Dejected by recent political defeats, some people in both the UK and the US have been calling for an alliance between right-wing and left-wing populists. These demands rest on a faulty understanding of populism and of the key differences between its right-wing and left-wing variants, especially in terms of how they each define the people.
What Is Populism?
The term populism is a translation of the Russian word narodnik, from narod (people). The first populist movement arose at a time when Russia was confronting the forces of modernity and industrialization, and was intended to galvanize the population to fight for their emancipation from an autocratic feudal past. A similar movement called prairie populism arose contemporaneously but independently in the US, in response to the pressures of industrialization. The prairie populists upheld farmers as the true people.
Populism is best understood as a thin ideology. Christoph Henning defines an ideology as “a system of shared beliefs that is relevant for social action, integration and social stability, though it is not necessarily true.” The populist ideology is thin because it is parasitic on a more comprehensive host ideology. Its main principles are that there are two homogenous groups in society—the pure people, and the corrupt elite—engaged in a Manichaean struggle. The populist argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. What is meant by people and elite depends on the host ideology on which the populism feeds and the specific national socioeconomic context. These conditions also help explain the differences between right and left-wing populism.
In general, populism can be understood as a response to or reaction against liberal democracy, which is characterized by popular sovereignty (the idea that government is legitimized by the consent of the governed), majoritarian rule and the peaceful transfer of power. A liberal democracy also has institutions designed to safeguard free speech and freedom of and from religion and to protect minorities. These institutions often arouse populist opposition. Contemporary populists or neopopulists are products of late-stage neoliberalism in liberal democratic nations. In Europe, for example, the transfer of certain administrative and governmental functions to unelected, transnational bureaucracies like the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank has removed power from local populations and threatens the principle of popular sovereignty. A sharp dichotomy has emerged between policy-making (the formulation of political proposals), which is now handled by transnational organizations, and politics, the discursive and performative exercise of gaining and exercising power, which is now media-focused. As Enzo Traverso puts it:
This overwhelming power does not emanate from any parliament or from popular sovereignty, since the IMF does not belong to the EU … In the EU’s current situation, this state of exception is not transitional; it constitutes its normal mode of functioning—the exception has become the rule—and implies the complete submission of the political to the financial.
Populism, then, is the result of the growth of transnational institutions and the weakening of the meditating institutions that tie the people to their representatives. Civil institutions such as unions, churches and political parties have all lost a great deal of power and influence—some would argue by design, since neoliberalism’s Hayekian program was based on the destruction of social structures in the name of preserving the free market and the insular nuclear family. Populists invoke the principle of popular sovereignty to criticize the institutions that are meant to safeguard liberal values and circumvent the direct exercise of political power by the people. That is why populist politicians and activists often attack the media, the political establishment, the deep state, etc.
Though the conditions that lead to right and left-wing populism are similar, their reactions to these conditions have been very different. Recent US populism, for example, can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis, which gave rise to both the leftist Occupy Wall Street movement and the right-wing Tea Party. Both groups were critical of the way in which the Obama administration handled the crisis, but for different reasons: the Tea Party invoked fiscal discipline and personal responsibility and criticized Obama for the too big to fail principle; the Occupy movement invoked solidarity and justice and felt that not enough help had been given to homeowners during the housing crash and that the speculators who caused the crisis had not been adequately punished. This demonstrates the way in which the thin ideology of populism needs a host ideology from which to draw its nourishment.
Right-Wing Populism
In the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump ran on the borrowed slogan Make America Great Again. Trump’s slogan was an adroit example of constituent construction: the process by which discrete populations with diverse political interests are turned into a unified political group. The slogan united all those on the right who felt that they were losing their grip on cultural, social and political institutions. Trump’s rhetoric about Latin American immigrants, the campaign’s ostentatious 1980s Americana aesthetics, the ubiquity of the American flag at his rallies and the focus on the border wall clearly marked this as a nationalist campaign.
Right-wing populism tends to feed off the host ideology of nationalism. According to Anthony D. Smith, ideological nationalism is defined by the following beliefs: the world is separated into nations, each with a unique historical character; the nation is the only source of political power; national loyalty should be paramount; freedom is contingent on national belonging; all nations must have full autonomy and freedom of self-expression; global peace requires a world order that balances the interests of autonomous nations. This almost perfectly describes right-wing Trumpist populism. Trump and his followers rail against globalists, are trade protectionists, connect freedom with citizenship (hence the controversies over undocumented immigrants and over the census) and talk up national independence (hence their anti-NATO rhetoric).
