The roots of populism: Neoliberalism and working-class lives

Introduction

Since the Brexit referendum result in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016, ‘populism’ has become one of the keywords of contemporary political discourse. Both events have precipitated a predictable torrent of writing, both in the popular media and in academia. The underlying consensus across these accounts is that populism represents, at base, a cardinal threat to the values and possibly even the continued existence of democratic culture. This threat is often articulated in terms of an extreme polarizing between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ within political logic and representation. As Cas Mudde (2018) notes: ‘Most scholars use populism as a set of ideas focused on an opposition between the people (good) and the elite (bad).’ To the extent that the Brexit (British exit from the EU) referendum result is recognized as a key symptom of British populism, this is similarly viewed as a largely negative protest vote. As William Davies, who has written extensively on populism for the Guardian and in monographs, remarks, ‘it seems clear that – beyond the rhetoric of Great Britain and democracy – Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel guilty for giving way to’ (Davies, 2016: 22).

Finally, academic studies of populism predominantly accentuate linkages with nativism, xenophobia and right-wing extremism (see Miller-Idriss and Pilkington, 2019; Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Traverso, 2019). In the US, following Donald Trump’s presidential victory, this is often accounted for in terms of an ongoing backlash against the rise of ‘liberal values’. As Pippa Norris (2016) noted in the run-up to Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign: ‘Trump’s support appears to be fueled by a backlash among traditionalists (often men and the less educated) faced with rising American support for issues such as gay marriage, sexual equality, and tolerance of social diversity’ (Norris, 2016). While I do not deny there is a degree of truth to these academically hegemonic treatments of populism, I align my analysis with another, quite distinct interpretation.

In this book, I argue that populism should be chiefly viewed as a reassertion of the original demand that gave rise to modern democracy. That demand is that the working class – a notion I will elaborate on in what follows – have visible, credible and generalized control over the material conditions of social existence, including control over the conditions of work. Accordingly, the thesis of this book is that populism should not be seen, at base, as a threat to but rather as a reassertion of modern democratic culture. Thus, it is not a question of populism or democracy, but rather populism within and for the sake of democracy.

In order to make this argument plausible, it will be necessary to characterize in detail those aspects of populism that are consistent with a reassertion of the cardinal democratic demand. Thus, while the analysis advanced in this book does not contest the claim that the current populist wave is in part motivated by nativist and nationalistic sentiments, it deliberately focuses on what might crudely be called the non-oppressive, properly democratic intent I contend underlies populism. If, on the contrary, populism is seen exclusively as an anti-liberal and anti-democratic political trend, then the idea that it represents a valid critique of the current state of liberal democracy is precluded in advance. My hope is that the underlying argument of this book is sufficiently novel to be engaging, but not so eccentric as to seem insupportable.

How then can populism be seen as a reassertion of the original democratic impulse? The key insight here is to view the rise of populism in the twenty-first century as an adverse reaction not to social liberalization but rather to economic and cultural neoliberalization. Accordingly, it is a matter of demonstrating how the shift to neoliberal governance, in the UK and other liberal democracies in the early 1980s, involved a political project inherently opposed to democracy understood as popular control over material conditions. Since that time, the norm of a self-determining collective democratic citizenry has been displaced by what Foucault, in a series of lectures delivered in 1979, notably characterized as a political-economic regulative ideal of the individual as ‘entrepreneur of himself’ (2008: 226). This involves an ideological as well as an institutional shift. Rather than allowing the populace to become self-organizing and self-determining social agents, neoliberal governance permits collective self-determination only within the framework of consumption-based corporate monopoly capitalism. Under the neoliberal aegis, workers are asked time and again to sacrifice the desire to control their own conditions of existence to the needs of an anonymous national and global economy. Eclipsing and dissolving the political into a particular paradigm of the economic is a salient hallmark of neoliberalism.

Progressively alienated from a two-hundred-year-old legacy of agitation and self-organization, under neoliberalism the working class in the UK and other liberal democracies has experienced the collapse of traditionally left-leaning political parties into mere creatures of hegemonic corporate interests. This process reached a transparently grotesque point when the 2008 Great Recession hit. At this point, the lurid contrast between homeowners being evicted due to defaulting on their mortgage loans and bank CEOs (chief executive officers) netting millions of dollars in bonuses become socially explosive. The Occupy movement was the most visible expression of popular outrage. But this was, ultimately, short-lived and lacked the coherent political demands needed to generate a movement with staying power and the clout to change the political system fundamentally. This book is far from unique in highlighting the pivotal interconnections between the Great Recession, neoliberalism and the rise of liberal democratic populism (see Judis, 2016). What is more distinctive about the analysis offered here, however, is its recognition that populism carries within it an appeal to the original and radical demand of democracy in the form of popular control over social existence.

