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Interview: The Populist Moment
Your book – The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession – traces the anti-political uprisings in the years following the financial crisis. As a period – from 2008-2022 – it exemplifies the shift to the “cheap affiliations” of the movement model that are mainly characterised by spontaneous – “gaseous” – responses to the shortfalls of our economic and political systems.
Can you explain why you call this period a “story of disorganisation” and also outline the historical preconditions – such as the deinstitutionalisation of politics and civil society – that inspired these particular responses to economic and political breakdown?
The first ambition with that part of the argument was to avoid moralising about why the approaches to the populist moment of the 2010s took the form they took. There’s often a sense in which you just have to attribute it to ideology or a fetish for horizontalism, which almost makes it a personal failing on behalf of certain organisations, or somehow accepts the idea that any institution which is hierarchical and authoritarian is undesirable. There were certainly ideological factors at play here – it’s not as if there were no horizontalists or anti-authoritarians, but at the same time, we were more interested in asking this question: what encouraged the prevalence of this ideology, or what were the factors that made it so plausible and so powerful at this point?