Abstract
This article explores the use of populism by comparatively privileged groups, a specific type of populism we call the ‘populism of the privileged’. Our argument is not merely that ‘populisms of the privileged’ are also forms of populism, but that they warrant a specific label. We first identify intersections between populism and privilege on the levels of populist actors, support for populism and beneficiaries of populism, which we call populism by, with and for the privileged. We then present a discursive conceptualization of ‘populism of the privileged’. Building on this we develop analytical strategies for the study the ‘populism of the privileged’, zooming in on how ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ are constructed in such populisms, their sociological directionality, the layeredness of privilege and un(der)privilege, the discursive construction of ‘crisis’ and ‘unmet demands’ and the role of discourses about populism in reproducing the claims of populisms of the privileged.
Introduction
The populist argument that ‘the elite’ does not represent ‘the people’ is a central motif in contemporary political discourse. Across much of the globe, political movements, parties and leaders criticize ‘the elite’ for having isolated itself from the life of ‘the man in the street’. This is attributed to elites’ privileged social positions and their desire to protect and extend their own privileges and those of dominant groups and/or minority ‘special interests’ instead of taking at heart ordinary people’s interests. Presenting themselves as alternatives to these ‘elites’, populists claim to represent ‘the people’, a category associated with underrepresentation, underprivilege and subordination – or, at the very least, an absence of privilege and political power.
But the relation between populism and privileged social groups is far less straightforward than populist discourse has it. One need only think of Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump, to give just two of the most striking examples, to see that populist leaders can themselves be members of (sometimes very) privileged groups. Not only do many populists come from at least relatively privileged backgrounds, more than a few populists who claim to be led by the interests of ‘the common man’ also seem more concerned with their own interests and those of privileged social groups; here too, Trump and Berlusconi are cases in point.
Populists’ privilege can be a matter of personal (acquired or inherited) wealth and privileged professional backgrounds, as in the case of Berlusconi and Trump and other members of business elites such as former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. People claiming to represent ‘the ordinary people’ have also built on privileged family ties and social networks, with figures such as former British PM Boris Johnson and many UK tabloid journalists and columnists regularly writing populist pieces slamming ‘the elite’ while themselves holding positions of significant power and hailing from well-to-do families, elite schools, universities and student associations.
Even populist political actors who come from non-privileged or even underprivileged social backgrounds, if they are successful, at some point become well-paid professional politicians with all the privileges that entails. In some cases, and especially for populist politicians on the left, these privileges can lead to accusations of hypocrisy, as when Spanish Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, was severely criticized from within his own party after buying what was considered a luxurious house outside Madrid in 2018. Iglesias was, like several other leading members of Podemos, also a university professor, a profession already associated with high cultural capital and its own kinds of privileges. Privilege, this shows, is not limited to the extreme kinds of wealth of the likes of Trump and Berlusconi but is a broader category that highlights how membership of dominant groups provides access to resources and power.
Privilege also extends beyond socio-economic and educational factors, with most populists belonging to dominant ethnic-cultural and religious groups, for example. This is true for populists on the left as well as the right (even if there are probably more exceptions on the left, with former Bolivian president Evo Morales being a prominent example). In contrast to populists on the left, however, far-right leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump use populist arguments to defend the dominant positions of privileged ethnic-cultural and religious groups.
Looking beyond the obvious and sometimes very pronounced privileges of populist politicians – and this is far less often recognized – there can indeed be significant tension between societal groups being discursively designated as the underdog ‘people’ and the empirical assessment of their sociological make-up and actual political influence. Put differently, the populist portrayal of ‘the people’ as an underdog does not imply that this ‘people’ is in fact sociologically un(der)privileged and politically powerless or subordinate. Indeed, populist politics can also be mobilized and supported by comparatively privileged social groups, be it in socio-economic, ethnic, religious or other terms.
In some cases, comparatively privileged groups lead and support left-wing populist efforts towards a more equal society, as illustrated by the support of the highly educated for the Spanish Podemos or for Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for the US presidential ticket. But in other cases, decades of right-wing populism in the US being a case in point (see Berlet and Lyons, 2000; Frank, 2000), the claim to speak in the name of the ‘ordinary people’ against ‘the elite’ is instrumentalized to undermine policies geared towards equality, and to defend and enhance dominant positions in terms of ethnic, religious, socio-economic and gender relations.
Such intersections between populism and privilege, we believe, warrant more dedicated attention than they have received so far. In this article, we introduce the notion of ‘populism of the privileged’. We conceptualize it as a specific form of populism and identify its different manifestations. We also reflect on the broader implications of the existence of such forms of populism for the conceptualization, empirical study and normative evaluation of populism more generally. We believe a proper understanding of this phenomenon requires a multi-faceted approach bringing together work on populist discourses and performances with insights into the ideologies of populist parties and their policymaking as well as with sociological and psychological analyses of the leaders and supporters of populist politics. In that sense, we hope this article might be of use to people working on populism across disciplines and approaches.
There are three main steps to our argument:
First, we problematize interpretations of populism that take at face value populists’ claims that they represent the underdog against ‘the elite’. Drawing on the literature on privilege (e.g. Kimmel and Ferber, 2017; McIntosh, 1989; Pease, 2010) and on different strands of literature that identify tensions between populist discourse and the sociology of populist leaders, followers and beneficiaries of these political projects, we then propose an analytical distinction between the notions of populism ‘by the privileged’, ‘for the privileged’ and ‘with the privileged’.
We then ask what conceptualization of populism allows us to theorize the ‘populism of the privileged’. A suitable starting point, we argue, is the discourse-theoretical approach (Laclau, 2005; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014) which stresses that ‘the people’ is not a pre-existing sociological category but that populist politics discursively construct ‘the people’ by claiming to represent them. At the same time, to uncouple the notion of populism from any assumptions about populist politics being necessarily undertaken by, supported by or favouring un(der)privileged groups, we need to critically consider of some of the theoretical blind spots of the discourse-theoretical perspective, deepen its constructivist nature as well as its ability to address sociological inequalities and further strengthen its dialogue with other approaches to populism.
Building on this, in a third section, we ask what analytical strategies are needed to capture how populisms of the privileged function. Drawing on this, we also reflect on what the broader study of populism could learn from taking populisms of the privileged seriously as forms of populism.