The symbolic aspect of populist nationalism is particular important. Its central metaphor is the family. The nationalist sees the nation as his family writ large, and imagines his country as a macroscopic image of his home. The border, then, becomes the country’s back door and illegal immigrants burglars breaking in under cover of night. Unfortunately, not all of those within the home are considered part of the clan. Owing to its dependence on an understanding of the nation drawn from a past that was more traditional and less equitable and diverse, right-wing populism often defines the people in exclusionary terms. For example, around 50 percent of Trump’s base is composed of evangelical Christians (who make up only 26 percent of the population). Trump did not choose his base—it formed as the result of extreme political sorting along racial, religious and geographical lines—but he did appeal to an exclusionary vision of America based on an imagined past. The wall is the ultimate embodiment of this: a wall is separation made manifest.
Exclusionary identitarian populism is not limited to the States. French president Nicolas Sarkozy once remarked that, “Once you are French, your ancestors are the Gauls.” Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) party (formerly the Front National) is anti-immigration, anti-radical Islam, anti-globalist, protectionist and nationalist, like its American siblings.
The animating principle behind the populist right is cultural, not economic. Le Pen wants less immigration, but she wants to keep France in the EU. Though Trump financed the border wall, he cut taxes for the affluent. The left-liberal position that Trump’s and Le Pen’s voters are primarily motivated by race in itself is false. Cultural issues, which often overlap with racial concerns, are the main determinants of their success. For Trump voters, undocumented immigrants were not part of the people because they lacked citizenship and because they served a globalist agenda. The Latin American immigrant was not part of the people not because of her racial heritage, but because she was an undocumented immigrant. The animosity of some Trump supporters towards black Americans was probably not primarily based on anti-black racism but on their perception that black people are part of the Democratic establishment. These cultural factors intensify already existing racial tensions, and frame the way in which economic issues are understood. Hence, some scholars talk about racialized economics—that is, they believe that identitarians see economic questions as zero-sum battles between racial groups. While I agree that this is an element of right-wing populism’s appeal, I think these racialized divisions are better seen as proxies for more fundamental differences in worldviews and cultural signifiers.
Left-Wing Populism
Left-wing populism, by contrast, is inclusionary. This is exemplified by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which invoked the idea that the protesters represented the 99% as against the 1% elites. The elites were defined in financial terms and the discourse focused on economic inequality. Anyone outside the moneyed elite—young or old, rich or poor, black or white—was seen as part of the people. This is unsurprising, since left-wing populism is generally linked to the host ideology of socialism.
Contemporary left-wing populism began in Latin America, in response to the decline of classical Marxism. It provided an effective means of political resistance and a way of mobilizing the left, without relying on Marxism’s rigid class analysis, and was more open to the new identitarian resistance movements that were rapidly gaining traction—a natural development, since many members of the liberatory movements also belonged to economically marginalized groups.
Left-wing populism has become perhaps the leading left-wing movement in the US. Bernie Sanders has been the main force behind this movement. In both his campaigns, Sanders employed the Manichaean language of populism to denounce the billionaire class, the Republican and Democratic establishments and the mainstream media. He calls himself a democratic socialist and advocates a multiracial, multigenerational, working-class coalition. He has even proposed legislation to democratize the workplace. His campaign slogan, Not Me, Us, articulates his expansive view of who the people are.
There is a clash, then, between the expansive idea of the people in left-wing populism, which is rooted in socialism, and the restricted idea of the people that characterizes right-wing populism, which is grounded in nationalism. Right-wing populists focus on cultural issues and symbolic nationhood, while left-leaning populists focus on economic issues, such as wealth redistribution and workers’ rights. These differences make a cross-aisle populist alliance difficult to imagine.
Since their interests are mainly cultural, right-wing populists are generally willing to make concessions to corporate power that would be anathema to left-wing populists. In Europe, as Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello point out:
They [right-wing populists] are not anti-systemic at all, and might thus rapidly lose their aura of radical outsiders. Their main policy issues—anti-immigration, welfare chauvinism, anti-EU and security—require little but cosmetic fixes to European debt ceilings and occasional cultural posturing on “Western values.” When it comes to migration, Angela Merkel and Matteo Salvini, or Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, have little to disagree on except how to distribute its financial load.
What is true of Europe is true of the States. Right-wing populism is primarily a social and cultural movement that sometimes uses populist economic rhetoric for cynical electoral purposes (the politicians concerned have no intention of implementing egalitarian economic policies) or to conceal a nativist agenda (by arguing, for example, that immigration drives down wages).
Conclusion
Populism (of any variety) is not a nuanced ideology—it eschews positive-sum thinking in favor of a binary division between the elite and the people. For the populist, anyone who is not with him is against him. He is besieged by enemies bent on his destruction, and he views politics not as the art of compromise, but as a battle for dominance. This same binary thinking influences the idea of the populist leader—he (or, more rarely, she) is the only person with the purity of intention, strength of will or moral probity to channel the will of the people and to enact it in defiance of the controlling elites. The zero-sum thinking that populism engenders transforms the leader into a saint or hero, which explains populism’s tendency to slide towards autocracy.
