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Reading Populism

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redsquirrel

This Machine Kills Progressives
There's been a bunch of books about populism recently, including a new one The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss by Marco Revelli (currently on offer). So a few of us have been discussing getting a reading group going on the Revelli book.

However, considering that past reading group threads on U75 have tended to die off I suggest that we don't concentrate too much on the specifics of one book but rather use it as a jumping off point to get some discussion of populism, and books about populism, going.

So anybody who's interested in the subject but can't get access to the copy of the book, doesn't have time to read it at the moment please still post more discussion we get the better the thread.

As a starting point I'll give a bunch of titles on populism that U75 posters have suggested
- National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell
- Rise of the Right: English nationalism and the transformation of working class politics by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Tredwell
- Realm of Lesser Evil by Jean-Claude Michea
- The People by Margaret Canovan
 
To kick the thread off I'll (re)give my opinions on

National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy

It's not without issues. Politically for all their criticisms of liberalism the book remains wedded to a liberal politics and he understanding of class is weak. There is also probably too much focus on polling data and compared to his and Fords book on UKIP the data presented is not as strong (although to be fair this is a Pelican primer covering a broad political movement rather than book concentrating on a single example).

That said it is certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. It is written in a very easy engaging style but covers quite a lot of ground. The case they make for the differentiation of national populism from fascism is strong enough that it deserves consideration. Neither their tracing the rise of national populism back before 2008 nor the distinction between cultural and ethnic nationalism is especially new but considering the number of people who still seem completely ignorant of these factors their inclusion is required. And the theory they raise that (national) populism is inevitable in a liberal democracy, and that it is the post-war years that were unusual rather than the present situation has a lot to recommend it*. I'd disagree with some aspects of the summaries of the four D's - distrust, destruction, deprivation and de-alignment - they give as the driving forces but overall as a general introductory text I certainly recommend it.

*On this point they mention the work of Margaret Canovan,


Rise of the Right: English nationalism and the transformation of working class politics

In contrast to Goodwin and Eatwell's book which takes a very broad view of national populism this book looks at populism by concentrating on a quite specific facet, those in the orbit of the EDL, though the information and conclusions it provides are clearly applicable across a much wider sphere.
The first three chapters give a general background of the processes the authors consider important to the rise of nationalism - the marginalisation of class politics, dominance of neo-liberalism, increasing inequality and job insecurity etc. While there are some very nice turns of phrase in this part of the book these topics will probably be familiar to most people who have read anything in this area.

It's the next three chapters that are the really stand out part of the book for me, where the authors reproduce some of the interviews they have had with those attracted to nationalism. Chapter 4 focusses on the comments of the men on dissatisfaction with the world with respect to the economic effects of the politics of the last 40 years, chapter 5 on their hatred for the liberal/left middle class and chapter 6 on the attitudes towards Muslims and immigration. These interviews provide some key insights into why populism is growing and deserve to be read with care.

The authors then place the comments of the interviewees, and especially their sense of some sort of loss, into the wider political framework. In particular they discuss 'mourning vs melancholy', in mourning something you ultimately accept it has gone and move on, while in the melancholy mindset there is an inability to move past the loss. The authors connect the nationalist views they have observed with the melancholia, and link it to the inability of the liberal left to fundamentally challenge nationalism/populism, if all you can offer is more of the same but now quite so bad how people overcome their melancholia be begin to mourn. A similar analysis continues in the conclusion and postscript (which deals with the EU referendum vote).
 
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I've also.picked up Enzo Traverso's New Faces of Fascism: Populism & the Far-right. No idea if it's any good.
 
Not read it all yet (I'm reading it bit by bit in Waterstones/Folyes) but, so far, I've found the clarity of Jan Werner Muller's straight-forward "What is Populism?" useful.
 
I'm highly sceptical about a lot of Cas Mudde's stuff but he's obviously a name in the field and so it's probably worth reading some of his pieces to get an idea of liberal anti-populist politics if for nothing else.
 
butchersapron said:
It's very good, reads brexit a bit wildly though and doesn't quite grasp british politics. He's always worth reading. I'll try and come back to this thread when i have more time over the weekend.