Populism and Privilege: Tensions, Contradictions, Intersections
What populism is exactly has been a matter of debate for decades, yet conceptualizations of populism have settled around a broad (but not total) consensus around ‘minimal’ definitions. The most prominent ones are the ideological definition associated with Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017; Mudde, 2004) and the discourse-theoretical definition associated with Laclau (2005). These definitions hold that populism is structured around a dichotomic opposition between ‘the people’ and the ‘elite’, with populists claiming to represent said ‘people’ while criticizing ‘the elite’ for not satisfying the demands or the will of ‘the people’.
‘The people’ of populism is described through a myriad of analogous expressions: ‘the plebs’, ‘the deficient being’, ‘the oppressed underdog’ or ‘the underprivileged’ (Laclau, 2005: 86–87); ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the oppressed people’ (Mudde, 2004: 546, 563); the ‘excluded or aggrieved social groups’, ‘the downtrodden’ (Casullo, 2020: 27, 30); or the ‘ordinarily marginalized social sectors’ [. . .] ‘the poor, the excluded, or others not previously mobilized’ (Jansen, 2011: 82–83). Opposed to this ‘people’ is a small but powerful and dominant group, commonly labelled ‘the elite’ or ‘the establishment’.
‘The people’ and ‘the elite’, then, are on opposite ends of an axis that has been called vertical, low/high, down/up or bottom/top (e.g. Dyrberg, 2003; Ostiguy, 2017; Reinfeldt, 2000; see also De Cleen, 2017; De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017). Mény and Surel (2002: 12) write that Drawing a line between the top and the bottom, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled produces an effect similar to the classic division along social or economic cleavages – that is, a sharp contrast between the privileged and the underdogs.
There is little doubt, then, that the claim to speak for the underdog and the critique of privileged ‘elites’ and their disregard for the needs of ‘ordinary people’ is at the heart of populist politics. Analyses of populism, however, are about the study of these claims and their appeal and should therefore be very careful not to take populist claims at face value. Even if usually denouncing populism as a threat to democracy, mainstream politicians, media commentators and some academics alike have all too often reproduced and legitimated the populist narrative (Brown et al., 2021; Mondon, 2022; Mondon and Winter, 2020). The success of populist radical right parties, for example, has been interpreted by many as the result of a ‘gap’ between political and other elites and ‘left-behind’ ordinary people, with voting for populist parties read as a counter-reaction to phenomena such as post-industrialization, immigration, globalization and detraditionalization. Populist radical right politics, through such approaches, are interpreted as merely tapping into the pre-existing frustrations of those who are tangibly marginalized, frustrated and abandoned by elites (Kögl, 2010: 177; Mudde, 2007: 4–8; Weyland, 2001: 5). The use of populist tropes by privileged groups makes clear that such interpretations of populism have significant blind spots.
What if the populist framework is used by individuals and groups who are themselves privileged? What if they are used to enact policies that favour the societally privileged and politically powerful? What if those who are interpellated as an underdog ‘people’ are in fact comparatively privileged groups in terms of class, ethnicity, gender or other factors? And what if populism is used to protect or extend such privileges or to roll back policies aimed at reducing inequalities? Should we still call this populism? How does such a populism work? And what are the broader consequences of the existence of such populisms for conceptualizations of populism and for explanations of populist electoral success?
Given the sheer quantity of literature on populism and the very centrality of privilege and un(der)privilege – even if usually under other labels – to definitions of populism and explanations of populist electoral success, there are surprisingly few in-depth explorations of the use of populism by privileged individuals and groups (works substantively reflecting on this, each using their own terminology, include Berlet and Lyons, 2000; Fleck, 2022; Frank, 2000; Ostiguy and Casullo, 2017). In this article we want to explore what we will call the ‘populism of the privileged’ as a particular form of populism (for earlier journalistic mentions of the term ‘populism of the privileged’, see Dionne, 2010; Hanson, 2008).
The notion of privilege is a profoundly sociological category here, and one that is not limited to extreme forms of privilege associated with the rich and powerful. In the literature as well as in public discourse, we find frequent references to tensions between populists’ discourse and their privileged positions and actual policy, with Donald Trump the epitome of this kind of ultra-rich populist speaking in the name of the ordinary people against the elite. However, if we want the concept of the ‘populism of the privileged’ to do more than expose the hypocrisy of some ultra-privileged populist leaders, we should not limit the notion of privilege to ‘the elite’. Privilege extends well beyond elite groups and criss-crosses society in a variety of ways.
Studies on privilege define it as the unearned comparative advantages and benefits individuals enjoy because of their membership of dominant groups in societies characterized by structural inequalities (Kimmel and Ferber, 2017; McIntosh, 1989; Pease, 2010). Focus has mainly been on ‘white privilege’ and ‘male privilege’, but has also extended to, for example, sexual orientation, class, physical ability and religion (Black and Stone, 2005). Inspired by work on intersectionality (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989), increasingly attention has gone to how these different dimensions of privilege and subordination ‘coincide, collide, contradict’ (Kimmel, 2017: 11), with different levels of privilege potentially reinforcing each other but with many individuals also ‘occupy[ing] positions of both privilege and subordination’ (Pease, 2010: 20; Coston and Kimmel, 2012).
The study of populism – as a politics that revolves around a simplified people-versus-elite antagonism – has much to benefit from engaging with such a broader and layered conceptualization of privilege, as we will discuss in more detail below. But let us start by sketching, in broader strokes, the different locations where populism and privilege might intersect. We can identify such intersections on three levels: populism by the privileged, populism with the privileged and populism for the privileged.
The first of these levels, ‘populism by the privileged’, refers to the privileged character of populist leadership and/or the citizens actively involved in populist movements. This is the most obvious of the three levels, with politicians such as Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi illustrating how people with significant wealth can present themselves as champions of ‘the people’. But cases with less conspicuous forms of privilege can also be approached using this category, with the Catalan independence movement showing how regional political elites in coalition with cultural and economic elites can be the central forces behind a populist movement (Barrio and Rodríguez-Teruel, 2017; Ruiz Casado, 2023), and Podemos having been set up as a very deliberately populist project by university professors (see Custodi, 2021; Kioupkiolis, 2016).