What we need is a political program that can address the economic concerns of the general public without sliding into the zero-sum thinking that fosters irrationality and nativism on the right and tends to devolve into disabling infighting over lifestyles and incoherence on the left. If such a program does not arise, the slide towards ever greater irrationality will continue.
17 comments
Article too verbose. We are, and i use the term “we” loosely, are in a covert war that will eventually go hot. Right now 330 million minds are scattered on the winds of chaos, as planned, and there has to be a political/social rally point in which to end this chaos and restore stability. Populism is just another word for common sense of the traditional peoples of any land. Not common sense for the tens of millions of latino invaders, not common sense for the small jewish, homosexual, or minority populations, but common sense for the traditional Americans who have been divided, polarized, and atomized into their own powerless little boxes. This postmodern, multicultural, tossed salad in which we are lost, has been created on purpose, as a weapon of war, and exploited by international/foreign forces. Pick a platform that can be agreed upon by the populous, army up around it, and remove all non-traditional forces from the land. It’s your ass if you don’t.
The past half-century has witnessed a growing American populist resentment against so-called “intellectuals,” “cultural elites,” or “educated classes,” and their predominant views on social, political, and cultural issues, particularly among White working and lower-middle classes. We see this reflected, for instance, in the increasing popularity conspiracy theories, “fake news” charges, suspicion of mainstream science and medicine (e.g, climate change, evolution, vaccination) in the last few decades. I see four main reasons for this populist trend:
(1) The growing social and economic inequality of American society since the early 1970’s, as a result of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies, the fading of the post-World War II economic boom with its seeming promise of endlessly growing affluence, and the decline of labor-union membership and influence;
(2) The increasing difficulty and uncertainty, since the early 1970’s, of upward social and economic mobility from the working and lower-middle classes into the professional and managerial classes, and especially into academic teaching careers; which now seem much less accessible to young working-class and lower-middle-class Americans in the 21st century than they did in the 1950’s and 1960’s–having a son or daughter become a college professor now seems a far more chimerically unrealistic hope for working-class or lower-middle-class American families than it would have five or six decades ago;
(3) A growing apparent but illusory narrowing of the gap in information and knowledge between the general public and trained academic, scientific, or medical experts. This popular (mis)perception of an ever-narrowing “knowledge gap” between the general public and the “elites” results partly from the seeming ease of acquiring knowledge and accessing information provided by media like television and especially the Internet, and partly from the much greater diffusion among the “masses” of a certain level of basic general education. It seems increasingly–but deceptively–easy for anyone to become an “expert” on any scientific, medical, historical, socio-economic, or political subject without having to undergo an excessive, time-consuming higher education;
(4) The essential completion in the 1950’s and 1960’s of both the “Americanization” of immigrant European ethnic groups, and of the “urbanization” or “metropolization” of small-town and rural migrants to the “big cities’ have greatly reduced occasions for generational conflict between older and younger generations of those groups since the mid-20th century–and thus far less incentive or motivation than 50 or 60 years ago for upward-mobile college-educated youth from such backgrounds to embrace liberal or leftist politics as part of a rebellion against the “narrow-minded,” “old-fogey,” “up-tight” ways and attitudes of “hick” or “greenhorn” parents. Why go to the trouble and drama of becoming a socialist, or even a Young Democrat, if Mom and Dad never yelled at you for dancing, going to the movies, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, playing Sunday sports, or dating a boy or girl of the “wrong” religion or ethnicity the way their own parents or grandparents might have 40 or 70 years ago?
“For the populist, anyone who is not with him is against him.”
Whereas, the Elites have long been oh-so compassionate and tactful !
“populism can be understood as a response to or reaction *against* liberal democracy….”
When Elitist shills hurl such *caricatures*, no wonder that millions lose hope for “liberal democracy” (i.e. Elitism).
“What we need is a political program that can address the economic concerns of the general public…”
Before such a program emerges (which isn’t riddled, with deceit from Elite machinations), hell will freeze over.
“Believe science has become a comforting social media slogan amid the past year’s chaos, but this platitude has an undertone that runs contrary to the true spirit of scientific inquiry. ”
“Believe science” means believe science instead of ideology or political bias. If you recall Russell’s well-know essay on belief, you know that the phrase does not mean (or intend) mindless adherence to authority.
> “Believe science” means believe science instead of ideology…. <
This is much less true now, than was so in Russell's day.
Now, it often means a badge of (class) tribal identity, see e.g.
https://judithcurry.com/2019/03/26/why-i-dont-believe-in-science/ .
