Monthly Archives: April 2021

Populist parties are often assumed to benefit electorally from major crises. Yet as Giuliano Bobba and Nicolas Hub explain, populist actors have found it difficult to politicise the crisis brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a new book covering the first wave of the pandemic in Europe, they identify several lessons concerning the effect of crises on the electoral appeal of populist parties.

Several authors agree that crisis situations are a precondition for the emergence and success of populists, or at least that they can favour them. While the impact of Covid-19 has not been the same around the world, in many countries the pandemic has been the biggest health, economic and social crisis since World War II.

Given the peculiar nature of the crisis, however, it is not obvious how populists can take advantage of it. Like other catastrophes or natural events, Covid-19 is difficult to politicise, that is, to become an arena for political confrontation between parties with traditional divides (us vs. others; elites vs. people), at least in its early stages.

In a new book, we have brought together contributions covering eight European countries that were affected in different ways by the pandemic (the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK). Our study presents a comprehensive comparison of how populist parties in each of these countries responded to the first wave.

Table 1: Impact of the first wave of Covid-19 infections in selected European countries

While populists sought to take advantage of the crisis, the impossibility of taking ownership of the Covid-19 issue has made it difficult to exploit the pandemic politically. In particular, populists in power have tried to depoliticise the pandemic, whereas radical right-populists in opposition have tried to politicise the crisis, but have largely failed to gain substantial public support. In what follows, we outline what we have learned so far and what we could expect in the next future.

Populists did not gain support during the pandemic

In terms of political support, as measured by voting intentions, populists have not significantly benefited from the crisis (Table 2). This is evident both in the short term, after the first wave (end of May 2020), and in the medium term (end of March 2021).

Table 2: Voting intentions for populist parties during the Covid-19 pandemic

Although the success of populism is often interpreted as the result of an external crisis (i.e., economic, financial, political, migration, traditional values), this general pattern does not work when applied to the Covid-19 crisis. The peculiar nature of the crisis, as well as the implementation of similar policy solutions across European states, has largely prevented populists from using their usual proposals and rhetoric to gain centrality in the political arena and public support.

Left-wing and right-wing populists reacted differently

Our research found evidence that right-wing and left-wing populist parties reacted in different ways to the crisis. On the one hand, right-wing populism has identified new lines of conflict: an intensified emphasis on nationalism (and neo-natalism), and the (resulting) opposition of we, the national people, not only against the EU but also against some other member states. These findings confirm that even during the pandemic, right-wing populism is strictly intertwined with Euroscepticism.

Right-wing populist parties have been prevented from using their traditional appeal to the people as a basis for support and have instead emphasised the handling of migration issues. While in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and the UK this included requests to close borders to reduce the risk of contagion from abroad, in France and Italy two right-wing populist leaders, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, accused governments of taking care of migrants instead of focusing only on nationals. On the other hand, left-wing parties (Podemos, La France Insoumise, and to a certain extent the Five Star Movement) did not use this kind of discourse. During the crisis, they were more focused on denouncing the lack of public investment in national health-care systems and the disastrous consequences of years of EU neoliberalism.

Being a populist in power or in opposition matters

Whether populist parties were in power or in opposition appears to have structured their discourse on Covid-19. Opposition parties attempted to politicise the pandemic at the end of the first wave, primarily blaming parties in power for their handling of the crisis, though with only partial success. No populist party attempted to politicise the pandemic in the manner Donald Trump did, by questioning the origin of the virus. The more marginal parties such as the Brexit Party, Vox, the AfD, and Konfederacja, have clearly radicalised their discourse based on nationalist, protectionist, and neo-nationalist agendas.

In contrast, parties aspiring to govern, such as the Rassemblement National, La France Insoumise, and Lega, have been much more cautious, focusing mainly on alleged government incompetence. On the other hand, the governing parties have tried to depoliticise the crisis using technical and scientific arguments and following the recommendations of national experts. For them, the crisis was an excellent opportunity to show their political competence, managerial skills and dedication to the people. A typical case is the Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babi, who emphasised his ability to govern the country through the crisis with the same success that he had achieved in managing his businesses in the past.