The tensions between populist leaders’ privileged positions and their discourse have been captured by labels such as ‘populism from above’ (Andrade, 2021; Opal, 2022) or ‘elitist populism’ (Caiani and della Porta, 2011). It has been pointed out that (especially right-wing) populism can be a strategy used by one elite to overthrow another, rather than a popular revolt against the power bloc (e.g. Freeden, 2017: 5; Mondon and Winter, 2020). Barker (2007: 102) has noted that many narratives with a strong populist component will be articulated by those who are far from powerless, and who clothe their power in the appearance of its opposite, thus simultaneously masking their exercise of it, and justifying their desire for it.
This phenomenon is not limited to politicians and parties. Focused on the rhetoric of business interests in the US, Thomas Frank speaks of ‘market populism’: the belief that the markets ‘expressed the popular will more articulately and more meaningfully than did mere elections’ and ‘looked out for our interests’ (Frank, 2000: xiv). Frank points at the fundamental contradictions between this type of populist discourse and its actual aims and effects: between its speaking in the name of democracy and its dismantling of democratic power, its talk of fairness and its effect of increasing economic equality, and its anti-elitism that goes hand in hand with ‘transforming CEOs as a class into one of the wealthiest elites of all time’ (Frank, 2000: xv). In an article drawing on Frank’s work, du Gay (2008: 99) argues that ‘this elite of anti-elitists can represent itself as “ordinary” precisely because it refuses to acknowledge its own elite status’. It is exactly such processes that the notion of a ‘populism by the privileged’ helps to make visible.
The second level, ‘populism with the privileged’, aims to capture the relative privilege of the groups supporting certain populist projects, most prominently as voters. This notion helps interrogate the all-too-often assumed causal relation between sociological un(der)privilege and voting for populist parties. As Rooduijn (2018: 352) writes, ‘[t]here exists a widely held belief that those who vote for populists are those with a lower socioeconomic position – the so-called ‘losers of globalization’ [. . .] (Kriesi et al., 2006, 2008)’. Rooduijn’s study of the electorates of 15 European populist parties finds no proof that the electorate of populist parties across left and right would be driven by unemployment, lower income, a lower-class position or lower education (Rooduijn, 2018: 364). In an overview of research on populism, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018: 1674) also write that ‘‟losers of globalization” constitute only a minority of the electorates of populist radical right parties (e.g. Arzheimer, 2011) and do not seem to disproportionately vote for these parties (Norris, 2005)’. This does not only put into question the assumption that populist parties are the parties of the underprivileged, but also implies that a significant part of their vote could in fact come from rather privileged groups. Mondon’s (2017) analysis of UKIP, for example, indicates that (a) especially when taking into account abstention, only a limited share of the lower classes voted for UKIP, but also that (b) almost half of UKIP’s vote came from the better-off and better-educated. Similarly, Podemos draw significant support from an urban, highly educated middle class (see Kioupkiolis, 2016: 109).
How the sociological diversity of populist parties’ electorates relates to these parties’ populism is a complex matter. One explanation is that populism is always only part of the picture next to more ideological reasons for voting for populist parties on the left or the right (e.g. Van der Brug, 2003). Another element is that the people-elite opposition central to the populist logic, when turned against a small elite, allows comparatively well-off groups to consider themselves part of ‘the ordinary people’ (see part 3). Yet another factor might be that ‘it is not vulnerability per se that matters [. . .] but subjectively experienced vulnerability (i.e., relative deprivation, anomie, perceived lack of political efficacy)’ (Spruyt et al., 2016: 344, italics added), with support for populism related to a perception of a general social decline and feelings of relative deprivation or loss of personal status (Elchardus and Spruyt, 2014; Gidron and Hall, 2017). Rather than people ‘at the very bottom of the social hierarchy’, ‘those most prone to [feel status anxiety] [. . .] are those whose social status is low enough to generate concern but who still have a significant measure of status to defend’ (Gidron and Hall, 2017: 68) and who feel ‘threatened from below’ (Heller, 2020: 592). As support for the populist radical right shows, those identifying as ‘the underdog’ can be driven by hostility to outgroups and to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, that is, of groups that are clearly more underprivileged than them.
This brings us to our third and final category: the ‘populism for the privileged’. This notion refers to populisms that through their demands and/or policy primarily benefit privileged groups. Critics of populism have commonly pointed out the hypocrisy of privileged individuals posturing as ‘(wo)men of the people’ and claiming to be the voice of ‘the ordinary people’ while in fact furthering their own interests and those of the rich and powerful. Although determining the ‘true’ interests of ‘ordinary people’ is anything but straightforward, it does seem clear that some populist leaders are led more by the pursuit of power and privilege than by the interests of ‘those from below’. Central to much of these criticisms is that populists mislead ‘the people’ into believing they are like them, that they abuse common people’s rightful frustrations and manipulate subordinated groups into supporting policies that go against their true interests. In this vein, Freeden (2017: 5) has argued that ‘[right-wing] populism is often seen as an ideology of the dispossessed, and it may indeed recruit them, but it is not articulating their political agenda’. Some left-wing populists have also been accused of this. For instance, Andrade (2021: 338) writes about Brazil that ‘Lula’s leadership emerged as representative of interests “from below” while advancing a political project that protected and nurtured interests “from above”’.
While much has been said about the (ab)use of ordinary people’s rightful frustrations by populist leaders, far less attention has gone to how ‘the people’ of populism themselves sometimes also belong to (comparatively) privileged groups and might support populist politics to protect or deepen their privileged positions. Drawing on a broader conceptualization of privilege that extends beyond the elites, this too can be considered a ‘populism for the privileged’, and an analytically rather more challenging (and interesting) one at that. In their book on right-wing populism in the US, Berlet and Lyons (2000: 3) write that right-wing populist movements are ‘social movements with a contradictory relationship to the established social and political order’. The contradiction, they argue, is that they ‘combine [. . .] antielite scapegoating [. . .] with efforts to maintain or intensify systems of social privilege and power’. They write, [h]istorically, right-wing populist movements have reflected the interests of two different kinds of social groups, often in combination: middle-level groups in the social hierarchy, notably middle- and working-class Whites, who have a stake in traditional social privilege but resent the power of upper-class elites over them, and, ‘Outsider’ factions of the elite itself, who sometimes use distorted forms of antielitism as part of their own bid for greater power (Berlet and Lyons, 2000: 2).
