Populist rhetoric can forge hegemonic alliances binding the people to capital.

Evidence

Its radicalism connects with radical-popular sentiments; but it effectively turns them round, absorbs and neutralizes their popular thrust, and creates, in the place of a popular rupture, a populist unity . It brings into existence a new “historic bloc” between certain sections of the dominant and dominated classes. We can see this construction of ideological cross-alliances between “Thatcherism” and “the people” actually going on in the very structure of Mrs. Thatcher’s own rhetoric. “Don’t talk to me about ‘them’ and ‘us’ in a company,” she once told the readers of Woman’s Own : “You’re all ‘we’ in a company. You survive as the company survives, prosper as the company prospers—everyone together. The future lies in cooperation and not confrontation.” This displaces an existing structure of oppositions—“them” vs. “us.” It sets in its place an alternative set of equivalents: “Them and us equals we .” Then it positions we—“the people”—in a particular relation to capital: behind it, dominated by its imperatives (profitability, accumulation); yet at the same time, yoked to it, identified with it. … The process we are looking at here is very similar to that which Gramsci once described as transformism : the neutralization of some elements in an ideological formation and their absorption and passive appropriation into a new political configuration. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1113

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Direct invocation of Gramsci’s transformism; the passage itself does the theoretical linking.
• DEFINE: Defines transformism as the absorption and neutralization of ideological elements into a new configuration.

Related

• Defeated populism is absorbed hierarchically into the ruling order (similarity 0.80)
• Populism can be mobilized either against or in service of the power bloc (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Participatory management rhetoric conceals a reorganization that strips subordinate power. #expands (0.78) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 800
• Popular ‘us versus them’ discourse can be recoded to support the power bloc #corroborates (0.75)
• Ideologies take effect by working along the grooves of existing popular attitudes. #expands (0.55)
• Hegemony is reproduced through unstable, shifting equilibria rather than static dominance #complicates (0.50) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 294
• Capital instrumentalizes Islamophobia rather than being driven by it #corroborates (0.45) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 59
• Hegemony is an unstable equilibrium that dominant forces must continually resecure #complicates (0.45) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 767
• Common sense is a key route to hegemonic power in democracies #expands (0.40)
• Becoming common sense is a key route to hegemonic power #expands (0.40)