Populism and Globalization E-Book

Barrie Axford

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: ProtoSociology - An International Journal of Indisciplinary Research
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 403

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The narrative of populism as a "rising tide" has enjoyed currency at least since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the success of the "Leave" campaign in the UK referendum on membership of the EU earlier in that year. And yet, on the eve of what proved to be President Trump's election defeat some four years later, the British journalist Nick Cohen felt able to muse "(w)e're endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail" (October 10, 2020). So, one might be forgiven for thinking that what goes around must eventually come around. However, things are not that simple, and the runes are harder to read.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Editorial: The Globalization of Populism

Barrie Axford and Manfred B. Steger

Part I Concepts and Contexts

Defining Populism and Fascism Relationally:Exploring Global Convergences in Unsettled Times

Paul James

Vico and Populism: the Return to a ‘Barbarism of Reflection’

Rico Isaacs

Populism and Cosmopolitanism as a Unitary Structure of Global Systemic Process: Notes and Graphs

Jonathan Friedman

No Going Back?Late Modernity and the Populisation of Politics

Simon Tormey

Part II Global and (G)local incursions

Neoliberalism and Nationalist-Authoritarian Populism:Explaining their Constitutive and Causal Connections

Heikki Patomäki

Populism and Worldwide Turbulence: a Glocal Perspective

Roland Robertson

Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and 21

st

Century Populism

Victor Roudometof

The Five Origins of European Populism:The “Old Continent” Between Fixing Techno-Wars And A Global Order In The Re-Making

Roland Benedikter

On Contemporary Philosophy

“But how is self-consciousness possible?”Hölderlin’s criticism of Fichte in “Judgment and Being”

Jürgen Stolzenberg

Contributors

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Book Publications of the Project

Editorial The Globalization of Populism

Barrie Axford and Manfred B. Steger

The narrative of populism as a “rising tide” has enjoyed currency at least since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the success of the “Leave” campaign in the UK referendum on membership of the EU earlier in that year. And yet, on the eve of what proved to be President Trump’s election defeat some four years later, the British journalist Nick Cohen felt able to muse “(w)e’re endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail” (October 10, 2020). So, one might be forgiven for thinking that what goes around must eventually come around.

However, things are not that simple, and the runes are harder to read. Trump duly lost the 2020 Presidential election and handed control of both Houses of the U.S. Congress to the Democrats, but at the same time harvested the votes of over seventy-four million of the U.S. electorate. While significantly less than the over 81 million votes garnered by Joe Biden, Trump’s yield at the ballot box turned out to be larger and more diverse than liberal wishful thinking could entertain. The even more sobering fact is that many of his supporters seem in it for the long run; or at any rate they presently say that they are.

Following the scenes of insurrection and mayhem on Capitol Hill on January 6 2021, a YouGov poll canvassed that forty-five per cent of Republican voters supported storming the Capitol Building, shrinking to eighteen per cent in the cold light of the next day. Thirty-two per cent of all voters did not see such actions as a threat to democracy. A month later a poll conducted by the same organization found that fifty four per cent of Republicans would vote for Trump in 2024 if he were to be acquitted in his second impeachment trial. Leaders of the far-right in Europe—the AfD’s Tino Chrupalla, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the Italian Lega’s strongman Matteo Salvini, condemned the actions of protestors, but fell short of pillorying Trump himself. In Hungary, Viktor Òrban uncharacteristically decided to hedge his bets by keeping his views to himself. Meanwhile, and out of quite another worldview, former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, vouchsafed that “(t)here are Trumps everywhere, so each and everyone should defend their Capitol” (as reported in euobserver, 8 January 2021).

For students of American and world politics, as well as for citizens more generally, the burden of these events has yet to unfold. However, one thing seems to be beyond doubt: Trump in office was a full-spectrum populist who ultimately became an “aspirational fascist” as William Connolly (2018) opined. Only time will tell if Trump’s final nosedive in the opinion polls—he left office on January 20, 2021 with a mere 29 per cent approval rating—combined with the drama of his second impeachment trial in February 2021 will lift or further depress the fortunes of his populist brand along with further secessionist, nationalistic and fascist murmerings and incursions in the U.S. and elsewhere. Following his second acquittal by the Senate on February 13 2021, Trump tweeted that he would fight on to revive the goal of “Making America Great Again” (MAGA). The temper and successes of populisms are massively inflected by local circumstances and conditions and by the fact that we are living through what Steger and James call “globalization’s most uneven and disjunctive phase in human history” (2020).

The link between globalization and the populist surge deserves to be highlighted and emerges as the major theme in the essays collected in this volume. Populism is a global phenomenon and possesses enormous world-making and world-sundering potential (Axford 2021). Indeed, the new wave of right-wing national populism is intricately connected to shifting perceptions of the role of globalization in the world (Moffitt 2016; Anselmi 2018; Steger and James 2019: 187–208). Adherents of racist far-right movements around the world share more than a common cause. For years far-right extremists traded ideology and inspiration on societies’ fringes and in the deepest realms of the internet (Bennhold and Schwirtz 2021). National populism is now everywhere and anywhere. But its ubiquity is not only a sign of its global geographical reach and growing political potency, but also exposes a potentially selfdefeating paradox. Its denunciation of “globalization” and “globalism” notwithstanding, populism has itself become part of a multidimensional process that cuts across national borders and cultural lines of demarcation.

