Liberalism and Centrism

Paul Bowman
22 min readApr 27, 2021

--

Liberal as scrabble word
[Photo credit: Mayberry Health and Home] (CC BY 2.0)

(Section 7 of Ideology and Practice)

Having proposed and given some illustration of the protagonist/antagonist distinction extended from the reading of Marx and Engels’ idiosyncratic and no longer current usage of the term “ideology”, I want to show how it can illuminate our understanding of centrism and what people often refer to as “liberalism” even though this common parlance doesn’t entirely correspond to the classical doctrines of liberalism. But first we need to deal with that problematic term “liberalism”.

Liberalism, classical and vulgar

Two things are immediately apparent about what we mean by the word liberalism today. One the one hand there’s a general recognition of an established historical origin in the political philosophies of a recognised canon of Enlightenment thinkers. The list varies, but names like Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Bentham, Turgot, Smith and so on, usually feature. On the other hand there is general recognition that the popular meaning of “liberals” as a designation, now varies considerably between America and Europe (at least), to the point of near-incompatibility. A statement like “liberals believe in big government” is arguably accepted in America, but opposite to the sense of liberalism in Europe, for example.

Clearly such divergence in meaning, from an agreed common point of origin shows a number of things. The first, trivially true, observation is that language evolves and the meanings of words change, and this happens in different ways in different places following the particular historical and cultural developments in that region. But an additional observation could also be made, in a similar vein to Marx’s discussion of the difference between political economy in its classical and “vulgar” phases.

To recap, Marx suggested that in the classical phase, political economy is the doctrine of a social class or fraction that is outside of power and needs to formulate its theory in the view of critically challenging the current hegemonic ideology and evangelising the new gospel. Once the partisans of political economy achieve their objective of conquering ideological hegemony over the superstructure (including state, media, academia, etc), there is no longer an enemy to be in opposition to or a new vision to sell as an alternative to the existing status quo. In the vulgar phase, the role of political economy switches to providing apologetics for the new status quo that it now dominates. Consequently, the doctrines of vulgar political economy become shorn of the critical tools and assault weapons adopted for the demystification of the apologetics of the old regime and becomes a new turgid dogmatics of justification (and eternalisation) of what now exists as being what must exist and, eventually once cultural amnesia strikes, what has always existed.

Going beyond Marx, in section 4 I suggested that in a bi-modal doctrine/doxa view of ideology, eventually even the vulgar apologist doctrines become less significant in sustaining the dominance of the doctrine than the role of the decaying fragments that become detached from doctrinal tree and fall to enter the mulch of common doxa. For me, this unmooring from any anchoring in formal doctrine, is key to how the meaning of terms, originally coined as theoretically-grounded concepts in a specific doctrine, can be carried along on the current of popular discourse and semantically drift into regions that reflect the lived experiences and histories of the peoples involved, in the form of doxa —“that which goes without saying, because it comes without saying.”

Before we look at liberalism today, we need to go back to liberalism yesterday, in its classical crusading period. Above all we need to remember the cultural, theological and ideological context that classical liberalism was in opposition to. In the first instance there was a move away from theological scholasticism towards a more secular scientific approach. But more generally, the watchword of “sapere aude” was the rejection of all obscure teachings or traditions not based on defensible rationalisation or empirical demonstration.

We are not going to review the ideological history of the Enlightenment here — and specifically not its imbrication with regressive or reactionary features like racism, much as these should not be airbrushed out of its history or dismissed as contingent, accidental features — but its worth recalling the historically progressive character of the demand to “question everything”. Above all because Destutt de Tracy’s initial project for an “ideology” as a science of sorting legitimate, evidence-based knowledge from the legacies of past superstitions, is inextricably part of this classical liberal programme. Yet we need to recognise that Tracy’s project already contained within it the seed of its own subversion — the very element that would quickly invert the meaning of “ideology” to the exact opposite of its original intent. That is the misguided modernist optimism that the fact-value distinction could be ignored and normative views on the optimal direction for the future development of society could be somehow be objectively resolved on purely scientific grounds, once and for all. In other words that the centrist dogma of the “ideology of non-ideology” is an historical offshoot of the core values of classical liberalism’s epistemological revolution.

