Os populistas, sejam de direita ou de esquerda, ainda não conseguiram o mundo que queriam. A década que começou com a Primavera Árabe terminou com insurrecionistas espalhafatosos, cheios de teorias da conspiração, invadindo o Capitólio dos EUA. Tudo agora é político, e a sociedade cada vez mais se assemelha a um "Caso Dreyfus permanente".
James Butler
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| Vol. 46 No. 3 · 8 February 2024 |
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
por Vincent Bevins.Wildfire, 336 pp., £25, outobro 2023, 978 1 0354 1227 3
Na história da esquerda, as revoluções têm estado mais frequentemente ausentes do que não, ou chegaram em formas estranhas ou repulsivas para aqueles que mais as desejavam. Como Perry Anderson certa vez observou, a "marca registrada oculta" do marxismo ocidental é que "é um produto da derrota". O cânone de fracassos revolucionários varia, mas pode-se contar 1914, 1919, 1926, 1956, 1968 e 1991. Cada caso oferece perguntas difíceis em vez de lições claras: como produzir mudanças sistêmicas em democracias desenvolvidas; por que as pessoas parecem votar contra seus melhores interesses; como responder à violência e repressão do Estado cometidas em seu nome; o que fazer quando os parâmetros básicos de classe parecem mudar, ou novas identidades adquirem significado político; como continuar quando você parece totalmente derrotado. A dificuldade de tais questões às vezes significa que, em vez de respostas, obtemos formações defensivas autoconsoladoras: fundamentalismo e caça à heresia, uma redobrada dedicação voluntarista, apocalipticismo ou um apego melancólico a um passado perdido.
Alguns dos entrevistados de Bevins gostariam de ter lido mais história ou teoria revolucionária. É certamente verdade que ideias conducentes à derrubada da dominação social dificilmente surgirão organicamente da cultura dominante, mesmo em seu disfarce "woke". A história revolucionária também oferece, no ritmo de Lenin, uma noção de quão poucas leis reais de movimento histórico existem, quão limitada a agência geralmente é, quão contingente, oportunista e imprevisível a mudança pode ser. As palavras de William Morris podem ressoar com os manifestantes brasileiros de Bevins: "Os homens lutam e perdem a batalha, e a coisa pela qual lutaram acontece apesar de sua derrota, e quando acontece acaba não sendo o que eles queriam dizer, e outros homens têm que lutar pelo que eles queriam dizer sob outro nome."
It is not an entirely depressing story. More than a decade on, we can recognise that the Occupy Wall Street generation has had a persistent influence on US politics. Few have drifted into reaction or quietism, and they have helped force issues of race and climate to the fore, while remaining conscious of the need to consider mass appeal and electoral strategy. This generation is responsible for the two Bernie Sanders campaigns, for revivifying the Democratic Socialists of America and for a highly visible increase in labour organising. The recent wave of car factory militancy comes from the shopfloor, but it also relies on the combative leadership and strategic cunning of the new United Autoworkers president, Shawn Fain, who frequently gives press conferences wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Eat the Rich’. He achieved his position by challenging a less militant incumbent; his bid was strongly supported by UAW-unionised, post-Occupy, post-Bernie grad students.
Most of Bevins’s subjects wonder about making the transition to formal politics, though only Gabriel Boric – once a student protester and now president of Chile – has done so. Boric might yet justify that decision, but Chile’s recent referendum on a draft right-wing constitution (it was rejected, as was a progressive version in 2022) and the drop in his approval ratings demonstrate the difficulty of the task. Those who shift from being a member of the crowd to seeking votes are often accused of populism, a word of convenient vagueness which bears the taint that ‘democracy’ did for much of its conceptual history, threatening popular unreason, government by passion and paranoia, majoritarian tyranny and the triumph of the demagogue. In the hands of Cold War liberals, Richard Hofstadter chief among them, all of these disorders were understood as symptoms of populism. Worse still, populism had a latent propensity towards fascism or totalitarianism.
Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger know that, despite an enormous and growing literature, the meaning of populism remains hazy, and that its critics mostly treat it as a manipulative and ‘perverse political style’. The Populist Moment briskly rejects this, insisting that contemporary populism is a response to what’s understood to be oligarchical corruption, economic strictures and democratic deficit: ‘the flower of populism only blossoms when there is a perceived crisis of representation.’ Populism is a creature of disintegration and decline. Its left-wing representatives appeal, not always coherently, to both a historic working class and a more diffuse sense of ‘the people’.