Over the years, a growing number of populism scholars have adopted “national-populism” as an umbrella term for a range of radical rightwing variants linked to different geographic regions in the world (Wodak et al., 2013). To be sure, various forms of left-wing populism have been on the march as well—a development that has been accompanied by new academic publications recommending “populism” as an effective strategy to revitalize the enervated global Left (Gerbaudo, 2017; Mouffe, 2018). The surprisingly cozy relationship that developed between the Mexican left-wing populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the right-winger Donald Trump speaks volumes about the significant conceptual and political overlap that exists between these two seemingly opposed variants of populism.

The ‘populist explosion’ in recent years has to be set in the global politics of anger and revolt that intensified in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and European Sovereign Debt Crisis (Appelbaum, 2020; Appadurai, 2013; Foa and Mounck, 2015; Judis 2016; Mishra 2018). It is an off-the-shelf vehicle of dissent, though bruited as a new kind of politics, promising a radical solution for the ills attributed to a cultural-economy of relativism and a history of bad faith by political, cultural and economic elites. In the larger scheme of things, it is part of the crisis of modernity and of the recently dominant model of market globalization, especially in neoliberal guise (Lonergan and Blyth, 2020; Steger 2020). In many places it manifests as an anti-global and largely defensive nationalism, sometimes spiced with nativism and xenophobia. In fact, it is all these things and more. At times reflecting what Laclau (2005) called an “empty signifier,” the politics of populism may yet prove to be a hiatus before usual politics resumes. But it can also be glossed as a transformative moment in the constitution of twenty-first century globality; an exemplar of the playing out of the elemental, and sometimes tortuous, dialectic of local and global. Populist politics is thus a phenomenon of its unsettled times. Increasingly modal—albeit with variable purchase on hearts and minds—it is a salutary reminder of the abiding visceral power of place, the familiar particular and the imagined exceptional, in global constitution.

The present issue of Protosociology addresses an intriguing and troubling facet of the current “populist” phase of global constitution; one that offers a gloss on the tensions between secular convergence and the potential for disruption, even the “end of globalization” (Livesay 2017; O’Sullivan 2019). Moreover, the global spread of COVID-19, and the intensification of ontological insecurity it has wrought, serves as an accelerant of the present phase of the Great Unsettling”—shorthand for an intensifying era of instability, insecurity, uncertainty, and dislocation that is threatening our familiar lifeworlds (Steger & James, 2019). Dislocation is apparent in a dire list of imposed constraints, each translatable as an increment of deglobalization: global mobilities of various kinds have run up against major pandemic-related obstacles such as protracted and repeated national lockdowns, severe travel restrictions, extended travel quarantines, strict social distancing rules, and a noticeable shift to working-from-home. Still, we must be careful not to equate these dynamics with “deglobalization” tout court (Herrero 2020). The contributors to this volume highlight the manner in which the assumptions framing globalization are being reworked and reconfigured under what muster as crisis conditions. Their presentations are informed by terms familiar to global scholars: those of global convergence and its discontents, hybridity, syncretism (with the latter two concepts implying cultural amalgamation or mixing) and, of course, glocalization—the manner in which the mutual manifestations of the local and global are articulated (Robertson 1992; Roudometof 2016).

For many commentators, globalization implies secular integration along with the growth of a modal transplanetary consciousness. To be sure, the intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-space and world-time has been a profound development that led to an explosion in popularity of the buzzword “globalization” in the first place. Such casual usage often left too much unsaid. For one thing, globalization is a geographically uneven and highly contingent set of complex processes. Second, different forms of globalization both reflect and are constitutive of different historical configurations of power. Third, globalization involves multiple formations and agents of enhanced global spatial mobility, extension, and interchange. But this does not mean that more intense globalization always translates into hypermobility. At times, it also involves the rupture, slowing down, delay, and disconnection of existing social relations and networks. Fourth, as we noted above, while it is useful to make analytical distinctions between spatial scales running from the local to the global, we must remember that the world of lived social relations is glocal. Finally, subjective processes of globalization reflected in the mobility of ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies are just as important as objective dimensions manifest in globalized institutional and technological relations such as the transnational mobility of goods, capital, information, and people (Steger 2008). At the same time, however, it is worth noting that material global relations are always constituted in connection to ideational global relations. In short, a narrow understanding of globalization as thickening connectivity has always been too reductionist a description for a complex, non-linear, uneven, and often contradictory set of processes that are increasingly disjunctive, decentred and multipolar (Steger and James 2020). Globalization comprises, above all, multidimensional dynamics moving to different impulses that inflect economic life, culture, the environment, and, of course, politics (Axford 2013).