Again, a difference seems to have emerged between the left-wing and right-wing populists in power. Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy, as members of coalition governments, have based their political action on the advice of scientific and technical committees, while emphasising the need for more public investment in health care. At the opposite end of the spectrum, right-wing populists in power in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary have primarily used scientific arguments to justify their political decisions, emphasising their leaders ability to make informed decisions solely on the basis of the authority of their political leadership.

Populists as crisis entrepreneurs

While populist actors often operate as crisis entrepreneurs, most of them have been unable to exploit the pandemic. Evidence suggests that populists benefit more from a situation of continual complaint against new contradictions than from the actual outbreak of a crisis such as Covid-19, or, worse still, from a solution to it, such as Brexit in the case of UKIP.

As crisis entrepreneurs, populist strive to fuel a permanent crisis cycle. This is, in fact, the condition that allows them to take full advantage of crises in terms of political centrality and voter support. Of course, as already mentioned, not all crises are the same. Populists take ownership of the contradictions that best suit their view of society. The quest for this crisis ownership is what feeds the continuous process of naming, blaming, and claiming of systemic contradictions that populists implement as a political strategy.

The pattern typically begins with the emergence of a political contradiction, triggered by populists. The next step is for this contradiction to be publicly recognised as a relevant problem, before being exploited by populist politicians, who then push it toward becoming an actual crisis. Finally, populists do not limit their focus to a single contradiction, but instead trigger this cycle for all contradictions they identify at a given time. The initial phase is when populists can benefit the most from a crisis while in the final phase, the climax, the contradiction finds a solution or a compromise that weakens the issue.

During the pandemic, all political actors suddenly found themselves in the final phase, where a crisis had broken out and a solution had to be found. This is the worst condition for populists because citizens perceive problems as real or experience them directly. Political responses must be rapidly implemented. At these critical junctures, disputes and polarisation often leave room for forms of political collaboration or non-hostile, tacit agreement in the name of national solidarity. However, as soon as this state of emergency ends, populists begin to implement the permanent crisis strategy again, fostering the emergence of new contradictions. This is exactly what happened in the eight countries we analysed between February and May 2020.

From the Covid-19 crisis to multiple crises: a new breeding ground for European populism?

In our view, crises per se do not necessarily favour populism. On the contrary, it is populists who fuel a permanent crisis cycle that consists of a continuous search for crisis ownership around stable or emerging political contradictions. The Covid-19 pandemic is an interesting case where populists were not able to obtain this kind of ownership at an early stage of the crisis. However, the consequences of the management of the pandemic in health, economic and social terms are multiplying critical situations that could lead to real crises in the coming months.

As we all know, unfortunately, the health crisis is far from over or under control. Covid-19 has entered the political routine and governments are oscillating between economic, public health, and preventive policy measures. Once in the coming months the first vaccination campaign is over, the situation will evolve to a new standard far different from the previous one in which the political struggle will take place and people will have to live. This normalisation of the Covid-19 crisis is likely to give opposition parties more opportunities to politicise the policies implemented by governments and possibly take advantage of the crisis. Populists in power and in opposition, therefore, will face opposite challenges, the outcome of which will determine the characteristics of European populism in the post-Covid-19 age.

For more information, see the authors accompanying book, Populism and the Politicization of the COVID-19 Crisis in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

Note: This study was conducted within the scope of the H2020 project Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe (DEMOS) and was funded by the European Commission under Grant agreement number 822590. The article gives the views of theauthors, not the position of EUROPP European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Rassemblement National

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Populism and Covid-19 in Europe: What we learned from the first wave of the pandemic - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

If such rhetoric is to animate people they have to hear (or see, or read) it. And how that happens depends on the technologies used to augment it. Hearing a speech as part of a crowd of people in the House of Commons is very different from reading a pamphlet in the library of a constituency Labour Club, which is also very different from watching BBC Question Time at home. Each of these creates a particular and distinct relationship between speakers, audiences and ideas.

