The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss

by Marco Revelli, David Broder (Translator)

A crisp and trenchant dissection of populism today

The word 'populism' has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines 'populism'? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality?

Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called 'populist' movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers who asserted their political role for the first time, in today's post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included.

Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to -isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the 'formless form' that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation. For Revelli, this new populism the child of an age in which the Left has been hollowed out and lost its capacity to offer an alternative.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 11, 2017

About the author

Professor of political science and son of writer Nuto Revelli

Reviews

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 2 out of 5]

A solid and highly readable overview of the recent political developments, this book, unfortunately, has - in an already crowded field of books purporting to explain populism - little to offer beyond being a quick glimpse of the conventional wisdom.

The two chapters attempting a theoretical explanation are cursory and glib: populism, apparently is a "senile disorder of democracy", the result of economic crisis and shifting economic reality, with declassé middle class and the poors doing their unruly thing; populism is conceptualized as a "mood". Basically, your weekend op-ed thinkpiece stretched to a book.

The rest of the chapters describing the populist moment in several countries are mostly regurgitated journalistic takes about the 'left behind' and quick analyses with pages of pontifications about electoral maps and descriptions of political going-ons. Unlike in many such similar takes, the author acknowledges there are other countries beyond the USA, GB, France, Italy, and Germany - he briefly pays attention to Central & Eastern Europe, but in the single paragraph he devotes to Slovakia he still manages to make 4 factual errors.

If you want a solid popular (not-too-academic) take on populism that offers a comparative overview of several countries and still manages to make an analytical contribution, you would do better to check out Catherine Fieschi's Populocracy.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurb on the back says that this book will be an analysis of populism that sees it as less a revolt of the excluded but a revolt of the "those who had until recently felt they had a voice". It has a positive review quote from William Davies, a very astute and intelligent person who I like and admire very much. Okay I thought, this sounds good. I was especially very much appealed by the notion of it being a 'revolt of the formerly included', which repositions populism less as some kind of continuation of the mass politics of the 20th, less some kind of new working class hegemony against the "globalised" elite which can fit squarely onto ideas of political economy, and more of a hybrid mix largely of the petit-bourgeois and older members of the worker classes, members who are not rich enough to enjoy the fruits of modern day capitalist society yet have enough wealth and assets to be unpersuaded by any socialism, who desire a form of politics that directly appeals to their class contractionary position, lacing their own anxieties, neuroses and bizarre predilections into the form of racism, xenophobia and an overwhelming hatred of politics, which they have no association towards and no ability to properly partake in.

That's not really what Revelli does in the end. Well, he sort of does, but it's mostly a muddled and confusing mess. In the end, he really has nothing of particular note or interest to say. In the end, he largely regurgitates the tired and sad old narrative of the "left behinds", the losers of globalisation who are fed up with "out of touch" politicians and want a change blah blah blah embrace fascism. In fact it seems to me, out of the 5 case studies he chooses (Trump, Brexit, Germany and the associated Eastern European far right movements, and Italy) at least two of them fail totally to match onto his idea.

He does not commit the error, thankfully, of presuming Trump represented the white working class, as statistically he did not. Trump's vote was overwhelming concentrated on those who made over 50,000 dollars a year, a rump coalition, as Mike Davis showed, of Mitt Romney's electoral vote and then some. Trump's only difference, and the reason he was able to cross over the finishing line, was the slither of massively electorally important Rust Belt states that were genuinely economically suffering, able to be appealed too due to their overwhelming hatred of Clinton and her association with the trade deals that ravaged their communities, and the slim promise of some kind of renewal. The fact that most of those states voted for Obama twice and voted for Biden in 2020 is proof that this was not a sole "whitelash" of incurably racist troglodytes, but a genuine spasm of class despair, one not broadly mapped onto the wider electoral map of Trump's victory. So, so far one down, and it's not a great start.