Understanding populism not only as a backlash against globalization but also as a globalizing force in its own right affords some purchase on an axial feature of this globalized world—the imbrication or antithesis of local and global, of difference and sameness—and gives it a piquant twist. A resilient antiglobalist strain of right-wing populism has been born over the past couple of decades, responding to the turbulence caused by the successes and failures of market globalization and its political and cultural avatars. Its ascent confirms the destabilization of once taken-for-granted shibboleths, including the central importance of the unfettered markets and the taken-for-grantedness of cosmopolitan elitism. Today’s chronic condition of the Great Unsettling brings traditional right-wing populism into a curious relationship with the alt-right, anarcho-capitalists, religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists and ‘anti-vaxxers’. In the United States, the successful convergence of surging Trumpists and more established Tea Partiers after 2016 compounded the situation. The spectre of “two Americas”—one Trumpist, perennially angry and even secessionist; the other clinging to the wreckage of liberal ideals while trying to negotiate the demands of identity politics—beggars both platitudes about reconciliation and earnest attempts such as those reflected in President Biden’s 2021 Inauguration Address, at least in the short-term.

And as a backdrop to such polarized politics is the strain of “antiglobalist populism” locked into a fierce decontestation struggle with market globalism over the meaning of globalization. It attempts to break the ideological hegemony of market globalism’s core concepts by attacking the five central claims of its neoliberal adversary: globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets; globalization is inevitable and irreversible; nobody is in charge of globalization; globalization benefits everyone; and globalization furthers the spread of democracy (Steger 2020). The objective of Trumpism is to challenge “globalization” and “globalism” in very specific ways that contrast sharply with the dominant neoliberal meanings. Yet, unlike the chief codifiers of justice globalism who attempted to formulate an ideological alternative to market globalism that drew on the rising global imaginary, populists like Trump, Farage, or Bolsonaro seek to reinvigorate a national imaginary that has come under significant strain by the destabilizing dynamics of globalization. Their challenge to market globalism resulted in a thickening of the ideational substance of populism that defies commonplace dismissals of the apparent flimsiness of its expressed ideas.

Thus, populism has been assembling a substantial political program that has strengthened its world-defining rallying call for antiglobalists everywhere. While ostensibly “antiglobalist,” most variants of populism are also at odds with more politically congenial manifestations of anti- or alter-globalization. This makes them uneasy bedfellows for much resistance to, most obviously, neoliberal globalization. So, populism—especially in its current resurgence—is a self-conscious challenge to globalization as commonly understood, but also manifests as the expression of a contested globality and is typical of its current phase. Their denunciation of globalization notwithstanding, national populists embrace globalism in many ways.

For example, antiglobalist populists are experts in utilizing the ideological echo chamber of the global social media. Whether they accuse footloose “cosmopolitans” of cheating the toiling masses or reproach the “liberal media” for spreading “fake news,” their preferred means of combat are Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Fattening the digital platforms of our “post-truth” age with “alternative facts,” they greatly benefit from electronic global flows that are today 50 times larger than only a decade ago. Contrary to their powerful siren song of deglobalization, antiglobalist populists have emerged as the new priests of “digital globalization.” Moreover, antiglobalist populists often engage in transnational economic activities for personal gain. Donald Trump is the epitome of this paradox. In fact, his eponymous brand comprises a global network of hotels from Honolulu to Rio de Janeiro. While his insistence on “making America great again” demands a shift from corporate globalism and free trade to economic nationalism and protectionism, he personally traveled in the opposite direction. Similarly, his desire to build a “beautiful wall” along the 1,989–mile US border with Mexico to keep undocumented immigrants out stands in stark contrast to his lucrative business practice of employing them.

Students of globalization often traffic a benign or neutral image of global complexity, unabashed by the liminal quality of a condition that so affronts many people who feel “left behind” by globalization. And the idea of being caught between somewhere and everywhere has a disturbing resonance, and demonstrably less appeal, when discussing what David Goodhart (2017) calls the “populist revolt” and when prefigured in accounts such as Arjun Appadurai’s (2006) “geographies of anger” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In his imagined landscape there is a visceral fear of strangers when they alight in the guise of terrorists, illegal immigrants, (some) refugees and many categories of mobile labor.

But it is not necessary to depict this modus as a simple, atavistic response to “out there” global forces, or a form of selective autarky when trafficked in political platforms that offer a nativist and exclusionary slant on migration, job protection and the preservation of cultural identity. Indeed, on the left of the political and academic spectrum, twenty-first century populism might pass for a more elemental reflex or “double movement” to the trammels of neoliberal globalization, as Karl Polanyi (2001) argued, playing out the dialectics of sameness and difference; domination and resistance, in glocal settings.

Today, populist rhetoric and appeals again display a good deal of vigor on the part of those economically “left behind” by globalization and those worried that immigration endangers national culture and values. The vista opened up by the globalization of populism does not just include the usual suspects such as Boris Johnson’s UK after Brexit; Germany according to Alexander Gauland’s Alternative for Germany (AfD); or Donald Trump’s rejection of the global liberal order in favor of a latter-day America-first Jacksonianism. Down-home national populism can be seen from Marseilles to Moscow, via France, Italy, Spain and Greece, Hungary and Poland. It is visible in Narendra Modi’s strain of Hindu nationalism in India and the “patronal authoritarianism” practiced by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

