Garland, C. (2019) 'Taking Back Control of Nothing: Elites Denouncing Elites to Mobilize Populism in the Service of Power - from NAFTA to Trump, Brexit, and the EU' (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Revolt against the Elites, or the New Populist Wave: An Interview
Telos (New York), 2016
The following is an updated and expanded version of an interview with journalist Alexis Franco for the site Atlantico, with the text published on June 12, 2016 (without notes). Q: The upturn of hostile discourse concerning elites and the "system" resounds in particular in Western populations: whether it is the U.S. with Donald Trump or France with Le Pen, including also Brexit proponents. Why have we reached such an unprecedented degree of opposition between the people and the elites? In your opinion, what examples illustrate this situation the best? Pierre-André Taguieff: We must be clear on the muddled issue of growing hostility toward elites, beginning with distinguishing the revolt of "those from below" (the new "plebs") against the ruling elites (those of both political power and wealth), challenging the established elites by the rising elites and the global rejection of the "system," considered locked, by a trans-classist mass that can be called "the people" (not the "plebs" but the modern equivalent of "populus romanus," meaning, people as a whole). In all three cases, the ruling passion of the revolt or protest is mistrust that propels the loss of left-right division, to the great despair of professional diagnosticians, who, like uninspired and shortsighted oracles, are able to speak only the language of diagnostics. Moreover, the lack of confidence also affects relationships between ordinary citizens. In fragmented contemporary communities, interpersonal trust, which is a prerequisite for all social living, has also grown community-centered. Such trust is sheltered in "communities," with some of them having features of secret societies, whose functioning Georg Simmel once analyzed. [1] Today, the anti-elitist political concept responds directly and effectively to social demands in Europe and the United States. And this anti-elitist or anti-system concept perfectly encompasses both the left and right, and, of course, the extremists. As different as they are, the new leaders are protesting and transgressive. Their demagoguery is marked by the language of transgression, provocation, and excess, based on the subversion of language or behavior codes: for them, this is a matter of drawing a clear distinction from the standard model policy. They can complain about being demonized by their opponents, while still trying to stay slightly demonized in order to maintain their attractiveness. This is the prerequisite to the seduction that they perform. This differentiates them from formatted and conformist leaders, who pursue respectability, which makes them somewhat watery. Regardless of the excessive use of the term since the early 1990s, we still can characterize the anti-system or anti-establishment leaders as populists. [2] In terms of the leaders' posture, populism can be defined as a political style, compatible with any ideological content, that involves direct appeals to the people, rejection of mediation, and criticism of established elites. This also includes the
The Elites in Twenty-First-Century Populism
M. Deshpande et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century, 2023
This paper deals with the analysis of elites, offering brief overviews of how some authors have dealt with the presence of elites throughout history, the main ways in which this phenomenon has been interpreted and the way in which elites are addressed in the context of the twenty-first century.
Beyond populism: The diversity of thin anti-establishment contestation in turbulent times
Pytlas, B (2022) 'Beyond populism: The diversity of thin anti-establishment contestation in turbulent times'. In: Party Politics, 2022
Studies of 'thin' anti-establishment supply assess mainly the extent of populist messages. This paper analyses the diversity of thin contestation beyond just populism. We deploy a content analysis of 142 social-media campaigns by anti-establishment (AEPs) and conventional parties during 23 elections across Europe 2010-2019. We find that in addition to popular will and extra-political technocratic expertise, AEPs increasingly enacted exceptional political calling, crafts and virtues depicted as necessary to revive 'true' formal-representative politics itself. Regression analysis shows that political vocation cues played an important auxiliary role in AEP mobilisation strategies. On average, AEPs across the political spectrum which used more political vocation messages performed better electorally ceteris paribus than those which used them less. Conventional parties instead did not universally benefit if they increasingly used thin messages. Anti-establishment and populism-related rhetoric played a further role within particular AEP groups, but neither was significantly associated with stronger AEP performance altogether. In order to better understand recent political turbulence it is therefore useful to account for more diverse thin contestation supply.
