The populist moment The Left after the great recession

Arthur Borriello

Book - 2023

"After thirty years of retreat, the last decade has witnessed a resurgent left in the United States and Western Europe. This upsurge of anti-establishment candidates was not only left-wing but also populist. Though in most cases these movements ran out of steam before getting to a position to wield state power, many of the parties and figures associated with this wave of left populism have entered government and others are still contesting high office. Providing a blow-by-blow history of the rise and defeat of this movement, Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger guide us through the conditions that shaped it. Extreme and rising inequality, the collapse of civic life, and a lack of trust in traditional institutions have all played a part. I...n these circumstances, some form of populism was all but inevitable. And, despite defeats, left offensives will remain populist in nature for the foreseeable future. The formative conditions of crisis are still very much with us"--

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Subjects
Published
London ; New York : Verso 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Arthur Borriello (author)
Other Authors
Anton Jäger, 1994- (author)
Physical Description
214 pages ; 20 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781804292488
  • Introduction: The Long 2010s
  • 1. What Populism?
  • 2. Why Populism?
  • 3. Ebb and Flow
  • 4. Populist Postgame
  • 5. Five Scenarios
  • Conclusion: Populism's Next Decade
  • Notes
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The fizzled crusades of left-wing populists are analyzed in this incisive political study. Political theorists Boriello and Jäger (Welfare for Markets) dissect several leftist political movements of the 2010s, including Greece's Syriza party, which in 2015 formed a government promising (but failing) to resist the austerity program dictated by Greece's European Union creditors; La France Insoumise, which couldn't capitalize on the initial promise it showed during the 2017 French presidential election; lefty parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn's takeover of Britain's Labour Party, which was crushed by Boris Johnson's Tories in 2019; and democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders' unsuccessful presidential primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020. These populist movements, the authors argue, took several wrong turns: they downplayed the traditional left-wing theme of working-class conflict with capitalists in favor of broad but vague appeals to the fight of "the people" against antidemocratic elites, eschewed stable party structures in favor of convenient but evanescent online mobilizations, and were dominated by charismatic "hyperleaders." Boriello and Jäger have a knack for making political writing lucid and elegant (La France Insoumise, they write, "displayed the physical properties of gas: expansive, flexible, but also volatile"), and they offer a persuasive analysis of contemporary politics as a thin soil of PR, protest spectacle, and social media fads in which serious left-wing projects struggle to take root. The result is a clear-sighted political postmortem. (Sept.)

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