Populism. Benjamin Moffitt
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Название: Populism

Автор: Benjamin Moffitt

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

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isbn: 9781509534340

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      For Ash and Will

      I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments on the initial proposal for this book made it much sharper and ensured that I did not just slip into the all-too-common tendency to examine Eurocentric conceptions and examples of populism; and even more so to the four anonymous reviewers who reviewed the draft manuscript, providing perhaps the most constructive, fair and useful comments I have received in all my time of writing about populism. At Polity Press, many thanks to George Owers for commissioning the book and for his sharp and astute comments on the text, and to Julia Davies for her editorial assistance. Thanks also to Manuela Tecusan, whose meticulous and keen-eyed copy-editing improved the text immensely. The book is much better as a result of all these people’s generosity and hard work.

      This research was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding scheme (project DE190101127).

      Elements of Chapter 5 first appeared in ‘Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern Europe’, in Politics and Governance (Moffitt 2017b), published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. I thank Cogitatio Press for permission to have these elements republished in this book.

      Melbourne, June 2019

      If there is one concept that seems to have captured the flavour of global politics in the twenty-first century, it is populism. Used to describe a wide range of disruptive and prominent leaders (Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Hugo Chávez), parties (Podemos, One Nation, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany)), movements (Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados) and even events (Brexit), the term has become a popular catch-all for diagnosing all that is exciting, worrying or dysfunctional in contemporary democracies worldwide. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary named populism its ‘Word of the Year’ for 2017, referring to its importance as ‘a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2017).

      Indeed, the term seems to link leaders, movements and parties that had previously seemed to have nothing to do with one another: what on earth does the right-wing Donald Trump have in common with the left-wing Occupy Wall Street, beyond a general distaste for ‘the elite’? What policies does the socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia share with the nativist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands? In what world can we link a so-called ‘populist uprising’ in the case of Brexit with the success of a foul-mouthed president of the Philippines who advocates the extrajudicial killings of drug users?

      The positive view is not shared by ‘the elite’, however: for many mainstream politicians across the globe, populism has become the single biggest threat to democracy in the contemporary political landscape. In 2010 the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, called populism ‘the greatest danger to the contemporary West’ (as quoted in Jäger 2018), while the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has warned against ‘galloping populism’ on the continent (see Ellyatt 2016). Tony Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, argues that populists ‘pose a real threat to democracy itself’ (Eiermann, Mounk and Gultchin 2017). Even the pontiff, Pope Francis, has spoken out about this phenomenon, stating that ‘[p]opulism is evil and ends badly’ (in di Lorenzo 2017).