For many observers, populism presents as a political methodology or political technology or style of rhetoric/performance. There is some truth to it. There is an evanescent quality about populism that seems to locate it at some way from what passes as more “robust” and “grander” narratives of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and fascism. But we must not fall into the trap of essentializing populism as a “mere” rhetorical style devoid of normative and policy contents. Far from being static, conceptually frozen entities, populisms are dynamic formations capable of responding quickly and effectively to changes in their conceptual environment and political context. Given the right circumstances, ideologies strong in rhetoric and weak on ideas can thicken their ideational density and emotional power by adopting more concepts and assembling more sophisticated political programs. The changeability and adaptability of populism underscores the importance of contextual factors such as increasing inequality, growing migration flows, erosion of traditional collective identities, the decreasing legitimacy of conventional political institutions, and the segmentation of the digital media environment—all of which are likely to increase the resonance of antiglobalist populism’s ideological claims across a wide range of economic, cultural, and socio-political change associated with globalization. Ultimately, national populism at war with “globalization” might actually develop into an enduring ideological tradition—just as the originally thin ideational clusters of fascism and communism evolved into thickcentered conceptual constellations through fierce ideological struggles with more mature ideologies such as conservatism and socialism.

Finally, for all its embrace of absolutes, and use of them as a stick with which to beat opponents, the modus operandi of populist politics is to corrode the universalist assumptions and protections found in liberal-democratic polities. Erosion of trust in the routines of elite succession, in the rule of law and in mainstream media as a stalwart of the public sphere, chart the growing appeal of illiberal forms of democracy that are inimical to pluralism. And paradoxically, while being the selfproclaimed nemesis of neoliberal globalization, populism is a symptom of what is, or may be, globalization’s new illiberal and sovereigntist phase.

This mix, and the politics it spawns, plays differently across the world, but always coheres around perceived loss of identity, status, dignity, voice, respect and, of course, economic well-being (Goodwin, 2020). While playing to different cultural scripts in particular localities, and producing more-or-less agreeable politics to boot, these are modal issues and pointers towards long-term, large-scale, global change. So Laclau’s “empty signifier” aphorism, which saw populism as a kind of pro-tem arrangement while real politics dusts itself down, also admits a more challenging, and likely more worrying, interpretation of populism and its effects. In this interpretation it is not a variant of usual politics, or a periodic feature of systems that are disturbed while still tending to equilibrium, but a global moment in the disruption and transformation of modern politics, of modern life.

In the issue we invited contributors to reflect on the complex relationship between globalization and populism from a variety of perspectives and thematic preferences, in what is a very broad and deep prospectus. The ambition in this issue is to treat the imbrication of populism and globalization as both a datum in understanding the current unsettled state of globality and as a means of furthering the growing transdisciplinary field of global studies. The essays that follow, each written by a scholar of note and out of a wealth of disciplinary tradition and interdisciplinary ambition, engage with this prospectus thus:

Heikki Patomäki examines the causal and constitutive connections between neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism from a critical realism perspective. He offers a subtle and detailed analysis of the differences between his key concepts while also identifying significant overlaps. Ultimately, he argues that while neoliberalism cannot explain nationalist-authoritarian populism as such, neoliberal economic policies contributed to a structural crisis that facilitated the surge of nationalist-authoritarian populism.

Meanwhile, Victor Roudometof advances the provocative thesis that social theory has in large part downplayed the significance of the local in favor of the global. The author argues that this holds especially true with regard to the fashionable discourse of cosmopolitanism that eclipses empirical evidence for the rise of nation-based localisms. Thus, global theorists are in danger of missing the enduring, and even growing, centrality of locality and place as an underlying dynamic fueling the surge of national populism around the world.

Simon Tormey offers the highly original thesis that populism should be interpreted as a symptom of a larger crisis that has enveloped advancing liberal democracy and globalizing capitalism. Arguing for a sociological reading of populism, the author convincingly analyzes the significance some key factors to explain the populist surge: decline of traditional structures of authority and hierarchy; individualization and decline of collective identities; bureaucracy and complexification; globalization; and the new (social) media. Rather than exceptional, populism appears as an increasingly dominant and banal phenomenon that is endemic to crisis-ridden modern social life around the world.

Rico Isaacs pursues a highly original thesis that the study of contemporary populism could benefit from stronger efforts to situate it within a broader philosophy of history. To that end, the author introduces Vico’s corso e recorso of history—especially his cyclical thesis of oscillating heroic and human ages—as a suitable framework to expand our understanding of today’s populism as a recurring outcome of ‘the barbarism of reflection’ that ends the human phase.

Paul James’ essay explores the relationship between right-wing populism and contemporary fascism. He examines the ways in which fascism has changed since the 1920s and discusses how the answers to this question point to a global shift that can be called the Great Unsettling—including a postmodern fracturing of prior modern ‘certainties’ about the nature of subjectivity, political practice and meaning, deconstructing the consequences of ‘truth’.

Roland Benedikter’s sets out what he calls the five origins of European populism. His essay explores in detail a number of themes in the lexicon of the current debates about re-globalization and the changing warp of populist globalization as a process. It also carries a lively normative message, principally as to the required comportment of the European Union during a period of global change and dislocation, which prefigures, or may yet give rise to a post-populist era.

