Your book – The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession – traces the anti-political uprisings in the years following the financial crisis. As a period – from 2008-2022 – it exemplifies the shift to the “cheap affiliations” of the movement model that are mainly characterised by spontaneous – “gaseous” – responses to the shortfalls of our economic and political systems.

Can you explain why you call this period a “story of disorganisation” and also outline the historical preconditions – such as the deinstitutionalisation of politics and civil society – that inspired these particular responses to economic and political breakdown?

The first ambition with that part of the argument was to avoid moralising about why the approaches to the populist moment of the 2010s took the form they took. There’s often a sense in which you just have to attribute it to ideology or a fetish for horizontalism, which almost makes it a personal failing on behalf of certain organisations, or somehow accepts the idea that any institution which is hierarchical and authoritarian is undesirable. There were certainly ideological factors at play here – it’s not as if there were no horizontalists or anti-authoritarians, but at the same time, we were more interested in asking this question: what encouraged the prevalence of this ideology, or what were the factors that made it so plausible and so powerful at this point?

The backstory we give does not start in the 2000s, but goes back to the 1970s and 1980s, and primarily concerns how global elites resolved the inflation and economic crisis of that time. This world economic crisis was mainly seen as a crisis of inflation, and prompted economic and political elites to ask what is stopping growth from relaunching itself. Their diagnosis focused on an overburdened state that was being occupied by a too large and too powerful civil society. Civil society – particularly in the form of unions – was essentially making it impossible to get capitalism going again. So it’s a story about how a specific form of organised democracy makes capital accumulation impossible. What takes place in the 1980s and 1990s is a concerted class off ensive that att empts to execute a controlled demolition of civil society.

Now, there were successful versions of this demolition. The unions, of course, but also if you look at François Mitt errand’s government in France, and across Europe, there is a transition to a model known as neoliberalism. In many ways, I think that’s too narrow a framing of what’s going on, because it focuses solely on neoliberals and their ideas when there is actually a much broader social offensive. What it does is break the ties between elites and masses in a very essential way, not just on the left , but also on the right. The right carefully decouples itself from the state, and gives people all kinds of alternatives for collective power. So, if you can get cheap credit or buy your own house, there are all kinds of ways of surviving within society that don’t require you to organise. At the same time, there were legal restraints on union membership, and predatory campaigns from the private sector in the mutual economy.

This is the broader story of this organisation which we trace back to the 1970s and 1980s, namely, an aggressive response to resolve the inflation crisis of the 1970s that creates the ‘void’ that Peter Mair diagnoses in the 2000s. Citizens have retreated into the private sphere, many politicians have retreated into the state, and between the state and society now lies this wasteland. This material backdrop explains why the protest movements of the 2010s took the form they took: it’s not just an ideological choice or that particular individuals have a preference for those types of organisations – it’s more a question of necessity. For individuals who were suddenly finding themselves reacting against a state that’s implementing austerity, you have to figure out the way to do something about this, even when many organisational tools have either been abandoned or have become very difficult to utilise.

I think populism, in that sense, is a way of remobilising citizens for an age of demobilisation. How can we try and get people involved in politics on a general basis again, even in a world in which this has become increasingly difficult? And in that sense, populism is a product of disorganisation, which explains its contradictory and complex nature.

You develop the late political scientist Peter Mair’s concept of the “void” to explain the general failure of populism. On one side, populists are resisted by the enduring power of established forms of politics, i.e. traditional parties. On the other side, populists are restricted by the weakening of associational power in civil society, i.e. citizens are not willing to commit to the social and financial responsibilities that are required to create long-term political change.

Can you explain how the specific nature of the void determined the outcomes of different electoral and social movements across Europe?

I don’t want to sound too metaphysical, but one misconception about the notion of a void comes from confusing it with something soft; it can in fact be hard but hollow. At this point in history, most parties retreat into the state, lose their membership, and sever their ties with civil society. That hollowness of the party somehow means that it loses a certain recalcitrance, and it cannot continue to function even in this zombie-like state. Parties also become dependent on private donors or on state financing, which means that they survive as ‘career vehicles’. It’s not as if these parties are not important in terms of policy, in delivering something to the electorate, or not providing access to the state. But parties don’t simply disappear or liquidate themselves – they become what Peter Mair called first ‘counterparties’ and then ‘cartel parties’. These are very different from mass membership parties, as the whole power structure no longer has any roots within society. With a new reliance on private finance, these cartel parties are still quite powerful in terms of financial firepower – which is particularly useful in resisting potential insurgents within the party.