From the perspective of British social history, the time span of neoliberalism is roughly the time of my own life. I was born in 1969 into a working-class family in northern England. My parents knew first-hand the deprivations of working-class poverty growing up in Liverpool in the 1930s and 1940s, years of economic recession followed by the straightened circumstances of the wartime and immediate post-war economy. They married in the 1950s and left their home city – extensively bombed and subsequently significantly depopulated – on the promise of better-paid work and a council home on the other side of the Mersey. Given this background, the personal motivation in writing this book is twofold. First, it represents an acknowledgement of the kinds of working-class culture in which I grew up. This culture is sharp-witted and caustic, involving close social ties and a general cynicism about the world beyond itself. Growing up, I felt this working-class milieu to be narrow-minded, incurious and stultifying. I think I can now see its merits in a way I could not forty or even twenty years ago.

Second, and closely related to the first point, I feel called upon to validate certain aspects of the working-class culture as embodied by my parents and grandparents. My grandparents on my father’s side spent the last twenty years of their lives living in a council-owned tower block in Childwall, Liverpool. In my recollections of childhood, they seemed perfectly content to be living in their modest two-bedroom council flat. They neither owned their home nor did they wish to. They knew most people in the block and the surrounding area. They went about their daily round with a kind of modest contentment: visiting and being visited by friends and family, with the occasional trip to the local shops, the bowling club or the bookmakers. Summer holidays consisted of a week or so at a Butlin’s holiday camp on the North Wales coast. For my younger self, my grandparents’ home represented a magically serene world, where nothing seemed to happen but everything was filled with a quiet joy. The paradox of this, when I now look back, is that my grandparents had virtually nothing in material goods and wealth and yet never seemed to miss or desire them. For my part, the seemingly endless offering of biscuits and cakes, punctuated by plentiful cups of tea, was already unimagined riches to my seven-year-old self.

This personal experience informs a crucial further claim advanced in this book: the working class is injured just as much, if not more so, by lack of political recognition as by economic deprivation. This is a central plank of the neoliberal transformation: that working-class practices of solidarity are dissolved within the social ideology of individualized self-betterment. To some extent, this change can be captured in terms of the working class embracing an aspiration for more typically middle-class lifestyles and possessions. But it is insufficient to portray the social and cultural impact of neoliberalization as a mere transition from working-class to middle-class values. As the central chapters of this book will argue, it is the working-class’s sense of being overlooked, ignored and thereby denigrated which has played a crucial role in giving rise to the widespread populist sentiment we now see on display in the UK and elsewhere. This is not to say that racism and xenophobia are not hallmarks of contemporary British working-class culture. But such mental attitudes are largely effects and not causes, compensatory mechanisms that respond to the reality of lacking social and political recognition. In a word, populism should be understood as arising from a demand, largely unstated and unrecognized, for the working class to regain social-political visibility and dignity.

The following analysis focuses largely on contemporary UK populism. I am aware that, given the international political conjuncture, this limits its potential validity. The immediate reason for this limitation is personal: I was born, raised and educated in the UK. For the last decade I have lived and worked in the United States (in Portland, Oregon), and this allows me more of an experiential foothold in US domestic politics. But, in this book, the focus remains largely on populism within British politics. Within this context, neoliberalization can be seen to reach a certain stage of maturity with the ascent of a reformulated Labour Party. The British Labour Party under Tony Blair rebranded itself as ‘New Labour’, thereby alienating its traditional working-class electorate by emphasizing a break with the workers’ movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with socialism and with the labour unions.

Party pluralism in the context of a liberal democracy is not a matter of simply having different products on the shelf to choose from. Rather, the different parties are necessary to articulate real differences of material interest within the political community. When the British Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party, which had championed political democratization throughout most of the nineteenth century, it represented the culmination of over a hundred years of working-class organization and agitation. Rebranding the party as New Labour sent out a clear message that the Thatcherite neoliberal transition was now ideologically unopposed by the two major political parties. As Panitch and Leys (2001: 290) tellingly noted after the first term of Blair’s New Labour, ‘the lack of party alternatives is now felt as strongly by the British left as it has always been by the American left’. In hindsight, we can now see that New Labour’s historic run of three electoral victories between 1997 and 2005 was bought at the price of leaving the British working class effectively homeless within the UK’s party-political system. This was the crucial development that opened a space for contemporary British populism, expressed initially in significant electoral results for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage and later by the surge of support for Brexit.

The decade following the defeat of Gordon Brown as Labour’s leader in the general election campaign of 2010 witnessed thoroughgoing economic austerity, presided over initially by a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that arose in the US in the midst of the Great Recession in September 2011 was the most salient social-political reaction to fiscal austerity. Shortly before, there had been a precursor to this in the UK where, in August 2011, London experienced repeated waves of public rioting and looting. Thomas Piketty’s (2013) book Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely best-seller two years later. Both the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan of OWS and Piketty’s meticulous analysis of inexorable economic inequality highlighted the distributive justice dimension to the neoliberal transformation. While the present analysis does not contest the important role played by exacerbated economic inequality over the preceding decade, it focuses rather on the qualitative dimension of how the working class under neoliberal hegemony has been rendered socially invisible and politically inaudible. In other words, the underlying cause of contemporary populism in the UK is presented in terms of the ‘hidden injuries’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972) inflicted upon the working class under conditions of advanced neoliberal governance.

