The roots of populism

Neoliberalism and working-class lives

Brian Elliott

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526136992
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What has led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers' movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years.

1

Populism and popular sovereignty: paradoxes of democracy

The rise of populism

In 2016, with the UK’s Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump as US president, media and academic attention was turned towards the phenomenon of populism with a hitherto unprecedented sense of urgency. One of the key questions that emerged was whether the tectonics of liberal democracy were shifting in some fundamental, historic way. In order to respond to this question, a necessary preliminary step is to provide a sufficiently nuanced account of what is being captured by the term ‘populism’. While recent assessments of contemporary populism – such as the one offered by Eatwell and Goodwin (2018) – rest their argument on statistical evidence of voting patterns, the approach pursued here is largely the conceptual one of philosophically informed political theory. While the obvious disadvantage of such a methodology is its speculative nature, its advantage, arguably, is that it becomes possible to penetrate through to something more fundamental about the object of investigation.

While the majority of academic studies, and media accounts a fortiori, consider populism through a short-term lens of the last ten or twenty years, in this book I consider it through a much longer time frame. This will involve, in the following chapter, recounting certain elements of the British nineteenth-century workers’ movements. But before any historical reconstruction of the historic origins of populism can be attempted, preliminary reflection on its nature is necessary.

The first, and obvious, thing to say is that populism is a contested concept. As indicated in the introduction, the general trend in academic treatments is to see it as a recrudescence of far-right ideology, including extreme forms of nativist nationalism. In their impressively synoptic assessment of ‘national populism’, Eatwell and Goodwin (2018: 5–6) identify what they call the ‘Four Ds’ that distinguish this phenomenon: distrust of politicians, destruction of national historical identity, deprivation due to relative inequality, and de-alignment between traditional mainstream parties and the people. Of these four features of populism, the analysis offered in this book will lay stress mostly on the last, somewhat on the first and third, and hardly at all on the second.

The underlying reason for emphasizing the disjunction between party and people derives from the nature of party-political democracy. The people in a liberal, representative democracy articulate their preferences through a choice between parties. In ‘first past the post’ voting systems in nations such as the UK and US, this has historically come down to expressing a preference for one of two dominant parties. Since the early 1980s, as neoliberal political common sense has become hegemonic, a drift towards centrism has led to widespread cynicism and disenchantment with democratic party politics. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, this tendency towards popular political disenchantment has increasingly manifested itself in large-scale voting success for non-traditional parties or politicians. The appeal here is often more rhetorical than real in terms of bringing about deep social and political change. Nevertheless, the overall loss in faith in mainstream political parties is, I believe, a fundamental hallmark of contemporary populism.

To distinguish the approach to populism adopted here from another, well-established authority in this area, consider the definition of populism offered by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2012). Populism, they assert, should be understood as ‘a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the People’ (2012: 8). What this definition misses, and is crucial to the analysis offered here, is the relationship between ‘the people’ and liberal democratic party politics. Political parties mediate the relationship between the state and the people.

Further, Mudde and Kaltwasser, while granting some validity to the idea of progressive populism defended by Laclau and Mouffe (considered in detail below), insist that their notion of radical democracy is ‘not a viable concept’ and ‘lacks a clear definition’ (2012: 15). This assessment stems from the fact that Mudde and Kaltwasser believe that, at the conceptual level, populism may or may not strengthen democratic political culture. While recognizing this, the analysis offered in this book seeks to draw out precisely the potential of populism to realize democracy as something ‘radical’, namely as the generalized capacity on the part of the populace to determine their own material conditions of everyday existence.

The growth of populism raises the question to what extent the disenchantment with mainstream party politics is a rejection of democratic politics in general. For those analyses of populism that accentuate links with far-right xenophobic nationalism, the answer to this question is that populism entails a desire to do away with democratic politics in favour of authoritarianism. In contrast to this dominant trend, the underlying thesis of the current analysis is the following: populism gives voice to a desire to renew the connection between liberal democratic party politics and the people. Otherwise stated: populism has arisen precisely to bring the systemic rift between the political class (including the party apparatus) and the people (primarily, the working class) into the centre of political consciousness and debate.