For Brexit his analysis is horribly muddled. He tries to spin Brexit into another "left behind" narrative, one of the disempowered former working classes. When Revelli was writing the book (in 2017, a year after both Trump and Brexit) this seemed the most accurate analysis, as a quick look at the map would have shown (Revelli is obsessed with the supposed electoral geography of the voting bases for populism being the magic key to show it all, which seems to me to be slightly reductive, considering a map is a blunt picture, and cannot show the intricate class dynamics and divisions going on inside it, by age, gender etc, which muddle the image of supposedly homogeneous voting blocs). But this is a poor analysis that doesn't work, and one soon discovers why when one looks at his use of class. He is following the statistical norm in the UK of registering classes on the basis of the absurd 'social class' model, which instead of simply boiling down people to "working" "middle" or "upper" class, decides instead on a complicated alphabet soup of classes, from AB (higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, professional occupations), to C2 (skilled manual occupations) to DE (semi-skilled and unskilled, manual occupations, unemployed and lowest grade occupations) (pp. 90-91). Based on this crude statistical gibberish, he is able to neatly compartmentalise the Brexit vote into his little boxes, inner urban young people (AB = middle class) and the North-East and other post-industrial communities (C2 and DE = working class). But even a simple look at this shows that it is a worthless analysis for understanding class. It is laced with value judgements based on no objective criteria ("Skilled" "semi-skilled". Who defines what a skill is? Why is manual labour a skill but operating McDonalds cooking vats not one?), has a frankly ridiculous notion of what counts as 'work' which reduces it to the parodic stereotype of what Marxists are supposed to believe in (working class as defined entirely by reference to manual labour) and lumping unemployed into DE along with a semi-skilled manual worker (despite being, obviously, completely differently kinds of labour, and having completely difference means of access to the source of social reproduction, i.e, the wage). In fact, all this stupid model does is to treat class as a form of culture, boiling it down to a series of generically recognisable affects and personality quirks. As Richard Seymour pointed out, the problems become all the more apparent when viewed through a Marxist perspective, in that Marxist perspectives of class says that "classes do not exist prior to coming into relationship with one another. It is impossible to imagine a working class without a capitalist class, or serfs without feudal lords. These classes have very specific mechanisms of reproduction, but only in relation to one another: the working class reproduces itself by selling its labour power, which it can only do if there is someone to buy it." Class then is not an identity. A worker is not a worker if he speaks in a northern voice and wears a flap cap, and a member of the middle class is not middle class is they speak in a refined accent, eats avocado on toast and drinks Frappuccinos. These are worthless cultural masquerades, which mystify the fact that class is a social relationship; you are working class depending where you are in the means of production. So in that case then, instead of AB being contrasted with C2 and DE, aspects of "AB" are far more working class than either C2 or bits of DE, simply because unlike them, they tend to be filled with highly educated but massively indebted, renting young people, living a totally insecure existence in multiple dead-end, zero hours contracts jobs, with absolutely zero access to the housing ladder, with the lucky ones living with and/or off their parents for years. That, by any definition, is working class. Similarly, an unemployed former coal miner in the north east is more similar (while not being the same to the former one) precisely because in the level of income and their relation to the wage, as