Accordingly, in this book contemporary populism is presented as an inchoate and largely blind reassertion of the principle of popular sovereignty within the democratic polity. In this light, the narrow victory of those who voted for the UK to leave the European Union should be seen as a symptom rather than the cause of a crisis in British democracy. The virtual paralysis of the UK government between 2016 and 2019 demonstrated, in turn, how difficult the British political class finds it to put into effect ‘the will of the people’. The two general elections that occurred in those years found all major parties vying to win over various subsets of the populace that had voted roughly 50/50 for and against continued membership of the EU. The Conservatives under Theresa May were divided against themselves (as they have been on the question of Europe since the 1980s). Labour, for its part, attempted an ultimately disastrous balancing act that saw its seats at Westminster plummet alarmingly in the 2019 general election under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Amidst the parliamentary pyrotechnics of those years, within the political establishment there seemed little genuine reflection on how the combined efforts of the political and economic establishment had come to be defeated in a popular vote in 2016. Caught up in the customary short-termism of electoral politics, the political class failed to recognize crucial elements of meaning connected to the Brexit vote. This lack of radical political reflection is, I believe, symptomatic of the depoliticization of British liberal democracy itself. Under the auspices of neoliberal reason, this depoliticization takes the form of an unquestioning economism with regard to all matters of social value. Brexit was considered by the political establishment a bad decision because it would be bad for business. When pro-EU opponents of Brexit within the political establishment found it unaccountable that the British working class could remain unconvinced by this line of argument, they failed to see that the neoliberal ideological identification between market buoyancy and collective self-interest had been terminally undermined in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Accordingly, Brexit voters found it relatively easy to subordinate economic growth to what promised to offer an enhanced sense of dignity and recognition. This preference for recognition over economics is why ‘Take back control’ was such an effective rhetorical rallying call on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016.

While the 2008 financial crisis offers a proximate cause of the recent wave of populism, the underlying causes derive from the neoliberal transformation which began in the 1970s and became conspicuously present by the early 1980s. In broad terms, the argument advanced in this book aligns with Paul Mason’s (2015) claim that the hegemony of neoliberal governance has interrupted a necessary transition out of the phase of capitalism that began in the immediate post-Second World War period. Liberal democratic politics feels as though it has been in a kind of holding pattern since the hegemony of the Washington Consensus emerged in the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its variety of command and control economics. However, whereas Mason (2015) believes a politically progressive framework of advanced automation holds the key to releasing Western democracies from the shackles of neoliberalism, the argument advanced in this book calls for a reformulation of the concrete contexts of working-class solidarity and popular sovereignty, including a holistic and credible reconstituting of mass union organization and worker-owned and -controlled business. Clearly, this cannot come in the form of an implausible ‘back to the future’ scenario. Working-class politics of the twenty-first century cannot be a mere rehash of nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism and social democracy.

In terms of methodological approach, this is a work of political theory: it does not harbour any pretensions to original social science research, nor it is primarily based on collated social science data. My immediate academic background is in philosophy, more specifically in twentieth-century European philosophy. The strength of my approach to the phenomenon of populism in this book is, arguably, also its weakness; namely, a more speculative methodology largely based on prolonged reflection. The political theory applied here to frame the contemporary phenomenon of populism is derived from an extended engagement with the logic of neoliberal governance. This began with an attempt at a critique of managerial local democratic governance in my book Constructing Community (Elliott, 2010) and was more directly developed in a critical analysis of the politics of climate change in the age of ‘sustainable development’ in Natural Catastrophe (Elliott, 2016). The itinerary of my thinking during this period has been guided chiefly by the work of the contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey and the cultural and social theorist Raymond Williams. The spirit of their thinking animates the analysis of populism offered throughout this book.

Part of the impetus to write this work stems from a frustration at what struck me as the preponderant, simplified reactions to Brexit in particular and, secondarily, to the election of Donald Trump. As Eatwell and Goodwin note in their thorough and incisive analysis of contemporary populism: ‘People tend to reduce highly complex movements to one type of voter or one cause because they want simple and straightforward explanations’ (2018: 17). As the UK general elections of 2017 and 2019 went on to show, the causes and ramifications of the Brexit vote were no easy matter for the major parties to contend with. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all attempted, in various ways, to appeal to what they considered to be a simple binary logic within the electorate and use it to their electoral advantage. For the opposition parties, this proved ultimately disastrous in the UK general election of December 2019. To understand the complexities of contemporary populism, the present analysis looks back to the origins of modern democracy in the UK as that polity was the earliest and most profoundly shaped by the forces of industrial capitalism.

In Chapter 1, I begin the analysis of populism by outlining and defending a certain conception of democracy. This does not involve a typology of forms of democracy – direct as opposed to representative democracy, and so forth – but rather delineates what I consider the animating principle and, to some extent, paradox of democracy, namely popular sovereignty. Here the theory is largely drawn from two sources: on the one hand, from the democratic theory of Ernesto Laclau (2005) and Chantal Mouffe (2000) and, on the other, from the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière (2006). While