Today speeches, pamphlets and television programmes still convey political ideas. But digital media platforms YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and so on are creating new forms and new kinds of relationships between speakers, audiences and ideas. They are reconfiguring ideological and informational contestation in ways that have given rise to new kinds of populist politics. Indeed, many current forms of populist politics cannot be understood apart from the digital platforms through which they have been propagated.

Social, digital, media platforms make it possible for lots of people to become ideological entrepreneurs, making a living from producing and disseminating political ideas and arguments yet unconstrained by the obligations that come with representing a party or adhering to the codes of professional journalism. This has enabled ambitious people to consolidate and coordinate political outlooks previously too marginal and dispersed to be noticed, developing new ways for people to apprehend their political life simply by liking and subscribing.

The individualising nature of social media not least the fact that we mostly consume it on our own, the voices inside our headphones creates a very particular dynamic between speakers and audiences. Supplied with the daily data, producers can quickly and rapidly adapt to audience reactions, in search of a continued supply of subscribers and paying followers. Audiences can develop close parasocial relationships with their ideological entrepreneurs of choice and with each other.

Significantly such online political actors do not produce only 30-second videos or 280-character tweets. They produce hours-long videos and millions of words discussing and developing political ideas, analysing current events and proposing ways to mobilise. They are far more complex and detailed than any party political broadcast.

Digital platforms are locations for intense ideological-rhetorical action and for the cultivation of political understanding. This is where a lot of the work of translating needs and interests into hearable demands now takes place. But people also find there new forms of subcultural community to attach to, and charismatic ideological entrepreneurs promising to explain the world, to show you how to identify the baddies and the goodies, to give you rules for life.

All of this also takes place, however, in a political-economic context. For most of us occupational security, status and income have all declined over the past 40 years. The acceleration of technological innovation has abolished some kinds of work, deskilling and routinising others (including, perhaps especially, the once-grand professions such as law or education).

It has brought a new experience of economic vulnerability to those who thought that their numbers, skills or credentials protected them. Within the workplace, union power and collective bargaining have been replaced by individual negotiations governed by mechanisms of performance management, overseen by the formalities of Human Resources. In daily life, we must follow the rules and live by the decisions of those whose technical, scientific and intellectual knowledge is applied by various bureaucratic authorities. In our time off our leisure pursuits are shaped by the creative workers of the capitalist media and entertainment industries.

Our working lives are governed by impersonal rules which feel imposed on us from outside; in our private lives, our capacities for creative expression are dwarfed by the power of the commercial media. Meanwhile, in our public, civic lives what was once mainstream political rhetoric has long since failed to be either engaging or reassuring about any of these experiences.

Professionalised and mechanistic, using a bland language we all know because we are subjected to it by technocrats at work, it urges us to enjoy the disruption and experience it as liberating. Many repelled by or simply excluded from all this, have been attracted by political figures who break with and mock the conventions of such official rhetorics, and who, with their deliberate bad manners, blur the genres of political discourse with those learned from prior careers in, say, comedy, wrestling and opinion journalism and who promise to free us from the iron cages of late-modernity.

Online, this kind of populist opposition to changes in occupational class experience and cultural power is led by the Right and far Right. Across platforms, and especially on YouTube, new ideological entrepreneurs have achieved commercial viability by cultivating audiences to whom they offer an explanation of what has happened and why, translating general anxieties and expectations into demands contained with a claim about a fundamental antagonism. What they offer in great detail, through polemics that are both angry and comedic is a class analysis but one which concentrates on domination by a class defined by its possession of cultural and discursive rather than economic power. That rhetoric divides us from the them the administrators and managers (especially those in HR), the government bureaucrats and officials, the professionals and experts, the entertainers and journalists.

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Rethinking politics, populism and platforms - Open Democracy

You can listen to the companion audio version of this and other essays in the series using the player below or onApple Podcasts,Google Podcasts,StitcherorAudible.

Author Thomas Frank is an unapologetic liberal and populist. Those characteristics shape his writing and worldview. He finds promise in the countrys original populists, who adopted the term in 1891, and who were protesting unbearable debt, monopoly and corruption forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans who were just as worthy as bankers or railroad barons were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws. Frank sees distinct parallels between conditions then and American capitalism as it exists today, complete with the stains of racism, sexism, economic inequality, and contempt for ordinary Americans.

