Populism: Tragedy and Farce
It would be tempting to map the fortunes of neoliberal populism to Marx’s comment on Hegel, that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, if the second round of authoritarian populism (Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro, et al.) was not so tragic. Even before the colossal criminality of the pandemic response in the UK, the US, and Brazil, the scale of socio-economic devastation the populists presided over was so enormous as to leave farce far behind.
And yet, there is an element of farce to contemporary populism - indeed, no-one knows this better than Johnson, who positively revels in his own farcical performance. And I suspect that if Trump is capable of any kind of reflection or self-awareness, he probably thought his presidency would have been simply a farcical romp through the corridors of power, a victory lap to show up Fifth Avenue and be done. History had other plans.
Early on in the pandemic I wrote a blog post asking why governments were unwilling to impose, say, mask mandates on populations. It seemed to take so much time, energy, and lives to get the government to impose any restrictions at all, and as we are seeing now they are champing at the bit to loosen them (the UK’s “Freedom Day” standing as the most tragic and yet farcical example). The same problem we had with mask mandates we are also having with vaccine mandates, with vaccination in the US seemingly more or less stalled, and vaccination rates declining in other developed countries, even as countries in the Global South are desperate for supplies of vaccine. Albertans have been bribed to vaccinate with a cash lottery, and in the latest symbol of perverse populism, with hunting licenses - killing wild animals in exchange for life-saving vaccination, playing into the Albertan self-image as rugged individualist survivalists.
I’ve been reading a lot of Stuart Hall, and I think I have one element of an explanation for all this. In the 1970s, as the neoliberal project was being constructed - a project which won political power in the elections of Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980) - Hall and others developed a conception of “authoritarian populism” to describe the rise of Thatcher. In Policing the Crisis (1978), they argued that neoliberalism’s “anti-statism” was simply one component of a larger hegemonic project, a way to win popular support for neoliberalism (as a loosening of government restrictions, in the name of maximized individual and market “freedom”), which gave a veneer of populism to the underlying authoritarianism of the new neoliberal state.
At the other end of neoliberalism, and having witnessed the second phase of authoritarian populism, it never occurred to me that Hall’s proposal would have been controversial. But in the pages of the New Left Review, he was attacked by Bob Jessop and others for prioritizing the ideological/political/cultural aspect of the neoliberal turn at the expense of the concrete economic restructuring which was also part of the project. In Hall’s response to Jessop et al, he argues that by ignoring the Gramscian conception of hegemony - by thinking of the state as purely coercive - Jessop and others were incapable of seeing how popular support - no matter how perverted - was a key element to the right-wing revanche on the welfare state.
Hall considers that the traditional strategies of the left - unionization/economic control and capture of the state - has become insufficient as the informational component of capitalist society has developed.
In sharp contrast to the political strategy of both the Labourist and the fundamentalist left, Thatcherite politics are “hegemonic” in their conception and project: the aim is to struggle on several fronts at once, not on the economic-corporate one alone; and this is based on the knowledge that, in order really to dominate and restructure a social formation, political, moral and intellectual leadership must be coupled to economic dominance. The Thatcherites know they must “win” in civil society as well as in the state… They mean, if possible, to reconstruct the terrain of what is “taken for granted’ in social and political thought - and so to form a new common sense. (Hall, “Authoritarian Populism”, 1985).
Johnson and Trump were the inheritors of this right-wing strategy, and indeed it is a strategy that continues to pay dividends for the right (as contemporary “culture war” discourse shows - the left seems to be incapable of playing by the same rules, for better or worse). But Thatcher and Reagan were never faced with anything like the Coronaviros pandemic. They were happy to use state force against the usual suspects (the miners, the air traffic controllers), just as the contemporary populists are happy to deploy police against Black protesters in the US, women holding a vigil in the UK, but continue to allow far-right, anti-mask, anti-vaxx, conspiracy theorists to hold dangerous gatherings with impunity. This double-standard led directly to the January 6 assault on the US capital. It is, as we know from the neoliberal period as a whole, possible to keep the two elements of “authoritarian populism” in balance - what appears as a double-standard is in reality a strategic political high-wire act.
But the pandemic changed all this. Suddenly, real authority was necessary to cope with the crisis, and the court-jesters of populism were unequal to the task. They relied so much on their populist base, and were used to turning state power only on the usual oppressed subjects, that they could not figure out how to use state authority to benefit their societies as a whole. The constant policy and communication failures, the U-turns, the double-standards (here Dominic Cummings stands as exemplar), the unwillingness and incapacity to draw a clear line and back it up, all of these indicate the failure of the authoritarian populist strategy in the face of a threat that could not divided-and-conquered.
And so the farce that people like Johnson, Trump, and Kenney thought would merely be a jolly interlude and a stepping stone to greater things, has become a political and social catastrophe, one which we are not out of yet. The dreadful - and probably criminal - consequences of relying on the Thatcher/Reagan populist strategy are going to be felt for many years to come.
Needless to say, the hastening climate emergency will also force a confrontation between authoritarianism and populism. My own view is that only a true, collective, left-wing populism will be a viable strategy, but I fear a lot of pain, violence, and lives will be the cost of realizing that strategy on a global scale.