it is poor to non-existent. However, even if they are semi-skilled, without a higher education, or maybe even a job, it is likely because of their age (a key factor to be considered here) to have a housing asset and a pension, two factors far above a young inner city precarious worker. On the other side, a rich middle class person living in a penthouse in West London has far more in common from a class perspective with a rich, older voter living in rural Tory heartlands, considering both of them are property owners (maybe even landlords) and more than well off. The differences between these groups are cultural and ideological, with the north-east former industrial worker and the outer suburb Tory rural pensioner sharing a common cultural grievance over migration and borders (although not, one should say, for the same reasons, for the north-east it's primarily mediated by notions that the migrants decrease wages, lower job opportunities and rob council housing spots, whereas the older, more rural Tory voter hates them on purely cultural means, i.e, can't say Merry Christmas anymore, can't have a nativity play, don't integrate, horrible language, causing litter etc). In the sense of Brexit, the middle class house owner and the indebted precarious young person share a common cultural liking to multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, open borders, a general sense of liberal openness etc. These unholy alliances were uniquely concentrated in Brexit over the specific issue of the EU, one that was capable of taking in multiple conflicting stances while producing one overall result. That was the genius of Dominic Cummings' strategy, and it is one mostly not recreated at an electoral level (as it happened, most of the Brexit voting Red Wall kept it's Labour vote in the non-Brexit related 2017 election, then collapsed to the Tories precisely over Brexit in 2019, while the inner city urban youth went straight to Labour and the middle classes swinging straight to the Tories). Getting this wrong, and conflating these ambiguous cultural traits into clearly defined class categories makes his analysis wholly wrong. In fact, it's not even clear based on this model it's even right still, Danny Dorling has written that most people who voted Leave were in the South of England, and that overall of all those who voted to Leave, 59% were in the ABs or C1s, with the proportion of those left in the lowest categories being a mere 24% (Dorling, Danny, "Brexit: the decision of a divided country" reprinted in Dorling, Danny, Peak Inequality: Britain's Ticking Time Bomb, 2018, Policy Press, pp.69-73). Dorling considers C1s and ABs to be, correctly IMO, middle class, splurging the lower and upper together, while the actual poorest of the poor being much less represented if one separates C2's off from them as part of the "working class". What this should show is that using such statistical analysis produces a hopelessly muddled and completely unworkable situation, in which any amount of statistical manipulation can be used to clump together any groups of people into "classes" based on a vague semblance of what is through to be class characteristics. It should also be pointed out that the wider trend of UK populism, that of UKIP's massive victories in the years preceding and leading up to the Brexit vote was (contrary to much of the continent) a lower middle to middle class phenomenon, with Richard Seymour, again showing that after the 2015 election, 43% of UKIP's voters had voted Tory in 2010, with only 14% voting Labour, and even when they did better in working class areas, it was on low turnouts. This overall should put any dent into the notion the overall anti-EU feeling was a wholly and uniformly working class uprising. While it is perfectly true, and I think correct, to say economic destruction and the linger absence of any kind of post-industrial solution drove the North-East to Brexit side (and subsequently clinged onto it during the 2019 election), to generalise in these breathless tones of something as bizarre, contested and incoherent as the Brexit vote is ridiculous.

