After Populism: On Borriello and Jäger’s “The Populist Moment”
Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger | The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession | Verso Books | September 2023 | 224 Pages
With The Populist Moment, Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger have done something rare, and written a book about populism that refuses to treat it as either an irrational complaint against stately liberal-democracy, or as the heaven sent re-politicization of a depoliticized world. Instead, brusquely side-stepping the myopic and seemingly endless debate about whether populism is intrinsically left or right-wing, Borriello and Jäger’s book is squarely addressed to a left-wing audience interested in the answer to a vitally important question: why did left wing politics manifest as populist, rather than social democratic, in the decade of the long 2010s which followed the 2008 financial crisis?
In the US, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential primaries and the surprising performances of both the Trump and Sanders’ campaigns, a minor cottage industry of books on the populist threat to liberal democracy blossomed. These books conceive populism as an explosion of the contradiction hidden by the hyphen that conjoined liberal-democracy. At best, populism is treated as an irrational symptom of a wrongly depoliticized public sphere; at worst, it’s reduced to a pathological assault on the politeness and norms which every prudent citizen knows undergirds a basically good status quo.
For partisans of the political left, this style of writing about populism is not worth very much. As a genre, it is interested more in understanding how to preserve the status quo populism attacks, and in explaining populism’s ardent fervor, than it is in assessing whether populism, as a repertoire of distinctive political strategies, is capable of changing the structural conditions populism emerged from.
The Populist Moment attempts to offer its readers that assessment. Borriello and Jäger treat populism as both a symptom and an agent: a phenomenon that emerges from a set of historical conditions, which tries to act back on and change those same conditions. Following the trajectories of Tsípras and Syriza in Greece, Iglesias and Podemos in Spain, Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France, Corbyn in Britain, and Sanders in the US, Borriello and Jäger offer their readers a clear eyed historical perspective on the context populism emerged from, its meteoric rise from 2010–2016, and its decline from 2016–2022.
Two different historical contexts are central to Borriello and Jäger’s understanding of populism. First, they place populism in the grand tradition of twentieth-century left wing politics by contrasting populism with social democracy. Like all political worldviews in the era of the popular franchise, left wing politics grappled with the question of how to form an electoral majority compatible with executing its political principles. This is the great question of pragmatic democratic politics, and social democracy answered it by attempting to assemble a coalition centered on an alliance between its privileged political subject, the working class, and sympathetic elements of the middle class and intelligentsia. The social democratic coalition would consist of more than just the working class—think sympathetic and progressively minded lawyers, doctors, and teachers—because this was necessary to win elections. But, crucially, social democratic parties were primarily parties of and for the workers.
The particular difficulty facing social democratic electoral politics was building a majority coalition around the interests of only this one particular group, the working class. Per one reading of the work of Karl Marx, this difficulty would be ameliorated by the course of capitalist development. Marx predicted that as capital accumulated, society would polarize into two groups: the disaffected and immiserated industrial working class on the one hand, and the increasingly small capitalist class on the other. Social democracy’s democratic majority would be produced by the trajectory of capital accumulation, and it need only organize the disaffected, but still materially aligned, members of the (relatively) homogenous working class.
However, the second major historical context Borriello and Jäger concern themselves with undermined the viability of this social democratic vision. Since the 1970s, in the North Atlantic world that is Borriello and Jäger’s focus, the decline of the share of the electorate working in manufacturing or affiliated with a trade union made the polarization of society into workers and owners harder to imagine. Rather than polarize into two easily recognizable camps of workers and owners, the make-up of the working class in the global north became increasingly heterogenous as the proletariat transformed into a precariat, a group defined more by their precarious and tenuous grasp on employment than their steady membership in the working class, and the service sector’s slice of GDP became an ever larger portion of the economic pie. It became increasingly difficult to imagine a social democratic electoral majority composed mostly of traditional workers: now, any left-of-center coalition would have to stretch from UAW members to waiters to parts of the middle class.
