On Populism
The Guardian’s recent series on populism has been surprisingly enlightening; but not, however, in the way they probably intended. Previously I’d just considered the term to be more-or-less meaningless, or rather, having whatever meaning the speaker wished it to have. However, the Guardian’s series, and particularly their ‘How populist are you?’ quiz, has corrected that.
Plotting the Guardian’s idea of a ‘populist’ on one axis of a graph,
with the other axis representing how ‘left’ or ‘right’ they are,This in itself is so difficult to quantify as to make
it meaningless. While individuals, groups, or ideas might be to the left
or right of one another, trying to assign a numeric score to this is
always going to be quite arbitrary.
has
highlighted that to a significant extent, ‘populist’ simply means either
to the left or the right of the political mainstream, beyond a
particular arbitrary point. In that sense, it seems like a revival of
the ‘horseshoe theory’, the assertion that the far-left and far-right
have more in common with each other than it might otherwise appear, and
in particular more in common with each other than the centre.
Looking more closely at the definition and methodology they
used
seems to me to confirm this. The first two points of their definition,
‘praising the common people’ and ‘anti-elite/anti-establishment
sentiments’ really seem to apply to any criticism of the
post-Thatcherite/Reaganite consensus (followed by Blair and Clinton) of
privatization, globalization, technocratic government—in short, of
neoliberalism. However, these critiques come from very different places,
and take very different forms. Indeed, one can argue that none of their
examples of right-wing populists pay more than lip-service to the idea
of anti-elitism (billionaire Trump, public schoolboy Farage) or respect
for the common people (usually limited to that section of the common
people that is white and male). Fundamentally, the right-wing opposition
to the status quo is only really that the wrong people are in charge
(i.e., not them), rather than any desire to change the system itself. As
such, the idea of grouping these distinct political positions together
makes sense only if the intention is simply to delegitimize anything
outside the political mainstream. I’m left with the impression that the
researchers started with the conclusion they wanted to reach, then found
a definition of ‘populism’ that met the requirements.It reminds me of the Political Compass
quiz. While that was probably
better-intentioned than this one, it nevertheless couldn’t avoid shaping
a particular kind of answer, by asking questions that assume that
economic and social factors are fundamentally abstract and
unrelated.
This theory is borne out when looking at other articles in the series,
such as the interview with Clinton and
Blair.
By now, of course, the vacuousness of Clinton’s ideas for defeating the
far right has been pointed out repeatedly—her political career being,
after all, most notable now for her failure to do so.In this regard she reminds me of Neil Kinnock, a man
who spectacularly failed to lead the Labour Party to electoral victory,
lecturing others on Corbyn’s unelectability.
The
substance of her proposals, too, demonstrates the fundamental
shallowness of centrist/liberal politics: in short, that the right will
win unless the centreOr ‘centre-left’, as the Guardian insists on describing
them, despite the lack of basis for doing so.
implements exactly the same kinds of anti-immigrant policies that the
right is demanding anyway. This is the same kind of claim that was made
repeatedly around Labour, especially in the Miliband years; it’s not
made clear exactly why anyone would vote for one party over the other in
that situation, where politics is essentially reduced to a game of two
identical opposing teams identified only by their colours. Blair, of
course, is impossible to take seriously as a critic of the left—his
post-Parliamentary career has consisted mostly of doomsaying about the
leftward shift in Labour that is more-or-less explicitly due to a
rejection of his legacy. His position on the right, on the other hand,
aligns with Clinton’s—that is, that immigration is a ‘legitimate
concern’ that cannot be ignored (and so we should give the right what
they want). The third interviewee, Matteo Renzi (about whom I know
little), manages to escape this trap, and notes that immigration is only
a concern because the right (I would argue with the complicity of the
centre) has made it one. Blair’s position basically involves deflecting
attention away from his own failure (intentional or not), in ten years
as Prime Minister, to control or reframe the right-wing narrative (not
to mention his direct involvement in the destabilization of the Middle
East that has led to the war in Syria and created the refugees in the
first place). The contradiction here seems to have gone unnoticed:
‘taking people’s concerns seriously’ is identified as the only possible
defence against the right, while simultaneously ‘listening closely to
the problems of the people’ is presented as pathological, a symptom of
the ‘populist’ disease.
It’s notable, in this series, how little is being said about left-wing
populism specifically; and this seems to me to support the idea that
it’s a reframing of the horseshoe theory. The Blair/Clinton/Renzi
interview refers to the dangers of right-wing populism; another
article’s title mentions ‘the rise of the far right and populism’. A
clear danger is presented in the form of the far right, then the term
‘populism’ is deployed in order to include the left within the same
category; but no danger actually presented by left-wing populists is
ever clearly explained. Any genuine threat that the left might pose
(i.e., to the capitalist establishment) is left unmentioned;As another article in the series noted, 44% of people
in the UK believe that “even though we live in what’s called a
democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway”,
and 76% of people distrust government
ministers,
so perhaps the concern is that talking about left-wing ideas might lead
to people actually agreeing with them.
conversely,
the genuine threat that the far-right poses is overlooked (and, indeed,
considered to be an acceptable policy for the centre-‘left’ to adopt),
leaving them presented instead as a non-specific threat, little more
than a bogeyman. None of this does much to alter the long-established
perception on the left that liberals/centrists would soon side with the
far-right when threatened from the left.This is not mere speculation; Anglo-American capitalist
and aristocratic sympathies openly lay with fascism in the 1930s,
especially regarding the Spanish Civil War, since fascism, unlike
socialism, presented no threat to wealth and
profits.
Put simply, the far-right does not
present a threat to the underlying power structures in the same way as
the left does; rather, it abandons the ideological justifications for
those power structures (ideas of equality, democracy, etc.) in order to
maintain them. The concept of populism thus allows tying the
easily-perceived threat of the right, albeit one which can more-or-less
safely be ignored by those in power, to the left, which is fundamentally
a threat only to those in power.
I’ve so far not really addressed the extent to which the ‘left-wing
populists’ they discuss actually present a threat to capitalism. The
fact that Bernie Sanders might be somewhat outside the mainstream of
American politics does not mean his positions are actually extreme in a
historical context; similarly, the Guardian’s favourite bugbear, Jeremy
Corbyn (strangely overlooked in this series) generally advocates
policies that would have been considered rather moderate social
democracy before the 1980s. Generally, the goal seems to be a ‘kinder
gentler capitalism’, with all the contradictions that entails, rather
than the end of capitalism. Yet that’s not really the point; “[t]he
Established Church, for instance, will more readily pardon an attack on
thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than on one thirty-ninth of its
income. Nowadays atheism is a culpa levis [a relatively slight
sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with the criticism of existing
property relations”;Karl Marx, Capital (1867), Preface to the
First German Edition.
even a mild shift to the
left is perceived as a threat, and centrists will abandon any pretence
of liberal–democratic principle to prevent it. Thus, for example,
Blair’s support for the EU and yet willingness to end free movement of
people: it’s free movement of capital that matters.
This, fundamentally, is the flaw of centrism: it can and will compromise on everything that might have appeared to be a principle, except for the ones that actually matter to people. It will gladly pander to racists by carving ‘controls on immigration’ on its own tombstone (a policy which has never worked), but is incapable of comprehending why people might vote for a party or a candidate that promises to re-nationalize the railways, restore the NHS, or reduce student debt. Perhaps those require politicians whose priorities extend beyond the maintenance of their own careers.