So two down, and I'm not impressed with his wafer-thin, shallow analysis. He is, I presume, on much stronger ground in his analysis of France, Germany, Eastern Europe and Italy, and I don't have much reason to contest what he says there, as none are my area of expertise. His analysis of Germany, for example, is sharp, in that even the richest country in Europe and the powerhouse of it's economic backbone has pretty colossal economic fissures running right down internally, with the economic growth of it's economy largely based on the repeated wage suppression of it's working class and the easy access to hyper-exploited export markets in the European periphery (Greece, Italy, Spain). Interesting to note is how hybrid and varied it seems the AfD's vote actually is, with him providing evidence to suggest it does not come primarily from post-communist voting blocs, something which surprised me. The case of the Front Nationale is far more clear, mapping on totally to the former communist heartlands.

His writing on Italy is especially sharp, documenting how Italy first bucked the trend of all of the western political world by having Berlusconi in charge, which during the time of his premiership was an acute anomaly in the world of Merkels, Clintons and Blairs. In retrospect, what with his ridiculous comic buffoon persona wielded surgically to disguise genuine scrutiny, hilarious "gaffes", all of a sexist, racist or generally offensive nature, derided by mainstream commentators but beloved by people for it's supposed "authenticity", his crude manipulation of facts and logic, his total domination over the media, Berlusconi now appears as some kind of ghastly, balding, grinning, tanned omen of doom for the rest of the western polity, of both Trump, but more specifically that of Boris Johnson. Then came Gussepi's non-political political "party" (in the loosest definition of the term) the Five Star Movement, a movement which Revelli notes may be the closest to pure populism we've ever seen in its complete absence of seemingly any fixed voting constituency or programme, and perhaps explains why it has relatively floundered under the weight of the neo-fascist Lega Norde party. And finally, and most interestingly when looking at populism, is that of Matteo Renzi, a non-populist populist, a figure firmly of the politically castrated and intellectually craven centre-right of dying social democracy in Italy, an ardent supporter of marketisation and privatisation, and the darling of the international European capitalist class if ever there was one. Although he failed spectacularly, first of all in the referendum and then at the elections, proving his brand of insurgent centrism was doomed, he's more interesting for, again, predicting what comes next, as in many ways Revelli's description of him is straight up the same as Macron. Renzi, a career politician with a firm history of being a SDP insider, linked to all manner of wealthy backers in the financial elite industry, and having policies not resembling any political programme but more a "list of requests (or orders) contained in Trichet and Draghi's 2011 letter, or a Troika memorandum, than a programme likely to enjoy popular support", with lacing it all with the familiar populist spectacles of mass media profiles, repeated invocations of "everyguy" stylings, and hysterical denunciations of the "old order" to be cleansed away by new, vigorous, energetic, dynamic leadership, is the spit of Macron's later victory. Renzi's total cleaning in the referendum and election is, therefore, a bad omen for the future of France, where so far three far right figures are dominating the landscape (I include Macron in this, a man whose narcissism and sense of entitled arrogance is matched only by his guttersnipe tendencies to ape the most repugnant, authoritarian, racist and Islamophobic tendencies of Gaullism in a truly pathetic and despicable bid to win over the far right. He was, of course, beloved by the centrist shit weasels).

All in all though, his analysis remains poor. A bewildering array of statistics comes deluging in page after page, many of them unreadable due to outsider's unfamiliarity with the sources they come from or the way their presented (the usual alphabet soup of party acronyms) makes the book a shockingly poor read. There is also no actual theory of populism much at all, aside from the occasional glances towards one, mostly towards the introduction. A real, genuine, Marxist analysis of populism is still needed, one which does not join in in the tiresome circus of ritualistic denunciation from the desiccated liberal centrist mob, nor equally joins in with the pathetically laughable attempts to latch a left project onto a style of politics which is fundamentally, innately, fascist in form and content (see Chantel Mouffe's worthless writings, nicely dissected by William Davies here , or Perry Anderson's excoriating obliteration of her and Laclau's work in The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony for why it fails). A much better look at the failings and follies of populism, based on similar ground as Revelli's but with a far more pertinent insight in my mind, is that of Anton Jager's notion of "hyperpolitics", specifically his point that "In this sense, ‘hyper-politics’ is what happens when ‘post-politics’ ends, but not on terms familiar to us from the twentieth century — the form political conflict takes in the absence of mass politics", of which the case of Renzi, and now also Macron (and actually before even, Blair and Obama in a way), show so well, that far from being a radical alternative to the death of history and of politics proclaimed by the neoliberals, the two modes of politics are in fact faintly continuous to one another with their mutual distain of collectivism, the absence of any political content, the containment of genuine participatory democracy in favour of vote-ticking exercise with pre-arranged decisions, the cults of personality propped up in substitute for any actual politics - populism is far more the worsening or vulgarising of such tendencies, with ruinous consequences for the world (William Davies
, again, has noted the shared genealogy of both in an analysis of Hayek).

I would also recommend is How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship by Ece Temelkuran, which is a beautiful, agonising, mournful book documenting what it actually feels like to see populism in action, not the abstract theory that Revelli is trying to engage in, but a far sharper sense of the sheer despairing irrationalism behind it, the cult like enthusiasm for the wilful ruining of one's one country, and the sheer giddying thrill that seemingly comes from actively surrounding yourself and your rights to your new fascist dictator, which you allowed in with open arms and a pepe the frog meme. Although it is shallow on political theory.

A socialist class politics, and specifically, one rooted in the Leninist party form, in complete opposition t0 populism, is needed more than ever.

