Populist breakthroughs erupt when social democratic alternatives fail and mediation channels clog

Evidence

In many ways, the debates of the 2010s echoed this turbulence. Populist breakthroughs usually happen when a spark—economic recession, fiscal reform, or modernization/globalization—first ignites a crisis of representation. Then a broad swath of the society comes to see democracy as having been perverted by an oligarchic minority’s plundering of public resources. Populism rides in as the white knight of “real democracy,” either to defend it against the hijack of its existing structures (the oligopolistic takeover of the United States in the late nineteenth century, the technocratic handling of the eurozone crisis in the aftermath of 2008) or to force its advent against the bottlenecks of pre-democratic societies (Tsarist Russia, Latin American landlordism). Through this lens we can see a common thread between the populist moments of past and present. From the People’s Party to the Five Star Movement, the populist moments erupt in situations where a social democratic option was either unavailable or discredited, the channels of democratic mediation were clogged, and the main social groups of a popular coalition were relatively fragmented and isolated, and so crying out for unification. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 80

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concise statement of the model that ties together a century of populist movements.
• XREF: This generalizes the recurring pattern seen across the populist case studies in this book and connects to the structural ‘sack of potatoes’ framing in [82]. — connects to: Left populism arose as an attempted replacement for, not an abolition of, social democracy. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 23; Representation crises trigger populist breakthroughs across eras — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 80; Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 297 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Representation crises trigger populist breakthroughs across eras #corroborates (0.85) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 80
• Populism surges as a response to perceived crises of democratic representation #corroborates (0.85) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 85
• A left-populist’s trajectory depends on the fate of its social democratic rival #corroborates (0.82) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 299
• Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization #qualifies (0.80) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 297
• Left populism helped destroy post-politics yet failed to restore mass politics #corroborates (0.78) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 345
• Post-2008 left populism failed from being either too left-wing or too populist #complicates (0.75) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 31
• Failed socialization forces revolutionary alternatives into the vacuum #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 30