Both mainstream and radical analyses of populism read it as irrational crowd behavior

Evidence

Since the days of influential nineteenth-century theorist Gustav Le Bon, both publics and markets have been consistently studied through the lens of crowd psychology. … Analyses of Trump’s 2016 election as a triumph of the mob have been expectedly popular, with arguments ranging from the regressive to the dismissive. On the one hand, conservative apologists such as Douglas Murray (2019) deride the unjustified anger of the New Left as an explanation for the inflammation of a “mass hysteria,” which sets the backdrop for a (“justified”) populism such as Trump’s. On the other side of this debate, sociologist Dylan Riley (2017, 2018) argues that the indebtedness of societies through increased financialization has atomized precarious wage earners, turning them into what Marx famously described as “a sack of potatoes.” More crudely, Riemen (2018) writes of the deplorable “mass man politics” and the “organised stupidity” of Trump supporters. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior material on irrationalist readings of crowds; also evokes Le Bon’s crowd psychology as a through-line in both this and earlier chapters. — connects to: Populism may itself express the public’s irrational exuberance — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 686; Moral condemnation has driven supposedly objective analyses of populism — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 58