Borriello and Jäger are academics, and theirs is a synoptic study rather than a social history, though they share with Bevins an interest in the reason large structural factors like the economy generate particular political responses. They are right to argue that automatically equating populism and nativism closes off other possible forms of political expression and offers xenophobes a convenient term with which to launder reputations. Most striking is their abrupt dismissal of the overheated debate about whether, or when, the Trump administration can be considered fascist. For them, fascism was a phenomenon of mass party organisation, dependent on widespread social violence carried out by organised paramilitary groups. They regard the differences between Trump’s rhetorical bombast and corruption and interwar conditions in Italy or Germany as ‘glaring’. But presumably no political formation – however reactionary – can meet these historical criteria, at least in the West (Modi’s BJP may be a different story). It’s hard not to wonder if this historicism serves to rob the term of its utility.
Their book isn’t concerned with the right, however, but with left-populist responses to the post-2008 world. The potted narratives offered are miserably familiar: Corbynism obliterated and subject to a thorough damnatio memoriae; Sanders running aground against the Democratic monolith; Syriza brought to heel by the Troika and Tsipras’s drift into inanity; Podemos’s internal bickering and eventual normalisation as a left-wing junior partner in a coalition government. In Spain and Greece – which seemed fertile terrain as a result of the insulation of Eurozone economic policy from democratic control – moribund social democratic parties have revived. (Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the most gaseous and personalised of these formations, can at least claim to have reordered and hegemonised France’s fissiparous radical left.) And yet, because so many of these movements have failed, we forget how volatile and uncertain things once were. As Jean-Claude Juncker, an architect of austerity, put it in a moment of candour: ‘We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’
Spain’s Podemos remains the most interesting as well as the most self-consciously populist of the decade’s experiments. The party’s intense focus on Pablo Iglesias as leader, its avoidance of leftist symbolism and relentless repetition of its social analysis (‘the people’ against the oligarchic ‘caste’) were tactics drawn from the academic literature on populism (Iglesias was a political scientist). But Podemos also wanted to escape the left’s political dead ends, translating the energy of the Indignados anti-austerity movement into concrete change. ‘I have defeat tattooed in my DNA,’ Iglesias said in a 2014 debate. ‘It bothers me enormously to lose, I can’t stand it. And I’ve spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can win.’ A decade later, and after its spell as a junior coalition partner, victory – of a sort – seems to have diminished Podemos: the party has dissolved into a jumbled collection of left-wing groupings, and Iglesias has left politics.
The case studies are dispiriting. It’s true that right-wing populist victories have been narrow, just as left-populist failures have sometimes been tantalisingly close. The balance sheet is strikingly lopsided, although the conclusions to be drawn from this fact aren’t obvious. Left populists might believe it demonstrates a need to go harder, like a left-wing Trump or Farage. But the consistent failure of such a strategy might raise questions about whether the repertoire of the right is, in fact, equally available to the left. Despite the intermittent episodes of revolutionary rhetoric and press histrionics, left populists are essentially moderate when compared with their 20th-century predecessors, broadly at peace with the liberal democratic state and the institutions it superintends.
Borriello and Jäger are most incisive when making the case for populism as ‘the operative term’ of modern politics, which is characterised by the atrophy of parties as mass organisations, the elevation of totemic individuals (‘hyperleaderism’) and new ad hoc organisational forms. Social media is both a symptom and an accelerant of these trends. The suggestion is that, whatever the failures of left populism, we should expect other movements to appear while these conditions obtain. This might not be good news. Hyperleaderism is a problem if the leader is flawed or compromised: replacement is tricky. Hollowed-out parties might be susceptible to surprise campaigns, but they are also easily controlled by internal oligarchies. Volatile electorates swell the ranks of an insurgency but just as rapidly lose interest. Social media drives everyone who uses it mad, as well as making them incapable of compromising or choosing priorities. Nostalgia for the life-encompassing institutions of the postwar parties is increasingly common on the left, so it’s worth recalling that they were often conformist, authoritarian and indulgent of mediocrity. Still, it’s hard not to sympathise with the old communist who, after leaving La France Insoumise, complained that the process entailed no inquiry about his dissatisfaction or probing of political difference. All he had to do was click ‘unsubscribe’.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Florian Philippot – then a member of the Front National, and often called a populist – declared: ‘Leur monde s’effondre. Le nôtre se construit’ (‘Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built’). But populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the US Capitol. As Borriello and Jäger put it, everything is now political, and society increasingly resembles a ‘permanent Dreyfus Affair’. There is a rush to draw analogies with interwar Europe, but perhaps it would be better to understand what we’re going through as a general crisis affecting the traditional supports of democratic politics.
