A SPECTER IS haunting the neoliberal establishments of Europe and the Americas: populism. And the intelligentsia beholden to those establishments is pitching a hissy fit in response.
You can see it happening via publications such as The Atlantic —with headlines such as “What Populists Do to Democracies” and “How to Be a Populist”—and The Guardian, which has devoted an inordinate amount of its cyberspace to “Team Populism,” a transnational network of academics studying the rise of populist movements and leaders. A search of my university library database shows 1,259 books with the word “populism” in the title published just since 2016. The Guardian even offers a “How Populist Are You?” quiz.
The current populist moment gives the international commentariat a lot to chew on. For starters, there is so much disagreement about what “populism” even means. It’s hard to see how a word regularly applied to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can mean much of anything at all. In their work, the Team Populism people try to sort out this left-right mishmash by detaching the phenomenon of populism from its associations with socialism and ethno-nationalism. They consider populism not an ideology for governing but a strategy for attaining and keeping power. According to their June 2018 policy paper: “[Scholars] call something populist if it expresses the belief that politics embodies a struggle between the forces of good, understood as the will of the common people, and the forces of evil, associated with a conspiring elite.”
Supposedly, the populist threat is worthy of so much study and discussion because it is alleged to pose a threat to liberal democracy. Best I can tell, this is because populism doesn’t lend itself to consensus-building and compromise, or to an appropriate reverence for longstanding procedures. The problem here is, of course, the presumption that consensus is the highest goal of political action in a democracy. To the neoliberals, populism is a problem because it is rude enough to insist that politics actually be about big, substantial questions that may require big, sweeping answers and major dislocations of the existing power structure.
The fact is that our country—and most of the world—is ruled by elites who pile up wealth and privilege for themselves, by disenfranchising and impoverishing masses of people. The experts identify populism with a destructive “us against them” mentality. But sometimes “us against them” simply reflects reality.
For example, in the U.S., the conflict between “us,” the stagnant-wage-earning majority, and “them,” the billionaire class, is real and irreconcilable.
The three richest people in our country—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet—own more of the nation’s wealth than the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. They may not be an evil, conspiratorial cabal, but their wealth rests on a foundation of low wages for the people and low taxes for themselves, and it allows them and their billionaire colleagues to exercise outsized influence on the country’s economic policies and priorities. Something as simple as a reasonable taxation of the billionaire class would allow us to fund a public sector that could provide universal health care, family supports, and useful work for all who want it.
In 2019, the populist genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back to the days of the corporate neoliberal consensus, and good riddance. Going forward, we can either have a populism that divides the people, through appeals to racism and cultural resentment, or we can have a populism that unites the “have-nots”—of all races, ethnicities, and genders—in a common struggle for justice and equity.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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