The Will of the People Trick

Communism lived on a promise it could never deliver. The posters showed strong-jawed workers and sturdy peasants, the speeches thundered about The People seizing their destiny. Yet The People never got their hands on the wheel. Before the engine even turned over, The Party was in the driver’s seat, claiming to know what The People really wanted and demanding silence from anyone who said otherwise.

History makes a mockery of the slogans. In 1962, when Soviet workers in Novocherkassk struck over rising food prices, the response was tanks and live rounds – dozens killed, hundreds imprisoned – followed by the official line that workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Party. In Mao’s China, the peasants were celebrated as the revolutionary vanguard, yet collectivisation and the Great Leap Forward starved millions while Party propaganda insisted the nation was marching to glory. The People existed as an abstraction, heroic on paper but crushed whenever they acted in the flesh.

It’s the same conjuring trick every time: build a shrine to The People, then keep control by monopolising the right to speak in their name. Those who agree are embraced. Those who dissent are rebranded as wreckers, traitors, enemies. The People become ventriloquists’ dummies, mouthing whatever the Party decrees.

Donald Trump simply put the act into sequins. He bellowed about “the forgotten man” and declared “I alone can fix it.” The People became his personal brand – a crowd he could summon at rallies, a mandate he alone could interpret. When they voted him out, he refused to accept it. The People, he said, could not possibly have chosen differently. Their will had been “stolen,” so he would define it for them. In other words, The People meant Trump, and Trump meant The People – the same circular logic the Communist Party used, only with more baseball caps and bunting.

And then there’s Nigel Farage, pint in hand, presenting himself as the antidote to authoritarianism. Yet his “Will of the People” is just the same trick in a Union Flag waistcoat. That slender 52–48 referendum result in 2016 became sacred text, eternal and unchallengeable, to be interpreted only by him and his followers. Suggest that The People might have changed their minds and suddenly you’re no longer one of them. The People spoke once, and from then on Farage would decide forever what they meant.

Different eras, different flags – red stars, Stars and Stripes, St George's Flags – but the game is the same. Invoke The People, strip them of agency, and concentrate power in the hands of those who claim to be their voice. In every case, the winners are not The People at all but the party bosses, the hedge-fund backers, the billionaires and oligarchs who thrive while everyone else is told to keep clapping. And here’s the sardonic truth: whenever politicians shout loudest about serving The People, you can be sure it’s The People who are about to be ignored.

Now lay that paradox beside another. The patriot who waves the St George’s Cross and shouts “This is a Christian country.” The cross is Christianity’s oldest emblem – red for the blood of Christ and the martyrs, white for purity and salvation. It stands for sacrifice, mercy, forgiveness, and love even for enemies. Yet those who wave it loudest behave in direct contradiction. They sneer at the poor, vilify the migrant, exalt punishment, and glory in division. The Sermon on the Mount – turn the other cheek, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger – is pushed aside in favour of spite dressed up as patriotism.

Just as Communism invoked “The People” while crushing them, today’s nationalists invoke the cross while debasing it. The emblem of sacrifice becomes a badge of hostility. The cross has become for them what “The People” became for The Party: a hollow word, emptied of meaning, endlessly invoked, but bent to serve those who wield it.

And the final sting? The man at the centre of that cross was a brown-skinned, homeless preacher without papers, crossing borders, warning the rich, telling his followers to forgive without limit, to welcome the stranger, to love their enemies. In today’s so-called “Christian country,” the flag-wavers would not be worshipping him. They would be shouting “Send him back” – and calling him a Marxist.