Stanford University Press Blog

A Critique of the Critique of Finance

Critics of neoliberal capitalism rarely recognize the productive power of speculation.

by MARTIJN KONINGS

CC0 via Pixabay.

If there is one theme that unites the various critiques of contemporary finance, it is the emphasis on its speculative character. Financial growth is said to be driven not by the logic of efficient markets, but rather by irrational sentiment, “animal spirits” that do not respect fundamental values.

Capital and Time » advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments.

Emphasizing the role of volatility in contemporary capitalism (evident at the time of writing, as the stock market is experiencing a downturn) is important as an antidote to notions of market efficiency and equilibrium. But it is a mistake to think that it provides a sufficient basis for effective critique. Predictions regarding the limits or collapse of neoliberal finance have simply not enjoyed a good track record. Over and over, the contemporary financial system has proven capable of sustaining higher levels of speculative activity than anticipated. This has certainly been true of the past decade. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason is my attempt to make sense of this—that is, to understand what might be wrong or missing in the existing heterodox critique of speculation, and to advance a more accurate understanding of the role of uncertainty, risk, and speculation in contemporary capitalism.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value. Although “essentialist” (or “foundationalist”) modes of explanation have been under fire across the social sciences for several decades now, when it comes to the critique of finance they have had considerable staying-power: without a notion of real value, it often seems, we lose any objective standard against which to assess the speculative gyrations of capitalist markets.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value.

The President’s Clout

For a first-year president, Trump’s presidential leverage is at a historic low.

by DANIEL E. PONDER

Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

For a person, indeed a president, so obsessed with “ratings,” Donald Trump must find his approval ratings jarring. While virtually all presidents start their terms with high approval, Trump started low, sank fast, and kept digging. Even George W. Bush, who came to office after a heavily contested election, began with 57 percent approval. Meanwhile, Trump, who is now approaching the milestone one-year mark of his presidency, has languished in the 30s for months, averaging just under 39 percent. To be sure, a few presidents have endured approval levels below his, but they did so in the midst of extraordinary times: Truman during the Korean War, Nixon on the cusp of resignation, Ford following his pardon of Nixon, Carter in the midst of the Iran-Hostage crisis, George H.W. Bush on the brink of losing the presidency to Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush post-Hurricane Katrina all posted lower approval ratings. Even Barack Obama briefly dipped into the 30s in September 2011, during the budget negotiation debacle. But no one has begun so low and fallen so quickly and consistently as Donald Trump.

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics. Presidents with high approval ratings are likely to be deemed powerful, particularly by the media, whereas presidents with low or middling opinion are seen as weak or ineffective. But is approval all it’s cracked up to be?

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics—but is it all it's cracked up to be?

Four Fishes, One Whale

How China diverges from the other economically emergent BRICS nations.

by SALVATORE BABONES

The leaders of the BRICS countries. Left to right: President Michel Temer of Brazil, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and President Jacob Zuma of South Africa. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In early September, 2017, the leaders of the five BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—met for their ninth annual summit in the old port city of Xiamen. The BRICS began life as the BRICs (minus South Africa), an investment category cooked up by emerging markets analyst Jim O'Neill in 2001. As it evolved into an actual political bloc, China insisted on the inclusion of South Africa to provide geographical balance. Since 2010 the leaders of the BRICs, and since 2012 the BRICS, have met every year to celebrate their economic success and growing power in the world.

BRICS or Bust? » makes the case for the implementation of government policies as a key means for jump-starting the economies of the BRICS countries.

And irony. "Keenly aware of the negative impact of corruption on sustainable development, we support the efforts to enhance BRICS anti-corruption cooperation," the five opined in their closing declaration at Xiamen. But to be fair, BRICS statements on feel-good topics like corruption, environmental protection, and the like are just platitudes, and everyone knows that. The real issue is economic development.

When it comes to economics, corruption is not the only thing that the BRICS have in common. All five are middle-income countries with declining poverty rates but persistently high levels of income inequality. They are all making big investments to modernize their physical and human infrastructure and have the government capacity to follow through on these investments. And each of the BRICS is the dominant economic power in its respective region.