And this was not just an economic transformation. In the background of Borriello and Jäger’s assessment of neoliberalism are Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void and Robert Putnam’s classic, Bowling Alone. Read together, these two books argue that neoliberalism and its concomitant economic trends, from globalization to digitalization to financialization, dramatically reshaped civil societies across the North Atlantic world. State institutions were drained of their governing capacity, which became increasingly concentrated in the hands of unelected technocrats, especially the economic managers of central banks. Social institutions lost their vital substance (just search third space on TikTok to see the latest way this trend manifests), and today we live in an era where we read regularly about an epidemic of loneliness. Electoral participation declined broadly from 1970–2008, as did church attendance and the number of close friends people reported having. Bowling alone indeed: neoliberalism drained state institutions of their governing capacity at the same time as public life withered.
Even as a kind of social democrat portrayed its electoral majority as simply a group united by economic conditions (e.g., the “working class”), at their peak, social democratic parties offered their constituency a complete cultural world. The worker could read the party’s daily newspaper and socialize at a bar or union hall associated with the party. Today, that world of mass politics has vanished. It exists only as an object of nostalgia, glimpsed sometimes when a certain kind of person (the author of this review; presumably also the authors of The Populist Moment) reads an NYRB novel about interwar Europe.
By 2008, the North Atlantic public world, in Borriello and Jäger’s portrayal, was a depoliticized void. On offer as a replacement for the total world of mass politics was an asset economy where citizens were encouraged to think of themselves as entrepreneurial consumers where every purchase was considered an investment: Elon Musk dreamed of making the car a purchase with a future return, like a home’s mortgage.
This void, populated by a disaffected, depoliticized, atomized, anomic, and consumerist citizenry, was electrified by a catastrophic financial crisis. The specifics of the 2008 crash are important to Borriello and Jäger’s account of the populist moment that follows. By beginning in the American housing market—the most vivid symbol of the consumerist democracy dream—the economic crisis imploded not only the economy but also the political imaginary that had underpinned the neoliberal consensus. Next, the major center left and center right parties on either side of the Atlantic, helped by unelected technocrats at the central banks, converged on a shared strategy of disinflation and austerity as an answer to the credit crisis. This policy solution required years of chronic underemployment and sclerotic growth to secure credit for the already wealthy, and unemployment (especially youth unemployment) rose in tandem with inequality. The reigning political parties, in other words, discredited themselves. The 2008 economic crisis very quickly became a legitimacy crisis for the political status quo as political elites responded to it by essentially evicting homeowners, spiking the unemployment rate, and bailing out the banks at public expense.
Enter populism. Populism, Borriello and Jäger argue, was well equipped to navigate the void it was born into (populism as Bane threatening the centrist parties as Batman: “you think the void is your ally. But you merely adopted the void; I was born in it, molded by it”). Rather than center its claims against the status quo around the person of the worker, populism’s privileged political actor is the people as a whole. This appeal to the many against the few was enabled by the center’s complicity with the disaster of 2008. It was also conditioned by the erosion of the manufacturing working class which had provided social democracy with its old electoral base. By uniting many distinct struggles and interests in the ambiguous, and thus extensive, signifier of “the people,” populism promised that an electoral majority was there waiting for it to claim precisely because it fought on behalf of the 99% against the 1%. Through the person of an authentic leader who represented the people, populism claimed to be the reassertion of a missing antagonism back into politics: populism was the repoliticization of a depoliticized public, the redemocratization of an oligarchic economy, and the organization of a disorganized society.
Sometimes, populism created a new political party for itself: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and La France Insoumise in France. In the UK and the US, populism instead contested control of a sclerotic center-left party. In either case in Borriello and Jäger’s portrayal, populism’s slick, forward-thinking media and digital savvy tactics led to a dramatic upswing. Populism did not institutionalize itself so much as it rallied the disaffected to its banner. Rather than work through existing institutions it challenged their legitimacy; and those institution’s weakness, or worse, their complicity in the world of politics that had brought about 2008, was populism’s strength.
