Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger — The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession

173 published claims from this book.

• 2010s leftists faced demobilized civil society instead of mass parties
• A Bernie-style campaign could aim to build lasting infrastructure beyond the election
• A left-populist’s trajectory depends on the fate of its social democratic rival
• Academic definitions of populism have spawned a media industry resembling personality-test astrology
• Academic far-right studies carried American populism discourse into European media
• Academics carried the word populism from America to Europe
• American commentators long saw populism as tied to the nineteenth-century biracial movement
• Applying the fascism label to present-day movements hinders rather than sharpens opposition to them
• Austerity doctrines explicitly justified suspending electoral accountability as institutional virtue
• Austerity during recession deepens downturns and worsens state finances
• Austerity policy served creditor protection more than economic recovery
• Austerity was framed by its architects as redemptive sacrifice required for recovery
• Austerity-driven left challengers displaced collapsing social democratic parties across Europe
• Bernie and Trump share an era even though they are opposite political phenomena
• Bernie’s organizational independence came from lacking any party machine to rely on
• Bipartisan rules neutered third-party challengers after Populism’s defeat
• Black Southern voters’ party loyalty functions as ethnic cartelization blocking insurgents.
• Bolivian MAS survived because of commodity boom and labor links Europe lacked
• British Conservative Party membership has decayed to a geriatric remnant
• Broad populist coalitions require a common enemy and ambiguous symbols
• Center-left parties lost their social bases and legitimacy, creating the vacuum populism filled.
• Center-left parties’ embrace of austerity fueled the European populist upsurge
• Centrist social democratic parties can collapse suddenly into irrelevance.
• Collective action against inflation fails because individual restraint could serve it equally.
• Commodified soccer clubs and cartelized parties both priced out loyal core fans
• Condemning ‘populism’ indirectly delegitimizes popular sovereignty itself
• Contemporary right-wing populist followings lack the mass organization fascism required
• Corbyn’s Labour coalition fractured along generational and geographic lines over Brexit
• Critics equated Gaullist France with authoritarian dictatorship
• Decline of the manufacturing capital-labor binary makes populist politics objectively more attractive.
• Declining intermediary bodies left modern societies atomized like Marx’s peasant sack of potatoes
• Deindustrialization shattered social democracy’s class coalition
• Democratic co-optation destroyed the original Populist party
• Different Marxist thinkers answered who-the-people-is differently across history
• Digital light-touch organization suits today’s disorganized democracy
• Digital party organization cannot replace vanished civil-society substructures
• Digital protest crowds behave like swarms that cannot be organized durably
• Disintermediation atomized society into isolated individuals
• Economic crises are ambiguous enough to enable wildly divergent political outcomes.
• Economic grievance alone could not sustain sustained protest movements past their first burst.
• Electoral system type determines whether populist leftists build new parties or capture existing ones
• Elite contempt for populist challengers backfired into their electoral triumph.
• Elite convergence on austerity, not austerity itself, triggered the populist breach
• Elites like Theodore Roosevelt wanted Populists shot
• Establishment center-left parties can collapse from dominance to irrelevance in years.
• Establishment parties admitted populists to government only once populists were safely weak
• EU conditionality gave national elites political cover for austerity reforms they already wanted
• EU diktat served as cover for elites’ own pre-existing austerity preferences.
• Euro-zone crisis management explicitly treated elections as threatening sound policy.
• Europe’s center-left parties enacted the first austerity programs and allied with the center-right
• European and American left-populist movements rose together between 2012 and 2017
• European austerity’s doom loop discredited center-left parties while US growth held
• European bailout austerity packages followed a standard tranche-and-deepen structure
• European elites deployed the word populist to discredit antiausterity movements
• European populist-left parties revived mass political enthusiasm around charismatic leaders
• Eurozone austerity was framed as moral redemption for past fiscal sins
• Eurozone rules enforced Germany’s economic model through power asymmetries
• Even the IMF came to doubt the economic efficacy of austerity programs
• Financial elites sincerely believed innovation had abolished capitalism’s boom-bust cycle.