Today, in most liberal democratic countries, liberalism is generally not taught as a specific subject in schools. Mainly because it’s unnecessary, in that the basic tropes of liberalism (pluralism, etc) are already folded into the course content of every subject on the curriculum. At further education level, the seemingly vast pluralism of the range of academic subjects and disciplines in the academy hides the extent to which a Henry Ford-like choice of “you can have any view you like, so long as its liberal” is universally enforced. Actually, it’s a little more sophisticated than that, in that there is a layer of indirection added, such that you can study any doctrines you want, including illiberal ones, as long as they are accompanied by liberal alternatives in an over-arching liberal meta-framework. The following quote from an article on the role of Oxford University’s notorious PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) degree illustrates the systemic effect perfectly[1]:

The very structure of the course, [Stewart] Wood [Labour peer] believes, leaves many PPE graduates with “a centrist bias”. “You cover so much material that most students think, mistakenly, that the only way to do it justice is to take a centre position. And they conclude, again mistakenly, that to do well in the exams you have to avoid being an outlier. They think if you know a bit of everything, you’ll never be found out.”

Mark Littlewood, director of the free-market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, who studied PPE at Oxford between 1990 and 1993, claims the degree’s political bias goes deeper. “PPE leads people towards a sort of statist role. My tutors were absolutely charming and brilliant, but I don’t think I was exposed to a single libertarian, conservative or classical liberal one. The students were overwhelmingly leftish.” A current PPE third-year says: “Nearly every academic at Oxford who teaches politics is a liberal, to some extent. They go from moderate Conservative to moderate Labour. There are lots of people on the right economically, but nearly everyone’s a social liberal.”

Obviously the right-leaning perspectives in the second paragraph are more contentious, but the point in the first paragraph about the systemic effect of overwhelming students with an excess of views is a key takeaway here — how systematic pluralism acts as a prophylactic against ideological attachment. Systemically it also reproduces what I’ve previously called “the ideology of non-ideology” earlier in this text. Being the view that any actor working within the framework of an identifiable single ideology must be, ipso facto, operating in an non-evidence based, blinkered, dogmatic mode that is inevitably erroneous in comparison to a self-ascribed “non-ideological” pragmatism. And this, I propose, is a key feature of centrism. To caricature, centrism is the belief that any non-centrist viewpoint is “ideological” where that term is understood as a pejorative. If “ideological” is bad, then “non-ideological” must be good — or at least better, hence “best practice” in the lingo.

Apollonius problem Gergonne solution step1
Finding the geometric radical centre, WillowW Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

Centrism — process

But what is “centrism”? And what is its relation to small-l liberalism — understood as intuitive or doxastic liberalism in our dualist framework? And what is the relation between centrism and what I termed the “general social doxa” or the “dominant” or “default” ideology back in section 4?

Before we get to the relation between centralism and the dominant ideology, one quick clarification needs to be made between the sense of “centrism” as used in common parlance and the specific Marxist sense of “centrism” from the past. The old Marxist sense of centrism, as used by Trotsky and others, is a description of a political position that oscillates between reformism and revolution, but more specifically, talks revolution but acts reformist. This “two-faced” nature of “do as I do, not as I say” is generally viewed through the lens of “opportunism”. “Opportunism” is one of those leftist bugbear terms, like “betrayal”, that presents as analytical but is more often moralising in practice. The inability to think of a distance or separation between theory and practice except through moralising and individualising charges of hypocrisy or lack of personal integrity is a major block on theorising the relation between ideology and practice and needs to be challenged and rejected wherever possible (and yes, that’s a normative, prescriptive statement). That said, where gaps appear between collective discourse and ideology on one hand, and the real-world practices of that same collective on the other, that is always worthy of attention and further analysis. For the sake of brevity, lets refer to it as “political dissonance” in future (technically “praxeological dissonance” would be more precise, but we need to limit obscurity in our chosen terms). As we now return to conventional (bourgeois) centrism, let’s just emphasise that we should start from a position that this has nothing to do with opportunism.

Back in section 4 I asserted that one of the characteristic effects of the dominant ideology is to effectively demobilise or disempower people. Obviously from the perspective of the dominant ruling class, this is a desirable feature. However, without further explanation for the causative mechanism or origins of this characteristic, it looks suspiciously like there is an implied “functionalist” cause at work. Because power-for-itself desires passivity amongst the masses, therefore the dominant ideology reproduces this.

For the purposes of outlining a model of how centrism operates in our socio-political environment, I’m going to have to crave a temporary indulgence for a functionalist explanation. Just as explaining the “design” of an eye in biology is not committing to the idea of creationism, so a functionalist model is a pedagogic shorthand not necessarily incompatible with an social evolutionary rather than an intentional design origin. Also, we need to distinguish between method (or process) and content when talking about centrism, focusing on the former.