Analyzing what he calls a “perfect global storm” raging in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6/21, Roland Robertson’s contribution develops a perspective on global populisms based on what we might call “methodological glocalism.” In particular, he seeks to overcome the binary thinking involved in reading populism as either a specific local/national assemblage or a global phenomenon that feeds on the mobility of ideas and movements across national boundaries. Emphasizing the pivotal role of the social media as a perfect mediator between the local and global, Robertson critically engages a number of binary studies of populism to make his case for the “glocal method”—the centrality of analyzing of local-global relationships—in seeking to make sense of the enduring appeal of populism in the global age.

Finally, Jonathan Friedman’s essay makes a compelling argument for treating populism today as a feature of declining hegemony. He sees it as an invariant latent structure of modern capitalist societies and the nature of class relations. At the same time, he contends that a clearer understanding of the factors underlying populism, and which contribute to its undoubted, yet variable, successes, has been hindered by taken-for granted assumptions about its nature, both within the academy and on the part of elite opinion more generally.

References

Anselmi, M. (2018): Populism: An Introduction. London and New York. Routledge.

Appadurai, A. (2006): Fear of Small Numbers: As Essay on the Geographies of Anger. Durham, NC. Duke University Press.

Appadurai, A. (2013) Between Utopia and Despair: The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso.

Appelbaum, A. (2020) Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. London: Allen Lane.

Axford, B. (2021): Populism Versus the New Globalization, London. Sage (Swifts). Axford, B. (2013): Theories of Globalization. Cambridge. Polity.

Bennhold K. and Schwirtz, M. (2021): “Capitol Riot Puts Spotlight on ‘Apocalyptically-Minded’ Global Far Right.” New York Times (24 January). https:// www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/world/europe/capitol-far-right global.html? action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 24 January 2021.

Cohen, N. (2021): If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one, The Observer Newspaper, 17.01.2021. 48.

Cohen, N. (2020): We’re endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail, The Observer Newspaper, 25. 10.2020. 56.

Connolly, W. (2018) Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press euobserver (2021): US Congress riot: how did EU’s pro-Trump Right react?, Brussels. January 8.

Foa, R. and Mounk, Y. (2015) Across the globe, a growing disillusionment with democracy. New York Times, 15 September. Accessed at: www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/opinion/across-the-globe-a-growing-disillusionmentwith-democracy.html?_r=0.

Gerbaudo, P. (2017): The Mask and the Flag. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Goodhart, D. (2017): The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London. C. Hurts & Co.

Herrero, A. (2020): From Globalization to Deglobalization: Zooming into Trade.

Bruegel.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Globalization-desglobalization.pdf. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Judis, J (2016): The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.

Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Livesay, F. (2017): From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalization. New Yor. Vintage.

Lonergan, E. and Blyth, M. (2020) Angrynomics. New York: Agenda.

Mishra, P. (2018): The Age of Anger: The History of the Present. New York. Picador.

Moffitt, B. (2016): The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press.

Mouffe, C. (2018): For A Left Populism. London. Verso.

O’Sullivan, M. (2019): The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization. New York. Public Affairs.

Polanyi, K. (2001): The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. 2nd ed. Boston. Beacon Press.

Robertson, R. (1992): Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London. Sage.

Roudometof, V. (2016): Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. London and New York. Routledge.

Steger, M. B. (2008): The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Poltiical Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press.

Steger, M. B. (2020): Globalisms: Facing the Populist Challenge. Lanham, MD. Rowman & Littlefield.

Steger, M. B. and James, P. (2019). Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.

Steger, M. B. and James, P. (2020): “Disjunctive Globalization in the Era of the Great Unsettling.” Theory Culture & Society 37.7&8: 187–204.

Wodak, R., Khosravinik, M., and Mral, B., eds., (2013): Right-Wing Populisms in Europe. London. Bloomsbury.

YouGov Direct (2021): Most voters say the events at the US Capitol are a threat to democracy, January 7 2021. 12.20 AM GMT.

Part I Concepts and Contexts

Defining Populism and Fascism Relationally: Exploring Global Convergences in Unsettled Times

Paul James

Abstract

What is the relationship between right-wing populism and contemporary fascism? How has fascism changed since the 1920s? And how do the answers to these questions concern a global shift that can be called the Great Unsettling—including a postmodern fracturing of prior modern ‘certainties’ about the nature of subjectivity, political practice and meaning, deconstructing the consequences of ‘truth’? This essay seeks to respond to these questions by first going back to foundational issues of definition and elaborating the meaning of populism and fascism in relation to their structural ‘moving parts’. Using this alternative scaffolding, the essay argues that right-wing populism and an orientation to postmodern fascism represented by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have converged. The context of this convergence is a globalizing shift that now challenges democratic politics.

What rough beast is this thing called ‘populism’? And how, if at all, does it relate to authoritarian nationalist movements and fascisms? If we can immediately say that like those far-right phenomena, contemporary populism gains strength from civic conditions of upheaval and uncertainty, then a further question arises. What are the particular globallocal uncertainties that now give rise to contemporary right-wing populism and fascism? Some commentators have turned back to W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) to register the momentousness of the widening upheaval: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ However, even this slumping evocation does not help directly. Yes, Yeats was writing during the civil chaos of his homeland and in the wake of the first global war, but his primary lament is the modern assault on the stability of tradition, faith and truth. Yes, just as the ontological form of classical fascism was modern, contemporary populism has a modern constitutive layer, but confounding any simple characterization, contemporary populisms at the same time both generate new postmodern uncertainties and speak in the name of rooted values or tradition. They seek both to globalize their cause and to project the enhancement of ‘their’ nation against the world. And they both undermine epistemologies of modern and traditional truth, while claiming to voice matters of deeper verity.1