The concept of a ‘populism of the privileged’, then, does not just comprise the way elites abuse the legitimate interests of those objectively ‘below’, but also needs to consider the possibility of a privileged ‘people-as-underdog’. This draws our attention to the instrumentalization of underdog identities by social groups defending conditions of comparative privilege, or even attempting to strengthen their positions of domination.
These three categories of populism by, with and for the privileged intersect in complex ways. This produces a variety of sub-types of the populism of the privileged, as visualized in Figure 1.
The intersections between populism by, with and for the privileged.
Important correlations exist between populisms by, with and for the privileged, as exemplified by Berlet and Lyons’ (2000: 2–3) abovementioned analysis of the populism of the US right. Their analysis shows a populism by the (very) privileged (‘outsider factions of the elites’), with the (comparatively) privileged (‘the support of ‘middle-level groups in the social hierarchy, notably middle- and working-class Whites, who have a stake in traditional social privilege’) and for the privileged (in ‘efforts to maintain or intensify systems of social privilege and power’).
At the same time, this figure makes clear that there is no necessary correspondence between these three categories. For example, as in the case of Podemos or the Bernie Sanders campaigns, it is entirely possible for privileged groups to use their positions of power to speak on behalf of non-privileged groups, with the aim of increasing social equality and intergroup justice. This can be considered a populism by the privileged and (at least partly) with the privileged, but not for the privileged.
As this shows, the notion of the ‘populism of the privileged’ is a normatively neutral one, even if also geared towards making possible the deconstruction and normative critique of certain forms of populism (especially those for the privileged) and of journalistic, political and academic discourse that takes the populist claims of such populisms of the privileged at face value.
‘Populism of the Privileged’: A Discursive Perspective
If populist politics can be developed by privileged actors and can be used to attract and to further the interests of groups that are comparatively privileged, we are left with two options. One option is to reserve the ‘populism’ label for those political forces that actually represent and defend ‘the people’ defined as the sociologically and politically underprivileged. This is the perspective taken by those who see ‘true’ populism as only reflected in left-wing and progressive forces and who dismiss certain – mainly right-wing – forms of populism as ‘fake’ (e.g. Clement, 2021), ‘phony’ (Frank, 2020), ‘fraudulent’ (Ostiguy and Casullo, 2017) or ‘false and damaging’ (du Gay, 2008: 99).
The second option is to stress that populism is about the discursive construction of particular groups as underdog (and of particular demands as unrepresented). Taken to its logical conclusions, this implies that the label ‘populism’ does not depend on these groups being sociologically underprivileged or politically powerless (or their grievances having roots in underprivilege or their demands being objectively unmet), and that populism can even be used by privileged groups in defence of their privileges. While the sociology of ‘the people’ and the policy of populist politics determine whether a politics can be considered as (‘truly’) populist according to the first option, in the latter the concept of populism is uncoupled entirely from the sociology of its leaders, supporters or beneficiaries, as well as from any predetermined ideological content. This article explores the consequences of taking this second option seriously.
A Discourse-Theoretical Perspective on Populism
The discursively constructed nature of ‘the people’ has been acknowledged by the leading approaches to populism. For example, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017: 9) argue that ‘[v]irtually everyone agrees that “the people” is a construction, at best referring to a specific interpretation (and simplification) of reality’. But it is in the discourse-theoretical approach to populism that we find the strongest theoretical development of the discursively constructed nature of ‘the people’ (see Katsambekis, 2020). In line with a broader insistence on the discursive construction of political identities (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), discourse-theoretical approaches have insisted that it is populists who discursively construct ‘the people’ through their claim to represent this category. Populism, it is argued, is a political logic that revolves around the construction of an equivalential chain between a series of unsatisfied demands. This chain of demands and ‘the people’ constructed through it is linked together not so much through substantive similarities between demands, but through a shared opposition to a ‘power bloc’ or ‘elite’ that negates these demands (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014).
This approach seems a promising starting point for thinking through the ‘populism of the privileged’. If populism is an ideologically flexible political logic that discursively constructs ‘the people’, there is no reason why a populism by, with or for the privileged would not be possible. If a certain politics follows that logic, it is a case of populism, whoever leads, supports or benefits from that populism.
At the same time, drawing on this approach to conceptualize populisms of the privileged is also somewhat counter-intuitive as Laclau, Mouffe and others drawing on their work have mainly focused on the democratic and progressive potentials of populism for the left. Going against the anti-populism that drives most studies of populism, they have treated populism not as a danger to democracy but as a way to resist the technocratic and neoliberal hollowing out of democracy, proposing left-wing populism as a strategy to beat the far-right as well as neoliberal centrist politics (Mouffe, 2018; Stavrakakis et al., 2018).
In his work on Thatcher, Stuart Hall (1988: 140) wrote that Laclau’s take on populism ‘sometimes appears to reflect the Latin-American context in relation to which it was first formulated’ in that it ‘does not take sufficiently into account the role which “populist” (rather than popular) discourses have played in securing “the people”, through an effective interpellation, to the practices of dominant classes’. Later discourse-theoretical work does deal with the populism of conservative and mainstream right-wing parties (e.g. Laycock, 2005; Mouffe, 2018: 25–38; Reyes, 2005), and the radical right (e.g. Mouffe, 2005), but this remains limited compared to the attention for the left.
Moreover, when looking at the populism of the (radical) right, discourse theory-inspired work has not approached this as an (at least partial) example of what is called a ‘populism of the privileged’. Quite the contrary, it has tended to interpret the success of the radical right as a symptom of popular discontent driven by the legitimate frustrations of the underprivileged with unresponsive elites. Support for populist radical right parties, in this manner, has largely been read as motivated not so much by racism or nativism, but by resistance to two related phenomena: ‘neoliberal globalization’ and ‘the post-democratic condition’ (Mouffe, 2018: 18). In For a Left Populism, Mouffe (2018: 22) writes that At the beginning, most of the political resistances against the post-democratic consensus came from the right. In the 1990s, right-wing populist parties like the FPÖ in Austria and the Front National in France began to present themselves as aiming to give back to ‘the people’ the voice of which they had been deprived by the elites. By drawing a frontier between the ‘people’ and the ‘political establishment’, they were able to translate into a nationalistic vocabulary the demands of the popular sectors who felt excluded from the dominant consensus.
