“Populism” may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.
Now, with the fortunes of the two political poles heading in different directions – the right gaining ground across the west while much of the left struggles to rebound from serial defeats – the notion that this word could encompass such different players seems even less plausible. For a lucid account of these forces, we might have to shift our focus elsewhere: finding terms that can explain their unequal balance of power, so that we can in turn find the proper remedy.
The difficulty of separating the real nature of populism from the fraught discourse that surrounds it is telling, because among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to “the people”: these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about “unity” and “consensus” for the hard semantic distinction between “us” and “them”.
For all the problems with the populist label, it was at least able to capture this highly rhetorical mode of politics, which took root at a time when most political expression was confined to the realm of words rather than deeds: Twitter (now X) fulminations and dinner-table rows as opposed to strikes and street fights. If populism was to some extent an empty signifier, it reflected a political culture that had been emptied out – with the decline of mass parties, trade unions and other voluntary associations leaving few channels for activism. The erosion of these structures forced outsider politicians to find other means to advance. Rather than building such popular bases, they relied on soundbites to monopolise the attention economy and turn out disenchanted voters.
But while “populism” was a useful summation of these electoral strategies, it was less able to delineate what such leaders hoped to do once they were in government. In the US, for example, Bernie Sanders was clear that his aim as president would be to harness the state to reactivate the labour movement and disempower the corporate sector. The cabal around Donald Trump also has a considered plan to reorient state policy by centralising authority in the executive and weaponising it against racialised groups. Although populism may have been the means, the ends were more extensive. By thinking of Sanders and Trump solely in terms of their campaign methods, commentators sidestepped a more thorough analysis of their governing projects: radical social democracy or hardline neo-nationalism.
Over the past decade, one of these projects has continued to accrue power – not only in the US, but also in Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Britain, France and elsewhere – while the other has mostly been marginalised. It turned out that when the left and right battled on the terrain of discourse, with politics often reduced to a series of sales pitches, the odds were in favour of the right, not least because a partisan media was willing to diffuse its message. The upshot is that Sanders’s social democracy remains merely an idea, while Trumpian neo-nationalism is increasingly a reality.
Given this development, the limits of the populist paradigm have become even more clear. The primary feature of our politics is no longer underdog candidates using this toolkit to capture the state; it is the left trying to reconstitute itself after the failure of that enterprise, while much of the right consolidates its success. Socialists have realised that populism, as a political practice, is not strong enough to resist an onslaught from the most powerful institutions in society: state ministries, centrist parties, legacy papers, the business lobby, the courts. Reactionaries, meanwhile, have learned that they can win elections on a populist platform, but they are still working out exactly what relationship to cultivate with these institutions. Post-populists on both sides are defined by how they approach such fortresses of the elite: not only in their rhetoric, but in their actions.
Here the options are twofold. They can either compromise at risk of being assimilated, or mount a direct challenge at risk of being overwhelmed. In Spain, the current leader of the left, Yolanda Díaz, has taken the first path: trying to strike deals with the centre left and big business, yet repeatedly realising the limits of her leverage. In France, by contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has preserved his party’s political independence and refused to make any concessions that would threaten it, but this has so far left him too isolated to outpace his opponents.
We can see a similar bifurcation out at the other end of the spectrum. Whereas leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni have pursued rapprochement with the traditional power bloc, backtracking on their riskier policies, ones including Trump have adopted a more pugnacious strategy: assailing the state bureaucracy, ignoring the judiciary and often overriding the demands of business. Both left and right must decide between bargaining with traditional elites or attempting to bulldoze them.
Once again, though, the odds are highly uneven. Just as the right finds it easier to win elections through populist messaging, it is also more able to navigate this choice between conciliation and confrontation. The reason is obvious. Socialists have a programme that would upend the present social order, while neo-nationalists are concerned with entrenching its hierarchies. One group wants to destroy the neoliberal consensus, the other to deepen its asymmetries of class, race and gender. The institutions that superintend this system will therefore put up greater resistance to the left than to the right. They may block some of the latter’s most destabilising actions – such as trying to steal elections – but they understand that there is no fundamental misalignment of their interests. So regardless of whether neo-nationalists are more peaceable or aggressive, gradualist or accelerationist, they can use these power centres to drive their project forward: a luxury that progressives lack.
“Populism” cannot illuminate these trends – not just because the term is too broad or loaded, but because it was more relevant to a specific period in which upstarts tried to break the electoral dominance of the centre by using various language games: the many against the few, insiders against outsiders. While these discourses haven’t gone away, their importance is diminished in a world where that dominance has now been shattered, and where the contest between left and right populism has been decided in favour of the right. A better approach to our present moment would be to study how both forces are trying, from very different starting points, to make their way in the institutional landscape of neoliberalism: the left seemingly thwarted whether it chooses compromise or conflict, the right able to march onward by either means. It will be extraordinarily difficult to overturn this situation. We must start by grasping the substance of contemporary politics, not simply its style.