This essay seeks to define contemporary populism and fascism in the face of these convergences and contradictions, woven around four propositions. First, across the past few years we have been witnessing the consolidation of a new right-wing national populism which has clear associative connections with the content and form of the authoritarian nationalist populism that characterized 1920s to 1930s’ fascism. The concept of ‘associative connections’ is important here. Contrary to Frederico Finchelstein’s argument that ‘Modern populism was born out of fascism’ (2017: xxxiii), I am not suggesting that they have an intertwining historical genealogy except contingently and to the extent that fascism characteristically uses a populist form of address.2 And coming from a different angle, I am certainly not suggesting that contemporary right-wing populism is the soft masking of a deeper continuous history of fascism, even if contemporary populism in some of its guises and expressions can be fascist. Fascism is not a continuous brown thread twisting its way through modern history. Both populism and fascism are sensibilities and practices which arise because of people acting under very particular conditions.

The second proposition emphasizes a core temporal change. Despite a family resemblance, the new fascisms and populisms are based on bundling together very different kinds of constituency than either classical fascism of the 1920s–1940s or the populisms of the early twentieth century. This constituency cannot be understood predominantly in terms of the classical modern subjectivities of followership, loyalty and character. Rather they are clusters of persons formed through the tension between modern identity formation and postmodern projective individualism. This constituency of individuals tends to follow leaders contingently rather than with brown-shirt discipline. They think of themselves as informed political actors, often using the Internet to research circumstantial connections (a.k.a. conspiracy theories) that explain the tortured ties that bind their enemies. Third, this changed constituency makes the present ‘fascist turn’ of contemporary right-wing populism more uneven, more jagged and inconsistent than earlier formations, and thus more fragile than classical fascism—though potentially just as dangerous. Fourth, despite its anti-globalization rhetoric, the latest round of populist/fascist expressions have been fueled by intensifying processes of disjunctural globalization.

Taking these as points of orientation rather than as propositions to be developed in themselves, the essay is structured around an attempt to set out a list of moving parts of populism and fascism, and to set up useful working definitions. These two tasks are not the same thing, though the second should in theory become easier having explored the first. Nor are these two tasks simple: ‘populism’ and ‘fascism’ are essentially contested terms with countless definitions—most of which have problems. Nevertheless, to begin to discuss how contemporary populism and fascism might relate, it is necessary to at least establish the definitional ground for distinguishing between them. What are the criteria for a good definition? For one, a definition does not operate as an ideal type or pure form. Isaiah Berlin called such an approach ‘the Cinderella complex’:

that there exists a shoe—the word ‘populism’—for which somewhere there must exist a foot. There are all kinds of feet which it nearly fits, but we must not be trapped by these nearly fitting feet. The prince is always wandering about with the shoe; and somewhere, we feel sure, there awaits a limb called pure populism. This is the nucleus of populism, its essence (Berlin 1967, 8).

In short, a definition does not name a pure essence. However, having identified this definitional problem, it needs to be quickly added that evoking the Cinderella trope has all too often been used to avoid the difficult task of defining this complex constellation of phenomena (Canovan 1981; Fuentes 2020; cf. Tarchi 2013). For example, in a book that is supposed to lay foundational groundwork of understanding two basic phenomena, fascism and the far right, Peter Davies and Derek Lynch (2002) discuss problems of definition, and they include a glossary that seems to define everything else associated with those core concepts, but they perpetually defer defining ‘fascism’ and ‘far right’ as concepts in themselves.

More than that, there is consistent confusion in the literature based on conflating the two tasks of definition and characterization: a list of moving parts or orientations (characterization) does not automatically translate into a good definition, and nor should it. We still need to name the foundational features of a phenomenon (definition), if only to distinguish it from other things. In other words, the false reasonableness of invoking the Cinderella complex cannot be used as an excuse for embarking on the path around Kafka’s castle, circling round and round the phenomena without ever settling on what it actually is. All too often, writers fall back on either the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’, using that concept without the care it requires, or alternatively listing a series of characteristics or possible features to stand in for a definition.3 They suggest that when you find enough of these variable features you have found the thing. This has its own problems. For example, David Arter writes: ‘There is general agreement in the comparative literature that populism is confrontational, chameleonic, culture-bound and context-dependent’ (2010, 490). Given that all political phenomena align with at least two of those characteristics— culture-bound and context-dependent—and many with the other two as well, this is not a very helpful list.

We certainly need a set of orienting characteristics, but its elements should have meaningful specificity while allow for historical and geographical variation. That is our first task. Working definitions will follow. Here definitional nuance is intended to give us a fine-grained account of two movements within the tangled changes of contemporary globalization. In particular, the essay treats these phenomena within a global shift towards the emergence of a postmodern unsettling (Steger and James, 2019). That is, more than offering (just) a useful and novel exegesis of the concepts, this essay is intended as a contribution to understanding the disjunctures and convergences of our world-in-common.

What is Populism?

