The mainstream commentariat is still using the word 'populist' to denote its opponents and condemn them for a style of inferior politics. The word 'populism' was a major weapon, used by commentators and academics and journalists and politicians at the time of the revolution of 2016. The revolution of 2016 was when the established politics of the previous at least 20 years – of Clinton, Bush, Blair and Cameron – was overturned, and something unusual was unleashed in America and Britain, if not in languid, sluggish, telepathic, repressive, centralised Europe.
'Brexit and Trump' is an ugly phrase, but there is no alternative to it, for marking this revolution.
The Old Order of Cameron, Obama, Campbell and their thousands of associates disliked the revolution which displaced them and replaced them with the mess of Bannon-Cummings-Farage-Johnson. So they looked for a terminology of 1) condemnation and 2) spurious analysis, and they alighted on 'populism'.
And, believe me, this language was taken up in a thousand forms by an entire generation of academics. There was already a sound recentish literature, e.g. Cas Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Political Studies 39 (2004), pp. 542-563 and Margaret Canovan, The People (Polity Press, 2005), but this literature was greatly magnified and celebrated and supplemented after 2016. Margaret Canovan, who died in 2018, was too old to benefit from the Brexit-and-Trump bump, but Cas Mudde has, since 2016, become the most-quoted theorist of populism, and has written much for the Guardian, becoming
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Love the article. Wish all academics were as clear as this
Populism is a smear term invented by those who designed the established political system such that they continuously profit from it at the expense of all others in order to avoid discussing politics and justifying their own political decisions. They don’t want to argue with Farage etc, they want to have mudslining contest instead. People who are attacked, especially, attacked in obviously unjustified way, tend to defend themselves vigorously. The outcome is thus everybody shouting invectives at everybody else while the plundering of the population silently continues without discussion.
Given the machine’s widely accepted definition of populism, I’d argue that ‘Left-wing populism” is an oxymoron. The two pushback events of 2016 were clearly not anticipated by whatever it is that actually controls the grid, hence the violent reaction. The chimps must be put back in their box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahra_Wagenknecht_Alliance
Given the scale of his election victory, is Burnham a populist?
Uniparty policy is forthrightly totalitarian. Statism and its ignorant supporters are not populists but simply the enemy.
A machine politician in populist clothing perhaps?
I would be interested in the history of the word – who used it first, who has used it and how, since.
My earliest memory of it is from between 15 and 20 years ago. A lefty schoolteacher acquaintance of mine, something of a populist herself, described her head teacher an “authoritarian populist”. I should have asked her what exactly he did that made her say that, and what she thought he ought to have been doing instead, but I didn’t. It may have been more to do with style than substance.
It seems to me that it is used almost exclusively now in a way that means “democracy is great as long as it leads to outcomes I approve of”. The implication is presumably that “populists” will send blackshirt thugs into the streets to arrest dissenters, or political opponents will disappear. It is quite ironic because the mainstream right has generally been the staunchest defender of individual rights against the power of the state (rights as freedom from government interference, not in the modern sense of rights as entitlements to government benefits).
As for “democracy”, there is indeed in my view a problem with it in that it can… Read more »
Indeed, the all encompassing state is now all but assumed by everyone and it’s just a question of who gets to be at the controls of the vast machinery with all its power. The snooty, deluded bon pensants. Or the angry, revanchists who are going to fix the place back to what it was for us.
Not much appetite for the idea of accepting that we are where we are, dismantling 80% of the state and letting people get on with their lives without being hectored by those who think they know what’s best.
Calling a person a populist is just an unsubstantiated, negative value judgement which doesn’t matter in the slighest. Farage (example) being right or wrong about something is entirely unrelated to him being called a populist by someone, especially considering that nobody really knows what this actually means.
Quoting from “25 ways for truth suppression”:
5.. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary
attack the messenger ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach.
Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as “kooks”, “right-wing”, “liberal”, “left-
wing”, “terrorists”, “conspiracy buffs”, “radicals”, “militia”, “racists”, “religious fanatics”,
“sexual deviates”, and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of
gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
Example: “You believe what you read in the Spotlight? The Publisher, Willis DeCarto, is
a well-known right-wing racist. I guess we know your politics — does your Bible have a
swastika on it? That certainly explains why you support this wild-eyed, right- wing
conspiracy theory.”
Indeed. Ask people what they mean by the term and they won’t be able to say or provide evidence for their labelling of a specific person.
You can either regard anti-populism as a ‘defence’ of the established order – or you can regard it as the dying twitches of an old Elite whose time has come to leave the boss business.
I’m going for the Last Hurrah of the Silver Horde.