You start out by selling jobs to Third World countries and end up with reproaches and insults at those you have taken out of work. I like this approach
Shawn Brewer speaks of both right-wing and left-wing populisms, though seeing both as parasitic on a host ideology–on nationalist on the right, socialism on the left. I myself these past five or six decades, however, seem to have noticed the term “populism” applied far more often by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and journalists to right-wing, conservative, or reactionary than to liberal, leftist, or progressivist politicians and movements. Even Bernie Sanders, for instance, was in fact called a “populist” less often than Donald Trump.
The general consensus in the past half-century, it seems to me, has argely been to use the term “populist” preferentially for figures and movements that combine some leftist, egalitarian, or welfare-statist economic demands with heavy doses of xenophobia, nativism, and cultural or religious conservatism–while mostly reserving terms like “liberal,” “leftist,” or “socialist” for politicians, movements, and regimes that are liberal, leftist, or progressive on cultural, ethnic/racial, and sexual/gender as well as economic issues. Another way of putting this might be to say that most people these past few decades have used “liberal” for movements affirming the Enlightenment legacy and “populist” for movements hostile or strongly ambivalent toward the Enlightenment heritage, unconsciously echoing José Ortega y Gasset’s ironic witticism in “The Revolt of the Masses” about “the eighteenth century, when certain minority groups discovered that all men are equal,” by “certain minority groups” referring to the Enlightenment “philosophes,” writers like Voltaire, Condorcet and Thomas Jefferson, who themselves came from aristocratic or upper-bourgeois, what we today would call “cultural elite,” social backgrounds.
While, as Brewer points out, the English word “populist” originated as a translation of the Russian term “narodnik,” it was first widely used on a large scale in English to describe the 1890’s and early 1900’s Midwestern and Southern agrarian and small-town “People’‘s Party” spearheaded by William Jennings Bryan. The People’s Party was long considered a liberal movement (and attacked as “socialist” by its conservative opponents), a view enshrined in academic circles by John D. Hicks’ classic 1931 study “The Populist Revolt,” with Bryan himself seen as a bizarrely paradoxical blend of political/economic progressive and religious reactionary. This view was very largely displaced, however, by Richard Hofstadter in “The Age of Reform” (1955), followed by “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” (1963), and the essays collected in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). Dismayed in the background and coloring of his thinking by the popularity of “McCarthyism” in the 1950’s and by the 1960’s rise of “Radical Right” movements like the John Birch Society, as well as by the memory of European Nazism and Fascism, Hofstadter dwelt on the xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theorizing he saw in some Populist politicians, writers, and journalists. At least partly as a result of Hofstadter’s influence, I suspect, many writers from the 1960’s on not only began questioning the liberal “bona fides” of the 1890’s American populist movement but also began using “populism” as a shorthand term for “xenophobia mixed with some egalitarian economic radicalism.”
To my analysis of Populism as a basically Dualistic view of contemporary social and political conflicts in terms of Canadian political scientist Thomas Flanagan’s typology of Monistic, Dualistic, and Monistic visions of politics in his 1995 paper on “The Politics of the Millennium,” I’d like to add a interesting 1979 observation by the neoconservative pundit Norman Podhoretz on what he saw (and lamented) as the increasingly Dualist (in Flanagan’s terms) direction f American ethnic and racial politics, away from an earlier Pluralism he found greatly preferable.
Podhoretz attacked a Dualistic, literally black-and-white “Southerly” (as he called it) view of American racial and ethnic relations in his September 30, 1979 “New York Times” Sunday magazine article “How the North Was Won.” He called it a “Southerly” perspective, linked with Georgia governor Jimmy Carter’s election as President in 1976, but also with the prominence of talented, fiercely ambitious liberal Southerners in post-1960 American journalism. Transplanted liberal Southern journalists in New York and other Northern cities, he felt, had spread a “new direction” of American liberalism, “Southerly” in its “conception of the racial problem,” viewing the North as “in all essential respects no different from the South in its feelings about blacks and in its treatment of them.” It was a view natural to Southerners used to seeing the “sin of racism” as “the curse of the South,” and also to living in “a homogeneous society where almost everyone not black was of Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry.” They viewed the Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Germans, Greeks, and other European immigrant ethnics of Northern cities as simply “an undifferentiated mass of whites,” though for Podhoretz “even the category white was misleading” in “a city like New York.”
In the North, Podhoretz argued, the racial “situation” was “radically different” from the South. In most Northern states, “laws prohibiting rather than mandating discrimination against blacks were on the books.” While “to the Southern eye it looked as though the blacks of the North were segregated…penned up in ghettos and kept out of the neighborhoods and schools of the whites,” Podhoretz called this a “distorted view.” Blacks “were not segregated in the North,” he argued. They “did live together in certain neighborhoods,” but “so did Italians and Jews and Slavs and other ethnic groups,” who all “clustered together for a great variety of reasons, of which discrimination (from which they all suffered themselves) was only one and not necessarily the most important.” They felt “more comfortable living among ‘their own kind,’ surrounded by stores catering to their tastes and with churches and synagogues conveniently at hand.” In this, “blacks in New York and other great Northern cities differed hardly at all from other ethnic groups.”
