Memory / Explainer

“Populism” and the Significance of Left and Right

In the United States, the Populist tradition has always defined left-wing and egalitarian politics, unfairly maligned by bosses and intellectuals alike.

by Charles Postel via Jacobin on November 25, 2019

...of power that the Left would prefer. These times cry out for a better understanding of the history, nature, and dynamics of this right-wing mobilization. One step in that direction would be to free the deliberations from the ahistorical notion of populism as a general category of analysis.

Journalists, political scientists, and other commentators regularly use and abuse the term in their treatments of right-wing nationalist politics. But the many definitions of populism tend to be internally incoherent, mutually incompatible, and historically ungrounded. And it is difficult to detect what insight the term brings to efforts to make sense of our moment.

But perhaps the contemporary use of the concept is accomplishing its true purpose: populism has become the preferred rhetorical device for obscuring the distinction between left and right.

The Origins of a Fallacy

In one way or another, the roots of the notion of populism as a general category of analysis go back to the historian Richard Hofstadter and a cohort of mid-twentieth-century social scientists. Looking at the wreckage of World War II, they viewed ideological passions as the main danger to a supposedly rational and tolerant consensus. And from that perspective, they “discovered” that the US Populist movement of the 1890s, a farmer-labor and social-democratic movement, was the harbinger of irrational intolerance. Populism, in Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Age of Reform, was a shape-shifting menace, whether in its left or right manifestation.

The Age of Reform was published in 1955. Since that time, three generations of historians, with widely varied agendas and methods, have dug deep in the archives and produced a robust body of scholarship. Virtually all of it has confirmed that the Hofstadter thesis was based on exaggeration, sketchy logic, and inadequate research.

In other words, the historical record tells us that the claims about US Populism representing an unstable ideology that shifted from left to right are ahistorical, illogical fallacies. Yet they survive and thrive in the contemporary speculations of political scientists, journalists, and pundits.

At the moment, we are being told that populism is a political discourse that juxtaposes “the people” against “the elites.” This, supposedly, is what defines and unifies populism as a political phenomenon. But such rhetoric has no analytical specificity or bearing on historical Populism. Rather, at least since the advent of a broad suffrage in the first half of the nineteenth century, appeals in the name of the people against various malefactors and elites have been a near-universal feature of political combat across the spectrum.

This has especially been the case in the United States, where the notion of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” forms part of the civic religion. But in France, too, as Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the coming of universal male suffrage with the 1848 Revolution meant that both democrats and a dictator could claim the votes of “the people” as the basis of their political legitimacy.