Franks latest book, The People, No (2020), completes a decades-long four-book circuit that both critiques conservatives for appropriating the language of populism in protecting elite economic interests and criticizes his fellow liberals for letting conservatives do it. Having completed Whats the Matter With Kansas? (2005), one of the most influential political books of the last quarter-century, Wrecking Crew (2009) and Listen Liberal (2017), Frank now makes an urgent, perhaps desperate, call for liberals and allied progressives to reclaim populism for the left. He laments the tendency in recent years to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition. In a bid to redeem populism, Frank describes his most recent book as my own personal narrative of . . . the running war between the populist tradition and the people who hate it.

The following interview has been edited for clarity, length and readability.

Governing: What's the Matter With Kansas? is one of the most durable books of our time. Its thesis has been enormously influential. Where are we now?

Thomas Frank: As a country, we're lost. Weve embraced the culture wars. What's the Matter With Kansas? is about the culture wars coming to overshadow traditional economic politics. That's everywhere now. Every day is a new battle over the legitimacy of the traditional ruling elites of this country. So much has changed since that book came out. I'm very critical of Biden, but in some ways, hes exactly what we need. Theres something very refreshing in this grandfatherly figure who's very forgiving, who doesn't despise people. He's very old-fashioned. He's a reminder.

I don't think Biden understands the historical position that hes in. Thats the problem with a lot of Democrats. They talk about Bidens election as if its Obama's third term. When Biden used that phrase, nothing will fundamentally change, it angered a lot of left-leaning people. This country desperately needs to see that liberal governance is a good thing, and that the Democratic Party and the government in Washington really genuinely do care about everyone, including the lowliest members of society. Biden doesn't understand the urgency of that task. If he fails, we're going to see a resurgence of Trumpism.

Governing: If he did understand, what could he do?

Thomas Frank: The playing field is ready for someone that understands the urgency and knows what to do. Biden definitely knows how to get things done. If he tackles COVID-19 in a really forceful way and gets things back to normal by summertime, this country will love him forever. If he gets the economy roaring, this country will love him. Unfortunately, there are other things that he's already screwed up. The minimum wage was an important one. The $2,000 checks [proposed by President Trump in the last days of the campaign] were an important one. But the country will forgive those if he gets the economy up and running again.

Governing: How does Biden overcome the paralysis in Congress?

Thomas Frank: There are plenty of precedents. He needs to persuade a couple members of the other party, or he needs to persuade members of his own party, like Joe Manchin, to do the right thing for the country. Nowadays presidents just throw up their hands and say, "It can't be done." But we know it can. Franklin Roosevelt did it all the time. Lyndon Johnson did it all the time. Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts done in 1981 with a Democratic House. The president has enormous bargaining power. Biden needs to get everybody to sit down at the table.

Governing: Can Biden deliver in relieving economic pressure and bringing about real economic democracy? This has been a difficult thing for Democrats.

Thomas Frank: There's a way to goose the economy, to create a simulacrum of economic democracy. Remember how Bill Clinton was loved toward the end of his presidency? It was because the economy was roaring and wages were growing. Trump never quite got there because of the pandemic, but he almost did.

By the standards at the time, the New Deal stimulus was enormous. We're on a completely different playing field now. This is so much bigger than anything Roosevelt did until World War II. Maybe this will be good enough to win it for Biden, but he needs a larger plan. The bigger question is what's gone wrong with middle-class society, and I think Biden has some glimmer of understanding. The only two candidates who really did get it were Biden and Sanders, and maybe Elizabeth Warren. But that's not to say that he has any idea what to do about it.

Governing: Much of this involves huge macro-economic things that very few people understand. AI and robotics are going to make it increasingly harder to employ millions of people, many of whom are going to be too old to be retrainable. How do you see all of this playing out over the next half century?