But after that initial upswing, a depressive low followed. Borriello and Jäger summarize how in each of the cases they follow, populism was either defeated (Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon) or neutralized (Tsípras, Iglesias). Readers may disagree with Borriello and Jäger’s argument that populism left little behind for future left wing movements to build upon. But the eclipse of populism happened fast. In February of 2020, Bernie Sanders carried the Nevada Democratic primary by finding his non-voting voter majority in a multiracial working class coalition; by March 2020, the center coalesced around Joe Biden and Sanders’ campaign for the Presidency collapsed in the same week that President Trump declared Covid a national emergency.
What explains the crushing defeats populism has endured over the last five years? First, the media and leader-centered strategies of populism left populism uniquely vulnerable, in turn, to media attacks on their leader’s authenticity. As Borriello and Jäger chart, Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon and Iglesias were each undercut by various media-driven scandals that targeted their authenticity.
Worse, Borriello and Jäger argue that the historical and material context that overdetermined populism’s emergence in the long 2010s also overdetermined its failure. The “void” populism emerged from constrained it in two ways. First, the void failed to be empty enough: the vestigial institutions that still existed resisted populism, and the attachments the legacy parties had long cultivated with their constituencies operated as a check on populism’s capacity to rally the whole of the people. Second, the void’s emptiness made populism’s appeal dramatic but brief. In many cases, people participated in populist politics online, where the barrier to entry and exit are low. They could quickly, almost manically, participate in the excitement of political antagonism—and exit just as easily.
And even worse, the material context which eroded the manufacturing working class that had traditionally been the center of social democratic politics did not organically produce a people united by common interest. Instead, the people populism sought were diverse, with a variety of distinct interests, united only by the negative feeling of having been wronged by the status quo. In Britain, for instance, Corbyn attempted to unite, first, remnants of Labour’s classic base in the northern working class and the trade unions, with, second, downwardly mobile, well educated, urban and media literate young people, and, third, workers in the service sector, who tended to be disproportionately racial minorities. All these groups suffered during the 2008 crisis. But their unsettled and novel political alliance broke over the question of Brexit. The northern postindustrial working class saw in Brexit a nostalgic return to domestic manufacturing and believed — to some degree rightly, to some degree wrongly — that the labor mobility encouraged by EU membership had eroded their status. The younger and more urban group, on the other hand, benefitted from the freedom of movement brought by EU membership, enjoyed the cheap commodities secured by labor competitivity, and were broadly cosmopolitan in cultural outlook. Corbyn failed to articulate a robust alliance between these groups, Borriello and Jäger argue, because material conditions pushed them apart rather than together.
Is there a way out of this dilemma? Is there a future for electoral left-wing politics in a void, which has now been repoliticized, but still lacks the old institutions that sustained social democracy, and lacks the material context which produced the social democratic vision of a future in which workers make up an electoral majority?
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In their description of the old total world of social democracy, Borriello and Jäger cite an essay by the late Hungarian Marxist G.M. Tamás titled “Telling the Truth About Class.” Their citation is meant to convey how the old world of social democratic parties produced a complete cultural world for the worker. But it is an ironic citation, because Tamás’s essay is meant to condemn, rather than express nostalgia for, that lost world of social democratic politics.
For Tamás, and for a certain kind of Marxist, making the working class the subject of politics such that it ought to be elevated to rule was a fatal misreading of Marx. The working class enjoyed a certain revolutionary privilege in Marx’s teleology, to be sure: but this privilege was that the working class was said to be the class that would abolish class, not rule on behalf of a particular class perspective. From this perspective, Borriello and Jäger’s book appears in a different light. Their excellent summation of the reasons why social democratic parties declined can be read less as a loss than as a spur to rethink the conditions social democracy must now adapt itself to. And, crucially, left wing politics need not become populist, as long as we are capable of following the way capital has transformed the composition of the working class.
Resources for understanding the transformation of capitalist reproduction are available—where else—in the writings of Karl Marx. While reading Marx as predicting a future where society is bifurcated into the twin poles of industrial working class and capitalist class is perfectly supportable by Marx’s texts, so too is another reading where Marx predicts not simply the growth of the working class, but the growth of people superfluous to capitalist reproduction. If capital always aims to reduce the amount of labor time necessary for the production of commodities in order to maximize the time labor spends producing surplus value, then capital accumulation tends to produce a world where an increasing number of people find themselves surplus to the reproduction process. Rather than produce a unified manufacturing class, all housed with necessity in the reproduction process, capital produces a world where we are made superfluous to our own reproduction process. Perhaps this experience of superfluity is related to the atomization, anomie, and general disaffection Borriello and Jäger associate with neoliberalism.