The Elitism of the "Anti-Populists"
Jacobin, 2019
Pundits analyzing the "populist threat" often assume an audience that wants to defend the status quo. Presenting all political "outsiders" as merely dangerous, anti-populist literature tells us more about the role of public intellectuals than the movements it is meant to describe. Today it seems normal to think of "populism" in negative terms. Elite politicians warn us about the threat it poses to stability, articles in illustrious journals tell us about the rising "populist" threat to democracy, and pundits use the term to put both the far right and the radical left in the same basket, as just so many challengers to the status quo. Even if these figures lack any shared or scientific definition of populism, they each locate this phenomenon somewhere in terms of "lies" "demagogy", ''extremism'' and "attempting to mislead the masses." Yet this "anti-populist" punditry is itself far from innocent-and its effect in shaping how we think about "populism" has clear political implications. Indeed, anti-populism doesn't come from a vacuum. It's the result of determined ideological interventions, designed to mask the radical history of this term and collapse it into its most negative contemporary expressions. Seeing how this pejorative definition of "populism" has been spread also allows us to question the role of punditry in informing public debate today, whether expressed by journalists, politicians, and think tanks, or by scholars like historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Though academic discussions of "populism" are far from one-sided, the political uses of this term since the 2008 crisis (and especially since the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's election in 2016) have given vent to a renewed cycle of anti-populist elitism.
2017
Analyses of populism tend to fall into two camps: one, sees populism as a defect or pathology of democracy and another sees populism as radical, participatory democracy. Seeing these two camps as unable to grasp the heterogeneous nature of populist politics—instead seeing it solely in terms of one form of political activity—Kaltwasser (2012) argues for a ‘minimal approach’ that views populism as an ambivalence: depending on the context, it can be left-leaning or right-leaning; it can be a ‘defect’ of democracy or an uprising of radical democratic participation.1 Taking Kaltwasser’s insights as a point of departure, this paper seeks to explore some of the possible causes of the increasing salience of right- leaning populist politics in present-day liberal-democratic societies. Doing so, it seeks to explore the structural, institutional, and socio-psychological forces at play in producing these movements, arguing two significant and interrelated developments in the 21st century international political economy help to explain the structural/systemic conditions for the current turn towards right-leaning populist politics that we see arising in liberal-democracies: (1) the continued expansion of the structural and institutional power of global finance has led to a blurring of the public and private domains in the formation of State domestic and international policy, resulting in private financial actors enjoying immense agenda- setting and decision-making power in society, often absent democratic oversight and aimed at benefiting the interests of an increasingly interconnected and cohesive transnational capitalist class; and (2) as the ideological program of this State-finance nexus of power, neoliberal discourses and policies that preach and support self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, presentness, and resilience— in tandem with shifts in the structure of global labor from full-time, steady work into ‘flexible’, part-time positions— have resulted in the retreat of the welfare state and the destruction of the collective bargaining power of labor, leaving workers increasingly precarious, alienated, and socially fragmented, in turn, making them more susceptible to right-leaning, authoritarian candidates who claim to represent order, authority, and security in the form of ethno-nationalized conceptions of citizenship and community. Exploring how these two interrelated developments in the international political economy impact and intensify the formation and politics of contemporary populist movements, this paper argues that contrary to Canovan’s assertion that populism moves against power structures, contemporary populisms are actually moving to cement elite power structures; contrary to Kaltwasser’s view that that the affinity between neoliberalism and neopopulism is losing its relevance, the two are more intertwined than ever before; and despite the arguments of Aslanidis (2015), ideology is central to this interconnected and symbiotic relationship. Empirical support will be provided by case studies of two contemporary examples where right-leaning populist politicians have come to power in liberal- democratic societies: Donald Trump in the United States and Viktar Orban in Hungary. Comparing the rhetoric used by each to the policies passed while in office, it will be argued that despite their appeals to ‘the people’ the actual policies enacted serve elite interests. Putting forth an original theory to capture this dynamic, this paper refers to these right-leaning and elite-friendly forms of contemporary populism as signifying the growing power of ‘Plutocratic-Populism’.
Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement (2018) (pre-proof)
This article formulates precise questions and 'rules of engagement' designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent 'the people', discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate 'elite'. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term 'populism' itself: how it is invoked, by whom, and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and 'populist hype', and reflect upon academia's own relation to populism and anti-populism.