Despite acknowledging that ‘there are people who feel perfectly at home with those reactionary values [of the radical right]’ (Mouffe, 2018: 22), Mouffe treats the populist radical right largely as a problematic articulation of what are in themselves legitimate popular demands of the ‘popular sectors’ who suffer from socio-economic hardship and whose voice is not heard in post-democracy. Developing a Gramscian strategy aimed at countering the right-wing articulation of those demands, Mouffe proposes ‘a left populist approach’ to make ‘a different language [. . .] available’ so that ‘many people might experience their situation in a different way and join the progressive struggle’ (Mouffe, 2018: 22). ‘This’, she writes, ‘does not mean condoning the politics of right-wing populist parties, but refusing to attribute to their voters the responsibility for the way their demands are articulated’ (Mouffe, 2018: 22).
Despite this important disclaimer, Mouffe’s reading risks legitimating the populist radical right as indeed voicing the legitimate demands of the ‘popular sectors’, while underplaying the inherently reactionary and exclusionary character of some of these demands. It obfuscates the possibility that we are dealing here, at least partly, with a ‘populism for the privileged’ that is not aimed at redressing inequalities or exclusion but at defending the privileges of what are in fact dominant groups in society.
Moreover, this reading – and this brings us to a broader theoretical argument – has sometimes treated ‘demands’, ‘the crisis of representation’ and ‘the power bloc’ responsible for it as pre-given rather than as co-constructed in populist discourse. The constructivist dimension of the theorization of populism, that is, seems to be mainly located in the construction of ‘the people’. In contrast, the ‘demands’ articulated by populists into a chain of equivalence, the ‘crises’ that produce those demands, the ‘power bloc’ and its ‘frustration’ of those demands as well as the ‘crisis of representation’ resulting from this are much less subjected to the constructivist treatment (see De Cleen and Glynos, 2021; De Cleen et al., 2018; Moffitt, 2015: 191). Zooming in on the populism of the privileged urges us to further strengthen the constructivist emphasis of the discourse-theoretical approach.
Privilege and the Populist Political Logic
The starting point for our exploration of the ‘populism of the privileged’ is the confrontation between populism as a political logic that revolves around the discursive construction of ‘the people’-as-underdog in opposition to ‘the elite’ and privilege as a sociological category that is not limited to ultra-privileged elites but captures the uneven and complex division of power and privilege across different societal cleavages. The underlying assumption is that there is no necessary correspondence between populist discourse and the actual subordination and privilege of those discursively constructed as ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, respectively.
The conceptualization of the ‘populism of the privileged’ has two seemingly contradictory implications for discourse-theoretical analysis of populism: it pushes it towards a stronger sociological sensitivity and towards a more pronounced constructivism. Studying the ‘populism of the privileged’ requires the willingness to bring in, however cautiously, a sociological perspective into discourse-theoretical and other discursive and performative approaches to populism. It urges us, as Ostiguy et al. (2021: 7) write, to not throw ‘sociology “out of the window”’ but to instead ‘interactively connect [. . .] performances, discourses and speech acts with social differences’ (Ostiguy et al., 2021: 10). While these authors are mainly interested in how populist politics ‘feed on’ (Ostiguy et al., 2021: 9) social differences, the populism of the privileged urges us to also confront discursively constructed positions with sociological insights.
This is a delicate operation. We should avoid a strict demarcation between sociological and discursive categories that loses sight of the intricate interrelations between them or presumes that sociological privilege would somehow be outside of discourse. At the same time, probing the use of populism by, with and for comparatively privileged groups requires not taking at face value the discursively constructed categories of ‘elite’ or ‘underdog’. This can only be achieved by confronting these discursively constructed categories with categories of a more sociological nature. To study the ‘populism of the privileged’, we must indeed believe that it is possible to establish – carefully and with respect for the complex and layered nature of un(der)privilege – first, whether, in what ways, and to what degrees particular groups are in fact un(der)privileged and/or privileged, and second, that it is possible to evaluate whether a populist politics contributes to furthering inequality and/or equality.
At the same time, the existence of populisms of the privileged emphasizes the need for a thoroughly constructivist approach that looks at ‘the people’, ‘the elite’, ‘demands’ and ‘crisis of representation’ as discursive constructions rather than as objective representations of reality. It is this deepened constructivist perspective that allows theorizing populisms in which sociologically privileged groups take up underdog positions, and in which demands for the defence of privilege and the reproduction of dominance are voiced and legitimated in populist terms.
These two seemingly contradictory implications of engaging with populisms of the privileged – a stronger engagement with privilege as sociological category and a more pronounced constructivist perspective – are not a contradiction at all. Only a more sociological appreciation of privilege allows identifying the use of populisms by, with and for the privileged. At the same time, taking seriously the populism of privileged social groups as forms of populism pushes us to radicalize the constructivist perspective on populism and let go of all assumptions about populist politics being necessarily undertaken by, supported by or favouring sociologically un(der)privileged groups.
Populism of the Privileged: Analytical Strategies
So far we have distinguished populism by, with and for the privileged as analytically distinct dimensions (section ‘Populism and Privilege: Tensions, Contradictions, Intersections’) and have argued that from a discourse-theoretical perspective the populism of the privileged is not a contradiction in terms but does necessitate a stronger sociological sensitivity and a more pronounced constructivism (section ‘‘Populism of the Privileged’: A Discursive Perspective’). In this final section, we ask what strategies are needed to analyse populisms of the privileged and how these strategies contribute to refining and refocusing the study of populism more broadly. We engage subsequently with the analytical implications of the populism of the privileged for the analysis of (a) ‘the people’, (b) ‘the elite’, (c) the sociological directionality of populism beyond the down/up relation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, (d) layers and axes of un(der)privilege, (e) the populist construction of ‘unmet grievances’ and the ‘crisis of representation’ and (f) the role of discourses about populism in legitimizing populisms of the privileged.