Thomas Frank: When I was doing research on the 1960s, I was surprised to discover that economists were talking about this back then. They used the term automation. Up until now, the fear has been largely overblown. Other things have done much more damage. The answer is not what the Democrats always do, which is to tell people to get used to it and learn how to code. Thats what Bill Clinton did. Rahm Emanuel did this just a short while ago. That's an insult, not an answer. Democrats have to come up with something other than that. I don't know if it's a universal basic income or some other reindustrialization scheme, but they've got to address the problem.

Thomas Frank

Governing: If we look back in history, the Nonpartisan League took agrarian discontent and found a narrative. The Grange found another narrative, and the Populist Party a third. These were grassroots situations that percolated out of the soil and out of actual discontent, and that created a narrative and a leadership vacuum that people came to fill. Do you see any way today to organize the populism?

Thomas Frank: We're definitely ripe for a new populist movement. We have been for a long time. All of these Republican politicians and some of the Democrats have appealed to that sentiment. Bill Clintons campaign in 1992 was all populist rhetoric, which he immediately discarded once he assumed office. Everybody does it. Reagan did it. George H.W. Bush. Were play acting. We all know what the country needs when we step back and look at where we are. This country is being torn apart by the second gilded age, by income inequality, by all the things that go with that. The incredible monopoly power, the de-industrialization of huge parts of the country, millions and millions of people left behind. I would also throw in mass incarceration, which is the destruction of opportunities for working people.

There are so many different facets of this, but it's all one thing. We all know what it is, and we gesture at it. We talk about it in coded ways without ever talking about it directly. Obama sometimes talked about it directly, but then his solutions were entirely technocratic. What we really need is another New Deal. We really need another Franklin Roosevelt coming in and remaking the system.

The Farmers' Alliance was an enormous group with millions of very dedicated members who were highly educated on farm issues. They eventually became the Populist Party. This was in the 1890s. But before they did that, they tried to flex their muscle as a traditional interest group in different states. They would elect a Democrat or a Republican, whoever said they would follow through on the issues of importance to farmers. But the politicians routinely sold them out. They'd get elected and then just say, "See you in four years." The Populous Party was started because members of the Farmers' Alliance and the other associated groups were sick of being betrayed.

The critical thing is that there are these episodes in our country's history where mass movements of working-class people go into politics and bring about incredible change. The Populists were the first and the most seismic, but the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) one half of todays AFL-CIO - was organizing unskilled workers in the 1930s. It caught on like wildfire, and they tripled in size over the course of the decade. That was really the force behind all of the great changes that happened in the 1930s. And then in the 1960s with the civil rights movement, you had a similar thing going on in the South, with organizers coming into communities. They were organizing around the right to vote, but by the end of the 60s it had become an economic crusade.

But were in the grip of a different theory now, which is that change is brought about by leaders sitting around a mahogany table in Washington and hammering everything out. That's what todays Democratic Party believes. The rank and file need to stay in their place. You get things done in this country by a coming together of the elites. That's profoundly wrong. I don't want to include all Democrats. There are a lot of good Democrats out there. And I think Joe Biden is one of them.

The progressive movement culture today is extremely judgmental and scolding toward ordinary people. The great scholar of populism, Larry Goodwin, developed a theory on how to build these movements. He said that you have to have ideological patience. To build a mass movement of ordinary people, you have to understand that they aren't highly educated. Their hearts might be in the right place, but they're not fully educated. The movement is supposed to get them there. But we approach it entirely the other way. Todays progressive movement wants to scold these people. It's all about excommunication, canceling, kicking people out. It's all about subtraction, not addition. If your whole object is to exclude people, by definition, then you can't build a mass movement. And if you're particularly excluding people who didn't go to college or who didn't go to graduate school, then you can't be a mass party of working-class people.

Governing: If, as youre suggesting, the populous movement is exactly what we need, why do you seem convinced that its not going to happen?

Thomas Frank: Because the two-party system is locked in. Look at the Republican Party. What they do and what they offer is so cynical. They'll say things that sound pretty good, but they don't mean it. Trump said things that sounded pretty good. Drain the swamp. He didn't mean it at all. He replenished it. Theres no way that what we need is going to come out of the Republican Party.

