Democratic breakdown, inequality and populism in the 21st Century: line-cutters, ladder-pullers and unreachable elites (Pre-published version)

Abstract

When I began my current research project, which examines as one of its components the underlying causes of contemporary populism, I started with the conviction that both deepening inequality and democratic deficits generated by decades of neo-liberal economic policy were contributing to the current populist surge on the left and the right. The United States and the United Kingdom, where the recent populist surge has been most pronounced, were the first societies where neo-liberal economic policy was applied for a sustained period on a grand scale (Harvey 2005). The history of neo-liberal thought demonstrates that those who developed these ideas were uneasy with democracy and felt it should be limited. Secondly, they recognised that deepening inequality would be an inevitable outcome of the application of their ideas and were willing to live with the societal consequences of that inequality (Dardot and Laval, 2013). In teaching graduate courses on globalization, I often make the distinction between social science understandings of globalization which focus on connectedness – of people, money, media, ideas – and neo-liberal globalization – a specific economic and political project which has been enacted quite deliberately by governments and trans-national institutions influenced by think-tanks and universities since the 1970s. I think both forms of globalization have created sets of pressures which have contributed to the populist surge which we are witnessing.