Muller is awful.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the pdf link.
I was going to say that Müller seemed (from my partial reading) a useful 'introductory' text for those starting to read around the topic...but D’Eramo's review certainly highlights it's limitations and ideological bias.

Self-conceptions as modern mirrors for princes are seldom avowed. But

there is one unassailable site of enunciation that our current crop of politi-
cal commentators have no trouble in making explicit, indeed like to dwell

on. They are, simply, adults. Their objects are minors. With condescension,
Müller speaks of populists as if they were political teenagers, or younger,
who can be granted a hearing so long as they don’t break the furniture or
make too much noise: ‘I suggest that, as long as populists stay within the
law—and don’t incite violence, for instance—other political actors (and

members of the media) are under some obligation to engage them.’ The self-
importance of that large-minded ‘some’ is a nice touch. Elsewhere, Müller is

brusquer. In contemplating the possibility of exit from the eu, he explained
before the referendum on it, Britain was acting like a ‘selfish and sullen
child’, whom other member states could no longer ‘take seriously’.
Adulthood as the achievement of maturity is not, of course, an entirely
unpolitical condition of being. But the politics it involves is automatic. What
could it be, other than liberalism?
Click to expand...

So...apologies if I've wasted anyone's time by introducing the Müller title, but I would say that if folk are looking in bookshops it is one that tends to be there on the politics shelves.
 
brogdale said:
So...apologies if I've wasted anyone's time by introducing the Müller title, but I would say that if folk are looking in bookshops it is one that tends to be there on the politics shelves.
Click to expand...
Nah, always good to have extra titles in the mix even if there are issues with them.
 
Not read the Müller book so I can't say whether the D’Eramo review is fair, but it is an absolutely brutal takedown. Some very good lines in there
Eventually, however, Müller is forced to explain that his strained characterization of populism must exclude the one movement in the history of the modern West that did actually define itself as populist, the late nineteenth-century People’s Party of the United States. Since the People’s Party could also speak of the ‘common’ or ‘plain’ people, the adjectives redeeming it, ‘one of the results of the analysis presented so far—counter-intuitive as it may seem—is that the party in us history that explicitly called itself “populist” was in fact not populist’. Counter-intuitive indeed: we might as well devise a concept of communism that excluded Marx.
Click to expand...
With condescension, Müller speaks of populists as if they were political teenagers, or younger, who can be granted a hearing so long as they don’t break the furniture or make too much noise: ‘I suggest that, as long as populists stay within the law—and don’t incite violence, for instance—other political actors (and members of the media) are under some obligation to engage them.’ The self-importance of that large-minded ‘some’ is a nice touch.
Click to expand...
:D
 
I've put the literature review that Revelli recommends in note 1 of chapter one here and the Judis one he also likes here.

(I think the Joel Gombin he later mentions in discussing the various approaches to the 'FN' is the son of Richard Gombin who some of you may recall from his work on the French ultra-left btw - at least he certainly added a Epilogue to the reissue of the latter's 1971 Leftism: origins and Perspective at the end of last year)
 
With the respect to Revelli's book anyone got any ideas/suggestions/recommendations about the best way to proceed?

Should we agree a time to reach a certain point and put up some comments then? Or do people think it would be better for readers just to comment as they go along and reach something they think worthy of discussion?

I've never actually been part of a reading group before so no idea about the "best" way to do things.
 
redsquirrel said:
With the respect to Revelli's book anyone got any ideas/suggestions/recommendations about the best way to proceed?

Should we agree a time to reach a certain point and put up some comments then? Or do people think it would be better for readers just to comment as they go along and reach something they think worthy of discussion?

I've never actually been part of a reading group before so no idea about the "best" way to do things.
Click to expand...

Me neither.

I've been reading it at night and going "Ooh, must quote this on Urban" and then falling asleep and forgetting which bit!

I'm up to the bit about "hillbillies".

It's very good so far.

Must go back and pick out some key points I've gleaned from what I've read though.
 
chilango said:
Me neither.

I've been reading it at night and going "Ooh, must quote this on Urban" and then falling asleep and forgetting which bit!

