Review of Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment. The Left after the Great Recession (Verso, 2023)
In The Populist Moment, Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger analyze a political cycle, “the long 2010s,” when left populists – perhaps most notably Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his various formations in France, Corbynism in the UK, and Sanders’ movement in the US – made notable attempts to rethink and revive the left by adopting a populist identity. The core agendas of this concise, dense, and engaging book are to investigate the specific origins and broader causes of this “populist moment”; to describe and explain the ebb and flow of its major representatives; to assess the major strengths and weaknesses of left populists in more general terms; and to conjecture about where such attempts to revive the left might be headed next. Borriello and Jäger manage to deliver on this ambitious agenda by offering numerous insights and developing a coherent overall interpretation – even though this comes at the price of somewhat narrow empirical foci and concerns.
Aiming to clear up the widespread confusion that has surrounded the concept of populism in recent years while explicitly rejecting what they consider to be influential anti-democratic criticisms of the phenomenon, the authors argue that the cornerstone of populist ideology is democracy. Populists worthy of the label are against oligarchic corruption, which may mean positioning peoples in opposition to elites but also – and quite crucially during the 2010s – creditors to debtors. Left populists may employ anti-establishment rhetoric, possess strong leaders, prefer direct communication and plebiscitarian decisions, and have weak party structures, but those are not specific to them, the authors remark.
An intention to construct the people as a political subject while seeking mass participation across classes combined with an antagonistic conception of politics just as calls are made for an expansion of rights and for redistribution is a much more precise way to delineate left populists, they propose.
In other words, left populists – akin to socialists, with whom they share a genealogy – aim to reduce social inequalities and strengthen democracy, the book asserts.
Left populists may flourish within the Western world, Borriello and Jäger continue, in places where social democracy is unavailable or has been discredited (such as via the further ideological convergence of mainstream parties in the years of recession, bailouts, and austerity), where the quality of democratic mediation has significantly worsened, and where fragmented and isolated social groups need to be brought together and unified.
Their political breakthrough is typically sparked by a crisis of representation combined with a powerful sense of oligarchic plundering – precisely the kind of combination that characterized much of the long 2010s.
In such moments, re-politicizing the economy and re-democratizing democracy are equally urgent tasks for the left; socio-economic grievances and democratic claims may thus come to form a tight package.
The Populist Moment also dissects the longer-term trends behind the upswing of left populism during this recent political cycle. Alongside the 2008 crash with all its sorry consequences, the authors emphasize the preexisting crisis of Western democracy. As they elaborate, the secular impoverishment of political life in an age of deindustrialization, the erosion of party democracy, the rise of technocracy, the marketization of politics, and the plight of civil society all combined to pose formidable challenges for the left in contemporary times. How can a profoundly demobilized society be mobilized in today’s disorganized democracies and the left rebuilt without a muscular labor movement? How can social democracy’s slack be picked up amidst high levels of social fragmentation and debt, how can it be “replaced rather than abolished” by constructively channeling contemporary discontent and protest movements?
As The Populist Moment suggests in an illuminating manner, these key challenges posed a dual dilemma for left-wing populists: of substance and of form. Should they aim to be ideologically pure but politically inflexible or should they become more versatile but also rather hollow? Should they remain a minoritarian force with a clear working-class profile or try to be a majoritarian, predominantly middle-class formation?
As Borriello and Jäger show, under the dire but also opportune conditions, such as those of the long 2010s, notable parts of the left responded by simplifying their ideological content while complexifying their form, i.e., by turning populist.
Either by conquest from the outside (as in the case of Syriza) or by “seizing the machine” (see, most obviously, Corbynism in the UK), such parties could emerge as a third main actor – next to liberal technocrats and the radical right – in several of what might be labelled disorganized democracies.
However, as the authors sharply observe, the aforementioned dilemmas set a trap for left-wing populists. Their parties could either prove too leftist for contemporary electorates to take full advantage of the traditional party system’s ongoing crisis or too populist and heterogeneous to address the organizational question convincingly and be able to propagate clear and meaningful changes. As Borriello and Jäger show in detail, while left populists were seeking to construct a broad and inclusive popular subject that would be capable of reclaiming democratic institutions, their attempt to deal with extreme heterogeneity proved only partially successful. They may have temporarily managed to bring the “lost generation” of the young and educated, as well as much of the squeezed middle classes, on board. However, what has survived from the industrial working class has typically remained relatively absent from their political projects.
