15. Populist Mobilization in the United States: Adding Political Economy to Cultural Explanations

Populism is looming large on the agenda of the social sciences. In most cases the literature deals with related phenomena in the context of liberal and representative democracies, often defining populism as an anti-pluralist “exclusionary form of identity politics” (Müller,.What is populism?, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016: 3) or as an authoritarian “cultural backlash” (Norris and Inglehart,.Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism, Cambridge University Press, 2019). In this chapter, we try to shift the focus away from populist actors, parties and governments and address instead the political, economic and social contexts in which populism can become successful in mobilizing electoral majorities in the first place. We are less interested in a normative discussion of populism nor do we explore the type of programs populists might pursue once in office (see Lammert, C. (2020). The Crisis of Democracy: The United States in Perspective. In: The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon, eds. B. Vormann and M. Weinman, Routledge, 124–139.; Vormann, B. & M. Weinman (2020). “From a Politics of No Alternative to a Politics of Fear: The Emergence of Illiberalism and its Variants”, in: The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon, eds. Boris Vormann and Michael Weinman, Routledge, 3–26. for such analyses). Rather, we focus on the contexts and scenarios in which populists thrive and to which they vow to offer political and economic alternatives.

In brief, we see populism as the result of specific political and economic developments that dovetail with dynamics of cultural backlash and white resentment. It produces crisis tendencies of its own once populist leaders take office, but is itself not the root cause of democracy’s ailment in the West. We contend that the recent success of populism across so many different country contexts needs to be viewed as a global phenomenon which has produced specific effects in particular institutional and historical contexts. For this chapter, our main focus lies on these developments in the United States.