It follows from this thesis that populism and democracy are not to be considered incompatible or alien with respect to each other. Nor, however, does it suffice to point, in the words of Mudde and Kaltwasser (2012: 205), to ‘the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy’. Admittedly, the approach adopted to populism in this book is predicated on a certain understanding of contemporary British politics. Rather than maintaining a properly academic neutrality on populism, the analysis offered here is directed by the strong intuition that it functions as a necessary corrective to a sclerotic democratic party-political apparatus, whose highly stage-managed media appearances seem ever more distant from working-class lives.

It is also necessary to admit that, as I indicated in the introduction, there is a personal motivation to my making this argument. Coming of age in the northwest of England in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s succession of Conservative governments, it was striking to me how complacent and patronizing Conservative politicians were in the face of the decaying post-industrial landscapes that translated into interminable bleakness and depression for the population of northern England. Leaving school in 1986 at the age of sixteen, I was told by a school employment counsellor that I may as well stay in education as ‘there’s nothing else out there for you’. This book, then, in a certain way repays a debt to an educational system that provided me with a way out of social and economic uselessness.

The makeover of the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair a decade later may have, in the short term at least, made the party more electable. But the three terms of office enjoyed by Labour from 1997 to 2010 seem to have come at the very high price of driving a wedge between the party and the so-called Labour heartlands in the economically deprived north of England. Guardian columnist John Harris (like me, born in Cheshire in 1969) captured the slow-motion collapse of working-class support for Labour immediately following Labour’s 2019 general election defeat: ‘This struggle is borne out in Labour’s falling vote share over 20 years: in Tony Blair’s former seat of Sedgefield, in County Durham, a 71% figure in 1997 was followed by 65% in 2001, then 59% four years later, and 45% in 2010. On Thursday, when the Tories took the seat, it had fallen to 36%’ (Harris, 2019).

In the face of such a decline in vote share in the Labour heartlands, the question is why working-class voters shifted their allegiance to what they largely still recognize as their historical enemy, the Conservative Party. Just before the 2019 UK general election, Harris reflected on his decade-long video project investigating popular opinion in places peripheral to the UK media-sphere, Anywhere but Westminster. In a long-form piece for the Guardian (Harris and Domokos, 2019), he remarked: ‘Lots of analysis and data since that referendum has cast doubt on the idea that Brexit was some kind of working-class revolt. But all across Britain, in neglected places that rarely saw TV cameras, we had met people who were voting to leave the EU as a way of calling for change: to be heard.’ This desire for political recognition among working-class constituents is, I argue in this book, a primary driver of contemporary populism in liberal democracies.

To make the same point in a different way, the argument advanced here is that populism registers an unsatisfied desire, primarily among working-class voters, for demonstrable democratic accountability on the part of their political representatives. What the Brexit vote and the two ensuing UK general elections in 2017 and 2019 seemed to make clear was that large swathes of the electorate were reacting to a felt lack of recognition of them and accountability towards them on the part of their political representatives. While there was only a small majority (52 per cent to 48 per cent) in favour of Britain leaving the EU in the June 2016 referendum (see Guardian, 2016), the fact that the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn between 2016 and 2019, was not prepared unambiguously to back the UK’s withdrawal from the EU appears to have radically alienated it from its traditional working-class supporters. This very much played into the hands of Conservative leader Boris Johnson’s simple pledge to ‘get Brexit done’ in the 2019 general election.

It is one thing to contend that contemporary populism is not, in essence, anti-democratic; it is quite another to demonstrate, in positive terms, how populism gives voice to a collective desire to renew democratic political culture. In common with populism itself, the very notion of democracy is highly contested. Political discourse on democracy has become mired in commonplaces about ‘free and fair elections’ and the ‘international rule of law’. While not wishing to deny that these are important political desiderata, what is needed is a more concrete sense of democratic political community. Accordingly, I will understand ‘democracy’ in this book as a kind of collective lived experience, along the lines of what Raymond Williams famously termed a ‘structure of feeling’ (1961: 63). To flesh this out, our first task is to construct a compelling and suitably nuanced concept of democracy.

To advance my argument, therefore, in this chapter I will draw on the political theory of Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe. In conjunction, these thinkers mount a consistent and cogent challenge to the hegemonic liberal view of democracy as a procedural set of norms pertaining to the internationally recognized ‘rule of law’. The work of Jürgen Habermas is foundational in constructing and advancing this conception of democratic politics. Habermas’s notions of communicative action (1985) and discourse ethics (1990) laid the foundations for further elaborations of ‘deliberative democracy’ (see Gutmann and Thompson, 1996), which grasp democratic culture as governed by an overriding drive towards consensus-building and transparent agreement guided by universal norms.

