Understanding today’s populism requires analogies to primal democracy rather than 1930s class war

Evidence

If this is so, rather than to the class wars of the 1930s, we should look back to a much older, primal age of democracy for suitable parallels with our populist age. Once we free our notion of populism from that more recent past, we can properly understand what gave us the current populist moment in the first place. Divergences with the worlds of mass democracy we have left behind will also become visible, and the resulting confusion over the term “populism” will clear up—and so, hopefully, will Paul Mason’s trading the streets of Athens for the offices of Whitehall. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 35

Categorization

• QUESTION: What ‘primal age of democracy’ parallels will the author actually mobilize, and do they hold up?
• XREF: connects to: Populism’s signature traits are shared adaptations to disorganized democracy rather than its own — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 83; Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 297; Populism expresses ambivalence toward industrial modernity from its periphery — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 41

Broader Connections

• Populism’s signature traits are shared adaptations to disorganized democracy rather than its own #expands (0.82) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 83
• Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization #expands (0.78) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 297
• Populism expresses ambivalence toward industrial modernity from its periphery #qualifies (0.72) — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 41