Populism as Liberal Alibi

This paper criticizes liberal discourse, both in the media and among scholars, that does not attend to the systemic relationship between left liberalism and authoritarian populism. Because these commentators do not recognize this link, they argue that populism can be combated only with more liberalism. Likewise, I criticize this discourse for establishing a false equivalence between far-right forms of authoritarian populism and left-of-center forms of social democracy associated with Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, which they identify as “left populism.” In this way, I suggest that populism functions as a justificatory “alibi” for liberalism. At the center of this paper is a close reading of Stuart Hall’s analysis of the emergence of Thatcherism in the late 1970s. I suggest that we today can learn from the way he identifies an intrinsic relationship between the rise of Thatcherism and the contradictions and failures of the British Labour Party. I emphasize and embrace Hall’s important distinction between authoritarian populism and popular democracy. Hall also enables me to reflect on continuities and disjunctures between the authoritarian populism he argues emerged in the moment of neoliberal ascent and current forms of populism in our moment, which we may characterize in terms of a crisis of—but not yet a break from—neoliberalism.