Then you look at the Democratic Party, the traditional bearers of the populist thread in American life. Theyve done everything in their power to squash it. Look at how they reacted to Bernie Sanders, who is as close to the populist tradition as its possible to get. If he had been the front runner in 2020, you would have seen Barack Obama come out against him. You would have seen them pull out all the stops to keep Sanders from being the nominee.

There are other hints as to who the Democratic Party is. White-collar elites are increasingly their number one constituency. They serve these people. They take the rest of us for granted. I don't have high hopes for them. More and more, they are withdrawing into that understanding of themselves. "We represent the smart people and the highly educated, and we have the answers in our technocratic, meritocratic philosophy."

The woke progressive movement is profoundly anti-populist. Again, it's all subtraction, not addition. They show no ideological patience. They have a thirst for ideological blood, to kick people out, to get people in trouble, to get people fired. It's the opposite of populism.

Governing: In The People, No, you tell the story of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the Kansas newspaper editor that started Little Blue Books. He published hundreds of millions of those low-priced paperbacks, bringing literature and a wide range of ideas to the working class. Can you see anything like that in todays era of immense digital publishing and social media?

Thomas Frank: There's a tremendous appetite for that sort of thing. I don't know that it will take precisely the same form. I'm fascinated by everything we've been talking about in this conversation, and I think the public is as well. This stuff needs to be more readily available. In todays culture, you turn on the TV and people are yelling at you. You go on Facebook and people are yelling at you and calling you names. It's really unpleasant. But I think there's a real appetite in this country for the kind of culture that takes you seriously as a reader and invites you to contemplate and to figure things out along with the author.

Governing: As we close, what's the most hopeful thing you can say?

Thomas Frank: I think Joe Biden is a good man. He has a very bad track record on the things that I care about, but he's a good guy at heart. Like Obama before him, he has the perfect opportunity to do the right thing. It's all up to him.

Governing: But he has to realize that, in some fundamental sense, President Obama failed.

Thomas Frank: I think he does. Thats one of the hopeful things about him. Thats why his stimulus is so large. Obama's stimulus was a half measure. He was poorly advised. The Republicans demanded that all those tax cuts be included. It was poorly done. Obama had the world at his feet. He could have had anything he wanted. Biden doesn't have that, but he does have political skills that Obama did not have. Let's hope he can leverage that. And look, he's getting $1.9 trillion. Thats unheard of. Let's hope that this is the future.

You can hear more of Clay Jenkinson's views on American history and the humanities on his long-running nationally syndicated public radio program and podcast, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and the new Governing podcast, The Future In Context.

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Can the Left Reclaim Populism With Biden as the Modern FDR? - Governing

Bosworth is among the leading English-language biographers of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and those seeking a magisterial treatment of his life and regime should consult the authors previous work. Here, instead, is a provocative reexamination of Italian fascism. Bosworth is not an apologist for Mussolinis excesses, but he maintains that labeling both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as fascists obscures the relative mildness of the Italian variant. Italian fascism resembled Hitlers Nazism or Joseph Stalins communism less than it did other authoritarian regimes that spread throughout Europe in the 1930s and even some democratic systems. In Italy, domestic repression, although deplorable, was far less thorough than in Germany or the Soviet Union. Italian imperialist impulses were less brutal and far less successful than British and French efforts. Mussolini neither desired nor provoked World War II, but Italy could not avoid it as an ally of Germany shunned by the West. Even so, Italian casualties remained a third lower than the number incurred in World War I, when Italy was led by liberal governments. One might not accept all these judgments, but this book does pose the question of whether Mussolini should be understood less as a totalitarian and more as a harbinger of modern populism.

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Mussolini and the Eclipse of Italian Fascism: From Dictatorship to Populism - Foreign Affairs

When Mondale finally ran for president in 1984, he first had to combat tired journalistic clichs about whether he had the fire in his belly to fight for the job. (Embarrassing confession: I used that expression more than once writing about the campaign for Newsweek.) During the primaries, Mondale ran as the candidate of the Democratic establishment while the political energy flowed to the underdog candidacy of Gary Hart and his new ideas. (Yes, these were the same ideas that Mondale successfully belittled in a debate by quoting a Wendys commercial: Wheres the beef?) New York Governor Mario Cuomos mother memorably encapsulated Mondales image problem by likening the former vice president to the blandest Italian food imaginable: polenta.