Populism has various paradoxes. Why does it so often produce a politics of personality? Why do the masses so often turn out to be Potemkin armies? If anti-corruption is such an important rallying principle, why do populist movements often elect crooks, and its politicians abandon their principles when in office? The Populist Moment suggests that one potential phase of populism was closed off by the pandemic response and the public-private bureaucracy’s return to legitimacy. Yet the factors that generate populist politics – a stubborn democratic deficit and an oligarchy that behaves with impunity – remain. The lessons that Bevins’s defeated protesters offer at the end of If We Burn bear repeating: plan for the day after; progress isn’t inevitable, and a better world doesn’t automatically emerge from protest; hierarchy isn’t an enemy; if you reject representation, someone else will represent you; cultural visibility and political power are separate things; power rushes to fill a void. Surprisingly, many of these interviewees are convinced that the past decade was just the beginning. That’s something the defeated often tell themselves, but in truth it’s hard to see world politics calming down. Some hanker after the old parties, but attempts to synthesise the best of both worlds – ‘networked Leninism’, in Rodrigo Nunes’s half-joking phrase – might be a better way.The mass protest decade, or the decade of populism, offered ostensibly propitious conditions for left-wing politics: 2008 had discredited elite wisdom, prompted a huge legitimacy crisis and led to the obviously unjust suffering inflicted by austerity. But even propitious times yielded a bitter crop. Podemos’s slide began with its discomfort over the question of Catalan independence, and questions of sovereignty aren’t going away. Structural problems such as the climate emergency require state-level solutions, but also initiate spirals of volatility, and lend the politics of emergency a new allure. In Britain, adults under forty have seen no growth in real wages during their working lives. War has returned to Europe, and Western states are shredding their little remaining global credibility over Palestine. Joe Biden put it well in an apparently off-the-cuff remark at the end of a press conference with Boric – the ex-protester – in November last year: ‘There comes a time ... where the world changes in a very short time ... I think what happens in the next two, three years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next five or six decades.’ It’s a daunting thought.
The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession
por Anton Jäger e Arthur Borriello.
por Anton Jäger e Arthur Borriello.
Verso, 214 pp., £10.99, setembro 2023, 978 1 80429 248 8
Em uma noite fria no início de fevereiro de 2011, um pequeno grupo de ativistas saiu de um squat em uma casa georgiana na Bloomsbury Square. O prédio — comprado recentemente por um apresentador do Antiques Roadshow — era então o lar de um coletivo solto que dirigia a Really Free School (RFS), uma série de palestras políticas, exibições de filmes e discussões. Era um centro natural para estudantes radicalizados por protestos recentes e pelo crescente movimento antiausteridade. Naquela noite, a atenção estava focada na revolução que parecia estar em andamento no Egito, que acompanhávamos de forma irregular em nossos feeds primitivos do Twitter. Ativistas deram as mãos em uma corrente humana no pórtico do Museu Britânico, inspirados por imagens de pessoas fazendo fila ao redor do Museu Egípcio no lado norte da Praça Tahrir, para protegê-lo de saques. O canto foi ouvido: "Yasqut, yasqut Hosni Mubarak!" Alguns ativistas com smartphones decentes filmaram e tiraram fotos; guardas de segurança perplexos eram o único público. Depois de uns vinte minutos, voltamos para a casa para compartilhar fotos no blog do RFS e, naturalmente, no Twitter (#solidariedade).