With this in mind, we can start thinking of superfluous people as members of a working class that could be represented by a social democratic party adapted to capitalist reproduction after neoliberalism. As Soren Mau argues in his new book Mute Compulsion, we can read “proletarian” as the name for not just those directly involved in the production process, but anyone who exists as a condition of the possibility of capital reproducing itself: those necessary to the production of surplus value, yes, but also those whose very superfluity constitutes a condition of capital’s reproduction. On this reading, the disaffected northern postindustrial workers and the southern service sector workers are alike in that their superfluity is produced by a capital which has reduced the necessary labor time for its reproduction to a minimum. They are all proletarians.
This does not mean that capital’s accumulation automatically produces a proletarian electoral majority. Of course not: since at least Gramsci, the left has recognized that the work of producing a political majority is just that, political, and the history they seek to make must be made in terms of the history they inherit. What Borriello and Jäger’s book shows us is that this historical terrain has shifted, and so our politics must shift as well.
Against this backdrop, Borriello and Jäger conclude by characterizing populism as a nostalgic desire and demand for a politics whose time has passed. Their book does an excellent job demonstrating that the material conditions of the old mass politics of social democracy are gone. Its replacement, “hyper-politics,” “offer[s] us a fragile, petulant alternative to the mass politics we knew in the twentieth century. Left populism at least tried to resuscitate the latter.” Psychoanalysis, they write, would recognize this for what it is: melancholy for a lost object, with its concomitant mania when the lost object comes teasingly close to being retrieved. But in the end, if Borriello and Jäger are right that the course of material history has moved on, then left politics cannot simply demand that the old world return and mimic its old style, from Roosevelt’s New Deal to the twenty-first-century’s Green New Deal. What Borriello and Jäger demonstrate is that the old material conditions that underpinned social democracy have disappeared. Against this backdrop, left populism constitutes a sincere, but plaintive, desire for the lost world to return.
It is cliché to observe that our world is suffused with nostalgia. Our media has lately become particularly obsessed with the mid-century world of physics—see the latest movies by Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson, and Cormac McCarthy’s last books—a milieu in which it seemed tantalizingly imaginable that our great minds could seize and then wield the truths of metaphysics and science. Left wing politics, like our culture, is also enamored with that past era. Politics seemed to make more sense then: masses of voters organized into parties clashing over distinct economic interests. In that past world, the future seemed to be a place where our theory of how things worked would find practical realization in the world of politics. Scientifically, we failed to produce a unified theory, but we did forge a sword of Damocles to hang above human history. Politically, social democrats seized power at different times and places across the western world, without ever achieving revolutionary breakthroughs.
Today, the social safety nets won by the parties of that past era are under attack from a radicalizing right and a neoliberal center. Left wing politics cannot be like our culture, enamored by a dream which failed to realize. To remain enchanted by that past world is to confuse ourselves about the reality that confronts us today; we must adapt our politics to present conditions. Theodor Adorno began Negative Dialectics with a characteristically pessimistic assessment: philosophy’s attempt to change the world miscarried. The past horizon where our theory could organize our practice seems to have disappeared from view. But only a particular theory, a particular attempt. The failure is only total insofar as we remain enamored by the failed attempt as our best and only option, a unique formula that just didn’t take. Capitalist reproduction remains a crisis-ridden process and the world which confronts us in 2024 plainly manifests that. What remains to be seen is whether we are up to the task of theorizing that crisis and exploiting it to left wing ends. If populism represented a reassessment of tactics, and a new effort to constitute a new majority for left wing politics, its failure should in turn entail a reassessment of tactics. Perhaps its failure can be greeted by us as the final passing of the nostalgic dream to return to an era of politics whose time has passed. The lesson of Borriello and Jäger’s history is that populism’s desire for the nostalgic lost object was not enough to obtain it.