The mood at the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, as I recall, reflected the forced gaiety of a party that knows it is doomed. Ronald Reagan and his morning in America was too popularand the Democratic Party, after its landslide defeat in 1980, was too lost to know what to do about it. It is telling that Cuomo delivered the most memorable speech at the convention, instead of Mondale. In fact, there were moments when it seemed like a Draft Cuomo effort could erupt at any minute.

But even at the convention, few could imagine the magnitude of Mondales coming 49-state wipeout, in which he barely carried Minnesota. His groundbreaking choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate ran into two weeks of controversy over the iffy real estate dealings of her husband, John Zaccaro. But more than anything, Mondale suffered from a campaign heavy on consultants and often lacking in authenticity. Something about those last days was also liberating, Mondale wrote, recalling the final week of the campaign. I could throw away the strategy memos and the media coaching and go out in front of the people and speak from the heart.

That, in essence, is the epitaph of the last old-fashioned liberal to be nominated for president. Only when landslide defeat was looming did Mondale feel free to speak from the heart. The man who envisioned universal daycare and battled the filibuster in the cause of civil rightsthe heir to a rural liberal populism that once defined his partyspent the bulk of his lone campaign for the presidency pretending to be more centrist than he was in his heart.

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Walter Mondale Is Dead, But His Visionary Liberalism Lives On - The New Republic

Populism is doomed to fail. It may seem a bright idea to some, in the short run. But sooner or later, it will, due to its very design, backfire. One can analyse the phenomenon endlessly. And certainly, it points to the deep-rooted and pressing issues of the moments of history it thrives in. But ultimately, the reason it fails and will continue to do so is because, as one writer puts it, the political science of providing simple answers to complex questions.

The saga of the Iran nuclear deal is just one illustration of this principle in action (for those who would choose to ignore ones closer to home). In recent days, there appears to be some headway in salvaging what remains of it after four years of Donald Trumps unbridled egotistical hubris. While we are told the signs now seem promising, one cannot help but consider the opportunities lost. Time that could have led to a significant roll-back of Tehrans nuclear ambitions and allowed for the nation of more than 80 million to gradually re-join the global mainstream has instead resulted in the opposite. Reports suggest Iran has already breached many of the deals restrictions on its nuclear activities in response to the US withdrawal and re-imposition of sanctions under Trump.

All this for what? Nothing more than pure and utter pettiness. A collective expression of spite because it could have been seen as part of his predecessors lasting legacy. That is the shape populism always takes. Logic flies out the window as we egg on a disenfranchised mass to listen to only emotion. Unreasonable emotion. And so it leads us back to where we started, in the best of cases. In the worst, to a new hell of our own making. There is a cautionary moral to all tales of populism for those who rule, perhaps best summed up by a popular comic book hero: With great power comes great responsibility. Most of us would ponder on and stress the underlying ethics of this statement. But we should also pay heed to the warning. Like fire, if you toy with power, it will always burn you in turn.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20th, 2021.

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Doomed to fail - The Express Tribune

ROME One of Pope Franciss signature innovations is the World Meeting of Popular Movements, a kind of Davos from the bottom up intended to give voice to grassroots organizations, including workers who are at risk or lack job security, all striving to correct what the pontiff has called an economy of exclusion and inequality.

From the beginning, Francis has been the worlds leading moral critic of a sort of savage free-market global capitalism, an economy that kills, and has relentlessly argued for embracing the ordinary working poor left behind by such a system.

When such workers take to the streets to protest government measures that leave them unable to do their jobs, and thus impoverished and alone, under ordinary circumstances one would expect Pope Francis to be the cheerleader-in-chief. The fact that precisely such protests broke out up and down Italy in recent days without any gesture of papal support and, in fact, with every reason to believe Francis likely disapproves speaks volumes about the limits of a populist popes populism.

