Confusionism, Frank Furedi and Spiked.

From ‘Living Marxism’ to this...

In the process of writing about populism and confusionism I’ve found this book, Pour l’amour du peuple. Histoire du populisme en France, XIXᵉ-XXIᵉ siècle Marc Lazar important.   Lazar, who wrote the brilliant, and short Communisme une passion française (2002/2025), considers France a “the cradle of populism in Europe and one of its favoured lands”. Lazar underlines the importance of the ‘chief’ in populist movements, “charismatic and plebiscitary”, who personifies the people’s will.

French history, he notes, is full of episodes where populist actors ”  thrive on the antagonism they strive to establish between the elite minority and the mass of the population. “

From General Boulanger in 1887, who intended to personify the Republic, loathing the Parliamentary 3rd Republic, the anti-Parliamentarian Ligues of the 1930s, who ended in the Vichy Collaboration, 1950s Poujadism, the “neo-populism” of Jean-Marie Le Pen and today’s Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblment National, as well as efforts to create a left wing’ populism,. there are certain “invariant” characteristics. populisms exalt the People, and the Nation, while always finding scapegoats and enemies. They are structured around a strong, overwhelming, Leader, Marine le Pen, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who appeals to the “collective” providing that it is at his “service and obéissant” (Page 215).

This is a very overdrawn picture of the leader of La France insoumise (LFI), whose movement has dropped its ‘populism’ for an appeal to a diverse Nouvelle France reflected in its recently elected figures in the local elections. But LFI retains its Chief.

What separates populism from fascism post-war is that nobody is in a position to establish a totalitarian state, or anything resembling it, in Europe, or the ‘West’. Left wing populism, a term whose, largely intellectual, fashion has largely gone, though revived to an extent around the Green Party, refers rather to efforts to rouse the electorate, the ‘people’, rather than rule by Plebiscite.

But authoritarianism, and illiberalism are important. It is clear that the last two words can be applied to groups like the RN, Reform, Restore, and, well see the following.

Cde Nick Cohen writes:

Orbán’s courtiers run out of excuses Frank Furedi and the vacuity of the radical right

“Furedi is about to publish In Defence of Populism (Polity Press). Although it is as cowardly as his refusal to criticise Orbán, it is worth a glance because it unwittingly reveals how the enemies of the radical right can fight it.

Furedi is the first populist thinker to perform a move I expect we will soon see everywhere. He slyly disassociates himself from the actual records of populists in power so he can avoid responsibility.”

FAVERSHAM, U.K. — Frank Furedi, one of the European populist right’s intellectual darlings, has a nagging anxiety. What if they gain power, then blow it?

A Hungarian-born sociologist who spent decades on the political fringes himself, Furedi now runs MCC Brussels, a think tank backed by Viktor Orbán’s Budapest government. It aims to challenge what he calls the European Union’s liberal consensus — and help sharpen the ideas of a rising populist right.

Speaking in his home office in the English market town of Faversham, where he was recovering from a recent illness, the 78-year-old professional provocateur — who has risen to prominence in Europe’s right-wing circles — hailed what he sees as the impending collapse of Europe’s political center (sic). But he also questioned whether the insurgent movements benefiting from that upheaval have the discipline needed to govern if they win.

Politico.

This costs a very unpopulist £20.

“In Defence of Populism. Polity Press. Frank Furedi.

‘Populist’ is now most commonly used as a term of abuse. Populists, we are repeatedly told, are xenophobic ignoramuses offering irrational, emotive solutions to complex problems. But is this true?

Frank Furedi argues that this is a self-serving narrative that owes more to the desire of elites to protect their own power and interests than it does to the truth. The widespread disdain expressed towards populism in the media and by many academics is in fact poorly concealed contempt towards the idea of popular sovereignty and democratic decision-making.

Populism is not equivalent to any specific ideology, as populist politicians vary greatly in their substantive views, but it is rather a broad disposition towards public life that stresses the value of giving the ordinary citizen a genuine voice in political decision-making. Attacks on ‘populism’ most commonly reveal the desire of those who run our institutions to keep real authority in the hands of unaccountable elites who veil their power under the guise of ‘expertise’.

This bracing defence of basic democratic values by one of our most fearless polemicists should be read by anyone who mistakes the complacent assurances of our elite for the wisdom of our betters.”

Oh dear.