É difícil imaginar essa pequena ação acontecendo da mesma forma hoje. Alguns dos slogans do RFS são atemporais ("desemprego para todos, não apenas para os ricos!"), mas o sentimento sincero de conexão com camaradas distantes fomentado pelas primeiras mídias sociais desapareceu há muito tempo, junto com a ideia de que as mídias sociais devem servir principalmente como um complemento para eventos reais. A hostilidade do RFS à representação — suas postagens de blog geralmente eram marcadas como #AJAB, "todos os jornalistas são bastardos" — não era excepcional, embora sua esperança implícita em tecnologias alternativas agora pareça equivocada. A ocupação está morta. Os motivos dos manifestantes agora seriam rapidamente escolhidos. (Museu Britânico? Um pouco colonial. Caramba.) As sensibilidades políticas mudaram da contracultura pós-situacionista para o realismo sombrio de Ken Loach. Mais importante, qualquer senso de uma onda global de mudança, surgindo da crise de 2008, atingindo o auge nas praças das capitais internacionais, há muito tempo desapareceu.
Em 2011, a Time fez do "manifestante" sua pessoa do ano. Ela citou a Primavera Árabe e o movimento Occupy, mas ficou particularmente impressionada com a chegada dos revolucionários digitais. "A grande contribuição da América no século XXI para fomentar a liberdade no exterior", afirmou, "não foi impô-la militarmente, mas habilitá-la tecnologicamente, como um epifenômeno da globalização". A onda de protesto global foi fácil de elogiar, em parte porque os jovens "conectados" cujo papel foi ampliado nas reportagens anglo-americanas eram tão familiares, aparentemente intercambiáveis com os alunos da Columbia ou da UCL. É certamente verdade, e impressionante, que manifestantes em todo o mundo compartilhavam técnicas e táticas, e se entendiam como parte de movimentos inter-relacionados: "O amor acabou, a Turquia está aqui!", gritavam os manifestantes em São Paulo em 2013, invocando os protestos do Parque Gezi enquanto o gás lacrimogêneo se espalhava.
Outras características dos protestos os tornaram palatáveis para o mainstream. De acordo com o sociólogo Asef Bayat, quando os manifestantes árabes tinham demandas políticas claras (o que nem sempre acontecia), eles eram menos propensos a serem "socialistas, anti-imperialistas e anticapitalistas" como em levantes anteriores, e mais propensos a se preocupar com "direitos humanos, responsabilidade política e reforma legal". Essas eram demandas substanciais, mas não aquelas que incomodavam os teleologistas em DC, que podiam interpretar os protestos como auxílio a uma eventual transição para a democracia liberal, o destino natural da humanidade. Hillary Clinton promoveu a liberdade na internet como semelhante ao apoio aos dissidentes soviéticos; um ex-conselheiro de segurança nacional de George W. Bush sugeriu conceder ao Twitter o Prêmio Nobel da Paz.
O ciclo de protestos que começou na Grã-Bretanha no final de 2010 foi extraordinariamente contencioso e conscientemente parte dessa onda global. Incluía manifestações estudantis contra aumentos nas mensalidades, marchas em massa contra a austeridade acompanhadas de ocupações de lojas sonegadoras de impostos e uma versão local do Occupy Wall Street nos degraus da St. Paul's. (Os tumultos urbanos de agosto de 2011 foram relacionados, mas distintos, originados como uma resposta a um assassinato policial.) Comparado com os protestos que Vincent Bevins discute em If We Burn, esse ativismo britânico era algo de baixo nível. Bevins está interessado em movimentos explosivos (a palavra é frequentemente usada), aqueles que derrubaram líderes ou desestabilizaram estados. Com base em mais de duzentas entrevistas em uma dúzia de países, seu livro é um olhar refrescante sobre a década de 2010, visto de fora do Norte Global. Com base no trabalho de Bevins como correspondente estrangeiro do LA Times no Brasil — onde ele foi testemunha da revolta de 2013 — o livro também acompanha as trágicas consequências de Tahrir e faz incursões em Hong Kong, Ucrânia, Coreia do Sul e Indonésia. (O primeiro livro de Bevins, The Jakarta Method, documentou o massacre de comunistas apoiado pelos EUA na Indonésia e suas imitações globais.) If We Burn é animado por uma pergunta simples: por que, quando tantos protestos da década de 2010 pareciam ter sucesso, a posição em seus países agora é exatamente o oposto do que os manifestantes estavam exigindo?
O caso brasileiro é exemplar. Bevins acompanha a história do Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), um pequeno grupo de jovens radicais sem partido em São Paulo que protestaram contra um aumento de 20 centavos na tarifa de ônibus da cidade. Alguns eram estudantes de classe média; outros — como Mayara, uma voz forte no livro — vieram de subculturas anarco-punk e tinham empregos de serviço em bares ou restaurantes. Eles eram um grupo unido de horizontalistas rigorosos, que conduziam reuniões longas e alucinantes para chegar a um consenso do grupo. O majoritarismo de qualquer tipo era automaticamente suspeito; os membros se revezavam entre posições de porta-voz, independentemente da aptidão, para evitar que o poder fosse atribuído a qualquer indivíduo. Mas, por mais sobrenatural que essa filosofia organizacional pudesse parecer, eles também eram astutos militantes, entendendo precisamente quais ações atrairiam que tipo de atenção da mídia. Seu objetivo final não era apenas manter as tarifas de ônibus baixas, mas desmercantilizar completamente o transporte público.
Não funcionou assim. Bloqueios de estradas e protestos de rua a princípio atraíram uma resposta irritada da imprensa, que pediu uma repressão. A repressão produziu brutalidade policial, incluindo — crucialmente — contra jornalistas tradicionais. A imprensa se voltou, denunciando a violência contra cidadãos decentes. O próximo protesto atraiu centenas de milhares de paulistanos comuns, mesmo que tenha se voltado para as classes médias. O MPL ficou eufórico; Bevins cita um colega fotógrafo, geralmente de disposição mordaz: ‘Acho que nunca vi nada mais bonito na minha vida.’ Muitos dos temas de Bevins comentam sobre a sublimidade política da multidão.
A expansão dos protestos teve desvantagens. Bevins descreve um encontro entre jovens punks do MPL e alguns recém-chegados que chegaram com uniformes de futebol brasileiro gritando slogans patrióticos. Os recém-chegados não estavam interessados em ser sermões sobre os perigos do nacionalismo vazio. Reclamações e cartazes se multiplicaram: alguns chamaram o Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) de bandidos, outros exigiram reformas obscuras legais ou de direitos humanos. O MPL permaneceu focado na passagem de ônibus e, eventualmente — depois que os protestos continuaram crescendo — o prefeito de São Paulo cedeu. Mas todos eles foram superados. "Não é pelos 20 centavos", dizia um slogan popular: "Não é sobre vinte centavos". Dois milhões de pessoas estavam nas ruas em todo o Brasil, mas o MPL, junto com outros movimentos de esquerda, se viu expulso. ‘Sem partido!’ os recém-chegados gritavam para qualquer um que tivesse alguma cor política discernível: ‘Sem partido!’
Bevins é perspicaz sobre a maneira como os canais de TV de direita e os think tanks de livre mercado financiados de forma obscura tentaram moldar a recepção dessa ‘erupção fundamentalmente ilegível de contenção’. E ele deixa claro que está envolvido em um trabalho semelhante de interpretação. Ele descreve um golpe discursivo e político, no qual os protestos serviram para fortalecer a Lava Jato – uma investigação anticorrupção que havia sido politicamente subornada e corrompida. Isso, por sua vez, se tornou o pretexto tênue para o impeachment da presidente brasileira, Dilma Rousseff, e sua substituição por seu vice, Michel Temer, que supervisionou uma emenda constitucional para limitar os gastos públicos e remover proteções para a Amazônia. O sucessor de Temer, Jair Bolsonaro, dedicou seu voto de impeachment de Dilma ao coronel que a torturou durante a ditadura. Outra linha do discurso de Bolsonaro se tornou seu slogan de campanha presidencial: "Brasil acima de tudo, Deus acima de todos".
Há idiossincrasias brasileiras nessa história: poucos dos outros movimentos de protesto no livro de Bevins foram conduzidos sob, ou contra, governos de esquerda, e os políticos do PT com quem Bevins fala ainda estão visivelmente frustrados com a oposição que enfrentaram. Mas, no geral, o mesmo padrão se aplica em outros lugares: ativistas provocam uma revolta "sem liderança" e forças reacionárias organizadas exploram isso para seus próprios fins. Frequentemente, os ativistas se comportam como se a forma certa de mudança surgisse espontaneamente, que ela está de alguma forma latente em sua ação. Lucas Monteiro, um membro do MPL, faz um lamento ecoado em vários países e ao longo da década: tendo planejado apenas para que seu protesto tivesse sucesso, "não tínhamos absolutamente nenhum plano para o que viria depois". Infelizmente, o poder político abomina o vácuo. Entre muitos dos entrevistados por Bevins, há agora um reconhecimento doloroso da necessidade de habilidade política e tenacidade – ‘a longa e lenta perfuração de tábuas duras’, na frase de Weber – e um anseio pelo partido estrategista de Gramsci, o ‘príncipe moderno’. Bevins concorda que a ausência de organizações representativas capazes de produzir líderes e estratégias foi um fator crucial na derrota desses grupos.
If We Burn tem o subtítulo ‘a década de protestos em massa e a revolução perdida’. Bevins, em comum com muitos de seus entrevistados, entende a desordem pós-2008 como representando a ‘exaustão do sistema global’. Mas é uma exaustão da qual não se recuperou. Depois de 1789, somos inclinados a pensar nas revoluções como progressivas, como pelo menos potencialmente geradoras de uma transformação das relações sociais. Mais frequentemente, na narrativa de Bevins, o sentido mais antigo de "revolução" se aplica: uma mutação cíclica - ou degeneração - de ordens constitucionais e seu eventual retorno à posição original. Essa compreensão da mudança política foi resumida por Hobbes no final de Behemoth: "Eu vi nesta revolução um movimento circular do poder soberano". Essa tradição de pensamento é profundamente hostil à multidão, mas enfatiza que sempre há outra força de olho no primeiro lugar. Normalmente, ela vê a política de massa como um teatro fraudulento; o círculo de agentes políticos reais sempre permanece pequeno. Bevins tem pouco tempo para especulações sobre o "estado profundo" ou atividade internacional, embora observe que as monarquias do Golfo financiaram secretamente os grupos astroturf que apoiaram o golpe militar no Egito. "Fomos enganados", diz um ativista de Tahrir.
Na história da esquerda, as revoluções têm estado mais frequentemente ausentes do que não, ou chegaram em formas estranhas ou repulsivas para aqueles que mais as desejavam. Como Perry Anderson certa vez observou, a "marca registrada oculta" do marxismo ocidental é que "é um produto da derrota". O cânone de fracassos revolucionários varia, mas pode-se contar 1914, 1919, 1926, 1956, 1968 e 1991. Cada caso oferece perguntas difíceis em vez de lições claras: como produzir mudanças sistêmicas em democracias desenvolvidas; por que as pessoas parecem votar contra seus melhores interesses; como responder à violência e repressão do Estado cometidas em seu nome; o que fazer quando os parâmetros básicos de classe parecem mudar, ou novas identidades adquirem significado político; como continuar quando você parece totalmente derrotado. A dificuldade de tais questões às vezes significa que, em vez de respostas, obtemos formações defensivas autoconsoladoras: fundamentalismo e caça à heresia, uma redobrada dedicação voluntarista, apocalipticismo ou um apego melancólico a um passado perdido.
Alguns dos entrevistados de Bevins gostariam de ter lido mais história ou teoria revolucionária. É certamente verdade que ideias conducentes à derrubada da dominação social dificilmente surgirão organicamente da cultura dominante, mesmo em seu disfarce "woke". A história revolucionária também oferece, no ritmo de Lenin, uma noção de quão poucas leis reais de movimento histórico existem, quão limitada a agência geralmente é, quão contingente, oportunista e imprevisível a mudança pode ser. As palavras de William Morris podem ressoar com os manifestantes brasileiros de Bevins: "Os homens lutam e perdem a batalha, e a coisa pela qual lutaram acontece apesar de sua derrota, e quando acontece acaba não sendo o que eles queriam dizer, e outros homens têm que lutar pelo que eles queriam dizer sob outro nome."
It is not an entirely depressing story. More than a decade on, we can recognise that the Occupy Wall Street generation has had a persistent influence on US politics. Few have drifted into reaction or quietism, and they have helped force issues of race and climate to the fore, while remaining conscious of the need to consider mass appeal and electoral strategy. This generation is responsible for the two Bernie Sanders campaigns, for revivifying the Democratic Socialists of America and for a highly visible increase in labour organising. The recent wave of car factory militancy comes from the shopfloor, but it also relies on the combative leadership and strategic cunning of the new United Autoworkers president, Shawn Fain, who frequently gives press conferences wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Eat the Rich’. He achieved his position by challenging a less militant incumbent; his bid was strongly supported by UAW-unionised, post-Occupy, post-Bernie grad students.
Most of Bevins’s subjects wonder about making the transition to formal politics, though only Gabriel Boric – once a student protester and now president of Chile – has done so. Boric might yet justify that decision, but Chile’s recent referendum on a draft right-wing constitution (it was rejected, as was a progressive version in 2022) and the drop in his approval ratings demonstrate the difficulty of the task. Those who shift from being a member of the crowd to seeking votes are often accused of populism, a word of convenient vagueness which bears the taint that ‘democracy’ did for much of its conceptual history, threatening popular unreason, government by passion and paranoia, majoritarian tyranny and the triumph of the demagogue. In the hands of Cold War liberals, Richard Hofstadter chief among them, all of these disorders were understood as symptoms of populism. Worse still, populism had a latent propensity towards fascism or totalitarianism.
Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger know that, despite an enormous and growing literature, the meaning of populism remains hazy, and that its critics mostly treat it as a manipulative and ‘perverse political style’. The Populist Moment briskly rejects this, insisting that contemporary populism is a response to what’s understood to be oligarchical corruption, economic strictures and democratic deficit: ‘the flower of populism only blossoms when there is a perceived crisis of representation.’ Populism is a creature of disintegration and decline. Its left-wing representatives appeal, not always coherently, to both a historic working class and a more diffuse sense of ‘the people’.
Borriello and Jäger are academics, and theirs is a synoptic study rather than a social history, though they share with Bevins an interest in the reason large structural factors like the economy generate particular political responses. They are right to argue that automatically equating populism and nativism closes off other possible forms of political expression and offers xenophobes a convenient term with which to launder reputations. Most striking is their abrupt dismissal of the overheated debate about whether, or when, the Trump administration can be considered fascist. For them, fascism was a phenomenon of mass party organisation, dependent on widespread social violence carried out by organised paramilitary groups. They regard the differences between Trump’s rhetorical bombast and corruption and interwar conditions in Italy or Germany as ‘glaring’. But presumably no political formation – however reactionary – can meet these historical criteria, at least in the West (Modi’s BJP may be a different story). It’s hard not to wonder if this historicism serves to rob the term of its utility.
Their book isn’t concerned with the right, however, but with left-populist responses to the post-2008 world. The potted narratives offered are miserably familiar: Corbynism obliterated and subject to a thorough damnatio memoriae; Sanders running aground against the Democratic monolith; Syriza brought to heel by the Troika and Tsipras’s drift into inanity; Podemos’s internal bickering and eventual normalisation as a left-wing junior partner in a coalition government. In Spain and Greece – which seemed fertile terrain as a result of the insulation of Eurozone economic policy from democratic control – moribund social democratic parties have revived. (Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the most gaseous and personalised of these formations, can at least claim to have reordered and hegemonised France’s fissiparous radical left.) And yet, because so many of these movements have failed, we forget how volatile and uncertain things once were. As Jean-Claude Juncker, an architect of austerity, put it in a moment of candour: ‘We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’
Spain’s Podemos remains the most interesting as well as the most self-consciously populist of the decade’s experiments. The party’s intense focus on Pablo Iglesias as leader, its avoidance of leftist symbolism and relentless repetition of its social analysis (‘the people’ against the oligarchic ‘caste’) were tactics drawn from the academic literature on populism (Iglesias was a political scientist). But Podemos also wanted to escape the left’s political dead ends, translating the energy of the Indignados anti-austerity movement into concrete change. ‘I have defeat tattooed in my DNA,’ Iglesias said in a 2014 debate. ‘It bothers me enormously to lose, I can’t stand it. And I’ve spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can win.’ A decade later, and after its spell as a junior coalition partner, victory – of a sort – seems to have diminished Podemos: the party has dissolved into a jumbled collection of left-wing groupings, and Iglesias has left politics.
