Abstract
The Global Rise of Populism makes a timely intervention within the much-in-demand field of populism scholarship. Building on the recognition that mediatization fundamentally shapes today’s politics but remains undertheorized in populism studies, Moffitt sets out to re-conceptualize populism in 21st century terms. The book’s central proposition is that populism should be thought of as a ‘political style’, a concept Moffitt defines as ‘the repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance made to audiences that are used to create and navigate the fields of power that comprise the political’ (pp. 28–29, original emphasis). In addition to pursuing the argument that populism can productively be read as a style that is ‘performed, embodied and enacted’ (p. 3), Moffitt provides an expansive critical overview of central lines of populism research. The Global Rise of Populism thus emerges as a highly effective roadmap into a large and regionally diverse area of scholarship, even if the categorization of key texts into ideological, strategic, discursive and political logic-based approaches with attendant strengths and weaknesses occasionally simplifies the field’s complexity.
The main argument for conceptualizing populism as a political style is laid out in the first three chapters. After surveying problems with previous approaches to populism and offering a refined definition of what constitutes a political style, Moffitt produces an inductively derived definition of populism as ‘a political style that features an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”, “bad manners” and the performance of crisis, breakdown or threat’ (p. 45, original emphasis). Subsequent chapters go on to highlight key elements of the populist style. Focusing on the ways in which the conceptualization of populism as a political style can offer new ways out of old impasses, Moffitt explores the populist leader as performer, ‘the people’ as populism’s audience and the mediatized stages on which populism is performed. A final chapter explores the controversial question of populism’s relationship to democracy and takes the middle-of-the-road view that the populist style incorporates both democratic and antidemocratic tendencies. The potentially democratizing tendency of populist politicians to be engaging and comprehensible is thus pitted against a propensity for scapegoating and over-simplification.
While neither the key aspects highlighted in Moffitt’s definition of the populist style (pp. 41–50) nor the arguments put forth for its democratic and antidemocratic tendencies (pp. 142–151) will sound revolutionary to those familiar with the field, Moffitt’s outstanding achievement lies in demonstrating how an engagement with theories of performativity can open up new, and more productive, ways of thinking about contemporary populism. The Global Rise of Populism is at its most insightful where Moffitt combines his survey of unresolved debates within populism research with the proposition to re-frame the debate in light of a performative understanding of contemporary politics. The chapter on populism and crisis, for instance, brilliantly rises above previous efforts attempting to link the rise of populism to states of crisis by postulating that, at a time when public life seems perpetually to be moving from one crisis to another, crisis itself needs to be understood as ‘a product of a symbolically mediated performance’ (p. 119, original emphasis). As a counterpoint to a field of scholarship divided on whether a causal link exists between populism and crisis, Moffitt then proposes that crisis should be seen as an internal feature of populist performances, rather than an external trigger of populist success. While Moffitt insists that his approach ‘offers a way to bring the populist literature into the twenty-first century’ (p. 27) and is therefore able to account for ‘populism’s changing shape’ (p. 10), there are much older resonances here. As with Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), which asked us to question the exceptionality of declared states of emergency, for instance, Moffitt posits that populism does not hinge on any objectively observable state of emergency so much as it depends on the creation of an always subjective but shared perception of crisis through performances in the public sphere.
Above all, through its detailed examination of how contemporary populism functions through performance, Moffitt’s book thus provides an important and innovative new perspective in a crowded field. If there is a quibble, it is that more could have been made of the book’s interdisciplinary aspiration. Despite a stated ‘interdisciplinary standpoint’ (p. 5), Moffitt’s sourcing remains, with the notable exception of a section drawing on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), firmly based in various spheres of political science scholarship. Theories of performance and performativity are absorbed via political scholarship of the ‘constructivist turn’, notably Michael Saward’s work, which tends to engage more directly with theories of performativity as developed by JL Austin, Judith Butler and others. Nevertheless, with the insistence that populism is ‘not a particular entity or “thing” but a political style that is done’, and with the choice to focus on performers, stages and audiences (p. 152, original emphasis), The Global Rise of Populism has pushed populism decisively and usefully into the realm of the performative in a way that is sure to open up many exciting and interdisciplinary avenues for future research.