Trump, February 2016. Wikicommons/Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA. Some rights reserved.Trump's victory marks a geopolitical turning point that has led many to start talking about ‘the populist era’, in shock at the crushing arrival of this New York tycoon in the capital of Empire.
Faced with events of this magnitude, it’s appropriate to pause to think about the causes and consequences. Some of us have spent years theorising and predicting that the blurring of political faultlines by the centrist progressive consensus would result in a "return of the political", understood as a friction between radically different political projects.
To the extent that the "Third Way” – applied in traditional socio-democratic parties – accepted neoliberal hegemony, it paved the way for a populist logic that would re-establish "the people" as a collective subject. The type of content or meaning acquired by this subject thus becomes fundamental, as the irruption of “the people” into political discourse is not in itself enough to unify us into a common category. Examples range from Trump and Le Pen to Podemos. "Concrete policies" will continue to be necessary in order to win, but they are no longer enough.
