More on Populism (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Psychology of Populism. The Tribal Challenge to Liberal Democracy. Edited by Joseph P. Forgas, Willian D. Crano and Klaus Fiedler. (Routledge, 2021. 386pp.)

The stated aim of the 19 essays making up this book is, according to its editors, ‘to contribute to a better understanding of the nature and psychological characteristics of populist movements’. They further state that they ‘hope to highlight the fundamental threat that collectivist popular beliefs and strategies, both on the left and right of the political spectrum, present for the core values and the very survival of liberal democratic systems’. The shared understanding, implicit where not explicit, of all the authors is that the combination of the market with capitalist democracy constitutes ‘the most successful civilisation in human history’, and that modern populism, arising from both left and right, has certain common features such as rejection of liberal democracy, ethnocentrism, tribalism, xenophobia, emotional and/or identity-based politics, and feelings of personal impotence.

Current examples of governments considered populist whose features are analysed here are those of Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Russia, while strong populist movements in countries like France, Germany, Austria and the US are also subjects of study and discussion. Support for populism in these countries is seen as arising from such sources as simplistic beliefs, feelings of frustrated self-importance, ‘self-uncertainty’, a ‘need for personal significance, and the ‘human search for a meaningful world view’. And the detailed supporting analysis is often interesting and well evidenced.

But even though much of the analysis in these essays is acute and telling, many of the authors are too quick to identify what they term as left-wing populism with ‘Marxism’. In their introductory chapter, for example, the editors refer to Marxism as one of the ‘clear and well-articulated populist ideologies’ and the sworn enemy of any kind of individualism or tolerance. Referencing writers from the past with particularly strong pro-capitalist and anti-Marxist agendas such as Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper, they describe Marxism as featuring ‘the same degree of authoritarianism, dogmatism and intolerance also found in right-wing totalitarian movements’. The problem here, as with the ‘authorities’ they quote, is that by Marxism is meant dictatorial states which bear no relation to the thinking of Marx, regimes such as the Soviet Union or Mao’s China (well described as ‘a famine-wracked disaster’) and, in more recent times, countries often referred to as ‘Marxist’ such as Cuba and Venezuela, but again representing a travesty of any lesson to be drawn from Marx’s writings. And, again, on the ideological front, they refer not to Marx’s own writings or prescriptions but to Lenin’s distorted version or implementation of these and to modern-day theorists, often self-styled ‘Marxists’, who ‘share a strongly critical attitude to Western liberal values, a romantic attachment to anti-enlightenment communalism, and a cold-eyed focus on power as the major social issue of interest’.

The trouble is that what the authors are describing here has nothing to do with the analysis and theory which is at the root of Marx’s writings, seeking as it does to transcend so-called ‘liberal values’ and pointing to the need for a world society of common ownership and democratic control and of free access to all goods and services, where human beings, far from their individualism being denied or oppressed, are in ultimate control of their own choices and their own individual existence.

While this volume contains much that is instructive and thought-provoking for an understanding of how populism arises and is practised, it fails on the whole to see that it is the political and other divisions produced by capitalism’s so-called ‘liberal democracy’ that are the real lightning rod for the very populism it is dedicated to exploring and critiquing. And the notion with which it is shot through that individual freedom is incompatible with collective organisation is fundamentally wrong-headed. The ‘collectivism’ it continually refers to and deplores is that of dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes or ideologies, not that of a world society organised democratically to satisfy everyone’s needs.

Howard Moss