Podhoretz did not foresee in 1979 that in the next few decades the starkly binary “Southerly” view of ethnic relations would be reinforced by new cultural and ideological influences very different from his guilt-ridden Southern liberal journalists. From the 1970’s on, his repentant Southerners were swamped in academia and in “highbrow” journals by postmodernist deconstructors of hegemonic white male bourgeois heteropatriarchal cisgender narratives inspired by mostly French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Julie Kristéva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard, exposing Western society’s oppressive and exclusive binaries. Podhoretz praised his transplanted young Southerners for their “superior literary talent” enabling them to “write better than the vast majority of American newspapermen,” but I really wonder what any of them would have made of the “po-mo” jargon of “discourse,” “hegemonic,” “valorize,” “interrogate,” “gaze,” “lens,” “positionality,” “alterity,” “The Other,” “precarity,” “intersectionality,” “coloniality,” “subjects,” “bodies,” etc. now flaunted by the apostles of literary, gender, critical race, postcolonial, queer, etc., “theory”!
Podhoretz’s 1979 article was a belated echo of a whole late 1960’s and early 1970’s literature of renewed sociological and media-pundit interest in America’s Northern urban “white ethnics,” in part stimulated by those “ethnics’” role in the “white backlash” against Black demands and liberal attempts to satisfy them, as well as their resentment at being ignored or patronized by educated elite liberals. Already in 1963, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had published their “Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Italians of New York City.” In 1970, they published a second edition, with a new 90-page introduction, “New York City in 1960,” examining developments since 1963, such as the rise of Black militancy, the response by the city’s peoples and political structures, the decline of Catholic (Irish and Italian) power in Mayor John Lindsay’s New York, the rise in power of Jews and educated liberal WASP’s, the growth of a black middle class, and the economic and political difficulties of the Puerto Ricans. Glazer and Moynihan anticipated Podhoretz in treating the “Negroes” and “Puerto Ricans” (few then spoke of “Blacks,” “Hispanics,” or “Latinos”–much less “Latinx”–nor yet of “people of color,” or “POC” for short) as simply two more urban ethnic groups alongside the Italians, Irish, Jews, and WASP’s (and the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Greeks, Scandinavians. etc.), awaiting their own turn to rise into the middle-class American mainstream in due time just as the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Germans, Scandinavians, etc., had done in earlier decades. Blacks and Spanish-speakers were just the latest of many waves of newcomers to America’s Northern cities successively challenging both the WASP’s and the various earlier groups of arrivals. No more than Podhoretz did Glazer and Moynihan preach a binary “Southerly” black/white racial dualism.
Glazer and Moynihan were followed in 1971 by Chicago-based priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley with “Why Can’t They Be Like Us? America’s White Ethnic Groups,” in turn followed the year after by Catholic social philosopher Michael Novak with “The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.” The Irish-American Greeley and the Slovak-American Novak both protested what they felt to be liberal and cultural-elite condescension against second- and third-generation immigrant working-class and lower-middle-class “white ethnics.” Journalists like Marshall Frady (a Southerner from Georgia) and Peter Schrag (a refugee from Nazi Germany) contributed popular articles on the same themes to magazines like “Harper’s”–Schrag also addressing them in his 1971 book on “The Decline of the WASP.” Like Glazer, Moynihan, and Podhoretz, they all stressed that the “Negroes,” Hispanics, Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, Greeks, and other “ethnics” in Northern cities all lived in their own neighborhoods not out of segregation but rather because they felt “comfortable living among their own kind,” with convenient access to “their” stores, churches, and synagogues. They also all emphasized that the so-called American “melting pot” has in fact not really quite “melted away” ethnic identities among Americans.
Transplanted Southern liberals expiating their native region’s racial sin, and academic disciples of Parisian intellectuals, had totally different cultural styles and intellectual outlooks. However, both groups espoused what Thomas Flanagan called a “Dualist” vision of society and politics, as opposed to what Flanagan would have called the “Pluralist” perspective of writers like Podhoretz, Glazer, Moynihan, Greeley, Novak, and Schrag. The “Southerly” view of American race and ethnic relations deplored by Norman Podhoretz closely conforms to Flanagan’s definition of “Dualism” in his 1995 essay on “The Politics of the Millennium” as “a philosophy or worldview which emphasizes the opposition between two forces or ideas,” as in “two nations locked in total war,” where “internal differences are suspended in a state of military emergency, and all energies are focused on the destruction of the enemy”–but also in Marxist class war and in Nazi or Black militant race war (Aryans vs. Jews, Blacks vs. Whites) By contrast, as I noted earlier today, Flanagan defined “Pluralism” as “a philosophy accepting the existence of a multiplicity of ideas, forces, or values,” not just two opposing ideas or forces. Pluralists, he pointed out. assume that all societies are “divided by cleavages of interest and ideology,” that “Politics is a competitive struggle for power carried on by building coalitions among various groups,” and that “There is no permanent end to the political process,” where “coalitions form, dissolve, and re-form kaleidoscopically.” Dualists thus see politics as an all-out conflict of two big groups, while Pluralists see it more as a perpetual jockeying for particular limited advantages between many little groups.
