and of his life?  Well, that is now accomplished.  Why, then, these complaints of the liberals, the democrats, the progressives of thirty years ago?  Or is it that, like children, they want something, but not the consequences of that something?  You want the ordinary man to be master.  Well, do not be surprised if he acts for himself, if he demands all forms of employment, if he firmly asserts his will, if he refuses all kinds of service, if he ceases to be docile to anyone, if he considers his own person and his own leisure … these are some of the attributes permanently attached to mastership.  To-day we find them taking up their abode in the ordinary man, in the mass.[1]

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

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[1] José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses. anonymous translation (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), pp. 23,24.