Of course, they differ dramatically in size. China is the whale, South Africa the minnow of the BRICS. China's economy is more than twice as large as those of the other four countries put together. But as in biology, size really isn't that important in economics. Look beneath the surface, and the big difference is structure.

Transparency on the Grassy Knoll

Government disclosures, like the release of the Kennedy files, do not improve public trust.

by MARK FENSTER

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Surprisingly soon after the Warren Commission Report concluded that Lee Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy, a significant and growing segment of the American public began to speculate about alternative perpetrators whose actions the Warren Commission had covered up. In 1992, facing the persistence of that speculation, Congress enacted the statute that prompted the recent disclosures (and non-disclosures) of secret documents relating to the assassination. It hoped to assure the public that the government was not complicit in the assassination, and nor was it withholding evidence of a conspiracy, a hope that President Trump reiterated upon the documents’ release.

#JFKFiles pic.twitter.com/AnPBSJFh3J

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2017

The effort was a noble one. Congress designed a timed disclosure mandate that would allow the public to know more and theorize less. In the predominant telling of history from the 1960s on, the assassination had initiated the public’s radical doubt about the government’s actions and willingness to tell the truth. In its wake, various cottage industries have circulated theories about government conspiracies to cover up, among other things, all of the major assassinations of the 1960s (including those of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as that of President Kennedy), its relationship with alien visitors, the rise of a globalist “new world order,” the truth behind the 9/11 attacks, and the place of President Obama’s birth. Perhaps by cleaning out its archives, the federal government could reset the public’s view of government and rid us of this persistent tendency to find conspiracy everywhere.

The Legal Limbo of DACA

Only Congress can provide relief for undocumented immigrants—it is time for them to act.

by LEO R. CHAVEZ

Protest near Trump Tower after the announcement of the administration's palns to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. September 5, 2017. Photo by Harrie van Veen. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Attorney General Jeff Session’s announcement that the Trump administration is ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program came as no real surprise. This is what Donald Trump promised to do if elected president. But let’s be honest. The DACA program was always a stopgap measure instituted by President Obama because of Congress’s failure to fix our broken immigration system. For years, Congress batted around the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have provided immigrants who came as children a path to citizenship.

The Latino Threat » investigates the stories about recent immigrants to show how prejudices are used to malign an entire population.

When President Obama introduced the idea of DACA, I welcomed the action but noted that it was not a panacea, just another form of legal limbo. As I wrote in my book The Latino Threat: “As a temporary stopgap measure, this new policy does not provide permanent relief from deportation (and those who come forward will be giving the government information on their whereabouts).” I also noted that a new president, one hostile to immigration, could end DACA. This has now happened. Despite assurances that the information collected from DACA applicants will not be shared with ICE for deportation purposes, there is still the risk that such easily available information will be used against DACA recipients. Supposedly confidential data has been used in the past, such as when Japanese Americans were rounded up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The real problem is Congress’s failure of leadership and the destructive partisanship that pervades our nation’s politics. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans are in favor of providing undocumented childhood arrivals a means to legalize their status. This is the only real way these young people can use their education to contribute to society, which benefits not only them but all of us.

Breaking the Power of Monuments

Is a new form of iconoclasm emerging?

by NATALIE CARNES

The Confederate Monument to Robert E. Lee is removed from its perch in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 17, 2017. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In a popular video circulating amidst the national debate over Confederate monuments, protesters chanting, “No KKK, no fascist USA,” throw a yellow rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina and wrench it from a pedestal. The statue twists and crumples as it hits the ground. The crowd cheers. Some come forward to take pictures with the toppled statue, which lay in its position of vanquish until hauled away the next morning.