A distinct pattern crystallized. An impressive upsurge based on rather innovative ideas and methods (to simplify: a strong and charismatic leader, direct communication, and plebiscitarian decisions to make vocal calls for an expansion of rights and redistribution) led to resounding electoral successes. However, those successes would soon be followed by electoral stagnation and strategic hesitation, which would in turn provoke severe internal tensions. Large numbers would become mobilized during the 2010s, especially among members of the networked but disaffiliated middle class youth, but many of them would then leave these political formations equally quickly and easily. The opportunities that seemed within grasp around the mid-2010s evaporated in the coming years.
What appeared to many active contributors to the left populist wave to be a wasted opportunity – after all, centrist parties were indeed caught in decline, new social movements were becoming powerful, fresh policy platforms were developed, and capable leaders emerged under favorable circumstances, giving rise to great expectations – had deeper structural causes, the book argues. The basic pattern of the rise and decline of left populism was in fact largely determined by the paradoxical environment in which it was acting, Borriello and Jäger explain.
The seemingly radical politics of left populists proved quite capable of adapting to the pre-existing environment of unmediated democracy.
At the same time, the political void (Peter Mair) has either been too empty or not empty enough in Western democracies: the former would make mobilization and organization too difficult whereas the latter preserved electoral ceilings despite the partial erosion of the party system.
What may have looked like a wasted opportunity should rather be qualified as resulting directly from mismatched realities and expectations, Borriello and Jäger suggest in slightly deterministic fashion.
The left populist intermission may have temporarily attracted supporters and voters by drawing valuable lessons in terms of the two dominant modes of politics in our age – protest and PR – and by responding to social dispersion and media centrality through making individual leaders more prominent. They may at times have succeeded in performing antagonisms in spectacular fashion. However, they only aggravated the problem of representation through their anti-mediation narrative.
When it comes to the most essential and urgent political tasks – such as creating coherent voting blocs, recreating social bonds, building a collective view of society, and training a new generation of cadres – the achievements of left populist parties have been very partial indeed, the authors assert.
Their five main representatives as discussed at some length on these pages – Syriza, Podemos, Mélenchon and his formations, Corbynism, and the Sanders movement – have either disappeared, become normalized, only managed to reorder, were neutralized, or have splintered. In retrospect, left populist parties ended up looking much like start-up companies, with their exuberant preference for digitization producing its own hierarchies and disappointments.
Many of these insights are sharp and the larger interpretations that Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger offer into the left after the great recession are persuasive on their own terms.
The historical-contextual explanation the book develops is inventive and powerful, though its impressive architecture and striking coherence also imply some significant omissions.
Most obviously, the five cases discussed all belong to the Western world and the larger narrative of democracy – “from organized to disorganized” – that the book’s argument is based on hardly seems applicable beyond its confines. Predictably, the clear focus on significant national examples comes at the expense of exploring transnational alliances or more local political innovations. The authors also have surprisingly little to say about several of the most discussed and contested subjects of “the long 2010s,” such as gender, race, the climate emergency, or the flourishing of a broader leftist public sphere that has arguably been just as exciting during this political cycle as the rise and decline of political parties – the two have indeed been inseparable parts of what they ungenerously refer to as “swarms.”
Not coincidentally, these are issues on which Western social democrats – whom left populism has been aiming to “replace rather than abolish”, ultimately amounting to “social democracy without social democracy” – have had an unenviable record. Borriello and Jäger raise critical questions regarding left populism on these pages and offer empathic, sufficiently complex, and nuanced assessments. However, those assessments are partly based on a conspicuous disinterest in interrogating in a comparable manner the history of social democracy and organized democracies more generally.
The Populist Moment concludes, more satisfyingly, by reflecting on how the political cycle it has studied may be understood as an interregnum. During this interregnum, left populists have managed to reopen the social democratic dilemma, the authors state, but have been unable to develop a convincing and sustainable left-wing counterweight.
However, the era of “post-politics” has clearly ended during this interregnum and has been replaced by what Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger rightly call an inspiring and exasperating hybrid.
Practically everything becomes fervently politicized these days but only a few become involved in the organized conflicts between interests, they aptly diagnose. In other words, what this recent political cycle has revealed is that a modicum of deliberation cannot be kept out forever, however the consequences may continue to be visible primarily on the discursive level.
Ferenc Laczó, Maastricht University