The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn provides a concrete illustration of these changes. Under Tony Blair, the mass Labour party completely imploded, but it didn’t mean that many of these elite structures in the party somehow disappeared when Corbyn tried to mount his assault on it. And I think it’s this elite survival within such zombie-like institutions that explains why it’s so difficult for populists either to fight them with their new parties, or to take over these parties, because a hard but hollow institution can still prove very difficult to beat.

At the same time, on the level of society, individuals have all these alternatives to collective power now – whether it’s credit, whether it’s individual advancement, or self-help. This gives citizens the sense that they no longer have to aggregate their interests or need to tie their power together. Now, you can say, I can just do this on my own. At the same time, in an economy in which wages are no longer rising, there are just fewer funds that people have to pay for membership fees. There is evidence in the American case, for example, that declining wages, mainly at the bott om of society, actually make it much more difficult for people to use this money to finance their membership of such organisations. Part of it also seems voluntary – many people are no longer willing to shoulder the financial costs of membership. But at the same time, wages have been stagnating for some time, and this makes it obviously much riskier for people to spend money on something like a membership organisation, certainly when the returns are not guaranteed. You’ve just seen that, for example, as unions and other left -wing societies have been losing member income.

What do you think is the effect of the suspicion and hostility towards more traditional political, civil society structures that you discuss in the book? That comes up a lot in different writing about the decline of those forms over the last couple of decades. That suspicion and hostility is quite deeply rooted and has obviously given licence to the more modern private NGOs, the advocacy model. What’s been the consequence of that suspicion and hostility towards people’s appetite for reprising more effective political forms from the past?

There is obviously an active story of repression of some of these institutions or where individuals are expelled from membership. But I think you should not deny that there’s an exit factor: people sometimes passively or spontaneously leave them because they’re fed up with the sometimes rather exigent demands made by these institutions. Within the French left in the 1970s, for example, figures like philosopher Michel Foucault had a relationship to the Communist Party that was very clearly related to his identity (he was gay) and the extremely strong demands it places on its members. There’s a sense of disillusionment from members of that generation who say, I’m simply unable to flourish as an individual within this type of institution, and it’s normal that they then look for some kinds of alternatives. It also means that, certainly in the post-war period, many of these institutions were ‘total organisations’. That means that they didn’t just make a claim on your public life, but also on your private life. Christian parties in Europe had a lot to say about what people did in their bedrooms if they were party members, for example. If you have a change in political culture where people sense that there might be ways to flourish outside of those parties, certainly if you have an identity that’s not tolerated by the party, it’s very understandable that members leave. There’s a cultural change, I think, which explains why people find it difficult to commit to institutions that might make quite strange demands on what they should do in their private lives. At the same time, I think the balance here should be struck quite carefully between making it impossible for people to join and people who actually just want to leave. If you look at the Labour Party under Corbyn, and the transition to Keir Starmer, Starmer doesn’t actually want the membership party, doesn’t want people meddling with the top of the party and the future managers of the British state. So there is a sort of active dislike of the role that a membership could play in a party, which just means that people want to push them out. But at the same time, there is a cultural story to be told – a lot of citizens find it difficult to tolerate the types of demands that these large parties previously made on their constituencies.

Within your analysis of populist movements across Europe, you outline how populist platforms were based on a rejection of representative democracy in favour of a more direct – unmediated – relationship between citizens and the state. Despite this appeal to become more democratic, you argue that political leaders become even more important than within traditional party structures.

Can you elaborate on some of the examples and weaknesses of the “leaderistic” platforms that emerged across Europe since 2008?

It’s what we could call a version of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, first proposed by the sociologist Robert Michels. Basically, it suggests that institutions typically operate within a chain of command – sorted into the leaders and the led – and where there is a lack of institutional structure, it’s almost inevitable that leaders will step in. Now this seems slightly underdetermined, or not specific enough an explanation of what’s going on, because there has always been leadership within political parties, but what explains these types of leadership? What is this shift to a dependence on a leader, not as someone who is able to carry out a programme, but a substitute for a programme? It’s very striking that before political leaders played immensely important roles in political parties, they were mainly seen as leaders who could be trusted in carrying out a certain political programme that pre-existed that leader. What you now have is a very interesting dynamic whereby the leaders themselves sell themselves thus: ‘I am electable, and therefore I will be able to give you a programme that can win’. That completely shifts the priority between programme and leader, where the leader comes before the programme, and the programme is almost secondary to what the leader can accomplish. I do think that has to do with the deinstitutionalisation that we talked about, because if you operate in a highly volatile environment, both electorally and in the media, you need certain kinds of recognisable personalities to compete in the current attention economy. It’s essential to have a recognisable brand in order for these extremely capricious customers or consumers to be able to keep their eyes fixed on you. I think it’s a testament to the marketisation of politics that leaders now don’t simply get a base together, or tell you that they can execute a programme. It’s all brand loyalty, and if you don’t have a personal, concrete figure that you can tie your loyalty to, it’s almost impossible.