‘The People’ and the Invisibility of Privilege
With studies on privilege being focused on ‘making privilege visible’ (Kimmel, 2017: 3; McIntosh, 1989), the populism of the privileged draws our attention to how the populist political logic can contribute to the obfuscation of privilege. Populist leaders can background their own privileges by criticizing the privileges of ‘the elite’ they contest, as well as by presenting themselves as ‘the voice of the people’ and as an underdog opposing ‘the elite’. But populisms of the privileged can also hide from view the privileged positions of those supporting populist politics as well as those of (parts of) ‘the people’ (see Mondon and Winter, 2020: 63–64). In his book Undoing Privilege, Pease (2010: 8) writes that Since elite theories identify privilege and power as being based upon considerable wealth and political and bureaucratic positions of authority, everyone else constitutes the ‘non-elite’. In this way, many of us who have particular dimensions of privilege are encouraged to see ourselves as part of the ‘non-elite’ because we are not in the upper class. This drawing of the boundaries between the elite and the non-elite conceals the multifaceted nature of privilege.
While focused on elite theories, this reflection about how thinking in terms of ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ hides from view the privilege of those who are part of this ‘non-elite’ has immediate relevance for the study of populism. The ‘populism of the privileged’ urges us to confront the populist political logic that revolves around the discursive simplification of the political space into two antagonistic blocs (‘the people’ and ‘the elite’) with ‘privilege’ as a concept that, on the contrary, aims to highlight the complexities of how privilege and underprivilege structure societies.
The ‘populism of the privileged’ also urges us to recognize the relative privilege embedded in ordinariness. The invisibility of privilege (especially in the eyes of the privileged) is linked to the fact that it is privileged groups that are considered the norm, the average (Kimmel, 2017: 2; McIntosh, 1989; Pease, 2010: 8). This emphasizes how ‘ordinariness’ – while opposed to ‘the elite’ in the populist logic – can itself be a position of privilege; be it in terms of relative economic privilege (e.g. the producerist opposition to bankers but also to the unemployed and poor), ethnic privilege (the category of ‘ordinary people’ being reserved for those that are part of the dominant ethnic group), sexual privilege (dominant gender identities or sexual orientations) or any other form of ‘ordinariness’. Again, it is the simplification of the political space into people-versus-elite that obfuscates this relative privilege of (parts of) ‘the people’ and that allows some populisms to use this ‘ordinariness’ to work towards the defence or enhancement of such privileges.
Indeed, the notion of the ‘populism of the privileged’ helps expose how underdog-identities can be used to strengthen privilege and domination. Not only can the opposition to ‘the elite’ make the significant privileges of some parts of ‘the people’ invisible, this opposition to ‘the elite’ in the name of the underdog can also be a mechanism to sustain inequalities and entrench the privileges of dominant groups.
Privilege and the Discursive Construction of ‘the Elite’
The discursive construction of ‘the elite’ has received much less attention in the literature on populism than that of ‘the people’ (Moffitt and Tormey, 2014: 395). The ‘populism of the privileged’ forces us to engage with the major role the notion of ‘the elite’ plays in the discursive construction of ‘the people’ as un(der)privileged. But it also pushes us to recognize that just like ‘the people’, ‘the elite’ should not be treated as an objective category, but as a category that is discursively co-constructed.
One central question is: which privileged groups are being castigated as ‘elite’, and which other privileged groups are not considered to be part of this illegitimate ‘elite’? But there is more. Just like ‘the people’ is not necessarily without privileges, those castigated as ‘elite’ are not necessarily the most privileged, even if they do usually enjoy significant privileges of some kind. In fact, those criticizing ‘the elite’ might be more privileged than that ‘elite’ itself. Oscar Reyes (2005: 106) has written about Thatcherism that ‘the elite’ [. . .] is also [like ‘the people’] indeterminate at a structural level. Indeed, Thatcherism has decisively shown how a populist discourse can be constructed from a structurally elite position. What we are dealing with in the case of populism, by contrast, is the posing of an ‘elite’ not at a structural but at an imaginary level. In the case of Thatcherism, this led to the demonisation [as ‘elite’] of Reds in the classroom, cultural workers, progressive politicians and intellectuals in general.
What Reyes argues here is that people belonging to the ‘structural’ elite discursively castigated as ‘the elite’ groups who arguably did not hold structural elite positions (teachers, cultural workers etc.). It might need to be stressed a bit more how positions of cultural-intellectual (rather than socio-economic) power also come with privilege. But Reyes’ argument is crucial for the study of the ‘populism of the privileged’ in that it highlights the double movement needed for such a populism to work: by highlighting the privileges and power of ‘the elite’ and presenting themselves as underdog, dominant groups can downplay or ignore the privileges and power of the leaders, followers and beneficiaries of populist practices. This argument extends to (far) right-wing critiques of the ‘politically correct’ or, more recently, ‘woke’ elites as well. Similar arguments, as mentioned earlier, have been made about market populism (Frank, 2000), where business interests obfuscate their own privilege and power and that of the well-off by using the populist logic to attack ‘the so-called elites and special interests responsible for maintaining a large welfare state at taxpayers’ expense’ (Sawer and Laycock, 2009: 133).
Beyond ‘the People’ and ‘the Elite’: The Social Other of Populism
A confrontation of populism with privilege implies looking beyond ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Ostiguy and Casullo (2017: 8–9) write that apart from the political establishment, there is also a ‘social other, the true object of the – very explicit and in no way hidden – ire of the populists’. This social other, they stress, often does not consist of sociologically elite groups, as evidenced by how far-right populisms ‘rail against (lower-class) immigrants’. They write that analysts need to look at populism’s ‘direction, sociologically speaking’: sociologically, left-wing populisms are ‘upward punching’ – toward the socio-economic (not just governing, political) elites. Right-wing populisms, sociologically, are ‘downward punching’, toward a social Other that is depicted, certainly, as culturally (or ethnically) outsider, but that is also at the same time (or ‘should be’, in their view), lower sociologically and in entitlements than their ‘native’ social equivalents (Ostiguy and Casullo, 2017: 8–9).
This notion of ‘downward punching’ populism is close to what we have called ‘populism for the privileged’. Our distinction between populism by, with and for the privileged does allow for the important nuance that populisms by and/or with the privileged might also be upward punching. Indeed, we disagree with suggestions that populism inherently has a double vertical structure: upwards against ‘the elite’ and downwards between ‘the (good) people’ and foreigners, drug dealers and other outgroups (e.g. Mény and Surel, 2002: 12; see De Cleen, 2017: 353). The notion of a ‘populism for the privileged’ as a specific subcategory indicates that rather than treating this downward opposition as inherent to populism, we should ask how the populist speaking in the name of the underdog is sometimes used to defend positions of (relative) privilege and domination and to kick downwards underprivileged groups.
