SMOKERS’ CORNER: MANUFACTURING POPULISM

The spectre of populism has been haunting a lot of people across the world for over a decade now. But there are also those to whom populism is not a spectre but a solution to decades of malpractice, corruption and exploitation by economic and political elites. Therefore, many observers once believed that populism was tailor-made for leftist forces to sweep in and take-over. 

But populism as we know it today has largely emerged on the right. What’s more, in the West, it has also been embraced by the urban working classes. Elsewhere — especially in countries such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, Tunisia and Argentina — populism has largely attracted the support and votes of the middle-classes. Populism’s trajectory in these countries has been rightward as well.

One of the most prominent theories explaining this is that, in the West, due to the outcome of neoliberal economics, the urban working classes and rural segments felt ignored and abandoned by urban ‘liberal’ elites who took control of the mainstream parties that previously used to strive for working class interests. 

In regions where right-wing populism has been embraced by the middle classes, these classes bemoan that ‘corrupt’ mainstream parties are only interested in engaging with the lower classes because these still constitute the larger percentage of the electorate. 

Far from being a spontaneous uprising of the people, modern populism has evolved into a carefully curated performance that is produced, packaged and sold by the very elites it claims to oppose

In the US and the UK, political scientists and sociologists have started to deconstruct populism to explore what exactly lies at its core. This deconstruction has segmented populism into three types: political, economic and cultural. There has been an increased interest in sociologists to especially explore populism’s cultural aspects.  

This is not to suggest that the three are in any significant way different from each other. Quite the contrary. Political populism carries in it rhetoric moulded from perceptions gestating in sections of society that believe that, after being thoroughly exploited, they are being sidelined and ignored by elites whose economic and political interests are not tied to the interests of these sections anymore. 

Political populism’s response in this regard is ‘economic populism’ or rhetoric/action that appeals to the sentiments of those who believe they’re being exploited/ignored by the elites. The response is often delivered in the shape of promises of creating more jobs for the working classes or (in the ‘Global South’) about creating more employment opportunities and space in politics for the middle classes. 

It is, however, the cultural turn that the study of populism has taken that is providing some fascinating insights into why populism has mushroomed in the manner it has from the 2010s. This cultural turn is the study of ‘cultural populism’ and how it provides staying power to present-day political and economic populisms. 

Interestingly though, ‘cultural populism’ — a term popularised in 1992 by the British cultural theorist Jim McGuigan who passed away in December — initially emerged from his study of popular/pop culture. According to McGuigan, popular culture products had stopped being understood in a more critical manner and were being celebrated and eulogised by sociologists as manifestations of art by, of and for the ‘masses’.

According to McGuigan, this was “a wholly illusory and ideologically naïve view” that did not take into account the political economy in which the popular culture industry operates, and the politics of those producing this culture’s products. 

In his 2009 book Cool Capitalism, McGuigan furthered his thesis by stating that a more critical exploration of popular culture products shows that cultural populism had little to do with any kind of cultural rebellion by the ‘masses’, but that it was more about “capitalism incorporating disaffection into capitalism itself.” 

For example, any nature of popular art/fashion/trend exhibiting itself as being rebellious, ‘cool’ or radical is often the brainchild of lucrative cultural industries which turn subversion, rebellion and anger into saleable commodities that are enthusiastically consumed by specifically targeted consumers. 

But what has this to do with political populism? Quite a lot. In 2020, cultural analysts Professor Jo Littler and Marie Moran referenced Jim McGuigan’s critique in their study of cultural populism. According to Littler and Moran there is a relationship between the economy and culture. More than a decade ago, cultural products shaped by popular media began to heighten the presence of economic and social crises (both imagined and real).

The media strengthened a narrative in which the crisis was due to ‘exploitation’, ‘corruption’, immigration, and a failure of the established order. It found a ready market for this angry/activist strand of ‘journalism.’ The ironic bit was, those funding this media-driven narrative were from an economic elite (‘media barons’). 

This thesis restates McGuigan’s conclusion that capitalism incorporates disaffection into capitalism itself. So, one can therefore posit that, in the last two decades, certain economic and political issues began being co-opted by media elites in a faux-angry manner. 

This faux anger was then sold as a commodity to the people. This greatly helped generate support for the kind of populism that mushroomed in the Global North as well as in the Global South. Its emergence wasn’t organic. It was manufactured. 

As mentioned, political populism uses economic populism to make certain pledges that include promises of sweeping economic reforms and so-called ‘pro-people’ economic policies. But it is cultural populism that thrills political populists and their audiences the most. According to the Indian academic Professor Somnath Ghosh, political populists often tie their populist economic promises to a mixed bag of emotive issues related to language, race, religion, ethnicity and morality. 

In fact, European political populism has been more cultural than economic. It has created an ‘other’ in the shape of the violent Muslim migrant who is apparently undermining European culture and threatening to destroy European values and the continent’s Christian heritage. 

In the US as well, populism is largely cultural, despite Donald Trump aggressively displaying a form of economic populism. But his core constituency remains Christian nationalists, Evangelical Protestants, social conservatives and ‘nativists’ who believe the US was supposed to be a white, Protestant Christian state built on ‘traditional American values.’ 

In Asia, populism’s constituency is largely middle class, which seamlessly fluctuates between modernity and traditionalism, pop culture and piety, patriotism and protest, conservatism and consumerism, and — at times — between liberalism and outright reactionary-ism. It is thus one of populism’s most unstable variants. 

Like populism in general, cultural populism too aims to demonise and demolish an ‘other’, and a group of elites. On the one hand, present-day populism may be the co-opted product of the very elites it rails against and, on the other hand, the result of one elite using populism to degrade a competing elite.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 27th, 2025