For the moment, let’s take as a starting assumption that the default ideology has this characteristic of encouraging people to be demobilised and inactive. In a liberal democracy that raises the problem of “disengagement” — people becoming so demobilised and lacking in belief in the possibility of real change, that they no longer bother voting or paying any attention to politicians or current affairs and media content related to representational politics.

Empirically this tends to happen more amongst the poorer sections of the working class and people with no property. The property-owning sections tend to avoid total disengagement, if only to protect the value of their property and make sure the state is not likely to confiscate or tax it away from them. Naïve cynicism might make one think that this tendency would be seen as an unmitigated benign effect by the upper classes.

Despite this (skipping the discussion on motives, for now), in practice mass disengagement is very much seen as a political problem, potentially verging on an existential threat, from the centrist perspective. The active processes of the “fourth estate” that go into forming and reproducing the centrist perspective (including state broadcasters, establishment capitalist media, etc) thus are oriented around a problematic with inner tensions. Between, on the one hand trying to engage and activate the audience as political subjects, and on the other hand, not engaging or activating them to the degree of either losing patience with forever waiting for representatives to do things on their behalf, or — god forbid — actually taking action on their own behalf.

Contradictory requirements

The centrist process wants constituents that inactively demand action and are engaged but passive. This problematic of mass producing the “activated but inactive”, “mobilised but static” constituent requires political boundaries that centrism both produces and polices. It also is inextricably linked to the political problematic of the superstructure, in other words it can’t be a simple interdiction of active governance. It may seek to limit the range for government action, but it still needs to enable it to some degree. The contemporary counter-example would be the current state of the US Republican Party, which has travelled so far down their right-libertarian “anti-Big Government” rabbit hole that they’ve reached the point of delegitimising almost any government action at all — other than tax cuts for the rich and spending on police and military repression. (In fact we could go so far as to say that the US is currently a good example of the systemic problems that occur when bipartisan centrism starts to break down, rather than anything else).

In order to produce and police boundaries capable of containing these contradictory needs — one the one hand agitating and mobilising constituents enough to engage them in the representational political process, but on the other hand, keeping them relatively inactive and dependent on others to take the actions they want to see — centrism relies not only on protagonist ideology but also on an anti-ideological stance, the “ideology of non-ideology”. The positive role of protagonism in orienting constituents to waiting for the state to act on their behalf is obvious. But the “anti-ideological” position of centrism, is in clear contradiction to the pluralist values of classical liberalism.

It is a feature, rather than a bug, because of the need to erect and police borders separating the chosen ideological content that centrism defends as “common sense” from the challenge of competing ideologies, specifically doctrines, cast into “outer darkness” by the centrism-producing process. There is a tendential anti-intellectualism in centrism here, in that debating the relative merits of the chosen centrist ideological content with competing doctrines on rationalist grounds is ruled out of order apriori. Centrism declares its content to be already agreed on and accepted by all legitimate social actors, and consequently seeks to “no platform” dissenting opinions as “fringe”, “marginal”, or just plain “mad”. Either you are part of the sane section of society that accepts centrist values as “just common sense”, or you are a crazy person. It’s often that crude (although more sophisticated versions of the same gambit can be produced, when absolutely necessary). The bottom line is, regardless of liberal doctrines of pluralism, there’s nothing as politically narrow-minded and intolerant of different opinion than centrism.

In its essential relation to the ideology and practice of governance, centrism of necessity has to have two main components in a capitalist society where political and economic powers are formally separated. An economic framework that polices the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic policy. And a political framework that upholds the legitimacy of the existing political system, including multi-party democracy, accepting the results of elections, “respecting the rule of law” and “pluralism”. Although centralism endows those two latter terms, inherited from classical liberal doctrine, with locally specific meanings.

“Respecting” the rule of law, inherits the classical liberal ontology of the state being the only legitimate representation of collective limits to individual freedoms, splices it with the protagonistic doxa of the state as the agent of historical change, and reinforces it with a conscious hostility to antagonistic strategies of building collective counterpowers driving for social change.

It is this third, negative component, necessary for the maintenance of the tension of “activated but inactive” engagement, that gives centrism it’s dual, Janus-faced orientation to power. Not only contemplating the glory of state power in front of it, but also forever looking over its shoulder for the threat of counterpower. This combination of distinct positive and negative elements in dynamic tension explains the otherwise aberrant apparent contradiction between the idealism inherent to protagonism and the centrist tenet of “non-ideology”. What would be unmanageably incoherent in a more dispassionate rationalist framework, can be held together, in tension, due to the emotional energy provided by fear and hostility. Because centrism is not a passive effect, but the result of an active process, that consumes energy and effort.