• German officials openly told Greek counterparts elections cannot change policy
• German reunification delivered a vast low-cost labor pool to employers
• Global movements claiming to speak for the people are winning power across democracies
• Greece lost a quarter of its GDP during the 2010s austerity decade
• Greek austerity raised debt ratios while destroying GDP and employment
• Hyper-political passion coexists with declining organized interest conflict
• Journalists long confined the populism label to the right before left forces adopted it
• Labour’s dilemma was compounded by civil-society disorganization since the 1980s
• Laclau defined populism as the unification of demands against a power bloc
• Laclau’s populism theory anticipated Europe’s 2010s fragmentation decades in advance.
• Laclau’s post-Marxism reframed left politics from class conflict to a peoples-versus-elites cleavage.
• Leader-centered movements become vulnerable to ad hominem attacks on the whole
• Leaderless protest movements of 2011 lacked the infrastructure to convert discontent into programmatic change.
• Left populism arose as an attempted replacement for, not an abolition of, social democracy.
• Left populism helped destroy post-politics yet failed to restore mass politics
• Left populist parties articulate a recognizable shared repertoire across distinct formations
• Left populists appeared radical only because centrist politics shifted rightward
• Left populists fused PR skills with square-protest horizontalism into a new politics
• Left protest shifted from workplace to spectacle because it lacked embedded organizations.
• Left-populist movements split into distinct strategic types facing different challenges
• Left-populist parties across countries followed an identically scripted rise and fall
• Left-populist parties across the West had all lost power by the early 2020s
• Left-populist strategy, not just structural context, made Syriza the antiausterity vehicle.
• Legislative deregulation drove the US financial sector’s postwar expansion
• LFI’s light structure aided mobilization but prevented long-run entrenchment
• Maastricht deficit rules were arbitrary and selectively enforced yet became the austerity stick.
• Many populist movements expand rather than restrict who counts as the people
• Mass demobilization, not elite capture alone, defines twenty-first century politics
• Mass political parties were free associations unlike obligatory medieval guilds
• Mélenchon won hegemony over the left but not over French society
• Modern leaderist populism differs fundamentally from Leninist ideological schools
• Neoliberal parties replaced mass-member pressure with marketing to atomized voters
• New mass-party replacements combine horizontal structure with undisciplined leaderism
• Online communities lack the thick involuntary bonds of offline associations
• Overly minimal definitions of populism make the label apply to almost all modern politicians
• Party democracy’s decline also destroyed the intermediary institutions linking citizens to the state
• Party democracy’s erosion destroyed the mediating civil society that stood between citizen and state.
• Party politics shifted to professional experts lacking democratic backing after 1990.
• Paul Mason chronicled Syriza’s rise as an enthusiastic populist partisan
• Podemos aimed beyond niche entry to displace social democracy wholly
• Podemos reached government only after losing two million voters and its deputy leader
• Podemos revived social democracy instead of displacing it
• Politicians now feign working-class authenticity against outdated stereotypes of their own constituents
• Populism builds cross-class coalitions while socialism centers one sovereign class
• Populism is best studied as a historical term that carries its own biography
• Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization
• Populism proved a transient politics because its age runs on short-term exit options
• Populism surges as a response to perceived crises of democratic representation
• Populism targets oligarchic corruption, not capitalism or democracy itself
• Populism’s signature traits are shared adaptations to disorganized democracy rather than its own
• Populist ambiguity yields lukewarm economics and narrow nationalism in power
• Populist breakthroughs erupt when social democratic alternatives fail and mediation channels clog
• Populist enthusiasts can convert into informants against their former allies
• Populist parties abandoned horizontal decision-making once they aimed to win power
• Populist-left parties channeled square-movements’ spirit into electoral bids for state power
• Populist-left parties replaced mass-party structures with leader-centric media-driven quick mobilization
• Populist-left politics emerged amid party decline and labor movement collapse
• Post-1970s fiscal crisis forced states to choose between workers and capital.
