‘Populism’: we used to know what it meant. Now the defining word of our era has lost its meaning | Oliver Eagleton
“P“Opulism” may have been the defining word of the previous decade: shorthand for the insurgent parties that rose to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal center. But no sooner had it become the main talking point on both the far left and the far right than commentators began to question its validity: fearing that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or that it would fuel the forces it was referring to.
Today, with the fortunes of the two political poles trending in different directions – the right gaining ground in the west while much of the left struggles to bounce back from serial defeats – the idea that the word could encompass such different players seems even less plausible. To lucidly account for these forces, we may need to shift our attention elsewhere: to find terms that can explain their unequal balance of power, so that we in turn can find the appropriate remedy.
The difficulty of separating the actual nature of populism from the fraught discourse that surrounds it is telling, because one of the only safe claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places a huge emphasis on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, direct address to “the people”: these were the common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that arose after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about “unity” and “consensus” in favor of the harsh semantic distinction between “us” and “them.”
For all the problems with the populist label, it has at least managed to capture this highly rhetorical mode of politics, which took root at a time when most political expression was limited to the realm of words rather than actions: rants on Twitter (now X) and dinner-table squabbles as opposed to strikes and street fights. If populism was to some extent an empty signifier, it reflected a political culture that had been hollowed out – with the decline of mass parties, unions and other voluntary associations, leaving few channels for activism. The erosion of these structures has forced foreign politicians to find other ways to advance. Rather than building such grassroots bases, they relied on soundbites to monopolize the attention economy and turn out disenchanted voters.
But while “populism” was a useful summary of these electoral strategies, it was less able to define what these leaders hoped to do once in government. In the United States, for example, Bernie Sanders has made it clear that his goal as president would be to mobilize the state to reactivate the labor movement and disempower the corporate sector. The cabal around Donald Trump also has a thoughtful plan to reorient state policy by centralizing authority within the executive branch and using it as a weapon against racialized groups. Although populism may have been a means, the end was larger. By thinking of Sanders and Trump only in terms of their campaign methods, commentators have avoided a deeper analysis of their governing plans: radical social democracy or hard-line neo-nationalism.
Over the past decade, one of these projects has continued to gain traction – not only in the United States, but also in Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Britain, France and elsewhere – while the other has been largely marginalized. It turned out that when the left and the right clashed on the rhetorical terrain, with politics often reduced to a series of sales pitches, the odds were in favor of the right, in part because a partisan media outlet was willing to broadcast its message. The result is that Sanders’ social democracy remains simply an idea, while Trumpian neo-nationalism is increasingly a reality.
Given this development, the limits of the populist paradigm have become even clearer. The defining feature of our politics is no longer that outsider candidates use this toolkit to take over the state; it is the left which is trying to reconstitute itself after the failure of this enterprise, while a large part of the right is consolidating its success. Socialists have understood that populism, as a political practice, is not strong enough to resist the assaults of the most powerful institutions in society: state ministries, centrist parties, historical newspapers, the business lobby, the courts. The reactionaries, for their part, have learned that they can win elections on a populist platform, but they are still figuring out exactly what relationships they should cultivate with these institutions. Post-populists on both sides define themselves by how they approach these elite strongholds: not only in their rhetoric, but also in their actions.
The options here are twofold. They can either compromise at the risk of being assimilated, or issue a direct challenge at the risk of being overtaken. In Spain, the current leader of the left, Yolanda Díaz, has chosen the first path: trying to reach agreements with the center left and big capital, while repeatedly realizing the limits of her influence. In France, by contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has preserved his party’s political independence and refused to make concessions that could threaten it, but this has so far left him too isolated to get ahead of his opponents.
We can see a similar bifurcation at the other end of the spectrum. While leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni have continued their rapprochement with the traditional power bloc, backtracking on their riskier policies, some, including Trump, have adopted a more pugnacious strategy: attacking state bureaucracy, ignoring the justice system and often overriding corporate demands. Both left and right must choose between negotiating with traditional elites or attempting to bulldoze them.
But once again, the chances are very unequal. Just as the right finds it easier to win elections thanks to populist messages, they are also better able to navigate this choice between conciliation and confrontation. The reason is obvious. Socialists have a program that would disrupt the current social order, while neo-nationalists are concerned with consolidating its hierarchies. One group wants to destroy the neoliberal consensus, the other to deepen its class, racial and gender asymmetries. The institutions that oversee this system will therefore put up more resistance to the left than to the right. They can block some of the latter’s most destabilizing actions – such as attempting to steal elections – but they understand that there is no fundamental misalignment of their interests. Thus, whether neo-nationalists are more pacifist or aggressive, incrementalist or accelerationist, they can use these centers of power to advance their project: a luxury that progressives lack.
“Populism” cannot illuminate these trends – not only because the term is too broad or loaded, but because it was more relevant to a specific period in which newcomers attempted to break the electoral dominance of the center using various language games: the many against the few, the insiders against the outsiders. Even if these discourses have not disappeared, their importance has diminished in a world where this domination has now been broken and where the struggle between left and right populism has been decided in favor of the right. A better approach to our current times would be to study how the two forces are trying, from very different starting points, to make their way through the institutional landscape of neoliberalism: the left seems upset whether it chooses compromise or conflict, with the right able to advance by both means. It will be extremely difficult to reverse this situation. We must begin by grasping the substance of contemporary politics, not just its style.