Last week, protests were organized in several Italian cities by restaurant and bar owners objecting to the ongoing shutdown of in-person dining as part of the countrys attempt to stem the latest wave of Covid infections. Under current restrictions, bars and restaurants remain closed at night and are open only for takeout during the day. According to one recent estimate, the restaurant and bar sector of the Italian economy lost a staggering $38.5 billion in 2020-2021 due to the Covid crisis.

Though the rallies were sponsored by the owners, many of those who showed up were cooks, waiters, kitchen staff, bar workers, and other front-line employees, whove either lost all income or been getting by on significantly less for more than a year. Many complained its impossible to support their families, demanding the government either find a way to make it safe for them to go back to work or provide much greater financial relief than has been delivered so far.

The problem is we just dont know what to do. They tell us that we can only do take-aways, but in my neighborhood with a population of 3,000, what kind of take-aways can I do? said Silvio Bessone, a chef from the northern Piedmont region.

Hundreds of demonstrators, many of them poor street vendors, also blocked Italys north-south A1 motorway between Naples and Caserta for several hours.

A few days later, workers at Italys national airline company, Alitalia, including flight attendants, mechanics and baggage handlers, staged a similar protest in Rome in response to rumors of massive job cuts at the carrier due to a long-running financial crisis thats been badly aggravated by pandemic-related shortfalls.

The Alitalia workers charged that unscrupulous managers and shareholders have been squeezing them for years to make up for their mistakes, and are now doing the same thing to pass on the hit from Covid to the people who can least afford it.

Were not your ATM! read one angry sign.

To put all this in context, were talking about a few hundred protestors, not hundreds of thousands, and polls continue to show that a slight majority of Italians support the idea that easing of restrictions should be decided on the basis of infection rates and not political considerations. Still, those workers in the streets represent another kind of pandemic victim not people who got sick, but people whose incomes, job security and personal dignity have been threatened.

There are two reasons why these newly vulnerable and marginalized folks have not drawn the overt, vocal support that Pope Francis would typically bestow in other circumstances. In fact, in most corners of Italian discussion, its taken for granted that the Vatican and the pope arent on board.

Why?

First, from the beginning Francis has been a champion of the medical and scientific consensus on Covid, lending his support to the restrictive measures at critical moments. His stance on Covid is of a piece with his approach to other issues, most clearly global warming and climate change, where hes insisted that religious believers and people of conscience need to heed the warnings of the experts.

Thats mostly a genuine conviction about the proper relationship between faith and science, though theres also a measure of politics involved. The plain fact is that Francis and his closest advisers are deeply suspicious of the voices most likely to object to the scientific consensus, since they also tend to be the same far-right, anti-immigrant, ultra-nationalist forces that oppose so much of the popes social and political agenda.

That brings us to the second reason why the pope has kept his distance, because the Rome protests also drew militants from Italys neo-fascist CasaPound movement. (The group is named for the American poet Ezra Pound, who was a great admirer of Mussolini during a long period in Italy and who campaigned for the Axis powers during World War II.)

CasaPound became infamous in 2011 when a member named Gianluca Casseri murdered two Senegalese immigrants in Florence and then killed himself to avoid capture by the police.

As the Irish saying goes, Youll know the man who boozes by the company he chooses. In this case, Francis probably doesnt like the company these protests attracted, whether or not anyone actually invited them.

In a recent video, Francis proposed what he called popularism as an alternative to the populist rage represented by the CasaPounds of the world.

The true response to the rise of populism is precisely not more individualism but quite the opposite: A politics of fraternity, rooted in the life of the people, Francis said. I like to use the termpopularism its about finding the means to guarantee a life for all people that is worthy of being called human, a life capable of cultivating virtue and forging new bonds.

RELATED: Pope Francis proposes popularism to counter populism

What remains to be seen is whether the pontiff can find a way to disentangle his popularist sympathy for working stiffs struggling amid the Coronavirus pandemic from the populist overlay in which their distress often comes wrapped.

Follow John Allen on Twitter at@JohnLAllenJr.

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For these working stiffs, ambivalence rather than amore from the Pope - Crux Now