Dedication
For Ash and Will
Acknowledgements
This book was written over the course of 2018 and 2019, in the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in the National School of Arts at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. I am grateful for the generous support and opportunities provided by both institutions, and am particularly thankful to my kind colleagues in both places whose conversations and feedback have made this book much better. At Uppsala, I wish to thank my colleagues in the political theory seminar – Sofia Näsström, Anthoula Malkopoulou, Gina Gustavsson, Sverker Gustavsson and Johan Wejryd – for helping me think through a number of the arguments presented here. At my new institutional home, the Australian Catholic University, my thanks go to Mark Chou, Rachel Busbridge, Naser Ghobadzadeh, Noah Riseman and Michael Ondaatje, who gave me helpful feedback and advice and made me feel at home so quickly after my return to Australia. Outside these institutions, I am grateful to Jonathan Kuyper, Simon Tormey, John Keane, Benjamin de Cleen, Yannis Stavrakakis, Pierre Ostiguy and Francisco Panizza, whose conversations and correspondence have all contributed to the thinking I develop in this book. I also benefitted from feedback on papers and presentations that touched on some of the issues contained here – all made at the ARENA Centre for European Studies in Oslo (April 2018) and at the UK Political Studies Association’s Populism Specialist Group Workshop in Bath (March 2018). Lastly, I am grateful to all my colleagues in the world of populism studies whose work I cite and engage with in this book: without their research, I wouldn’t have anything to write about, agree strongly with, get mad about, or analyse in depth here. Despite what it may look like to outsiders, the world of populism studies is actually an intellectually diverse, heterogeneous, open and friendly one, and I am very thankful for my colleagues’ generally open-minded and good-natured approach to academia – it’s a real rarity.
I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments on the initial proposal for this book made it much sharper and ensured that I did not just slip into the all-too-common tendency to examine Eurocentric conceptions and examples of populism; and even more so to the four anonymous reviewers who reviewed the draft manuscript, providing perhaps the most constructive, fair and useful comments I have received in all my time of writing about populism. At Polity Press, many thanks to George Owers for commissioning the book and for his sharp and astute comments on the text, and to Julia Davies for her editorial assistance. Thanks also to Manuela Tecusan, whose meticulous and keen-eyed copy-editing improved the text immensely. The book is much better as a result of all these people’s generosity and hard work.
This research was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding scheme (project DE190101127).
Elements of Chapter 5 first appeared in ‘Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern Europe’, in Politics and Governance (Moffitt 2017b), published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. I thank Cogitatio Press for permission to have these elements republished in this book.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Ash and Will. Ash has patiently listened to me drone on about populism for almost a decade now, and has asked the tricky questions that have helped me clarify what I am talking about when things sounded a little woolly; on the other hand, Will has distracted me from finishing this book as best as he could. For both those things – and, more importantly, for their love and support – I am eternally grateful!
Melbourne, June 2019
1 Why Populism Matters
If there is one concept that seems to have captured the flavour of global politics in the twenty-first century, it is populism. Used to describe a wide range of disruptive and prominent leaders (Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Hugo Chávez), parties (Podemos, One Nation, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany)), movements (Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados) and even events (Brexit), the term has become a popular catch-all for diagnosing all that is exciting, worrying or dysfunctional in contemporary democracies worldwide. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary named populism its ‘Word of the Year’ for 2017, referring to its importance as ‘a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2017).
Indeed, the term seems to link leaders, movements and parties that had previously seemed to have nothing to do with one another: what on earth does the right-wing Donald Trump have in common with the left-wing Occupy Wall Street, beyond a general distaste for ‘the elite’? What policies does the socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia share with the nativist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands? In what world can we link a so-called ‘populist uprising’ in the case of Brexit with the success of a foul-mouthed president of the Philippines who advocates the extrajudicial killings of drug users?
To add to this confusion, after years of being something of a ‘four-letter word’ that hardly any politicians would dare claim for themselves, populism has begun to be openly celebrated as a label and used by political actors as a self-descriptor. Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist under Trump and former executive chairman of Breitbart News, proudly labelled the anti-elite movement he helped foment around Trump as ‘Jacksonian populism’ (see Rose 2017) and said that he is aiming to set up ‘the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement’ (see Horowitz 2018). Alexander Gauland, the leader of Alternative für Deutschland, has declared of his party that ‘[w]e are a populist movement and proud of it’ (cited in Deloy 2017: 5). Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, has stated of his MoVimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and Lega government that, ‘if populism is the attitude of listening to people’s needs, then we lay a claim to it’ (see ANSA 2018). Meanwhile, the Spanish Podemos party openly views itself as populist, laying claim to a theoretical project of left-wing populism (Errejón and Mouffe 2016). In a rather short period of time, it seems that the term ‘populism’ has shed its scarlet letter associations for politicians across the political spectrum and taken on instead something of a positive hue for signalling a lack of complicity with ‘the elite’ and a sense of being in touch with ‘the people’.
The positive view is not shared by ‘the elite’, however: for many mainstream politicians across the globe, populism has become the single biggest threat to democracy in the contemporary political landscape. In 2010 the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, called populism ‘the greatest danger to the contemporary West’ (as quoted in Jäger 2018), while the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has warned against ‘galloping populism’ on the continent (see Ellyatt 2016). Tony Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, argues that populists ‘pose a real threat to democracy itself’ (Eiermann, Mounk and Gultchin 2017). Even the pontiff, Pope Francis, has spoken out about this phenomenon, stating that ‘[p]opulism is evil and ends badly’ (in di Lorenzo 2017).
Accompanying the popular interest in populism has been a veritable explosion of work on this topic in academic literature. While the concept has enjoyed widespread usage and in-depth analysis in the literatures on European and on Latin American politics as well as in political theory over the past two decades or so, the twin 2016 populist shocks – Trump’s victory and the outcome of the Brexit referendum – saw populism move from being a relatively marginal topic in the discipline of political science to being one of its hottest – and most hotly debated. This sudden escalation in importance saw a vast number of researchers who worked on themes even remotely related to populism suddenly become ‘experts’ on it
