Smith J. A. - Other Peoples Politics : Populism to Corbynism

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheer-led by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before. If you have enjoyed this book, why not tell other readers by posting a review on your preferred book site.

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Towards the end of the decade that followed the global financial crash, parties, campaigns, and political formations associated with the radical right achieved shocking victories across Europe and the United States. In textbook populist style, these groups have represented themselves as speaking for a politics that the people the good and sensible silent majority has always wanted and believed in, but has been denied by a vapid liberal elite. Since then, commentators branding themselves as anthropologists of the white working class have fallen over each other to explain the motivations of those who have voted for populism. (There has been much less curiosity, incidentally, about why moderate and liberal voters were so insufficiently inspired by their spokespeople to turn out in adequate numbers to counter the so-called populists)

Two competing explanations for the right-wing victories dominate. The first is that voters who respond to the populist right do so as a result of the economic anxiety of life under globalization. While the liberalization of the world economy since the 1970s has brought net wealth to many western countries, it has also had many deleterious effects: upturning traditional communities and ways of life, depressing wages and imposing inequalities unknown in the twentieth century, as well as expelling whole demographic groups from dependable employment and meaningful political representation (and thats before we get on to its vampire-like treatment of the global south) Yet the value of critiques that attribute support for the radical right to economic insecurity seem to be forestalled when we note that being personally economically insecure is not a reliable predictor of voting for anti-establishment parties.

As such, a growing group of scholars have moved away from economic arguments to focus on values. Eric Kaufmann believes that the Leave/Remain, Trump/Clinton divide is best understood not through the lens of class, but via the difference between those who prefer order and those who seek novelty: a division reflected in any number of recent post-liberal defences of socially conservative somewheres against freewheeling liberal anywheres. Specifically, Kaufmann writes, immigration is unsettling that portion of the white electorate that prefers cultural order over change.

The problem with this values approach is that it confers a dignity of permanence (and a misty-eyed aura of special sincerity) onto such views, that isnt really backed up by reality. There are many possible reasons for this change: satisfaction at reducing immigration figures, a feeling that with Brexit forthcoming immigration is no longer an imposition outside democratic consent, or even the impact of a Labour leadership that has broadly refused to play with the xenophobic fire of its predecessors. But none of these reasons suggest a permanent rooting of anti-immigrant feeling in the immoveable identities of individual voters.

During the long 2016, many among Kaufmanns group of those who prefer order have pursued it precisely by seeking novelty, whether in voting to accommodate a Donald Trump, or even as did 16% of former UK Independence Party voters in 2017 a Jeremy Corbyn. Values seems an oddly ossifying term to apply to a time when electorates seem mainly notable for their ability to change their minds.

Another crucial problem for the values approach is that everything these new populist formations offer and, with the exception of the German AfD, virtually all organizations that made advances under populisms banner around 2016 was available to electorates well before the financial crash.