The Canadian (University of Calgary) political scientist Thomas Flagagan offered an interesting, illuminating perspective on Populism, which he saw as necessarily involving a Manichaean us-and-them dualism, in his 1995 paper on “The Politics of Millennarianism” in the journal “Terrorism and Political Violence.” Flanagan distinguished between three main basic types of politics based on attitudes toward conflict within the community for control over the community (and toward also conflict between communities): MONISM (found in administration, populism, and totalitarianism), DUALISM (represented by total war and by class or race struggle), and PLURALISM (found in liberal democracy and in constitutional regimes). Millenarian movements, according to Flanagan, are Monistic in their view of the future but Dualistic in their view of the present. As complex societies are inherently pluralistic, he argued, millenarian projects are bound to be infeasible (utopianism) or to require high levels of force, compulsion, and repression in the effort to transform reality (as in totalitarianism).
Flanagan defined MONISM as a philosophy of oneness, in politics as a belief in a society without significant conflicts of interests, without war or class struggle, without hierarchy or oppression, without poverty or inequality. He saw POPULISM as a form of Monistic (yet in actual practice also Dualistic) politics based on the idea that “the people” (the “Volk,” the “narod”) are one, that divisions among them are not genuine but are manufactured by a few greedy or power-hungry men of ill will. Flanagan saw all Populist movements, whether of the Left, Right, or Centre, as viewing “the people” (the “Volk,” the “narod”) as an undifferentiated whole all sharing the same common set of desires and aspirations. When Populist politicians or pundits posit enemies, they typically demonize small “elites” or “special interests” portrayed as out of touch with the needs, well-being, values, traditions, and beliefs of the “common people,” the “folk,” or the “masses.” Totalitarianism, Flanagan argued, was also a Monistic form of politics, but in the future tense, seeing the present society as deeply divided between races (Jews and Aryans, whites and “people of color”) or classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie, small peasants and kulaks), with the goal of politics being to eliminate the enemy race or class to create a Monistic utopia.
Flanagan then defined DUALISM as a philosophy or world-view stressing the opposition between two great forces or ideas–as in two nations locked in all-out total war, or Marx and Engels’ split of society into Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, or the Nazi struggle between Aryans and Jews, or the struggle between Backs and Whites posited in different ways both by Christian Identity groups and by the Nation of Islam (or by today’s White supremacists and “woke” anti-racists alike). Christian Millennarianism, he pointed out, is also full of Dualistic imagery–God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, Chosen People and Gentiles, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats. Historically, Flanagan followed Norman Cohn’ “The Pursuit of the Millennium” and “Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come” in ultimately tracing the origin of Dualism to the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster with his vision of history as an ages-long conflict of the forces of light and order led by Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) and the forces of darkness and chaos led by Angra Mainya (Ahriman), culminating in the final annihilation of Angra Mainya/Ahriman, all his demonic hosts, and all his human allies by Ahura Mazda/Ormuzd and his angels. Zoroastrian Dualism, in Cohn’s and Flanagan’s view, was transmitted through late Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism, and Manichaean Dualism, to modern Millennarianism. Flanagan thus saw Milennarianism as both Monistic and Dualistic–Dualistic in its view of the present, which it wishes to overthrow, but Monistic in its view of the future, which it hopes to realize. Populism, too, is both Monistic and Dualistic in Flanagan’s view–Monistic in its basic view of “the people” and its dream of ultimate future harmony, but Dualistic in its view of present-day political conflict.
To both Monism and Dualism, Flanagan opposed PLURALISM as a philosopy accepting the permanent existence of a multiplicity of ideas, forces, or values. Pluralists, in Flanagan’s view, see all societies, except perhaps the very smallest or most primtive, as divided by cleavages of interests and ideology. They see politics as a competitive struggle for power created by building coalitions between various groups. They see no permanent end to the political process–rather, Pluralists believe, coalitions form, dissolve, and re-form kaleidoscopically–yesterday’s ally may become today’s opponent or rival and then tomorrow’s ally again, while yesterday’s opponent may become today’s ally but maybe tomorrow’s opponent again. Ours being inherently a world of opposing interests and of conflicts among them, moral principles can never be fully realized, as Monists and Dualists both hope, but must rather be approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts.