Centre point building
Ian Turk, Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Centrism — content

The content of centrism today is not the same as it was in the past, even the recent past. For example in the 1970s then-US president Richard Nixon once declared “We all all Keynesians now”. Keynesianism was the economic component of the centrism of that era. As we know that has since been replaced by a new centrist order where neoliberalism is the economics of the political centre-ground. But while the history of the emergence of centrism as a process (arguably as far back as the struggle around the Corn Laws in 19th century Britain) and its subsequent evolutions, is a topic worth exploring at another time, we’re going to skip that for now and jump directly to our current situation.

Briefly then, our contemporary centrism is neoliberal in economics and liberal democratic in politics. There are left-wing and right-wing positions that are within the horizon of this centrism. The left-wing centrists are anxious that the social order is threatened by the ever-increasing economic inequalities between rich and poor, and the threat of absolute poverty and immiseration and disenfranchisement (homelessness, disease, hunger, incarceration) of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The right-wing centrists are anxious that the social order is threatened by the political disorder of crime, immigration, political subversion, gender and sexual deviation and degeneracy, and so on. Naturally mix and match combinations and variations on this basic binary exist.

But whether left or right, centrism is protagonistic, not only cognitively, in terms of the limits of their imagination, but also normatively, which is to say ideologically. Above all, the centrist horror of counterpower is common to both. By all means, oppose the Poll Tax for e.g., but do so in the proper manner by waiting for the next election and voting for a party that promises to abolish it through legal means. Whatever you do, don’t oppose it by breaking the law. Because collective action outside of the law, in defiance of the power of the state, is mob rule, is akin to fascism. And, to use the vernacular where “liberals” is used as a synonym for centrists — for liberals all counterpower is fascism.

In this feature of needing to agitate the demand for action in the alienated mode of desiring to be acted-upon, we can begin to see already the germs of a peculiar mentality and desire that in darker, more extreme circumstances, can flower into the demand for “strong leadership”. In the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari addressed the question of “how can desire come to desire its own repression” — a question that Reich had already raised in relation to the mass appeal of fascism. Deleuze and Guattari follow Reich to some degree in seeking the answer in psychological mechanisms, including Freud’s Oedipal triangle. By contrast, in the mechanisms of centrism we can begin to see a purely ideological dynamic that does not fall back on psychological idiosyncrasies or individual family histories. The ideological fear of an imagined collapse of social order, obedience and compliance, combined with a horror of counterpower as harbinger of chaos can more directly motivate a demand for “robust measures” to re-impose order.

This same, heightened ideological anxiety can give the context for why even people with genuine reasons for fearing fascism can end up resenting the actions of militant anti-fascists more than their far right opponents. To the “good centrists”, their desire to believe (against all historical precedence) that they can rely on the benevolence and liberal rationality of the state to protect them from the violence of fascism, leads them to see the actions of militant anti-fascists as the provocation that upsets the delicate balance of legitimacy and order that keeps everybody safe. Anti-fascists are long used to the accusations of “red fascists” from centrist liberals. But these can be motivated not only by reactionary ideological stupidities like “horseshoe theory”, but also from bad faith and existential terror on the part of those who objectively have most to fear from the crushing of anti-fascist counterpower (as opposed to the majority of those whose “liberal” hypocrisies merely mask the fact that their class and ethnic position mean they have in reality little to fear from xenophobic authoritarianism).

There is so much more to be said about centrism. For example, mention must be made of the neoliberal right’s recent-ish invention of the “Overton window” concept in an attempt to systematise their efforts to drag the political centre in a rightwards direction. And so many other elements and dynamics of our modern socio-political process relate to centrism, that you could write a book on it. But I wanted to simply sketch an outline here, so we can use it as a basis for examining how political positions like populism and radicalism relate back to centrism.

But one final point before we move on. I need to finally clarify the relation between centrism as an active process and the dominant ideology as a dynamic product of that process interacting with what I called the “general social doxa” back in section 4, in order to re-situate all three in a more social evolutionary, less functionalist framework. Although I’m going to defer a fuller discussion of the different mechanisms of ideological determination until a later section on a reconsideration of standpoint theory, some immediate clarifications are called for.