I'm up to the bit about "hillbillies".
Click to expand...
I've not got up to the hillbillies yet, sounds intriguing.

I'm a good chunk into chapter 2, just about to start looking at Italy.

For those that haven't got the book chapter 1 is a quite short (15 pages) intro but even so there are a couple of points that I think are useful/noteworthy
1) the stuff about populism, or perhaps populisms, being the 'sickness' of democracy
Whenever some part of ‘the people’, or an entire people, does not feel represented, it returns to one or another kind of reaction that takes the name ‘populism’. Early in democracy’s development, this reaction appeared as its ‘infantile disorder’, when limited suffrage and class barriers kept part of the citizenry out of the game (late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century populism was, in large measure, a ‘revolt of the excluded’). Today, it manifests itself as a ‘senile disorder of democracy’.
Click to expand...
2) the distinction between populism and other political movements
As such, the area on which we need to focus our concerns is not so much the various forms of this protagonist’s self-expression, ... but the mechanism of rupture that has produced this metamorphosis. We need to think through the dissolution of these old political containers (the mass parties of the twentieth century, the channels of traditional political participation, the late-industrial forms of aggregation).
Click to expand...
 
For those who haven't bought it and others but would like to read them and participate or just follow the discussion, then those who have them can share pdfs etc?

Apols if this has already been done.
 
redsquirrel said:
With the respect to Revelli's book anyone got any ideas/suggestions/recommendations about the best way to proceed?

Should we agree a time to reach a certain point and put up some comments then? Or do people think it would be better for readers just to comment as they go along and reach something they think worthy of discussion?

I've never actually been part of a reading group before so no idea about the "best" way to do things.
Click to expand...


Three points:

1. Populism is a massive subject. Are we just looking at populism in Britain or Europe or America or the entire world?
2. Happy to share PDFS like Butchers and others do but don't know how to do it. If someone can explain how I'll have a go.
3. Finally, nice one redsquirrel for trying to get a discussion on this up and running. I joined the Capital reading group on here which petered out disappointingly quickly. The way I understand how they should work is that everyone agrees to read a chapter of a book/an essay/an academic journal article etc and then one person leads off with their thoughts on it and others then chip in. I think asking people to read an entire book means the thread will become disjointed as people read at different speeds.
 
From an American context, I would recommend this book by Cowie that charts the roots of national populism in the USA and the imbricating processes of deindustrialisation, the collapse of working class jobs/communities/hope, the exhaustion and defeat of the trade union, the role of the New Left and civil rights movements and the eventual cultural accommodation of a section of the working class with the GOP. Again however, this is a very long book and it might be best to read a chapter.

Jefferson Cowie - Stayin' Alive
 
Smokeandsteam said:
1. Populism is a massive subject. Are we just looking at populism in Britain or Europe or America or the entire world?
2. Happy to share PDFS like Butchers and others do but don't know how to do it. If someone can explain how I'll have a go.
3. The way I understand how they should work is that everyone agrees to read a chapter of a book/an essay/an academic journal article etc and then one person leads off with their thoughts on it and others then chip in. I think asking people to read an entire book means the thread will become disjointed as people read at different speeds.
Click to expand...
1) I'm happy to go with the consensus but my opinion would be that the wider the discussion is the more people might get involved, so I'd suggest the whole world.
2) Likewise, happy to help out here but could do with some guidance
3) OK should we say that we give our thoughts to the first two chapters of Revelli at the weekend, or do people think that is too short a deadline?
 
redsquirrel said:
1) I'm happy to go with the consensus but my opinion would be that the wider the discussion is the more people might get involved, so I'd suggest the whole world.
2) Likewise, happy to help out here but could do with some guidance
3) OK should we say that we give our thoughts to the first two chapters of Revelli at the weekend, or do people think that is too short a deadline?
Click to expand...

On 3) I’m well up for that deadline - but if someone could pdf them then that would be good.
 
That sounds good. Gives me some time to follow up the bit on it being a 'myth' that the FN has simply inherited the old PCF vote, which i think is a very important for any discussion we have on this stuff in this country.
 
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