The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation by Benjamin Moffitt

Author:Benjamin Moffitt [Moffitt, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

7

The Stage II: Populism and Crisis

‘Crisis’ being a vague term, it is easily coined and devalued. Thus it is not difficult to associate ‘populism’ (or almost anything else) with ‘crisis’. There is also a tautological tendency to impute populism (or anything else) to ‘crisis’, as if ‘crisis’ were a discernible cause, when, in fact, it is often a loose description of a bundle of phenomena. Disaggregation sometimes reveals that it was not ‘crisis’ which generated populism (or mobilisation, rebellion, etc.), but rather populism (or mobilisation, rebellion, etc.) which generated crisis.

—Knight (1998, 227)

As we find ourselves entering the adolescent years of the twenty-first century, it appears that we are well and truly living in the age of crisis—the Global Financial Crisis, the Eurozone crisis, environmental crisis, various humanitarian crises—the list goes on. More broadly, it is alleged that we are undergoing a crisis of faith in democracy (Crouch 2004; Zakaria 2013). In such a situation, it would seem that the stage has been set for populists to sweep in, appeal to ‘the people’ and enjoy great success by capitalising on a general loss of faith and disaffection with their representatives, ‘the elite’ and politics in general. Crisis breeds populism, doesn’t it?

To some extent, this has occurred: Beppe Grillo’s MoVimento 5 Stelle made a stunning political debut in Italy in 2013, capturing approximately a quarter of the overall votes in the national elections; populist parties in the Nordic countries have enjoyed a steady rise in popularity; while in Latin America, Rafael Correa is in his third term as president in Ecuador and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro continues to fly the Chavista flag. Yet elsewhere, populists are not doing so well in these times of crisis. Despite still commanding some influence within the Republican Party, the US Tea Party flailed following the humiliating defeat of a number of their star candidates; the much-vaunted Le Pen-Wilders alliance ‘European Alliance for Freedom’ failed to form an official group in the European Parliament following the 2014 EU elections; and in many countries allegedly undergoing crisis, populist challengers have simply not emerged or succeeded. This mixed evidence from across the world suggests a need to challenge the received wisdom regarding the causal relationship between populism and crisis, which tends to argue that crisis acts as either an external trigger or a necessary precondition of populism.

In this light, this chapter offers a new perspective on the relationship between populism and crisis, arguing that rather than just thinking about crisis as a trigger of populism, we should also think about how populism attempts to act as a trigger for crisis. This is due to the fact that crises are never ‘neutral’ phenomena, but must be mediated and ‘performed’ by certain actors, setting the stage for populist success. It argues that populist actors actively participate in this ‘spectacularisation of failure’ that underlies crisis, allowing them to pit ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ or associated dangerous Others; radically simplify the terms and terrain of political debate; and advocate strong leadership and quick political action to stave off or solve the impending crisis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.