Regarding the “dominant ideology” (doxa) — that this is more or less the product of the centrist process, a kind of ideology-for-itself created by the active work of the extended superstructure, principally the mass media and, indirectly, academia and wider intelligentsia. Two points must be made regarding this narrower conception. First that, despite being produced by the ideational apparatus of the extended superstructure, this is a process that is not outside of the class dynamic — even though the class antagonism more properly occurs between wage labour and capital within the infrastructure of social production. Principally this means the domination, in terms of staffing and control, of the relatively privileged layers of the middle classes, and that this in itself distances the process from the less privileged layers of the working class. Second, that although there are very visible partisan actors amongst the media-owning capitalists, the likes of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, the Mercers, etc, who are clearly pushing a distinct, conscious ideological line (and their impact should not to be discounted), the bulk of the ideological push of the “fourth estate” is more driven by commercial drivers, than ideological crusades. If “engagement” is part of the liberal democratic political problematic, it is also part of the commercial lifeblood of media corporations. Media needs the engagement of its consumers to win eyeballs and sell advertising. The central direction of mass media is not dictated by some conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the “sheeple” so much as a desperate Darwinian struggle to win audience. In this sense, the advent of social media simply amplifies and accelerates this basic money-driven dynamic. Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey may not be personally as interested in the promotion of far-right narratives as the Kochs, Murdochs or Mercers, but if the algorithm determines that hatred pushes engagement, then they’re happy to make shareholder value out of it.

Regarding the more general social doxa — the “default ideology” — I posit this as the passive effect of the totality of social relations and recent history. In other words, for example, people can find themselves outside of the boundaries of “acceptable thought” produced and policed by centrist processes, without necessarily leaving the wider, more general field of the default ideology. For example, the notion that justice and injustice is synonymous with equality and inequality is a passive systemic fetish-like doxastic effect of generalised commodity production. Left-of-centre views that stray outside of centrist views on race and gender, for example, may still remain within the wider bourgeois horizon of the default ideology in this sense.

We’ll return to this wider dynamic in our later discussion on standpoint theory and the multiple determinants of ideological consciousness. But for now, let’s move to mapping the political space outside of centrism.

Centrism and Radicalism

The first pole of distinction from centrism is along the line of opposition to its anti-ideological political and philosophical epistemology. The polar opposite would be the position of radicalism, whether left or right. At this point, given that self-described “radical centrists” occasionally challenge the left-right political spectrum as being anachronistic or no longer useful, a brief defence of its relevance is called for.

Its historically true that the left right distinction arose from the contingent seating arrangements of the French revolutionary convention. However the terms have acquired well-established resonances and meanings in common parlance since — indeed in the generally accepted common ideological doxa, in our terminology — and not only is it pointlessly contrarian to pretend otherwise, it’s not that hard to come up with an acceptable informal definition. Generally speaking, the view that the tendency of capitalism to make the rich richer and the poor poorer is somehow socially harmful, we can associate with the left. And the view that economic and social inequality is both natural and desirable, we can associate with the right. More sophisticated definitions are available, but not necessary for our immediate purposes here.

Radical left and right, then, are positions to the left or right of centrism that stake their positions through attachment to definite ideological doctrines, be they Marxist or anarchist (or even Keynesian nowadays, given it’s no longer centrist) on the left, or fascist or ultra-imperialist on the right. The specific doctrines matter less than the fact of them being doctrinal and in opposition, on either an economic or political basis, to current centrist positions.

Although we should hedge that somewhat, by adding that in additional to doctrinal anti-centrist positions, there should be a militant commitment to social change to bring their own doctrine into power and a recognition that more dramatic means than the limited parameters for evolutionary change allowed by the current political framework may be required to carry this out. There are less militant, more quietist or contemplative doctrines that, while being in strident subjective opposition to the dominant centrist doxa, are so from a position so doctrinaire or dogmatic that there is no accompanying militant commitment to radical change, in practice (aside from the psychological consolations of vaguely apocalyptic fantasies). The ideological obsessions of the followers of so-called “Austrian economics”, for example, may be doctrinally to the right of current neoliberal centrism, but they have no programme or strategy for radical change, so don’t qualify as part of the radical right.