It does not matter much where we start in our quest to list a basic set of working parts relevant to populism. To begin with an obvious but often overlooked point, the term ‘populist’ in contemporary usage tends to be applied politically and analytically to others, usually by those who are deemed the enemies of ‘good’ populists: journalists, academics, establishment politicians, and other elites. Although occasionally a populist leader will provocatively acknowledge the term as relevant to defining their politics, there are now no self-identified national populist movements, and certainly no self-proclaimed global populist movements. This does not mean that there are no national or globalizing populist movements. It means, in the first instance, that naming a practice or ideology as populist does not suggest that its proponents will necessarily identify themselves as such. Taken from a different angle, it also implies that a definition should be normatively open enough for those who are identified by that name to potentially identify with it—even if they never do.4

This point can be added to our criteria for a good definition, but it is also relevant to the nature of populism: it tends not to name itself as such, and when it does, at least contemporarily, it leans towards doing so as an act of irony or provocation. Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Rally (Rassemblement national), once famously responded to journalists saying, ‘If [populism] means a government of the people, by the people and for the people, well then, I am a populist (Le Pen 2013).5 The obvious problem here is that Le Pen is disingenuously skewing a well-known definition of democracy towards naming populism. The loose resemblance depends upon her fudging the populist meaning of the concept of ‘people’. Populism, as distinct from democracy, does not inclusively address ‘all the people’ in a political community; it separates out some of those people as the Others to its core rassemblement.

Here, in this simple example, we arrive at a second and third elemental characteristic of all populisms, including national, right-wing and left populism. The second: populism gathers its ‘people’ by excluding some: in particular, those it explicitly names as Others. For the Right this group of Others variously includes outsiders, elites, technocrats, or establishment figures, as well as those who would intrude across the boundaries of the nation-state: refugees and uninvited migrants. Left populism is rhetorically more inclusive in addressing ‘the people’, but nevertheless does define its Others, albeit in class or kindred terms. The third: populists work around a core ideological invocation of the will of the people or some variation—even if this ideology is loosely developed and often contradictorily applied. This characteristic of invoking and speaking to the aspirations of ordinary people against others, ushers in a further dimension: the active tendency to identify its counter-expressions—its enemies. As Victor Órban (2020) intoned during his 2020 State of the Nation speech: ‘Enemies all around us. This meant political quarantine, economic isolation, debilitated national defence, cultural solitude and spiritual loneliness.’ He then characteristically identifies the enemy as producing a long struggle: ‘So, we hunkered down and set our sights on survival. We knew we had to wait: wait until the enemy state formations weakened, and the key was duly given to us.’ And thus, the speech moves to a further dimension—projected hope and redemption. Órban continues: ‘This is what happened. Legend has it that one hundred years ago, Apponyi also said that although Hungary’s grave had been dug, we Hungarians would be there at the funerals of our gravediggers.’

Towards a List of the Moving Parts of Populism

Instead of elaborating upon this discussion of the characteristics of populism, which others have done with much more depth and acuity (Wiles 1969; Müller 2016; Axford 2021), drawing upon those writings and others we can now lay out the combinate orientations of populism. Ten categories have been chosen in order to facilitate a meaningful comparison with fascism in the next section; it could have been many more, but ten is a classic number of sufficient complexity to cover what we need:

1. Appellation: a tendency not to name itself as such.

2. Constituency: an amorphously defined but (assumed) politically related community of individuals, excluding specified Others such as ‘elites’. This constituency is variously ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’, as distinct from all citizens of a nation-state in the formal universal sense or denizens in the broad geographical sense.

3. Communication: a politics of spectacle and hope, addressing ‘the people’, and appealing to those who are frustrated, humiliated, frightened, or who at least are either seeking some kind of future redemption or return to a stronger past. An evocative and concrete use of language, drawing upon stories and images expressing the hopes of ordinary people. An amplification of the voice and face of the leader through extended communications technologies that are managed so as to emphasize the unmediated and the authentic.

4. Ideology: a variable set of framing ideas depending upon context and time, sometimes thick with associative connections to nationalism and anti-globalism, sometimes thin.

5. Subjectivity: a culture of heroism, focussing on the individual who becomes strong by acting in concert with others. A variable orientation to gender and ethnic relations (at least in relation to those who are part of ‘us’), though tending to follow mainstream understandings for good and ill.

6. Leadership and followership: an exaltation of the strong leadership of an outsider to mainstream politics, thus involving a contradictory advocacy of popular elitism, without that leader necessarily being skilled at the art of governance. A calling together of the aggrieved.

7. Organization: a variable set of possibilities, ranging from disorganized to authoritarian, aimed at enhancing the power of its constituency through political action now.

8. Engagement: a fear of intruders, a rejection of social difference, and a disdain for internal disagreement or external critique. A tendency to treat social life as an ongoing struggle between friends and enemies.

9. Epistemology: a culture of circumstantial certainty (from fixed to mobile) based on intuition and proclaimed practical consciousness, associated with a distrust of those intellectuals and critics who are abstracted from ‘the people’ by virtue of their claim to objective counter-knowledges. A receptiveness to explanations based on circumstantial evidence, including internal and external conspiracies.