In spite of the horizontal promises of the internet – the idea that the platform economy is open, democratic, and flat – once you institutionalise, you just have to have some kind of counterpart at the top. And because the ties are so weak between the base and the leadership, a “hyper leader” is basically the only figure that can do this task for you.

Corbyn was quite consistent on certain policy points, which he has always been known for, but, at the same time, it was a very personalistic movement. It was very much about a figure, and their ‘moral aura’, which inspired so many people to join the party, rather than a concrete agreement on the set of proposals or programmes which could lead people into the idea that maybe this party could be reformed. It speaks to a political sphere where, on the one hand, the media has become far more important, so the way that politicians communicate to their base is so heavily mediated or determined by the media – if you have a figure that plays well to the media, it’s almost inevitable that they will win. But there’s also something which is specific to the left – the movement’s media have had a particularly difficult time in the last 20 or 30 years. An independent, working-class press is now a practical absence for the majority of British media. And that means that although you can launch something into this media-sphere, and earn a lot of popularity, you’re also subject to the commercial imperatives and political preferences of a media establishment that in many ways is hostile to your politics. That means that as long as you don’t have your own media circuit, you’re basically forced to battle on very hostile terrain, and it means that you’re extremely susceptible to scandal: if so many voters can be convinced that you’re a morally problematic character and they have no other way to see who you are communicating with except for the mainstream media, then it will likely spell disaster for your electoral chances in the next election. In Europe, or in the mainland, they call it media democracy because the media now plays a structural role in these democracies. That is incomparable to what came before. Media democracy allows you to launch these political celebrities quite easily in a way that wasn’t possible before, but at the same time, the volatility of that new media market means they can quickly fade away if they don’t deliver on their promises.

Another aspect of the ‘movement model’ of populism is the shift from using member income to a reliance on philanthropic and state funding. This is ultimately a question of independence from both the state – which has increasingly funded political parties – and private foundations – which have increasingly funded civil society bodies.

While there are valid criticisms of private influence within politics (i.e. wealthy donors), there still seems to be little public desire to fund these organisations and activities. Should we not talk more about this consequence within the broader conversation about citizen withdrawal from politics?

I think it’s an important discussion because it’s not just a question of wage stagnation. People were able to fund and finance organisations in a time when wages were even lower, so it’s not a perfect explanation for what’s happening – I think you need a much bigger sense of what is actually going on. For example, if you look at the Bernie Sanders campaign, he was able to get together an impressively wide pool of small donors to kickstart many of his first presidential runs. Unlike the super PACs and the wealthy donors that usually provide the financial base for most of these presidential candidacies, he chose to pool and broaden his financial base by asking individuals to chip in a little bit, recognising that if they do it in large numbers this could have a significant cumulative effect. What is very striking about this method is that it’s quite effective and is obviously more democratic than the donorship model, but it does rely on an opt-out option if you don’t want to make a regular contribution.

It also relies on funding cycles or funding streams that are subject to media attention, as well. If people are agitated or mobilised enough by one specific cycle of politics, then they can chip in and give money, but when it comes to actually having to pay every month, even when this specific candidate might not be doing very well or be as prominent in debates, it becomes much more difficult. Again, that is not just a question of how low wages are, but it reflects a profound disbelief, and impatience, with the sense that long-term institutional change is actually possible. It either inspires these quick-fix ideas where you can say, let’s give this much money and then everything will be sorted; or it implies, like they say in finance, that once you see your stocks dropping, you just have to withdraw your funds because otherwise you can lose everything. Even with a losing asset or an asset that’s depreciating, people find it very difficult to think that they should keep their funds where they are. Once again, I think this is a change in political culture, where politicians for instance can get quite large sums of money in short, momentous funding streams, but for people to decide to dedicate a sum every month is much more difficult. And don’t forget how the whole Corbyn experiment actually started with lowering membership fees to allow supporters to chip in and thus to exercise power with the party, which was in many ways an outgrowth of the cartelisation of the party. Once again, populism had an ambiguous relationship to this new model of campaign and political financing, even as it tried to democratise philanthropy. ∞

Anton Jäger is a historian of political thought and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published widely on populism, basic income, and the contemporary crisis of democracy, and recently co-authored The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession with Arthur Borriello (Verso, 2023).