The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

The iconoclasm in Durham is both new—it speaks to the particular racial anxieties of our present moment—and also familiar. It echoes the French revolutionaries smashing signs of the old regime in their efforts to establish a political order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It echoes, too, the early Protestants breaking, burning, and mocking the images in the Catholic Church that they had renounced. The images that worried early Protestants most were those depicting the divine, for such images, according to their detractors, falsely pretend to bear God’s presence. The Protestants defaced images of Christ to say—to prove—that God is not present in them. God, they insisted, is present everywhere, unbounded by materiality. These iconoclasts, then, broke images both to deny God’s presence and affirm it. A similar dynamic characterizes the iconoclasm of political revolutions. The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

 

 

Everyday Forms of White Supremacy

When we see white supremacy only in its most explicit incarnations, we lose sight of how racism operates.

by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY

Protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia carrying Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and a Nazi flag. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity as a sociologist-in-training and now as a Professor of Sociology. My research included a comparative ethnographic examination of a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, which culminated in my book, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Given this background, the events of August 12th unfolded into a spectacle that eerily resonates with the sociological findings of my earlier work, the title of which pays homage to master sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois asks a prescient question: “why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past?” Nearly one hundred years later, I, like many, still struggle to answer this question.

I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity.

Yet, I do offer a tripartite riposte.

While both white nationalists and white antiracists hold deeply opposed political, economic, and social worldviews on a variety of topics, both groups hold aloft a similar ideal of white racial identity. That ideal form of white identity entailed differing performances, depending on the context: a kind of messianic or paternalistic savior to people of color; a creative and cosmopolitan “borrower” of the styles and traditions of people of color in order to alleviate the self-perceived dullness or emptiness of whiteness, and ultimately; a manifestation of biological or cultural superiority by virtue of their whiteness. That ideal white person is both a goal (in the sense of trajectory) and a potent cohesive and organizing force in their lives (in the sense in which Du Bois intended) and thereby provides a double entendre for “bound” in my title. This similarity is built on common assumptions about what “race” is—from its dominant social meanings to assumptions about its biological and cultural make-up. Members of both the nationalist and the antiracist groups I studied also expressed entitlement to all issues coded as “racial” and saw any white exclusion as “reverse racism.” In both groups, it was common to view people of color, as Du Bois put it, with “amused contempt and pity.”

From the Vote to the Vatican

In the Trump era, the relationship between Catholics and U.S. politics is complicated.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Donald Trump and Pope Francis. Image by DonkeyHotey. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The November election showed a major shift in the Catholic vote: for the first time since 1968, the majority of Catholics did not vote in the same way as the majority of Americans. In 1968, the majority of Catholics voted for Hubert Humphrey, while the majority of the popular vote went, as we know, to Richard Nixon (though Humphrey lost almost 20 percentage points to the Republicans as compared to the 1964 elections). Even in 2000, Catholics voted in the same way as the majority of their fellow citizens: 51% of them chose Al Gore, who was eventually defeated by the Electoral College system. This identity between “Catholic vote” and popular vote has led many observers to state that a “Catholic vote” simply does not exist, or even that “Catholics are the bellwether voters: as go Catholics, so goes the nation.”

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority (55%) for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote (46.1%), a difference of about nine percentage points. This is a noteworthy change, one that signals at least two things: first, that the Catholic hierarchy did not challenge Donald Trump, despite what certain statements made by Pope Francis during the campaign had led people to think; and second, that there is a majority of Catholics in the United States who want to carve their social, and therefore political, advancement in stone. And that these two phenomena influence each other.

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote.

 

In Rome We Trust » reveals how Catholics have come to play an increasingly significant role in American politics.

This thirst for social advancement can be explained in the following way: since the end of the World War II, Catholics have climbed the social ladder, achieving the pre-eminent role in the political life of the country that I describe in my new book, In Rome We Trust. The result is that they now have dreams of overcoming the traditional social hierarchy that identifies America with WASPs. Some of them want to see a “De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite,” as Robert C. Christopher puts it in Crashing the Gates–something achieved in the Supreme Court before the death of Antonin Scalia, when three Jews and six Catholics made up the country’s most important judicial body. Others (now clearly a majority) on the contrary, aspire to join the WASP ranks, thus distinguishing not from the WASPs themselves, but from those Catholics who remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, essentially, recent immigrants from Latin America and the Philippines. The most radical wing of this latter group has pushed its “WASP-ing” agenda to the point of abandoning Catholicism for militant evangelicalism (Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Neil Gorsuch are the best known examples).

