Populism, historically, meant divergence from imperial realpolitik, the way it is used today isn’t fundamentally different, neither are the interests involved.
eg “the assassination by an animal-rights activist of Pym Fortuyn, a flamboyant, right wing, anti-immigrant populist”
This talk of populism, basically, is a moment where the dwarf temporarily appears to correct the errors of the moorish potentate, since the people who produce the newspapers would like it to be known that there’s a certain distance between themselves and the gay fascist. And there is a distance. In this and other things.
This society cannot be considered apart from its entire apparatus of impersonal communication. The methodology of this apparatus was always predicated on and served to reinforce the receiver’s sense of incompetence, but for a number of technical and historical reasons this generalised contempt rarely entered the content of that which was disseminated.
Characteristic of the fragments of ideology produced by the market economy, the populism argument has a single relationship of support, which in this case is an extrinsic relation. This populism is desirable, in a sense, but also untenable, and this untenable quality derives not from any part of the analysis, since there is no analysis, but from the receiver’s self-affirmed abstractedness. One of the methods of advertising: premises disavowed.
The standard shorthand of right wing political commentary has for a long time been the opposition:
laissez-faire – managerialism
Where the latter is denigrated in favour of the former. The paradigm in which populism can be used in a pejorative sense is fundamentally different, since populism cannot be meaningfully opposed to laissez-faire, necessarily:
managerialism - populism
This first opposition: laissez-faire – managerialism, is historically specific. It came about as a straightforward way of discrediting the managerialist model of the USSR, and was subsequently extended into a way of discrediting trade unions, the welfare state etc. But it’s merely critique, and as a theory in no way accounts for the total movement of capitalism, in which capital necessarily aggregates and in which power necessarily becomes concentrated. So subsequent to the conclusion of a particular period of conflict, we should not be surprised if those in power desire to make use of that which their propagandists formerly denigrated.
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