Populism

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2019

Soundings, 2020

Concern about the global rise of the political phenomenon known as populism has been a prominent component of mainstream political discussion for more than a decade. Recent electoral successes of parties outside the conventional centre-ground political spectrum, at the expense of those long seen as the natural ruling parties, has raised considerable alarm in the political establishment, particularly on the traditional centre-left. In the UK, concern about the upsurge of populism was centred first on the electoral success of UKIP and then on the result of the Brexit referendum, which was also widely ascribed to the rise of populism. Later, the unexpected development of the movement which subsequently became known as Corbynism was also ascribed to the rise of populism. In the United States 2017 elections, the significant challenge posed to Hillary Clinton by Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, and the unexpected election of Donald Trump to the presidency, have also been portrayed as the result of the upsurge in populism. So has Boris Johnson's takeover of the Conservative Party and his subsequent victory in the 2019 general election. Populism has been largely portrayed in the self-described quality centre-left media, in the UK, in Western Europe and in the US, as posing a mortal danger to liberal democracy. This alarm has been nowhere more apparent than in the pages of The Guardian. i The threat posed by populism to politics as 'business as usual', conducted on the centre-ground, is portrayed as a threat to democracy itself, which is equated with representative democracy. This article does not seek to analyse the extensive and complex literature on populism; it is, instead, a critique of the portrayal of populism purely as a threat to democracy, which must be fought. My argument is that this position fails to recognise that the feelings that populism expresses are widespread and justified feelings of discontent with the operation of the capitalist system, and of representative democracy, which has ceased to be representative and has become corrupted by money. The political phenomena we are observing are primarily the result of the shifts brought about by the dynamics of the capitalist system, which, over a very short period of time, have brought about major changes in the social and geographic structure of societies and their interrelationships. ii This dynamic has become largely impervious to the actions of national governments, particularly those whose economies are peripheral to the operation of the global system. As a consequence people have become unhappy with the system itself: it does not respond to their economic needs, and they do not feel represented in its governing institutions. This is the systemic crisis. The swelling disaffection and discontent that have resulted from this crisis have expressed themselves in three main ways: by placing most of the blame on foreigners-an expression of nationalist feeling; by blaming elites-primarily an expression of class identity; or by blaming both simultaneously. iii

Global Labor Journal, 2020

In recent years right-wing populism has risen significantly across the west. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, came very close to winning the French presidential election. She eventually lost out to Emanuel Macron, a man dedicated to maintaining the neoliberal consensus but smart enough to voice the usual progressive liberal platitudes during his election campaign. If this was a victory for liberalism over an increasingly virulent and regressive nationalism, it rang rather hallow. The huge strides made by the National Front under Le Pen, quite clearly, do not augur well for the continuation of liberal values in Europe. However, it seems quite important to ask why a representative of the dominant yet ailing politico-economic order was presented to the electorate as the alternative to the ethnocentric nationalism currently pulling France to the right. Is it feasible that Macron's unmitigated neoliberalism can assuage the anger and anxiety that underpin the new French nationalism? Does the invidious choice between Le Pen and Macron not tell us something about the parlous state of liberal democracy and the chains that have been placed upon our collective political imagination? Might the continued dominance of neoliberal capitalism – which has throughout the west concentrated wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and permeated economic insecurity throughout the rest of the population – have in some way influenced the development of this new right-wing populism? Could the current crisis in fact be an outcome of neoliberalism's continued political dominance? And perhaps more to the point, shouldn't we be asking searching questions about why the political right has been the principal beneficiary of post-crash economic insecurity, stagnating wages, declining lifestyles, austerity and the gradual breakup of the west's welfare states? Why has there not been a resurgence of interest in traditional left-wing politics rooted in political economy and committed to advancing the interests of the multi-ethnic working class? Why have we not seen a new generation of strident leftist politicians, keen to control the brutal excesses of market society, bursting onto the stage? There is no doubt that the new right has prospered in the vacuum created by the traditional left's decline. Focusing on 'Brexit Britain', the task we have set ourselves here is to identify why the historical relationship between the working class and left-wing politics has become fragile, strained and at risk of coming to an end altogether.

Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is then expanded to articulate the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such move- ments’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas.