Monism and dualism, Flanagan concluded, resemble each other much more than either resembles Pluralism. In fact, he saw them both alike in their rejection of Pluralism. They refuse to accept the legitimacy of a world where the permanent plurality of interests precludes the primacy or final victory of a single, absolute principle. In this respect, the difference between Monism and Dualism is actually very slight–just a question of timing, because Dualists always believe in the ultimate victory of their favored principle. Moreover, Flanagan argued, all forms of political Monism and Dualism are rebellions against the pluralism of the real world. Administration seeks to carve out a sector of the world where a directed order can reign. Populism claims that the appearance of pluralism is superficial, that there is a monistic reality underneath. All Dualistic visions of class or racial war seek to collapse the manifold variations of a plural world into two great categories, into two great opposing class or racial blocs, and then demand the total victory of one and the annihilation of the other. Millennarianism and totalitarianism, which are both Dualistic in the present, also both paint elaborate beautiful pictures of the Monistic society of the future, whether they see it being created by human action or by divine intervention.
On Carl W’s discomfort with Marshawn’s conception of “Nationalism” while agreeing wholeheartedly with Brewer’s condemnation of Populism, I believe it was the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, like Brewer and CarlW a foe of Populism, who distinguished between Patriotism, the love of one’s concrete real-life historically evolved community with all its messy untidy ethnic, class, religious, and subcultural diversity, versus Nationalism, the doctrinaire utopian fantasy of a racially, ethnically, religiously, and culturally uniform and monolithic big extended family where everybody (or at least more than 98.6% of the population)is a pure-blooded WASP, German, Frenchman, Hungarian, Pole, Russian, Arab, Persian, Serb, Croat, or Jew professing the same religion. Lukacs extolled Patriotism but loathed Nationalism, by his definition. The true conservative and authentic traditionalist, too, Lukacs argued, cherishes the really existing ethnic diversity of his country as it has developed historically through time, without feeling any temptation to ethnic cleansing–which by contrast he considered a radical, revolutionary, utopian, Jacobin idea.
Interesting comments, Peter. IMO, more interesting and insightful than this article.
Still, I would define both populism and nationalism in less alarmist terms than either you or the author.
For me, populism is not an ideology, parasitic or otherwise. It is two things: (1) It is a political style—us against them, the people against the elite—but without any requirement that “the people” be defined in pejorative terms, as racist or fascist, etc. (2) It is a political dynamic, describing political realignments (or attempts at realignment) that may occur when older political and social elites have lost legitimacy.
For me, the defining characteristic of nationalism is the idea that the nation-state is the optimal scale for key political activities and that (for democratic nationalists) the largest unit in which democratic processes can properly. In encompasses demonic forms like German National Socialism and benign forms like Canadian nationalism, the ideal of pursuing a independent national project in the northern half of North America.
I’ve been saying that populism ‘transcends’ ideology but to call it a ‘parasitic’ overlay onto more comprehensive forms of ideology is more visceral. I shall use it. A problem today is that it parasitically attaches to more than just left and right. It can be seen even among centrists in the form of behaviours. If you simplify or sensationalize complex issues, if you think politics is all about personality, if you reduce others or even yourself to a political caricature, then you are playing a populist game. Problem is, somebody else will inevitably be better than you at it, and will beat you at the game you’ve decided to play.
“Bernie Sanders has been the main force behind this movement.”
…Wha? Bernie Sanders was a Judas goat to get the far left onto the Democrat plantation. One of the highlights of my political life was watching the Jimmy Dore video where he finally came to the realization that Bernie had been playing the long con and Jimmy had fallen for it.
“For the populist, anyone who is not with him is against him. He is besieged by enemies bent on his destruction, and he views politics not as the art of compromise, but as a battle for dominance.”
This is not the case? Elites hate our guts and want us gone. The complex maneuvering of some extremely bright and learned people triggered the financial crisis, hurt all of us, and not a single one of them went to jail. Apocalyptic deadlines for climate change devastation came and went without fireworks. Smart people keep getting it wrong and skepticism about their competence has grown as a result. People of higher status are more likely to think that those who disagree with them are stupid or biased — even when their high status is the result of luck. A minority has gained enormous power and wealth from globalization, but the masses have been left out in the cold.
Ask the experts who said the government’s historical “food pyramid” was good science. Ask the experts who used to say marijuana was a gateway drug. Ask the experts who used to say sexual orientation is just a choice. Ask the experts who said alcoholism is a moral failure and not a matter of genetics.
