In the 2010s it described an insurgent rhetorical style; in the 2020s it is inadequate to account for the wildly diverging fates of the left and right
“P
opulism” may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.
Now, with the fortunes of the two political poles heading in different directions – the right gaining ground across the west while much of the left struggles to rebound from serial defeats – the notion that this word could encompass such different players seems even less plausible. For a lucid account of these forces, we might have to shift our focus elsewhere: finding terms that can explain their unequal balance of power, so that we can in turn find the proper remedy.
The difficulty of separating the real nature of populism from the fraught discourse that surrounds it is telling, because among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to “the people”: these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about “unity” and “consensus” for the hard semantic distinction between “us” and “them”.