Layers and Axes of Privilege and Un(der)privilege
Populisms are not just unequivocally by, with or for the privileged. Not only do populisms bring together a variety of people from heterogeneous backgrounds, privilege itself is also a complex phenomenon that appears in a variety of domains, based on sex, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, physical ability, age and so on (Black and Stone, 2005: 245). These facets of privilege are interwoven in complex ways, so ‘the majority of people occupy contradictory positions in society’, being at the same time oppressed in some ways and holding ‘varying degrees of relative privilege in other ways’ (Berlet and Lyons, 2000: 15).
This complexity raises significant questions for the study of the populism of the privileged. First, if a group is privileged in some ways and un(der)privileged in some other ways, the question becomes: In what ways does its populism further equality and protect the interests of those ‘below’? In what ways does it defend the privileges of comparatively dominant groups? And in what ways it might even ‘keep down’ or ‘push down’ the un(der)privileged? Let us look at white unskilled workers in Western European countries as an example. This is a group that could be considered as comparatively un(der)privileged in socio-economic terms but privileged as part of the dominant ethnic group. This group can be interpellated by a left-wing populism that demands more economic redistribution in the name of the ‘ordinary people’. But it can also be interpellated by the populist radical right that pits ‘natives’ against ‘foreigners’ and that demands a preferential treatment for the natives in the workplace and the welfare state while accusing the elite of pampering migrants. The former is not a ‘populism for the privileged’ in that it does not mobilize the white workers as members of the dominant ethnic group against the rights of people of foreign descent; the latter is, as it aims to protect and further entrench the privileges of the dominant ethnic group.
A second question is: How are privilege and un(der)privilege discursively related? Is privilege along one dimension hidden through focus on another dimension? Is un(der)privilege on one level (e.g. socio-economic position) used to defend privilege in another level (e.g. ethnic privilege)? The layered character of privilege-un(der)privilege means that it is possible – and indeed likely – for populisms of the privileged to, in part, mobilize resistance to actual oppression while simultaneously mobilizing a discursive ‘resistance to oppression’ that actually constitutes a defence of privileges and positions of domination. This layeredness complicates the clear-cut judgement of the overall privileged character of a political project. The analytical aim, then, is never to determine whether a particular populism is ‘of the privileged’, yes or no, but rather to determine in what ways it is, in what ways it is not, to what degree, and what the interactions between these dimensions are.
A central task in the analysis of ‘populism of the privileged’ becomes to determine which axes of privilege-un(der)privilege are being mobilized and which remain invisible. What are the markers, in a particular populism, of privilege and un(der)privilege in relation to the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘the people’? Which dimensions of privilege become marked as such? And which ones do not? Is it socio-economic markers that determine ‘people’ and ‘elite’ positions, as is common in left-wing populism? Or is it cultural or ethnic markers, as is more common on the right, which constructs intellectual and cultural capital as markers of ‘elite’ status and ‘flaunt[s] of the low’ in a socio-cultural sense’ (Ostiguy, 2017) to mark closeness to ‘the people’. Such a sensitivity for different axes of privilege-un(der)privilege and their performance (Aiolfi, 2022; Moffitt, 2016) is needed to understand how hamburger-eating and baseball-cap wearing millionaires (high economic capital, low cultural capital) can be seen as champions of ‘the people’, and how much more modestly paid journalists, artists, cultural workers and academics (high cultural capital, middle and sometimes low economic capital) riding bicycles and living on a vegetarian diet become seen as a powerful ‘elite’.
‘Unmet Grievances’ and ‘the Crisis of Representation’
The ‘populism of the privileged’ highlights the role of populism in the discursive co-construction of ‘unmet grievances’ and the ‘crisis of representation’. Understanding this requires emphasizing that populist politics do not merely bring together previously existing frustrated demands in a ‘dichotomic division between unfulfilled social demands, on the one hand, and an unresponsive power, on the other’ (Laclau, 2005: 86). For one, as Elchardus and Spruyt (2014: 127) write a ‘sense of decline or feelings of relative deprivation can drive people to populist parties and populist politicians’ but at the same time ‘the discourse of those parties and politicians is likely to increase their sense of decline and of the injustice of their plight’. Moreover, groups identifying as underdogs are not necessarily at the receiving end of societal inequality to start with either. In an article on the Dutch List Pim Fortuyn, Van der Brug (2003) calls attention to how this populist radical right party ‘fuelled discontent’ among voters that did not fit the sociological profile of an objectively subordinate or underprivileged group. Mols and Jetten (2016: 275) even write that populist radical right parties should be seen as ‘crafty identity entrepreneurs who are able to turn objective relative gratification into perceived relative deprivation’.
Populist actors, then, draw on but also (to a more or lesser extent, depending on the case in question) discursively co-construct the very feelings of frustration and loss of status that mobilize populist supporters. This idea has been developed in works that emphasize the role of populism in the discursive co-creation of ‘crises’: such analyses question the widespread assumption that populism emerges at times of crisis simply because crisis straightforwardly breeds populism and that populism is the natural response to an objectifiable ‘crisis of representation’ (Moffitt, 2015; see also De Cleen and Glynos, 2021). To understand the ‘populism of the privileged’ (and especially populism for the privileged), we need to analyse not just how populism constructs a ‘people’ by tapping into unmet demands. We should also zoom in on how it discursively co-constructs these demands, how it co-constructs them as ‘popular’ demands, how it co-constructs them as ‘unmet’, how it co-constructs the ‘power bloc’ as ‘unresponsive’ and how it co-constructs a ‘crisis of representation’. This is not to say that populist discourse is customarily disconnected from the realities of sociological inequality or political underrepresentation, but rather to insist that populist discourse greatly influences the interpretation of these realities and that, sometimes, such interpretations of reality may differ from observable empirical facts.
The ‘populism of the privileged’ also highlights that the demands of ‘the common people’ that are ‘unmet’ by ‘the elite’ can in fact constitute demands towards the maintenance of privilege. Crucial questions in analysing this are: What is ‘the elite’ criticized for? Is ‘the elite’ blamed for not meeting demands for equality and justice? Or is it blamed for exactly the opposite: for a politics of equality and justice, for supposedly favouring the interests of migrants, sexual minorities, the unemployed?