2017

Analyses of populism tend to fall into two camps: one, sees populism as a defect or pathology of democracy and another sees populism as radical, participatory democracy. Seeing these two camps as unable to grasp the heterogeneous nature of populist politics—instead seeing it solely in terms of one form of political activity—Kaltwasser (2012) argues for a ‘minimal approach’ that views populism as an ambivalence: depending on the context, it can be left-leaning or right-leaning; it can be a ‘defect’ of democracy or an uprising of radical democratic participation.1 Taking Kaltwasser’s insights as a point of departure, this paper seeks to explore some of the possible causes of the increasing salience of right- leaning populist politics in present-day liberal-democratic societies. Doing so, it seeks to explore the structural, institutional, and socio-psychological forces at play in producing these movements, arguing two significant and interrelated developments in the 21st century international political economy help to explain the structural/systemic conditions for the current turn towards right-leaning populist politics that we see arising in liberal-democracies: (1) the continued expansion of the structural and institutional power of global finance has led to a blurring of the public and private domains in the formation of State domestic and international policy, resulting in private financial actors enjoying immense agenda- setting and decision-making power in society, often absent democratic oversight and aimed at benefiting the interests of an increasingly interconnected and cohesive transnational capitalist class; and (2) as the ideological program of this State-finance nexus of power, neoliberal discourses and policies that preach and support self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, presentness, and resilience— in tandem with shifts in the structure of global labor from full-time, steady work into ‘flexible’, part-time positions— have resulted in the retreat of the welfare state and the destruction of the collective bargaining power of labor, leaving workers increasingly precarious, alienated, and socially fragmented, in turn, making them more susceptible to right-leaning, authoritarian candidates who claim to represent order, authority, and security in the form of ethno-nationalized conceptions of citizenship and community. Exploring how these two interrelated developments in the international political economy impact and intensify the formation and politics of contemporary populist movements, this paper argues that contrary to Canovan’s assertion that populism moves against power structures, contemporary populisms are actually moving to cement elite power structures; contrary to Kaltwasser’s view that that the affinity between neoliberalism and neopopulism is losing its relevance, the two are more intertwined than ever before; and despite the arguments of Aslanidis (2015), ideology is central to this interconnected and symbiotic relationship. Empirical support will be provided by case studies of two contemporary examples where right-leaning populist politicians have come to power in liberal- democratic societies: Donald Trump in the United States and Viktar Orban in Hungary. Comparing the rhetoric used by each to the policies passed while in office, it will be argued that despite their appeals to ‘the people’ the actual policies enacted serve elite interests. Putting forth an original theory to capture this dynamic, this paper refers to these right-leaning and elite-friendly forms of contemporary populism as signifying the growing power of ‘Plutocratic-Populism’.

American Affairs, 2018

If politics is ultimately about our deepest fears and desires rather than about, say, tax policy or better health care, then what place is there for a Left whose raison d’être will always be tied to improving the economic fortunes of the least fortunate? One answer is to begin to outline an “economics of meaning,” where economic or class critiques are a means to channel anger, create meaning, and build solidarity rather than to implement better policy outcomes (although, of course, policy changes would be good on their own, for moral rather than necessarily electoral reasons). This requires changing standard conceptions of what elections are for and what it means to win.

Journal of Human Rights and Social Work

Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative U-turn prompted by rising unemployment and political unrest. Others called for the Labour Party to adopt more radical economic and political policies and to restructure itself as a vehicle for the eventual implementation of a socialist alternative economic strategy. They hoped that this would undermine Thatcherism by refuting its claim that there is no alternative; or that it would at least give the left the initiative when Thatcherism collapsed for other reasons. Yet others concentrated on the ideology of Thatcherism and called for a similarly ideological strategy from the Left. They attributed Thatcherism's success to the initiatives of the new Right in constructing a new hegemonic project and mobilizing popular support for a right-wing solution to the economic and political crisis. Complementing this apparent celebration of Thatcherism is the charge that the Left has failed to adopt a 'national-popular' approach of its own to ideological and political struggle and has fallen back on economistic or voluntaristic analysis of the growing crisis of social democracy and the Left in Britain. This last approach is represented above all in the work of Stuart Hall, but it has since been adopted quite widely on the left. The guiding thread of Hall's work is the argument that Thatcherism rests on 'authoritarian populism'. He argues that 'authoritarian populism' (hereafter 'AP') successfully condenses a wide range of popular discontents with the postwar economic and political order and mobilizes them around an authoritarian, right-wing solution to the current economic and political crisis in Britain. This success is regarded with begrudging admiration because Thatcherism took the ideological struggle more seriously than the Left and has reaped the reward of popular support. Some conclude that the Left must articulate Thatcherite themes into its own discourse, but others, such as Hall, insist that Thatcherism can best be defeated by developing an alternative vision of the future, a socialist morality, and a socialist common-sense. Thus the apparent ideological

The rise of right-wing populism in recent years can be interpreted as a direct consequence of the crisis in the relationship between traditional parties and the civilian population. A careful reflection on this phenomenon, though, requires a more extensive and ramified explanation of its material and ideological causes. A significant role has also been played by the inability of the media and institutions to understand the needs of less well-todo classes, driven, as they are, to search for alternatives in right-wing populism. This is accompanied by the structural crisis within the traditional left-wing political parties and their movements. They were unable to respond in a credible way to the devastating socioeconomic effects of the 2008 global crisis and are now unable to restore a balance between welfare and development at a time when financial capital is volatile. These considerations are then augmented by a series of comparisons between the many forms that populism has taken both in the western world and beyond, in particular comparisons between protectionist populism in the United States, nationalism in Turkey and Hindu extremism in India. Taking these differences into account, today's populism seems to have originated in the cyclical worsening of popular resentment and in the weakening of social democratic bonds between social classes. These tensions can only be countered by politics that are more human and attentive to the actual needs of the civilian population.