[Hattie · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book failed to provide the analysis the rise of post-2008 populism it promised. very descriptive

[bossboeo]

Di solito riporto un passo che mi ha colpito nettamente e che riassuma in qualche modo la lettura. Questa volta non riesco a farlo, poiché sia le dissertazioni su AfD, su Trump (pazzesco come un miliardario imprenditore padrone sia diventato paladino degli operai e dei contadini) e Brexit, sui tre neopopulismi italiani mi hanno colpito in egual modo.
Aver aperto questo libro mi ha spalancato la porta del populismo, che, mi accorgo, fa parte della democrazia a livello genetico; per non farla diventare la sua versione down: la demagogia (perdonatemi l'orribile paragone), bisogna restare connessi ai bisogni dei miei conterranei e della mia comunità, con accortezza, costruendo canali atti a ottimizzare la società, fluidificandola. Non è la fine del mondo, se lo si usa correttamente. Un po' come il raggio della morte. Il populismo significa assecondare le folle, il che è imbecille, nel vero senso del termine: non può stare in piedi da solo, necessita dello spirito critico che appartiene al singolo individuo e non certo alla moltitudine, quindi necessita di calmarsi e ragionarci su, riguardo ogni questione. Limitarmi a seguire la corrente, per me politico, mi porterà a sfociare in uno strapiombo di cento metri, alias cascata, che è spettacolare, liberatorio e magnifico se non aggiungo dove andrò a finire con questo volo angelico. Per questo uscire dall'euro e buttare via a calci gli immigrati sembra un'azione così conveniente.
Do quattro stelle perché sembra un'opera di Cicerone: subordinate a mai finire, parentesi, incidentali. E basta! Oltre al fatto che l'opera non è "people-friendly", ovvero risulta ostica a chi legge per la prima volta un libro sul populismo. Come il sottoscritto. E questo fa capire tante cose proprio sul perché il populismo sta attecchendo: fate, non so, un trattato sul populismo in stile Stephen Hawking, con disegnini, black jack e squillo di lusso. xD
Inorridisco davanti alla citazione di Dante al minuscolo: "il poeta", ma gioisco quando leggo il plurale di "principio" con l'accento circonflesso.
Populismo 2.0 e Credere Disobbedire Combattere mi accolgono nel mondo della politica, cui ora sono definitivamente interessato.

(E Salvini prende 20 mila euro al mese)

[David Gilani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good at bringing in data and descriptive summaries of the rise of populist governments in the US and Western Europe... as well as the Brexit referendum and some Eastern European governments. However, it's very, very descriptive. Doesn't give much analysis into why this is happening - i.e. the role of any organisations in shaping public opinion. It seems to suggest that it is just the presentation of political candidates and sometimes a general sense of disappointment across the electorate that shape elections.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Democracy is Halal. Populism is Haram. Same idea. Different view. If the speaker's gang is winning, than Democracy is at work. If the speaker's gang is losing, than Populism is at work. Yet, these simple observations go way above the head of Revelli, another academic leech that needs to pump up the "published works" section of his resume so that Democracy would pay him an even larger cut of the collected tax as "pension" for an obedient solider of the system.

[Mehdi · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book focuses on right-wing populism, and while it started good in pointing out the betrayal of the working class on the part of the left, the argument kind of drawned in an overuse of numbers and statistics when it came to explain the french, italian and ‘central european’ cases

[Klejton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This genuinely seems like the guy sat down and just started writing whatever came to his mind. Very little connection from chapter to chapter, paragraph to paragraph and sentence to sentence. Some mildly interesting ideas here and there. Whoever edited this scammed him.

[Federica Breimaier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quando un popolo (o una sua parte) non si sente rappresentato ed è escluso dal potere, tende a reagire in vari modi, e la reazione oggi più frequente è proprio il populismo. L’autore distingue il populismo di fine Ottocento–inizio Novecento (malattia infantile della democrazia) da quello recente di fine Novecento e inizio XXI secolo (il neo-populismo, malattia senile della democrazia), quando le dinamiche oligarchiche marginalizzano la popolazione e creano un deficit di rappresentanza. Il titolo del libro rimanda a, per vedere il resto della recensione=> https://giornatedilettura.wordpress.c...