Let us look, for instance, at the role of ‘the elite’ in populist radical right discourse. Voters for the populist radical right have been said to ‘want to maintain their social privilege by denying rights to other groups in the population’ (Lee, 2020: 38) with these parties mobilizing ‘in defense of disproportionate access to power, wealth, and privilege’ (Berlet and Lyons, 2000: 14). A crucial role in this process is played by victimhood and humiliation narratives (Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021; Sengul, 2022; Wodak, 2015) that appeal to ‘the people’ as victims of a ‘liberal elite’ that has betrayed ‘the people’ by giving special privileges to ‘non-deserving minorities’ in ethnic and other terms, rather than acting in the interest of ‘the people’ (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017: 25). In this sense, the ‘populism for the privileged’ can be seen as one specific way of enacting – through criticism of an illegitimate elite – ‘dominant group victimhood’, a reaction of those who feel an ‘actual or potential loss of dominance, a sense of resentment at this loss which is bound up with issues of entitlement’ (Reicher and Ulusahin, 2021: 277).
When studying such processes, we should not see populisms of the privileged as a mere matter of manipulative elites misleading ordinary people’s rightful frustrations. Our insistence that ‘populism of the privileged’ can be by, with and for the privileged stresses that ‘the people’ are not mere passive supporters or dupes of populist leaders, instead underlining ‘the people’s’ capacity to actively influence populist dynamics. Comparatively privileged people – both populist leaders and supporters – can implement their agenda by actively painting grievances and demands as ‘popular’ and ‘frustrated by the elite’ in day-to-day discourses. Instead of considering top-down and bottom-up mobilization as separate processes, both spheres have to be evaluated as part of the intricate process of the populisms of the privileged (cf. Ostiguy, 2017).
Discourses About ‘Populism’
The ‘populism of the privileged’, finally, draws attention to the politics of the signifier ‘populism’ (cf. De Cleen et al., 2018). Even more so than other forms of populism, populisms of the privileged (and especially those for the privileged) require us to keep a critical distance from populist claims. It has been argued (De Cleen et al., 2021; Mondon, 2017, 2022; Mondon and Winter, 2020) that the use of the label ‘populism’ for the radical right has inadvertently led to a legitimation of these parties as ‘the voice of ordinary people’ and of their demands as ‘popular demands’. Mondon (2017: 357) writes that the term ‘populism‘ has allowed PRRPs, despite their own elitist and authoritarian background, to appropriate for themselves the concept of ’the people‘, and shift its understanding away from more emancipatory meanings found in revolutionary times, to that of the national people, based on ethnicity, a homogeneous culture and ultimately race.
This process, Mondon argues, has gone hand in hand with an exaggeration of working-class support for the radical right (and an underestimation of support from higher socio-economic groups) [a process the concept of ‘the populism with the privileged’ could help highlight)], as well as a ‘racialisation of the working class’ and ‘the people’ (Mondon, 2017: 370). Not only are non-white workers excluded from the conception of the working class and ‘the ordinary people’, opposition to ethnic-cultural diversity supposedly promoted by ‘the elite’ also becomes seen as the main ‘popular’ demand.
The use of the label ‘populism’ by journalist, politicians and academics can indeed contribute to the acceptance of the claims of populist actors that they represent ‘ordinary people’, that these are in fact the victims of a privileged ‘elite’ that does not represent them and that these ordinary people’s interests are indeed not being met. This does not mean that we cannot use the label ‘populism’ for such politics. Rather, it means that in using that term we should use it to highlight a political logic that revolves around a particular kind of claims but without taking such populist claims at face value. The notion of a ‘populism of the privileged’ helps us to create exactly that analytical and critical distance.
Conclusion
This article has introduced the notion of ‘the populism of the privileged’ to conceptualize configurations of populism in which the people-as-underdog is primarily constructed and/or supported from a position of relative privilege and/or to the benefit of comparatively privileged social groups. Going against the widespread tendency to take at face value populist claims towards the representation of the underdog, we address how the populist identity of the underdog can be mobilized and supported by comparatively privileged groups, often to maintain or enhance their dominance.
With this article we have aimed to make three contributions to the conceptualization and understanding of ‘the populism of the privileged’, and to the study of populism more broadly. First, we have introduced an analytical distinction between populism by the privileged (understood as populist practices that are driven by privileged groups), with the privileged (defined as a populist political project broadly supported by privileged groups) and for the privileged (populist discursive practices used towards the preservation or increase of positions of domination and privilege).
Second, we have argued that instead of treating such populist politics favouring the privileged in the name of the underdog as fake forms of populism, their populist nature must be examined rigorously. This requires (a) uncoupling the label ‘populism’ entirely from the sociology of its leaders, supporters or beneficiaries; (b) studying the role that populist discourse plays in discursively co-constructing a ‘people-as-underdog’; (c) confronting populist discourse with sociological insights.
Third, we have reflected on analytical strategies for the study of the populism of the privileged, which we believe also have relevance to the study of populism more generally. How do populisms of the privileged navigate the tensions between populist discourse and sociological positions of privilege-un(der)privilege? What happens on the discursive level to make the populism by, with and for the privileged work? We have highlighted that the study of the ‘populism of the privileged’ urges a more thoroughly constructivist perspective on the central signifiers of populism (not only ‘the people’, but also ‘the elite’, ‘unmet demands’ and ‘the crisis of representation’), as well as attention for the complex and layered sociological directionality of populism, and the role of discourses about populism in making populisms of the privileged resonate.
With the notion of the ‘populism of the privileged’, we have aimed to draw attention to the particularities of a specific subset of populist politics. We argued that the comparatively privileged nature of the leaders, followers or beneficiaries of populist politics does not undermine the populist character of these forms of populism, but that this dimension of relative privilege needs to be highlighted and made explicit to allow understanding the specificity of this type of populism and evaluate its impact on democracy and on the reproduction and defence of social inequality. Indeed, our argument is not merely that ‘populisms of the privileged’ are also forms of populism, but that these kinds of populism warrant a specific label, for both analytical and normative reasons.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the following people for their much-appreciated input: Yazan Badran, Edina Dóci, Benjamin Moffitt, Aurelien Mondon, Lin Shu-fen and Bram Spruyt.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
