Robin McAlpine – We must name the villains

There is and cannot be a left populism. The left must be about rebalancing power, so it has to be in an ‘anti-elitism’ zone which is kind of like the opposite of populism

Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal

The first half of this article is one I write every two or three years. I keep writing it because of the poor use of political language in contemporary political discourse, this time prompted partly by my last article (on the future of the left) and party on Rory’s semi-response last week (which I agree with but fell into the same linguistic trap).

I want to explain why it is generally wrong to talk about a ‘left populism’, why the phrase keeps reoccurring over and over again anyway, and why it is important that we challenge this.

So why is it wrong to talk about a ‘left populism’? Basically because it is almost impossible. There have been racist or antisemitic strands in left politics over the centuries, but populism isn’t just about being racist or antisemitic, it has to mean something much more specific than that. To understand why, we need to return again to the word’s linguistic roots. 

The word ‘populism’ has no relationship whatsoever to ‘popular’ or ‘popularity’ but rather to the entirely separate linguistic root ‘populace’, meaning the body of people in a given place. Populism is a process of defining who is and isn’t part of the ‘real’ population of a territory as a means of elite control. 

By contrast, nationalism defines a populace based on where it ends and what is beyond it. Populism is about whether ‘a jew’ or ‘a muslim’ is part of the ‘real’ populace (usually meaning some kind of ahistorical conception of the indigenous ethnic community). Nationalism is just saying ‘France is another country’.

I encourage you to think about it like this; nationalism is about ‘us, not them’ while populism is ‘you and me, not him’. There are utterly benign forms of nationalism (as in ‘we should pay tax to maintain our health service but people in France shouldn’t have to shoulder our tax burden because they have a separate healths system’). 

There is no benign form of populism. It is always – always – about powerful people controlling a domestic population through divide and rule, to direct hatred towards the weakest as a means of deflecting it away from the most powerful. In Trump’s America the problem will always be the migrants, never the billionaires.

Which means that while the left is still not entirely free of antisemitism or racism, and while there is a growing strand of the European left which is harking back to a left which was anti-immigration because it undermined wages (for example Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany) and which now proposes strict immigration controls, they don’t claim that immigrants are the source of society’s problems.

At its heart the left criticises ‘the power of capital’ and places that at the centre of its analysis, not vulnerable groups. Which is to say it is actually just about impossible to have a meaningful left which is meaningfully populist. The concepts are broadly in conflict with each other. Yet still the term keeps recurring, usually in the centrist media. How and why?

It is a simple trick of the rich and powerful. What they did was redefine themselves as a coherent group, as if they were Jews or Muslims or Gypsy Travellers. To blame them (i.e. the people who own and run the economy) for the results of what they do is framed as being the same as blaming Jewish people for disease. That is most resoundingly not the case.

Or to put it another way, prisons aren’t ‘populism’ because they ‘blame’ crime on criminals. Criminals broke the law and were held accountable based on a the preexisting law they broke. It’s not personal. Similarly, if you complain about the actions of the super-wealthy, it is not to present them as a ‘sub-species’ or lesser humans than the rest of us.

So let me be resolute in my clarity here; holding powerful people to account for the results of their actions is not and never will be populism. And there is no correlation whatsoever between what the elite call ‘anti-elitism’ and populism. These are manufactured slurs created by the rich to frame challenge to their rule as basically the same thing as Naziism. It’s total garbage.

What they really fear isn’t populism (as Jeff Bezos showed us, elites become remarkably comfortable with fascism when it works in their favour) but the popularity of left politics. If the left sticks to deeply unpopular messages like ‘degrowth’ or ‘please state your pronoun’ (and yes, these really are unpopular with most people, right or wrong), elites are more than happy to accommodate us.

But if we say anything popular like ‘poor people, it is the rich who have stolen the benefits of 50 years of economic growth from you by manipulating democracy through their wealth and connection’, the elites go mad and start implying you’re borderline fascists.

They are most assuredly not that worried about rising authoritarianism which has always served their interests in the past, they are worried about a popular left which most certainly does not. That is why they push so hard to create the language of ‘left populism’ and ‘anti-elitism’ as if in so doing they have delegitimised and entire political ideology.

If that doesn’t work in itself and you get a Corbyn, the elites suddenly discover that they are a consistent group of people after all and coordinate to stop them using all the power available. Then the ‘left’ panics, believes this stuff and gives us Starmer.

But – and this is crucial – you could just about transform a society based on thinking about abstract ‘power structures in the economy’ but you will never win an election that way. Human minds operate on the basis of ‘heroes and villains’, and we ascribe intentionality to people, not abstract forces.

That’s because the features of our society which impact their lives negatively really aren’t the result of abstract forces but of people. Imagine if the dominant media culture behaved that way. What if instead of ‘financial markets reacted badly to…’ stories we had ‘a group of wealthy traders attacked the UK currency today after…’ stories. Do you see how that looks different?

Stuff doesn’t ‘just happen’. Something makes them happen, and in human affairs it is human actions that make them happen. The economy or society we have is not a law of nature or a fundamental physical force, it is the outcome of those human actions, and the humans doing the acting are responsible for it. If we can’t say that we can never explain what is going wrong.

I should caveat things here; I’m a humanist and on the whole I still think it is best not to create villains which are particularly personalised. Many of the people doing villainous things (and they really are villainous things) aren’t bad people themselves. The actions of senior executives in the oil and gas industry have done more harm to the planet than anyone else in history.

But those senior executives are trapped in the logic of a system that makes them do these things. I’ve met fairly senior people in the oil and gas industry who feel remorse for this but feel they have no option but to get up again and do it tomorrow because they have a family to feed.

So the truth is somewhere between ‘it’s abstract forces beyond the ken of man’ and ‘if only we rounded up these ten thousand people all our problems would go away’. Sometimes our villains really are Jim Ratcliffe breaking unions to make himself richer, sometimes it is his lobbyists who are paid to undermine environmental regulations, sometimes it is just the reality of the economy which has failed to decarbonise as a result and so keeps needing to be fed petrochemicals.

But whatever it is, it didn’t just happen, it was created. And someone or something created it. Unless we are able to name the villains in the pieces, the left will never win and society and the planet will teeter towards further and further disintegration.

The failure of the mainstream left (loosely, I’m including ‘Labour’ here) to call out the villains who have imposed harm on the vast bulk of the population and who instead cosy up to the villains and present them as partners in solving the problem those villains created in the first place is exactly what has led to the rise of Reform in Britain and the far right across Europe.

Put bluntly, the public is experiencing a society which really must have villains in it somewhere because the richer we get as a nation, the worse things get for a majority. The existing political left refuses to name any villains other than ‘the other political party’ in a solipsistic game of ‘it’s all their fault, my turn’ which no-one believes any more. The right has villains coming out its ears but none of them bare any real responsibility for our problems.

Until that changes, the powers of positive social change remain irrelevant because they have no story about what is making people’s lives worse. The use of the terms ‘populism’ and ‘anti-elitism’ are just tricks to make us run away from telling that story.

There is and cannot be a left populism. The left must be about rebalancing power, so it has to be in an ‘anti-elitism’ zone which is kind of like the opposite of populism. Until we tell a different story (it really, really isn’t ‘just the Tories’ and no more) we are stuck where we are. The longer it takes us to accept all of this, the worse things will get.

Robin McAlpine

“Globally, these are dark times. There is a sense that things are getting worse on a whole range of fronts. More people across Europe want to see change than in any time I can remember. But where will they go? To the far right or a democratic, environmental left? Without publications like Brave New Europe, we’ve simply got less chance of shaping change for the better.”

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