Populism: Ebb and Flow?
The “Red Wave” turned out to be a relatively minor tempest. It’s not too early, I think, to assess the exhaustion of the Trumpist vindictive triumphalism. Fatigue can erode any political folly. Sooner or later, populist fervor gets rusty. Zealots get bored they wan a rejuvenated show, new actors, new costumes.
I published my piece titled “Hypotheses on Populism” in 2000 in the journal East European Politics and Sovieties. It was actually my contribution to a symposium on populism. The other two participants were political scientists Marc Howard and Cas Mudde. At that moment, there were several growing extreme populist parties in Europe: Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, Corneliu Vadim Tudor’s Greater Romania Party, National Front in France. Yet, rabid nationalism, Milosevic-style, was losing momentum. In Russia, Zhirinovsky’s histrionics were rather pathetic. I tried to link populism to the ideological and axiological crises and the yearning for imminent (and immanent) salvation via immersion in collective ecstasies. I wondered whether a post-modern version and practice of Fascism might be the forthcoming contagious delusion.
In his response to Francis Fukuyama's influential article “The End of History?” political philosopher Alan Bloom disturbingly wrote: “... liberalism has won but may be decisively unsatisfactory... And, although fascism was defeated on the battlefield, its dark possibilities were not seen through the end. If an alternative is sought there is nowhere else to seek it. I suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future” (See National Interest, Summer 1989, 21). Similarly, French political scientist Pierre Hassner asked: “Is it really impossible that the search for action in a prosaic society, or the search for scapegoats in a bewildered one confronted with sudden social or natural catastrophe, should produce not the rebirth of systematic ideological doctrines but a primitive form of fascism based on resentment, fear, hatred, and hysteria?” (idem, p. 23). So, like the disease in Albert Camus’s The Plague, the populist delirium fades away. For how long?