Negotiating North Korea

Given the mixed results of the past, could sanctions work on North Korea moving forward?

by STEPHAN HAGGARD and MARCUS NOLAND

"North Korea Victory Day." Photo by Stefan Krawsowski. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Following the Mar-a-Lago summit, President Trump touted his cooperation with President Xi Jinping on North Korea as a diplomatic win. In the weeks since the summit, the outlines of the administration’s policy toward the peninsula have become more clear. Under the name of “maximum pressure and engagement,” Secretary Tillerson has outlined a strategy that includes more aggressive sanctions, while leaving military options open. Yet at the same time, he has promised that the United States would be willing to engage in negotiations—long a Chinese demand—were North Korea to express a willingness to discuss denuclearization. He has even stated that the United States is not seeking regime change nor unification and could provide North Korea security guarantees.

Hard Target » captures the effects of sanctions and inducements on North Korea and provides a detailed reconstruction of the role of economic incentives in the bargaining around the country's nuclear program.

The history of such two-track efforts, which have resurfaced repeatedly since the first North Korean nuclear crisis some 25 years ago, are often plagued by complications that undermine the strategy. In Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea, we investigate the history of these efforts, which are dogged by two problems. The first is that sanctions require coordination. At various times the United States has faced difficulty aligning not only China, but South Korea as well, around more robust pressure on the North. Since the onset of the second nuclear crisis in 2002, multilateral and other sanctions have had the perverse effect of pushing North Korea’s trade toward China, which now accounts for nearly 90 percent of bilateral merchandise trade. The changing geography of trade compounds these coordination problems. Getting North Korea to move has increasingly become a question of how to get China to move.

Xi Jinping’s decision to cooperate with the United States with respect to North Korea was also influenced in part by US sticks and carrots. Military blandishments might have helped spur China’s new engagement on the issue, reminding Beijing that North Korea is a strategic liability. The decision to abjure naming China a currency manipulator and threats of secondary sanctions—placing sanctions on Chinese entities doing business with North Korea—also might have had some effect. But the basis of cooperation with China undoubtedly rests on US commitments to re-enter negotiations if North Korea signals interest, with the inevitable discussion of quid-pro-quos and inducements that such negotiations necessarily entail.

“Wrong Time, Wrong Place”

The clarion call of two men wrongfully detained in Guantanamo.

by DANIEL HARTNETT NORLAND

Guantanamo Camp X-Ray, January 2002. U.S. Army Military Police escort a detainee to his cell in Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Shane T. McCoy. Public domain.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently described the military prison at Guantanamo as a “very fine place.” I’d like to introduce him to two men who know better: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir, who spent seven years in Guantanamo before establishing their innocence.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot. After a three-month investigation uncovered no evidence, all charges were dropped. However, instead of releasing them, Bosnian officials—acting under the cover of darkness and intense U.S. pressure—handed them over to American soldiers who brought them, blindfolded and shackled, to Guantanamo.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Sarajevo when, in October 2001, they were arrested by Bosnian police and accused of participating in a terrorist plot.

By 2002, military intelligence officers realized that the charges against Lakhdar and Mustafa were—as acknowledged in emails that surfaced years later—“bullshit.” Nevertheless, it took six-and-a-half years and a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Boumediene v. Bush, for Lakhdar and Mustafa to even have a chance to appear before a federal judge and argue their innocence. When they finally did, that judge, George W. Bush–appointee Richard Leon, was stunned by the weakness of the government’s case and ordered their release.

Tempting Fate in Northeast Asia

Fear of instability in Northeast Asia mounts as US intentions in the region remain unclear.

by THOMAS FINGAR

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2017. Photo by the U.S. State Department. Public domain.