Between the “anti-ideological” fundamentalism of the centrists and the entrenched doctrinal commitments of its radical opponents, lie intermediate zones of the left-of-centre and right-of-centre. These zones are inhabited by people who are not depoliticised or disengaged, but neither content to accept either centrist or radical doctrines or dogmas, unquestioningly. Some of this is structural. There is a contradiction already noted between the general idealistic cast of the protagonistic ideologies of the superstructure — particularly in the case of the intelligentsia in and around academia, literati and the media. Even if a surprisingly large proportion of these intellectual workers of the extended superstructure are willing to ideologically conform to the boundaries of centrism in order to keep open their channels to the political powers-that-be in the executive core, there is always going to be a sizeable fringe that chafe at the tendentially anti-intellectual strictures of those boundaries. Now that the internet has lowered the communication barriers of material capital of the past (printing presses, paper distribution logistics, radio and TV broadcast access) that pushed people into institutional settings, individuals and small groups can today interact in a massified if atomised way in these non-collective ideological interzones.

Today then, the relative size of the engaged left-of-centre and right-of-centre milieus, relative to the doctrinally-committed radical left and right movements and the centrist establishment has grown to a much larger extent than has previously existed. Partly this is also linked to other social developments, aside from the merely technological, like the increase in third-level education in the general population, and so on. The fact is that the ideological space between the centre-left and centre-right and its respective radical poles of opposition, is far too large to be dismissed as a marginal or liminal phenomenon. In fact, in terms of numbers, you could even argue that the radicals are now the marginal phenomena at this stage. Although that would be blind to the strategic power of even small collectively organised bodies relative to much larger but atomised ones.

Centrism and Antagonism

Aside from ideology, the other dimension of proximity or distance to centrism, is the crucial sphere of practice. Antagonism is a matter of strategy and practice, before ideas or subjectivity. Whereas protagonism presents state power as the alpha and the omega of social change, antagonism focuses on the strategy of counterpower, of building and harnessing the collective force of the socially-excluded and acted-upon, to exert power on their own behalf in the face of the opposition of the owner-class and its minions. A fuller discussion of the strategies of counterpower (community and workplace deep organising) contrasted with those of the protagonist alternatives (advocacy, electoral, public opinion and media strategies, mobilisation) will be the focus of a later section. But similarly to the discussion of centrism and radicalism, it’s the middle term between the two that interests us immediately. Populism is the name of the game here.

Populism is “politically dissonant” in the sense we talked about above in relation to the old Marxist usage of centrist to refer to tendencies that talk revolution and act reformist. Populism is necessarily in opposition to centrism, but rather than attacking the superstructure directly — which would be self-defeating, given that’s its protagonist strategy still lies in either taking control or entering into coalition with government power — or the capitalist class and its unproductive strata of apparatchiks that rules over the social field, populism always targets a proxy. For right-populists this is “the elite”. Left-populists choose deliberately ambiguous proxies, like “the Tories”, “the clique”, “oligarchs”, “greedy bankers”, “developers” and so on, that to their true believer socialist constituency sound as close to the class enemy as makes no difference, but to future electoral partners, indicates a willingness to scapegoat certain specific factions of the ruling class, without necessarily overturning capitalist rule in toto.

All forms of populism prey on people alienated by and disengaged from the complacent messages of the centrists. Often this reflects real material social conditions of generalised deprivation or economic crisis that are provoking anger and discontent to the point of overcoming the normal indifference with which the large sections of the disengaged working class regard the commentariat. The material role of a class dynamic that separates the fourth estate from its intended audience cannot be swept under the carpet of “merely subjective factors”. Populists have to harness this discontent and anger through the performance of a simulated antagonism. Generally this simulation lies through demagoguery — stirring up rage and resentment against the chosen proxy enemy and demonised segments of society excluded from the category of the “true people” by the populist ideology. For right populists this is usually migrant or racial minorities, often along with caricatured “feminists” or other “gender non-conformists”, associated discursively with the hated (but vaguely defined) “elites”. Left-populists are occasionally not above the odd bit of immigrant-bashing themselves, but generally stick to safer targets such as proxies for the real capitalist class, centrist media and political hate-figures and the supposedly wicked allies of the elites, the dreaded “idpol radical liberals”. But to resist the temptation to be too diverted into more specifically cultural and even psychological fields, we need to emphasise the ideological role of protagonism as a driver for this simulation of antagonism through aggressive displacement and political scapegoating. That is, that despite the populist posturing of being outside and against the state and the elite, their chosen road to power lies through gaining state power which also inevitably requires cutting a deal with sections of the media and capitalist classes.

Notes

[1] Beckett, Andy. “PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain“ https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

--

--

No responses yet