Billionaires pay millionaires to tell the middle class that the poor are the problem. Stop fucking worrying about the masses of powerless poor people and punch up and fight the ruling class criminals. The type of people who write these articles, particularly those in the American media, are the epitome of privilege. They refuse to acknowledge that uncapped unskilled immigration is screwing the working class. They live in a bubble and most of them have always lived in a bubble. They don’t know anyone who is working class, let alone know what it is like to be working class.
The first step to legitimacy is often when the people in charge simply start taking their critics seriously, rather than treating them as a pestilence to be eliminated. I like to remind myself that 8 of the 15 participants at the Wannsee Conference had Ph.Ds.
“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
Heike scrobe, “I like to remind myself that 8 of the 15 participants at the Wannsee Conference had PhD’s.” Isn’t this getting awfully close to the “Hitler Rule” about comparing people or ideas you don’t like to Hitler and the Nazi’s? And isn’t this also getting awfully close to hinting that, to quote Heike’s own immediately orevious sentence, that PhD’s, or even college graduates in general, are “a pestilence to be eliminated”? Maybe someone should remind Heike that ALL PhD’s shouldn’t be demonized because of the bad ideas espoused by some of them!–Best regards, T. Peter Park, PhD 1970 from University of Virginia, lifelong close friend of several oter 1960’s and 1970’s U.Va. PhD’s! I certainly don’t think my old friends represent a pestilence to be eliminated!) Unfortunately, because of the silliness of a few intellectuals, all too many people these days do seem to be close to regarding all intelectuals, or even all colege graduates, as a pestilence to be eliminated–to be sure, probably not with gas chambers, but maybe rather with compulsory membership in fundamentalist churches??, or forced marriage to conservative spouses?? :=) :=)
Mike Godwin went on record as publicly revoking Godwin’s Law. So no, it’s not outlandish any more to compare evil people to Nazis. Especially when they were literal Nazis.
“compulsory membership in fundamentalist churches”? Where do you get this stuff? Are you a mind reader? If you are, can you tell me what I had for breakfast?
Name a war started by a commoner. Now, name one started by highly educated people. Oh, that would be all of them.
There is something wrong with the author’s conception of “Nationalism.” He defines it in a way that makes me an almost down the line Nationalist, who disagrees – or even despises – all those things comprising his right wing populism. I say this only so the author can tighten his argument, which I favor greatly. Populism, left and right, needs to be exposed, criticized, and thoroughly discredited.
The past half-century has witnessed a growing American populist resentment against so-called “intellectuals,” “cultural elites,” or “educated classes,” and their predominant views on social, political, and cultural issues, particularly among White working and lower-middle classes. We see this reflected, for instance, in the increasing popularity conspiracy theories, “fake news” charges, suspicion of mainstream science and medicine (e.g, climate change, evolution, vaccination) in the last few decades. I see four main reasons for this populist trend:
(1) The growing social and economic inequality of American society since the early 1970’s, as a result of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies, the fading of the post-World War II economic boom with its seeming promise of endlessly growing affluence, and the decline of labor-union membership and influence;
(2) The increasing difficulty and uncertainty, since the early 1970’s, of upward social and economic mobility from the working and lower-middle classes into the professional and managerial classes, and especially into academic teaching careers; which now seem much less accessible to young working-class and lower-middle-class Americans in the 21st century than they did in the 1950’s and 1960’s–having a son or daughter become a college professor now seems a far more chimerically unrealistic hope for working-class or lower-middle-class American families than it would have five or six decades ago;
(3) A growing apparent but illusory narrowing of the gap in information and knowledge between the general public and trained academic, scientific, or medical experts. This popular (mis)perception of an ever-narrowing “knowledge gap” between the general public and the “elites” results partly from the seeming ease of acquiring knowledge and accessing information provided by media like television and especially the Internet, and partly from the much greater diffusion among the “masses” of a certain level of basic general education. It seems increasingly–but deceptively–easy for anyone to become an “expert” on any scientific, medical, historical, socio-economic, or political subject without having to undergo an excessive, time-consuming higher education;
(4) The essential completion in the 1950’s and 1960’s of both the “Americanization” of immigrant European ethnic groups, and of the “urbanization” or “metropolization” of small-town and rural migrants to the “big cities’ have greatly reduced occasions for generational conflict between older and younger generations of those groups since the mid-20th century–and thus far less incentive or motivation than 50 or 60 years ago for upward-mobile college-educated youth from such backgrounds to embrace liberal or leftist politics as part of a rebellion against the “narrow-minded,” “old-fogey,” “up-tight” ways and attitudes of “hick” or “greenhorn” parents. Why go to the trouble and drama of becoming a socialist, or even a Young Democrat, if Mom and Dad never yelled at you for dancing, going to the movies, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, playing Sunday sports, or dating a boy or girl of the “wrong” religion or ethnicity the way their own parents or grandparents might have 40 or 70 years ago?