To depict President Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the functional equivalent of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would be an exaggeration, but because trade is the primary instrument of regional integration in Northeast Asia, its implications are more worrisome than those of Brexit. While Europe has cultivated a system of shared values and made conscious efforts to overcome historical animosities and reduce the risks of war by building interlocking institutions and fostering a “European” identity, Northeast Asia has eschewed integrating mechanisms and the dilution of national identities. What integration has been achieved is the result of market-based economic decisions and American engagement. Trump’s rejection of TPP and repudiation of Obama’s “rebalance” to Asia undercuts both pillars of regional stability and prosperity.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades. North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal. China’s economy is slowing but Beijing’s military buildup and use of economic and political leverage to pressure its neighbors have intensified. South Korea’s president has been impeached and imprisoned; her approach to North Korea and “Comfort Women” agreement to reduce tensions with Japan might be repudiated after the upcoming special election. Japan’s modest adjustments to military policy in response to threats from North Korea and Chinese pressure over disputed islands have unsettled domestic constituencies and enraged Chinese and Korean politicians.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades.

Great Father Rising

From Jackson to Trump, American conservatism is animated by a paternalistic logic.

by JEFFREY R. DUDAS

Donald Trump in the Oval Office, January 2017. Public domain.

From the perspective of political stagecraft, the 2016 Republican National Convention was a catastrophe. The presumptive nominee was the subject of continuing opposition from party officials and luminaries, including the sitting governor of the state in which the convention was held. In spite of the nominee’s boasts that the event would feature high-wattage star power, the best that he could offer audiences was the endorsement of an aged thespian best known for portraying a male nanny on a decades-old sitcom. Worst of all, his fiercest rival for the party’s nomination was given a prime-time speaking slot—and then not only refused to endorse the nominee but intimated that American conservatives would do well to withhold their support as well. By contrast, his opponent’s nominating convention the next week was a masterclass in political messaging.

But in hindsight it is clear that the Republican National Convention accomplished for its nominee precisely what it intended. For the point of the event was not to display Donald Trump’s devotion to conservative principle but instead to envelop the candidate in the particulars of conservative identity. The goal, after all, was to portray Donald Trump as a great biological and national father—a singular figure who would rescue the nation from what is, for a great many Americans, the nightmare of multicultural politics. And, at that, the convention was a manifest success.

Modern American conservatism is obsessed with the influence of American fathers past and present.

Indeed, modern American conservatism is obsessed with the influence of American fathers past and present, with the legacies of both the nation’s historical “founding fathers” and its actual, biological fathers. As Raised Right argues, this obsession manifests, in practice, as a paternal rights discourse that emphasizes that American democracy exists for “good” American citizens, who can be trusted to exercise their rights to self-governance and autonomy in responsible ways. Conversely, those Americans who, lacking the influence of paternal authority (whether biological or historical) never learned self-discipline and cannot be trusted to exercise their rights in mature ways. Thus does modern American conservatism employ the standard of paternal authority to cast citizens as either virtuous and worthy of governmental support or vicious and worthy of governmental discipline, of law and order. And, apropos for a multicultural nation, these categories of virtuous and vicious tend to be inflected with gender and race-based dynamics.

What’s Wrong with Paid Family Leave?

Without broader cultural changes paid family leave is only a Band-Aid—or worse yet, a stigma.

by SARAH COTE HAMPSON

Public domain via Pixabay.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Be Bold for Change”—a premise that is as much a call to action as it is a reminder that change still needs to happen, that women’s equality is still not a reality in our world. As I write this, a bill is making its way through the legislature in my state that aims to address at least one of the challenges women face in establishing equality with their male peers: if passed, the bill would establish a public insurance scheme to fund paid family leave. Indeed, Washington State is not alone in this effort. Over 20 other states, and an even greater number of municipalities, are actively considering or have recently passed some form of paid family leave legislation. California was the first state to pass such legislation in 2002, and its insurance scheme to help fund paid family leave for both women and men has been in place since 2004.

Numerous scholars and others have pointed out just how inadequate the Family and Medical Leave Act is for meeting the needs of working parents.

State, municipal, and employer-level family leave policies have bubbled forth in the vacuum left by an absence of a robust federal family leave policy. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is currently the only federal policy governing the rights of men and women who need to take time off work to care for new children or sick family members. Introduced in 1993, the FMLA allows workers who have been employed for more than one year to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for the purposes of supplying this family care. However, numerous scholars and others have pointed out just how inadequate this policy is for meeting the needs of working parents. Because the leave is unpaid, most of the leave-eligible workers who do not take it report not being able to do so because they are unable to afford unpaid time off work. Additionally, even if they could afford to take unpaid time off, more than 40 percent of American workers are not even covered by the policy, since it only applies to employers with 50 or more workers.