• Post-1989 Italian communists celebrated Wall Street as democratic temples.
• Post-1989 left parties dissolved into market-friendly formations
• Post-2008 austerity discredited center-left parties and radicalized a generation into populism
• Post-2008 left populism failed from being either too left-wing or too populist
• Post-2011 austerity governance operated through a spreading fog of despair
• Post-Communist leaders embraced their former enemies’ institutions publicly
• Post-politics gave way directly to hyper-politics without restoring mass organization
• Post-social-democratic student movements must build themselves from nothing without prior leftist infrastructure
• Post-war demand management was replaced by credit-financed private consumption
• Postwar democratic regimes nonetheless rested on party states and empowered workers
• Postwar social democracy rested on perpetual growth between capital and labor
• Radical left parties can collapse mainstream social democrats to near extinction
• Representation crises trigger populist breakthroughs across eras
• Right-wing populism today is swarm politics, not mass fascism.
• Russia uses separate words for 19th-century and present populism, unlike Europe
• Scholarship on populism splits between resigned retention and outright ban of the word
• Social democratic parties abandoned class politics for a pro-market Third Way
• Social democrats faced a structural dilemma between class base and middle-class concessions
• Social media grew in a civic void and then accelerated that void
• Southern European credit booms were fueled by recycled German surplus profits
• Southern European parties reframed class conflict as generational conflict
• Square movements attacked elite collusion rather than capital itself, breaking from labor tradition
• Square movements targeted elite collusion, not capitalism per se.
• Strategic equivocation on divisive issues can hold an electoral coalition together.
• Street protest evacuates rather than supplants the organized workplace struggle the left once waged
• Street-based anti-capitalist protest fails because it abandons the workplace where politics meets daily life.
• Strong leadership signals the weakness of the underlying social movement
• Successful movements broaden from sectoral protest to a unified ‘the people’ appeal.
• Sudden investor panic, not fiscal reality, newly branded Mediterranean debt intractable
• The 1980s shifted politicians from representing sectors to selling to publics
• The 1990s middle class later became the occupy movement’s squeezed core
• The 2008 bailouts bred a felt betrayal that fueled the Occupy movement.
• The 2008 bank bailouts delegitimized the political centre ground myth
• The 2008 crash accelerated a decades-long hollowing out of party democracy
• The 2008 crisis accelerated a decades-long party democracy decline
• The 2008 crisis merely accelerated a party-democracy decline dating to 1973.
• The 2011 square movements broke from older left protest forms in scale and organization
• The Democratic Party functions as a state department, not a real party
• The euro’s design deliberately enforced German-model reforms through power asymmetries.
• The industrial working class’s absence crippled the squares movement
• The millennial left faced organizing without the mediating institutions that once welded its coalition
• The near-simultaneous 2011 protests revealed a shared deep crisis of neoliberal capitalism
• The nonprofit model turned membership advocacy groups into advocates serving donor interests.
• The occupy movement allied three demographics that rarely marched together
• The persistence of the word populism signals a real hidden dynamic despite its vagueness
• The populist left sought to re-democratize democracy, not abolish capitalism
• The sovereign debt narrative mislabeled private-debt crises as state profligacy.
• The sovereign-debt framing wrongly blamed state profligacy for private-bubble collapses
• The word populism originated with American Midwest farmers, not Europe
• The working and middle classes swapped sides on globalization and nationalism
• The working and middle classes traded their internationalist-nationalist orientations during the twentieth century.
• Tsipras’s 2015 capitulation triggered the whole left-populist movement’s decline
• Understanding today’s populism requires analogies to primal democracy rather than 1930s class war
• Unelected bodies captured policy while media seized politics after the 1990s.
• US parties were never mass parties but functioned as such via civil associations.
• Working inside an established party warps and defeats the populist challenger