Recent political history has definitely been marked by the concept of populism. It was used to explain and denounce everything that deviated from the imagined "household order" of liberal democracy. The usefulness of the term itself was questionable for at least two reasons. If we use a term to both interpret and discredit someone, then its interpretive reach is limited and very vulnerable to accusations of bias. The second problem concerns the assumed intellectual inequality. Populist actors simply do not know how to manage society and the economy and are guided by short-term interests and unsustainable constructions. Unlike them, traditional experts know how things work.
In the course of political time, a third reason is increasingly being imposed, which is somewhat different in nature from the previous ones. Namely, the analytical efforts that sought to clarify recent political history through a populist lens contained not fully explained timeline. Populism in itself should be a capricious reaction, an impulsive political impulse that cannot be trusted in the stability of the political form or guarantee any kind of institutional continuity. He is there, therefore, to evaporate. Or that, if by any chance he takes power, he transforms into full-blooded fascism. However, today it is clear that neither of these things happened. What happened is Update "house order". With the exception of the German AfD, primarily due to the country's history itself, the parties of the so-called populist right are legitimate holders of power, coalition partners or serious competitors for the takeover of power in numerous European countries.
This sketchy overview of the situation inevitably raises two questions. Why didn't "fascism" happen? And why didn't the left seize its opportunity in these turbulent times? The answers, at least in part, to these questions can be found in this week's articles in the renowned liberal press of the Western world. Anton Jäger, a Belgian historian and theoretician, tried on the pages of the New York Times in an article about the rise of the extreme right in Europe to explain the shortcomings of historical parallels between our time and the 30s. To begin with, the fascists and Nazis then had to contend with strong socialist forces and a mass labor movement. Today, a strong labor movement does not exist, not to mention the revolutionary threat. In such a context, coalitions between big capital and the extreme right are not even likely, which opens the way for the right to advertise itself as an anti-establishment option.
Almost a hundred years ago, the extreme right operated in a period of intensely politicized societies. Today, its success rests to a significant extent on demobilization. They generally achieve the best results in elections marked by historically low turnout or in those areas where turnout is the lowest. And the third important point that makes historical parallels extremely loose is geopolitical ambition. Unlike the Nazis and fascists who wanted to grab their piece of the colonial pie and suppress the Anglo-American domination of the world, today's European far-right is content with defending the borders from refugees and the Internet from "woke" brigades. Therefore, we are not witnessing some kind of political coup, but the adjustment of "household order" to some different values. These values will make life difficult for many people, but we cannot talk about fascism.
The inability of the left to find its way in the given circumstances is the result of complex historical processes and problems that cannot even be exhausted here. That's why we'll look at just one. And it consists of agreeing to the frameworks of the debate, terms and codes that the right puts into the public space. So we are debating about gender ideology, culture of cancellation, "woke" culture and similar concepts that primarily serve to ensure that the right has a legitimate space for chauvinistic practices, and not a more convincing interpretation to the world. This group also includes the diagnosis that the working class has turned to the right and that the left, which has now allegedly become an option for (cultural) elites, is no longer attracted to it. In that diagnosis, as in the previous ones, there are bits of truth, but there is not even the slightest trace of political natural law.
Three days ago, on the pages of the Guardian, Thomas Piketty and Julie Cagé presented the basic results of their recently published study in French, in which they processed and analyzed election data from all French municipalities since the beginning of democratization. At the same time, they focused precisely on the supposedly inevitable transfer of workers' votes to the right boxes. There are two problems on which this assumption is based. The first is a definition of the working class that includes only white manual workers. If we single out only that demographic group, the assumption would be somewhat sustainable, but socially completely unconvincing when it comes to the working class. The second concerns geographical differences. The working class in big cities still predominantly votes for left-wing parties, while workers in smaller towns and rural areas are turning to the right. The reason for this is the deindustrialization and infrastructural neglect of the provinces. Namely, the service economy in cities replaces lost jobs in industry, and in smaller areas this is simply impossible. Also, as the authors point out, it is precisely these socioeconomic problems that primarily motivate the working class from the provinces to lean towards the right. Despite all the specifics, the situation in France does not deviate from European trends.
Listening to the voices of those people is the necessary first step that the left must take in order to finally dismantle that arduous interplay between the liberal elites and the extreme right in which the former make "progressives" and the latter an anti-establishment option. And that extremely demanding step would further accelerate the devaluation of populism as an analytical category. His time has passed.
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