The Language of Nowhere

Divisive rhetoric has hijacked our judgment, intervening between us and reality.

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and US President, Donald Trump, meet at the White House. Photo by Jay Allen. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Last October, as we woke up in the autumn gloom of a Disunited Kingdom after the summer referendum, and groped our way to the tea pot in order to Keep Calm and Carry On, we heard the voice of Theresa May announcing the death of the English language: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” she said, speaking to a supportive audience, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Words can be deployed to all kinds of illogical ends. They are a shifty lot.

Well, that woke us up pretty quick. We are more inclined by nature to support than undermine, much prefer to acquiesce than oppose but here was a definition of words that raised too many questions before breakfast. A citizen of the world is a citizen of “nowhere”? The entire planet, pace Butler, is Erewhon? And where does that place modern Britain? On Mars?

To be accused of having no link to this planet and its peoples may be a surprise for a fair number of us who have been born in one country, raised in another, educated in a third, married, had children, and buried family members in a fourth, fifth and sixth, lived and worked in seven or eight other countries, and might now be obliged to request naturalization in a ninth, because of Brexit. It may also be news for all those of us who had been forced to flee in desperation from our homelands as a result of war, famine, plague, terrorism, persecution and/or natural as well as financial disasters. It can even be a shock to learn that “rootless cosmopolitans” as some of us were called in a previous age, are actually part of a “global elite” in this one, even though we cannot afford London housing. Was our Prime Minister really suggesting that only those who believe in Being First deserve to be British? Can people with a world-embracing vision really not “understand what citizenship means?”

Populist Times

It’s time to rethink how we define and describe contemporary populism.

by BENJAMIN MOFFITT

U.S. President (then the Republican nominee) Donald Trump holds a rally in Newtown, Pennsylvania in October 2016, weeks before the election. Photo by Michael Canedelori. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We are seemingly living in populist times. The effects of the Global Financial Crisis drag on, the Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis continues to threaten the very existence of the European Union, and more broadly, it is alleged that we are suffering from a crisis of faith in democracy, with political party membership falling dramatically and citizens finding themselves more and more disillusioned with mainstream politics. The anger, fury and disgust targeted at members of “the elite”—whether the bankers of Wall Street, the bureaucrats of Brussels, the politicians of leading parties, or the cultural warriors of the op-ed pages—is palpable, with calls for layoffs, imprisonment or even all-out revolution to change the status quo. The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of “the people” to make great political gains.

The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of “the people” to make great political gains.

And gain they have. Over the past two decades—but particularly in the last decade or so—populists across the world have made headlines by setting “the people” against “the elite” in the name of popular sovereignty and “defending democracy.” Europe has experienced a groundswell of populism in the form of leaders like Silvio Berlusconi, Geert Wilders, Jörg Haider and Marine Le Pen, and populist parties throughout the Continent have enjoyed significant and prolonged political success. Latin America has seen influential left-wing populist leaders change the region irrevocably, with Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa all gaining the highest office in their respective countries. In the Asia-Pacific, populists like Thaksin Shinawatra, Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada, Pauline Hanson and Winston Peters have left indelible marks on their respective countries, while Africa has experienced its own share of heavy-handed populist leaders, witnessing the presidencies of Yoweri Museveni, Michael Sata and Jacob Zuma. In the United States, the Tea Party ostensibly caused the 2013 government shutdown, and figures like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have shaped the new face of American conservatism.

In other words, populism is back—and it is back with a vengeance. What was once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe. In order to account for this situation, some scholars have spoken of a “populist Zeitgeist,” a “populist wave,” and a “populist revival.” Populism has also been at the center of recent debates within political theory, with key figures like Laclau, Mouffe, Rancière, and Žižek having engaged with the concept, tackling populism’s sometimes paradoxical relationship with democracy.