By contrast, Laclau, Rancière and Mouffe view the dynamics of democratic culture through the lens of dissent and disagreement. Crucially, from the 1980s on, they also anticipated the rise of populism across liberal and social democracies as the traditional parties of the left drifted ever further from their roots in nineteenth-century socialism and the popular workers’ movements. What is common to these theorists is the recognition that democracy rests on an irresolvable question about adequately representing ‘the people’. For these thinkers, the notion of popular sovereignty is at once the basis for and most challenging issue of modern democratic theory.

Democracy and disagreement

Jacques Rancière is an influential contemporary French philosopher whose writings, spanning five decades, centre on issues of labour and work, society and politics, and aesthetics and knowledge. Some of his more overtly political works are Disagreement (1999 [1995]) and Hatred of Democracy (2006). In his earlier work Proletarian Nights (2012), published in 1981, Rancière documented and analysed in great detail the writings of nineteenth-century French artisans which expressed their dreams of economic and social emancipation. In the preface to the new English translation, Rancière notes: ‘If this book goes against the current now, in an age which proclaims the disappearance of the proletariat, it should be remembered that it also did so at a time that still upheld the consistency of the working class united by the condition of the factory and the science of capitalist production’ (2012: viii).

As Rancière goes on to clarify, it was the Marxist belief in worker ‘false consciousness’ which he sought to dispel in this his early book: that is, the idea that only an ‘enlightened’ working class can be politically effective. An analogous thesis guides Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991 [1987]), a study of the eighteenth-century Belgian pedagogue Joseph Jacatot, who advanced the radical idea that any learner already contains within themselves what is needed for their own self-development and emancipation.

The common thread running through Rancière’s thought is that ‘the people’ assert their desire to be seen and heard against the constant resistance of those who deem them unqualified to speak. We can readily recognize how this idea lends itself to the treatment of populism. As noted, populism presents itself through an oppositional logic between an ‘Us’ of the people and a ‘Them’ of the established political and cultural elite. As indicated in the introduction, the dominant interpretation of this ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ dichotomy is that it is, at base, driven by exclusive nationalism and xenophobic nativism. What Rancière’s line of thinking does here is open a space within which populism can be seen, instead, as an essential dynamic within progressive democratic political culture.

In his more recent work, Rancière has tended to focus his political critique on the hypocritical denial by the liberal democratic establishment that they employ mechanisms of technocratic authoritarianism to maintain order within the political community. In Rancière’s rather idiosyncratic terms, this tendency towards technocratic rule reduces ‘the political’ proper to a managerial form of governance he refers to as ‘the police’. As Rancière puts this in Disagreement: ‘Democracy is more precisely the name of a singular disruption of this order of distribution of bodies as a community that we proposed to conceptualize in the broader concept of the police. It is the name of what comes and interrupts the smooth working of this order through a singular mechanism of subjectification’ (1999: 99).

According to Rancière’s analysis, since the 1980s Western liberal democracies have become increasingly dominated by methods of ‘the police’, to the detriment of what he considers ‘the political’, this latter being considered an open-ended process of popular contestation. ‘The police’ and ‘the political’ represent for him dialectical terms held in dynamic tension rather than mutually exclusive formations of the political community. Rancière also argues that the neoliberal configuration of politics, with its attendant political theory of consensus-driven deliberative democracy, has resulted in a condition of ‘postdemocracy’. Commenting on the ubiquity of opinion polls, for instance, he remarks: ‘The utopia of postdemocracy is that of an uninterrupted count that presents the total of “public opinion” as identical to the body of the people’ (1999: 103).

For Rancière, both in theory and in practice the emergence of modern democracy centres the permanent contestation of political power in and through ‘the people’. As he notes, the history of actually existing liberal democracy can be read in terms of various protracted efforts to subvert, limit or circumvent this appeal to popular sovereignty. On Rancière’s view, appeal to the popular will amounts to asserting a political principle that constantly interrupts and questions any time-honoured source of legitimacy. Further, appealing to ‘the people’ involves calling on nobody in particular – that is, on everyone regardless of any particular knowledge or other qualif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Populism and popular sovereignty: paradoxes of democracy
• 2 Democracy and the working class
• 3 The invention of working-class culture
• 4 Work and the working class now
• 5 The politics of work
• Conclusion
• References
• Index