Bernie used plenty of populist rethoric when he pointed fingers at Wall Street. Mexico's leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is pretty evidently populist. Populism has nothing to do with right or left.
Populism is such an ambiguous word that it can describe any popular movement that violates the norms of acceptable discourse. Very little united the reactionary crowd that welcomed Trump in Phoenix with the left-wing masses that came to protest him except their shared, but pointedly different, disdain for the existing political class. Yet, opinion pieces from
all across our
liberal consensus can be found explaining why left-wing anger is just as dangerous as right-wing rage. Or to put it in other words, that rough or vulgar attempts to defeat fascists are
just as bad as fascism simply because these efforts are rough and vulgar.
The populism narrative can unite disparate movements regardless of ideology or class character, making it easier for the political class to defend their consensus from any serious criticism. When an imaginary sameness is projected onto factions that hate each other, the same arguments can be used to defeat them. This brings to our current terrifying and hazy state of online liberal dialogue, where pundits will accuse
members of a nurse's union of being "alt-left activists" because they aren't enthusiastic about their preferred candidates.
I'm skeptical that populism really exists beyond the rhetoric, because that's all that unites the hundreds of activists from every political locus who've been labelled, generally accusingly, as populists. Because tone and language alone cannot amount to political change, I think this is a pretty stupid thing to get worked up over. But it's foolish to the think people who condemn populism are all cynics struggling to find a moral high ground. Movements that challenge liberal ideology, whether left or right, often do violate the norms of decency that liberals have set up. It's understandable that people within this accepted paradigm will lash out against those who seek to change it. But liberals who obsess over discourse and the norms of acceptability must recognize that activists who oppress people are different from activists who want to save people. It doesn't matter if they both give angry speeches -- their political objectives are directly opposed. Because the far right is always going to play dirty, policing the language of the activist left
inhibits anti-fascist efforts. If liberals continue to pretend that populist movements are interchangeable, we can't work together to defeat those movements which are actually harmful.
(Roosevelt's being the exception.)
