Populism

I study populism in relation to inequality, crises of legitimacy, political realignment, and intraparty insurgency, with a focus on the contemporary United States (with a longer-term interest in cross-national comparative research). 

Different scholars mean different things with the term populism, so I will briefly note what I mean. I concur with Thomas Frank’s choice to claim populism itself as a form of mass politics that takes aim at concentrated economic and political power, with a redistributionist agenda, whose origin as a term was a specific redistributionist mass movement in the United States in the late nineteenth century. I examine how authoritarians like Donald Trump hijack this rhetorical form for authoritarian ends. Trump, I argue, taps into widespread anti-elite and anti-establishment anger, but directs it towards cultural elites in the top 20% of the economic spectrum, deflecting attention from the extraordinarily wealthy at the “tippy top” and effectively leaving inequality and extreme consolidation of wealth off the hook. Authoritarians’ targeting of immigrants, trans people, and other vulnerable populations must then be understood not only as “punching down,” but as operating in tandem with a reactionary pseudo-populism that masquerades as “punching up” — at cultural, not economic, elites.

Current socioeconomic realities make this authoritarian pseudo-populist rhetorical strategy salient, namely the unprecedented insularity of the top economic quintile in the United States today, which has created a severe cultural chasm between the highly educated and relatively affluent (to generalize) and everyone else. This class-based insularity of the top quintile is a very different problem than that of corporate power, greedy billionaires, or the “one percent” named by Occupy Wall Street. Pointing the finger at cultural elites can be poignant because of working-class voters’ real-life experiences of elite snobbery and condescension, combined with general class resentment. Contemporary authoritarians exploit these conditions.

Part of my research explores the Democratic Party’s failure to stop, or even really understand, Trump’s pseudo-populist strategy. I explain this failure as a combination of Democratic leaders’ own class-based insularity, class-based dispositions, and raw class interests (e.g., courting big donors). I diverge from orthodox Marxist explanations of the party’s failure to connect to working-class voters; specifically the idea that a straightforward, instrumentalist relationship to billionaire donors provides a complete explanation for why Democrats are reticent to take on big money and corporate power. While this is undoubtably a significant factor, I take a more Weberian perspective, where the political class has an important degree of relative autonomy. Most political operatives genuinely want to win elections, but their ideas about how to do so are constrained and distorted by the elite cultural milieu in which they are embedded.

Ongoing research on this topic is central to my fellowship research with the Othering & Belonging Institute. My writing related to this research has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Hill, The Intercept, The Nation, New Internationalist, and New York Magazine, and will culminate in my forthcoming book, The Many vs. the Few: A Practical Guide to Populism (Rutgers University Press, 2027).