10. Ontology: variously modern and postmodern with occasional modern incursions into neo-traditional nostalgia.

In these terms, populism is a much more complex phenomenon than just a mode of address. It involves ideological projection—sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner—to a constituency which knows itself even if it does not name itself. In the provocative words of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ‘We are the people. Who are you?’ (cited in Müller 2016: 3). Beyond that calling together of a constituency, populism variously presents as ‘a style of political behaviour, as a set of beliefs and principles that form the basis of a political culture, as a rhetorical register, or as a formula of legitimation that can act as the basis of a regime’ (Tarchi 2013, 124). The right-wing version of this ideology and practice can be summarized as ‘our people against the world’. Here we find the generic basis of contemporary populism’s tendency towards relative anti-globalization. In turn, the relativizing nature of Donald Trump’s anti-globalist populism leads to a further layer of rethinking: populism in its form is now stretched between the modern and the postmodern. As Barrie Axford’s summarizes the changing nature of contemporary populisms and its new postmodern turn,

these features of populist mobilization can be understood as a postmodern phenomenon, subsisting on an unlikely combination of cynicism and credulity on the part of disaffected publics now less anchored by the pull of firm identification, and circulating in a media firmament that augments—and seems to thrive on—hyperbole and allegory. This is a politics of paradox (2021, 21–22).

Considering these key elements, and leaving the definition open enough to handle its right-wing, left-wing variants, its historical changes, and its ontological tensions, the definition of populism becomes surprisingly simple: populism is a political practice in which leaders draw upon ideas that speak to a disaffected constituency of the people— themselves understood in self-conscious contradistinction to named Others—offering collective redemption and seeking increased political power.

What is Fascism?

Whereas ‘populism’ tends to be used as term of diminishment, ‘fascism’ is now hurled as a weapon of abuse. Using the term ‘fascist’ to name someone’s political position can never be taken lightly. Too often it is attached to the ultimate political insult: ‘Nazi’, a very particular form of fascism. I do want to suggest that in some of their political expressions and practices, and to varying degrees of intensity, political figures such as Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Marine Le Pen, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, can be described as fascist. However, this needs to be based on a process of carefully defining fascism and generalizing the concept beyond either insult or amassing details of its historical roots in Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista.

The question has been causing a new round of consternation since Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. Madeleine Albright’s book Fascism: A Warning is fascinating in this regard. She writes: ‘If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab’ (2018, 4–5). She mentions Donald Trump dozens of times; however, she never describes him directly as such. Nevertheless, starting with a trickle, and intensifying in 2017 and 2018, commentators began asking ‘Is Donald Trump a Fascist?’.

Most responses, such as the headline article ‘I Know Fascists: Donald Trump Is No Fascist’ in The Atlantic Monthly (Riotta 2016), say ‘no’, effectively normalizing Trump as an inconsistent maverick. Riotta lived through Mussolini’s fascism and argues that Trump is no Mussolini: ‘I know Americans will not goose-step down Broadway; no screaming squadraccia of middle-aged Trump fans will occupy Grand Central’. Maybe not, but the storming and occupying of the Capitol in January 2021 by Trump supporters suggests otherwise. In any case, blanket disavowal does not help us to understand the phenomenon in its broadest sense. In this way, critique is delegitimized in favour of narrow historical specificity. President Donald Trump is thus normalized as a messy crank with a few foibles and some ugly rhetoric. Alternatively, one early Newsweek article, again headed by this very question, answered, ‘I do not use that word as an insult only. It is accurate’ (Tucker 2015). Unfortunately, except for throwing other associated concepts such as ‘nativistic jingoism’ and ‘totalitarian’ into the mix, the article left the undefined concept to do its own work. This is a general weakness in the field. Most mainstream commentators do not go back to the question of what fascism actually is—or if they do, the definition is either so loose as to be meaningless or so tight as to miss the generality of different kinds of fascisms. It remains critically important that we do this definitional work so that naming (or not) does not turn into the same kind of roving rhetorical politics of accusation that some populists effect. Indiscriminate use of the term diminishes our understanding of a practice and ideology that potentially has horrendous implications.

Towards a List of the Moving Parts of Fascism

There is a huge amount of work to be done here, but given that the acts of characterization and definition are only a foundation for other equally necessary work, here again there is only the space to describe the end point of that journey. Drawing upon a series of writers—including variously Umberto Eco (1995), Michael Mann (2004), Robert Paxton (2004) and Roger Griffin (2018), a definitional foundation of fascism can be built out of its changing orientations and characteristics. With this, and also with the definition that follows, I have tried hard to keep the list normatively open and capacious, but sufficiently tight to be meaningful. Here again, our critique should be of the practice, not effected through the definition itself.

1. Appellation: a proud naming of itself as fascist in its early movements, but now with an avoidance of doing so publicly because those earlier associations are now anathema to the vast majority of people.

2. Constituency: a carefully defined political community—the racialized nation—as distinct from all citizens of a nation-state in the formal universal sense or denizens in the geographical sense.

3. Communication: a politics of spectacle, addressing a ‘chosen’ people, and appealing to those who have had histories of frustration or humiliation, and who now seek either some kind of future redemption or return to a stronger past. An evocative but relatively impoverished language-set that limits the instruments for critical thinking. A populist amplification of the voice and face of the leader through extended communications technologies that are managed so as to emphasize the unmediated and the authentic.

4. Ideology: