It often seems as though populism defines our current political age. The term is splashed across the headlines, brandished in political speeches and commentaries, and applied extensively in numerous academic publications and conferences. In November 2018, The Guardian dedicated vast resources and space on its front page to understanding the phenomenon, bringing in the expertise of many specialists. An article launching the project asked: ‘Why is populism suddenly all the rage?’ and, in a rather ironic manner, the subheading read: ‘In 1998, about 300 Guardian articles mentioned populism. In 2016, 2,000 did’. With seemingly no reflection on the paper’s own role in generating this statistic, the suggestion was that the media simply followed and mirrored public opinion rather than having an impact on what was reported.
In recent years, the term has been applied to a multitude of disparate movements from the left to the right. However, in general, it tends to be used in a derogatory manner to describe a threat to the status quo, usually defined as liberal democracy. Sometimes, this is based on the racist and anti-immigration positions of so-called populists, but in a way that euphemises them and/or presumes that establishment liberal democratic parties and the status quo are not racist and xenophobic in terms of rhetoric, policies and institutions. At other times, it is used as a way for the establishment to sell racist and xenophobic policies as the will of ‘the people’ and fend off the threat of ‘populists’. We argue that not only has the careless use of the term created damaging false equivalences between movements with differing visions of politics and society (think of UKIP and Podemos), but that it has also led to a process of euphemisation, contributing to the legitimisation of harmful discourses and diverting our attention away from engaging with real alternatives to such threats.
Indeed, the hype around populism has seen it become one of the main descriptors for right-wing forms of politics, when there are many more accurate terms to describe politics beyond the mainstream right. This is reflected in The Guardian’s coverage, where the majority of articles were dedicated to the far right. The coverage culminated in no less than four articles on Steve Bannon, even though his European project was failing, and an opinion piece by Hillary Clinton advising that ‘Europe must curb immigration to stop right-wing populists’.
