Laclau’s populism theory anticipated Europe’s 2010s fragmentation decades in advance.

Evidence

In that regard, the context in which Laclau built his theory of populism is noteworthy. While he took inspiration from the Peronist regime in his home country, his primary interventions took place in the Marxist debates of the late 1980s, when deindustrialization and the rise of new struggles including civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism were redefining the terms of the substantial dilemma that had always haunted the left. As Perry Anderson has noted, his work thereby strangely “anticipated developments in Europe thirty years later, when globalization had shrunk and divided the working class, leaving a much more fragmented social landscape, and a multiplication of movements, left and right, contesting the established order in the name of the people.” For the left, the return of the populist temptation went hand in hand with the shattering of the original coalition on which social democracy had built its successes. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the book’s earlier framing of populism’s recurrence across the 1890s, 1930s, and 2010s generations. — connects to: The post-political mood fractured by the late 2010s across Europe

Broader Connections

• The post-political mood fractured by the late 2010s across Europe #corroborates (0.80)