О, а я підписаний на цього журналіста давно

https://telex.hu/english/2026/03/26/accusing-investigative-journalists-of-espionage-is-unprecedented-this-is-the-hallmark-of-putin-s-russia-accused-journalist-says

#Hungary #Orban #Russia #EU #Europe #populism #authoritarianism

Ob in #Deutschland, den #USA, #Frankreich oder sonst wo, der rechte #Kulturkampf ist vor allem deshalb erfolgreich, weil der materielle Wohlstand weiter Teile der Arbeiter- und Mittelschicht durch steigende Lebenshaltungskosten evaporiert.

Gleichzeitig fehlt eine positive (demokratische) Zukunftsperspektive, weshalb auch immer mehr Junge hart nach rechts driften. Die rechte Propaganda auf Social Media, aus dem In- wie Ausland (#Putin) rennt offene Türen ein. 1/2

#depol #eupol #chpol #populism

Liam Byrne has a good line on populism:

'Populism today is not simply a movement of grievance. It is a venture, with investors and revenue models. It thrives on the same forces that have reshaped global finance: speed, scale, opacity and the monetising of volatility....

[And] they are incentivised to keep countries in a permanent state of agitation. When volatility becomes the product, calm becomes the enemy'!

Populism is essentially disaster capitalism

#Populism #politics
h/t FT

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Anton Jäger. Review.

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Anton Jäger 

Was America, asks Anton Jäger, citing Jean Baudrillard, in the late 1980s showing signs of hysteresis, “the process by which something continues to develop by inertia whereby an effect persists even when its cause has disappeared” ? Lacking real international opposition from an anti-capitalist alternative – the Stalinist model – Washington’s enemies, one would evidently underline Iran, exist but without offering serious competition.

The final chapter of Hyperpolitics suggests that Baudrillard’s ‘end of History’ reflections, that history is “splintering into scattered fragments” may be ending. That, “events and conflicts from the age of industrial modernity appear to be resurfacing”, if it is not clear whether as “disembodied virtual phenomena” or if “this time history is really returning.”

The ‘populist moment’ of leader focused parties ‘insurgant’ parties (Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession 2023) has faltered on the left. One notes that even La France insoumise now focuses on mobilising la Nouvelle France and not the promotion of Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself.

Anton Jäger offers a stimulating reflection on the replacement of ‘postpolitics, by ‘hyperpolitics’ . This is a world where viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish from one to another.

And yet….One hesitates to describe the battles over anti-Semitism, Gaza, the attack on Iran Islamism, mass murder and genocides, in this vein. in social media exchanges sometimes hallucinatory that they may be, there is hard as nails real reference, not things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.

The term hyperpolitics works until it doesn’t. On the left, the ‘acephalous’ character of protest sometimes looks like an activist headless chicken. But the Greens in England and Wales, now joined by a certain Proudfoot, the leader of a groupuscule once cited by Jäger, the Northern Independence Party, have wind in their sails, mobilising feeling around cause, such as climate change and Gaza, resemble the conventional strategy of the Liberal Democrats, not anything new.

Perhaps it’s better to heed Jager’s suggestion that there is merit in a “re-institutionalisation of political engagement” on the left, based on long-term party/union membership and activism.

On the right, there is social media driven protest against migrants. But national populism is making an equally conventional bid for political power. This, with some echoes of Trump’s MAGA, is, in Farage’s Reform, and in France’s  Rassemblement national, through the conventional mechanisms of local and national elections. It promises if elected to send enormous shock waves to the Parliamentary and Presidential systems of these countries.

The limits to cultural criticism in politics can be shown by referring back to where we started from.

In the 1980s Jean Baudrillard, through the medium of his chronicles in Le Monde, was popular on the critical French left. His articles, collected in the book La Gauche Divine (1985), presented an analysis of how President Mitterrand came to power in France and how political power seduced the French Left and became a simulacrum, a performance, a spectacle.

In the “nouvelle Société informative” people are kept alive, except “life” itself resembles the passengers in suspended animation in the spacecraft Discovery, controlled by computer HAL. The Socialists (then in power), “occupent l’espace virtuel.” hiding from themselves the indifference of the masses for their ‘virtual’ politics.

In 1991 Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu). He claimed that people (that is those not taking part) were unable to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its hyper-real misrepresentation through simulacra.

All that remains of this polemic is that phrase.