The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession

The fizzled crusades of left-wing populists are analyzed in this incisive political study. Political theorists Boriello and Jäger (Welfare for Markets) dissect several leftist political movements of the 2010s, including Greece’s Syriza party, which in 2015 formed a government promising (but failing) to resist the austerity program dictated by Greece’s European Union creditors; La France Insoumise, which couldn’t capitalize on the initial promise it showed during the 2017 French presidential election; lefty parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn’s takeover of Britain’s Labour Party, which was crushed by Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019; and democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful presidential primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020. These populist movements, the authors argue, took several wrong turns: they downplayed the traditional left-wing theme of working-class conflict with capitalists in favor of broad but vague appeals to the fight of “the people” against antidemocratic elites, eschewed stable party structures in favor of convenient but evanescent online mobilizations, and were dominated by charismatic “hyperleaders.” Boriello and Jäger have a knack for making political writing lucid and elegant (La France Insoumise, they write, “displayed the physical properties of gas: expansive, flexible, but also volatile”), and they offer a persuasive analysis of contemporary politics as a thin soil of PR, protest spectacle, and social media fads in which serious left-wing projects struggle to take root. The result is a clear-sighted political postmortem. (Sept.)