The Populist Moment by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello

Reading dates: 10 October – 13 November 2024

The Populist Moment’s subtitle is The Left After the Great Recession, and it looks at Europe (Spain, Greece, France and the UK) and the US after the 2008 banking crisis and the ensuing protests. While the description of the populist moment in the West, its outcomes and its failures is interesting to understand a change in politics we are currently experiencing , it is not courageous enough to propose any analysis or visions of the future. It just describes the past and provides some similes, but does not relate it to anything that might help us understand why what happened happened. The tone is one of speaking to one’s peers, but to the non-initiated, and at times it is opaque, like an in-joke, or an acronym I might not know about. It assumes knowledge of the political systems in all of those countries. Spain was easy for me to understand but I could not make heads of tails of the French electoral structure.

It also feels like their definition of populism is a catch all terms, so much so that it is no longer useful. Populism seems to simply mean ‘of the people’ indistinct of who they are or represent.

I lost most of my quotes to technology mishaps (change of e-book and not knowing how to export from the new Boox system). Here is what survived:

“Policy” stands for the methods by which states organize their societies, such as choosing winners and losers in industrial policy. “Politics” includes the process of what political theorists call “will formation”: competition between parties, campaigning, and the forging of coalitions.

Pasokification. Noun.
Reducing a country’s main social democratic party to the smallest party in parliament as a result of the rise of a more radical left party. Pasokification has already happened to Scottish Labour.

there is more unity in strength than strength in unity.

More and more, it has become the substitute association for a world in which all associative units have been eroded. There is ample research showing strong correlations between declining civic commitment and broadband access.

Any assessment of the left’s populist gamble was also intimately tied to its capacity to face up to the two dilemmas of twenty-first-century left politics-the social content of its coalition and its new organizational form.

Neither would Tsipras, Corbyn, or Sanders style themselves revolutionaries: the fact that they appeared so radical to many observers merely showed how far the ideological center of gravity had veered to the right.

Pasokification, at the end of the day, could be read both ways: as the virtual disappearance of a social democratic party, or as the “social-democratization” of the populist left.

This points to a limit that seems inherent to populism: lacking both the thorough economic analysis and the strong international imagination that have characterized the labor movement throughout history, the populist approach always risks ending up in lukewarm economic policies and narrow nationalism

Where the preconditions are not met for the development of social democracy – either because the groups it purports to represent have yet to be organized, as in the examples cited above, or because they are in a state of advanced decomposition, as today – populism will become the default mode of politics.

Tony Blair claimed that opposing globalization was like opposing the changing of the seasons, while the term “Alternativlosigkeit’ (lack of an alternative) entered the German dictionary.

policymakers have opted to replace the invisible hand of the market with the invisible hand of the state – a referee who will occasionally assist the players but rarely, if ever, participate in the game itself.