The case studies are dispiriting. It’s true that right-wing populist victories have been narrow, just as left-populist failures have sometimes been tantalisingly close. The balance sheet is strikingly lopsided, although the conclusions to be drawn from this fact aren’t obvious. Left populists might believe it demonstrates a need to go harder, like a left-wing Trump or Farage. But the consistent failure of such a strategy might raise questions about whether the repertoire of the right is, in fact, equally available to the left. Despite the intermittent episodes of revolutionary rhetoric and press histrionics, left populists are essentially moderate when compared with their 20th-century predecessors, broadly at peace with the liberal democratic state and the institutions it superintends.
Borriello and Jäger are most incisive when making the case for populism as ‘the operative term’ of modern politics, which is characterised by the atrophy of parties as mass organisations, the elevation of totemic individuals (‘hyperleaderism’) and new ad hoc organisational forms. Social media is both a symptom and an accelerant of these trends. The suggestion is that, whatever the failures of left populism, we should expect other movements to appear while these conditions obtain. This might not be good news. Hyperleaderism is a problem if the leader is flawed or compromised: replacement is tricky. Hollowed-out parties might be susceptible to surprise campaigns, but they are also easily controlled by internal oligarchies. Volatile electorates swell the ranks of an insurgency but just as rapidly lose interest. Social media drives everyone who uses it mad, as well as making them incapable of compromising or choosing priorities. Nostalgia for the life-encompassing institutions of the postwar parties is increasingly common on the left, so it’s worth recalling that they were often conformist, authoritarian and indulgent of mediocrity. Still, it’s hard not to sympathise with the old communist who, after leaving La France Insoumise, complained that the process entailed no inquiry about his dissatisfaction or probing of political difference. All he had to do was click ‘unsubscribe’.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Florian Philippot – then a member of the Front National, and often called a populist – declared: ‘Leur monde s’effondre. Le nôtre se construit’ (‘Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built’). But populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the US Capitol. As Borriello and Jäger put it, everything is now political, and society increasingly resembles a ‘permanent Dreyfus Affair’. There is a rush to draw analogies with interwar Europe, but perhaps it would be better to understand what we’re going through as a general crisis affecting the traditional supports of democratic politics.
Populism has various paradoxes. Why does it so often produce a politics of personality? Why do the masses so often turn out to be Potemkin armies? If anti-corruption is such an important rallying principle, why do populist movements often elect crooks, and its politicians abandon their principles when in office? The Populist Moment suggests that one potential phase of populism was closed off by the pandemic response and the public-private bureaucracy’s return to legitimacy. Yet the factors that generate populist politics – a stubborn democratic deficit and an oligarchy that behaves with impunity – remain. The lessons that Bevins’s defeated protesters offer at the end of If We Burn bear repeating: plan for the day after; progress isn’t inevitable, and a better world doesn’t automatically emerge from protest; hierarchy isn’t an enemy; if you reject representation, someone else will represent you; cultural visibility and political power are separate things; power rushes to fill a void. Surprisingly, many of these interviewees are convinced that the past decade was just the beginning. That’s something the defeated often tell themselves, but in truth it’s hard to see world politics calming down. Some hanker after the old parties, but attempts to synthesise the best of both worlds – ‘networked Leninism’, in Rodrigo Nunes’s half-joking phrase – might be a better way.The mass protest decade, or the decade of populism, offered ostensibly propitious conditions for left-wing politics: 2008 had discredited elite wisdom, prompted a huge legitimacy crisis and led to the obviously unjust suffering inflicted by austerity. But even propitious times yielded a bitter crop. Podemos’s slide began with its discomfort over the question of Catalan independence, and questions of sovereignty aren’t going away. Structural problems such as the climate emergency require state-level solutions, but also initiate spirals of volatility, and lend the politics of emergency a new allure. In Britain, adults under forty have seen no growth in real wages during their working lives. War has returned to Europe, and Western states are shredding their little remaining global credibility over Palestine. Joe Biden put it well in an apparently off-the-cuff remark at the end of a press conference with Boric – the ex-protester – in November last year: ‘There comes a time ... where the world changes in a very short time ... I think what happens in the next two, three years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next five or six decades.’ It’s a daunting thought.
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