The Barque of Dante, Édouard Manet (1854–1858)

Much has been written about the election of ‘populists’ in the US, Italy, Hungary, Poland and other countries. Indeed, though these governments hold values and goals that may unambiguously be identified with the far right, ‘populism’ or ‘right-wing populism’ is not a misnomer. Populism invokes and appeals to the organic unity of the ‘People’ defined broadly (and covertly, selectively) with despotic and even totalitarian undertones. Polities employing this language evince different levels of authoritarianism from the illiberal or managed ‘democracy’ to fascism, mediated by particular local histories and political life.

Now we see the rise of populist revolt marked by variegated demands drawn from across the political spectrum – from higher wages for the struggling mass of ‘left behind’ employees and higher public spending, to tighter immigration controls and the deportation of immigrants, for a more generous benefits regime and to administering such a regime on a ‘racialized’ basis.

The commentary generated by these campaigns and movements – here we are thinking of the Brexit campaign in Britain which fundamentally reshaped the political terrain, the Italian national election that saw the Northern League break out of its relatively affluent northern strongholds and join the Five Star Movement in government and most recently the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ protests in France – all reveal a worrying trend to take populism at its own word, treating the phenomena as somehow transcending politics.

In reality, the idea of a revolt of the whole of society, of all the ‘popular classes’, except perhaps a narrow ruling stratum and their explicit supporters, was only ever valid in the colonial situation (but even then, often not). While the financialization of global capitalism has led to a world market economy, exacerbating uneven development and extremes of wealth and poverty (even as it raised incomes everywhere), to claim counter-systemic populism is a revolt against exploitation per se, seems far from the mark. Rather, in keeping with this highly cathected and risible  notion of majority victimhood in the global North, we are offered a simulcra of the colonial revolt in reverse with genuinely oppressed minorities cast as the pied noir aligned with ‘globalist’ liberal elites. Such a perverse view is a text book example of privilege or pathological narcissism. Having found oneself on the summit of Mount Olympus no less, our benighted First World citizen ignores the spectacular view in favour of a minute inspection of their navel. After years of austerity in Britain it would be foolish to deny the reality there is some degree of wretchedness in the country as the UN’s rappateur discovered recently while touring many of the poorest towns, cities and regions but the decisive battalions of Leave voters were provided by older UKIP and Tory voters who resemble nothing so much as The Fatted of the Earth.

The idea of social fluidity, multiculturalism and the long, slow decay of essentialist or traditional notions of identity, has provoked a reactionary backlash and come under sustained attack recently, especially since the referendum. Yet these ‘cosmopolitan’ conceptions were very much a positive part of global modernity’s curate’s egg. From the Brexiteers pantomine claim that Britain is a vassal of Brussels to the anti Semitic suggestion that Macron is a play thing of ‘the Jews’, much of the current situation in Europe is about the inability to face up to a baleful past of imperial domination and murder, preferring instead the narcissistic clinging to roseate illusions of a lost golden age of ‘sovereignty’.

With Toni Negri’s comical resuscitation of the idea of the ‘jacquerie’ to various anarchist inflected notions of spontaneous revolt in France, the left has an idea of a pre-political revolt in which the right and left duke it out to win hegemony. A left desperate to deny its own meaningless and nullity, instead acts as if History had granted a wish. This is utterly wrong, not just because the left is historically and culturally very unlikely to triumph as a result of the sedimentation of right-wing ideas as common sense in the social imaginary or because it leads, as we have already seen, to the left screening out stubborn facts or reading them as morbid symptoms pointing down the road to Calvary (that’s if they don’t simply tail ‘anti-systemic’ racism, as many do) but also because the idea of a social movement, however, amorphous, existing in a state of pre-signification and pre-meaning, is simply impossible. Only movements with a strong sense of civic or humanist values and significations of self government and equality, properly count as progressive social movements. Populism like other forms of majoritarianism is a pernicious poison because it draws from the doxa of the current value orientations of this society while rejecting that society. Populism hothouses, metastasises and mutates the worst reactions of the reigning social malaise.

Now with fascists across Europe donning yellow vests we are able to glimpse how fascists will organise for the foreseeable future. This could be a successful modus operandi as it battens on to the idea of ‘racial’ threat and an elite conspiracy against the plebeian nation. A conspiracy theory is often an act of displacement, with shadowy elites who are often invoked in such narratives, being much more psychically palatable than the truth that the global social order has run out of control – with no one truly in charge – the real condition of capitalism. We have already seen that C21st fascism in Europe comes with the words globalism on its lips,  Russian money in its pocket, Syrian blood on its hands and bawling conspiracy theories.

A striking feature of the current populism is the prominence of climate change denialism – if fascism has often been linked to a displacement of both death and change, particularly the individual’s inability to permit the thought that their identity and objects are not superior to another’s and thus begin to work on the unconscious egotism about perfection and eminence that haunts the human condition due to our long infancy and helplessness – we now see  individuals refusing to register the profound civilizational and personal change necessary to deal with global warming and its concomitant change of values. The current populism doesn’t suggest a New Man but the same man without the irritating challenges to his own self-satisfied sense of entitlement.

If fascism represents a drive to abolish the non-I by annihilating that which is in conflict with one’s own desires and fuse with an ‘archaic’ mother represented by the monist mass movement, perhaps we could also speak of climate change being the elephant in the psyche that is displaced by projective identification. If the grand changes brought about by modernity were displaced on to ‘the Jew’ in the Nazi imaginary, could today’s civilizational challenge posed by climate change now be displaced on to migrants, outsiders and ‘globalists’ (the last standing for anti-racists and liberals)? If in the unconscious nature is associated with the mother’s body, is it any wonder that we often repress the damage we have done to it and refuse to acknowledge the catastrophe at hand, can it but draw into consciousness repressed the guilty feelings about damaging mother that all children have?

For us, democratic revolt means the disenchanted radicalism of a project for an egalitarian future that openly acknowledges the damage that our imperial and ecocidal civilisation has done to others, the Earth and ourselves. Populism, drawing long and deep from the fascist imaginary, represents almost the exact antithesis of this project.

by Joseph Aylmer