Profits of deceit: Performing populism in polarised times

Abstract

The article is an invited contribution to the special issue to mark the anniversary of the publication of Jim McGuigan’s ‘Cultural Populism’. Drawing on work on authoritarian populism produced by the scholars grouped around the Frankfurt Institute of Research during their war-time exile in the Unites States, this article explores the right-wing populist platforms developed by Donald Trump during and after his presidential campaign and by the two Leave campaigns in the British referendum on European Union membership. It argues that understanding their popular appeal requires us to pay particular attention to the performative styles employed and the ways they mobilise motifs from popular media and direct forms of communicative address to connect with lived experiences, articulate anxieties and present policies that benefit the already privileged as true expressions of the popular interest.

‘Populism is the permanent shadow of representative politics’.

–Muller (2017: 101)

‘Our agenda is not a partisan agenda although some people say that it is. It’s a mainstream, common-sense agenda of the American people’.

–President Donald Trump speaking at a political rally in El Paso, quoted in Eggers (2019: 12)

‘The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all’.

–GK Chesterton (2011 [1908]: 108–109)

Critical populism and critical theory

Jim McGuigan’s animating ambition in writing Cultural Populism was to explore the possibility of developing ‘a critical populism, which can account for both ordinary people’s everyday culture and its material construction by powerful forces beyond [their] immediate comprehension and control’ (McGuigan, 1992: 5 (italics in the original)). Pursuing this project, he argues, requires both ‘greater dialogue between cultural studies and the political economy of culture’ (McGuigan, 1992: 244) and sustained attention to the ‘historical changes in the experiential conditions of ordinary people’ (McGuigan, 1992: 5). In the book’s final section, he turns to the arena of political struggle and it is this strand that I want to pursue here.

Towards the end of the book, he confesses that ‘For us critics, ours is an age of “disorientation”’, marked by events that we feel we do not fully understand (McGuigan, 1992: 246). The unexpected resurgence of right-wing populist movements in two of the world’s oldest democracies, with Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States and the majority vote to leave the European Union (EU) in the referendum held in Britain, has once again discomforted many critical observers. Established commentary saw Trump as unlikely to win either the Republican nomination or the presidency and predicted a majority for the official campaign to remain in the EU, headed by the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who had called the referendum to lance the boil of euro scepticism inside and outside his party. Observers failed to recognise the popular purchase of the imaginaries promoted by Trump and the two parallel campaigns pressing for Britain to exit the EU (Brexit), the official Vote Leave campaign fronted by the former Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign headed by Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). I want to argue here against disorientation and suggest that we can begin to craft an account by taking up Jim McGuigan’s challenge to develop an integrated analysis.

As Chantal Mouffe (2018) has noted, populism ‘is a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms . . . and is compatible with a variety of institutional frameworks’ (p. 11). A range of recent political movements in Latin America and Western and Eastern Europe have been described as ‘populist’, and while they share certain features in common, analysis of particular cases needs to pay close attention to the specific histories and conditions that have shaped them.

Commentary on Trump’s presidency has increasingly turned to comparisons with the inter-war period in Europe (see Riley, 2018). As the historian Geoff Ely has cautioned, however, we should not rush too quickly to draw direct equivalences between contemporary right-wing populisms and the ‘politics calling itself fascist then’ (Ely, 2018). In sharp contrast to the central role of the state under Hitler’s National Socialism, both Trump and the Brexiteers champion minimal state regulation of corporations. But there are continuities, with both the Trump presidency and the Brexit referendum, in the formative conditions and social base of support, in the key narrative themes and performative styles employed, and in the emphasis on direct, unmediated communication with audiences.

Two strands within cultural analysis offer useful starting points for unpacking these communicative dynamics: Raymond Williams’s concept of structures of feeling and the studies of right-wing radio agitation conducted by members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during their war-time exile in the United States in the 1940s.

As Jim McGuigan (2019) has argued, the concept of structures of feeling remains a ‘major contribution to the cultural analysis of our time’ (p. 151). It directs us to look beyond the interrogation of ideologies as sets of assertions about the way the world works to investigate the emotional anchorage of political platforms in the hopes, disappointments and resentments of lived experience. As Williams (1997) points out,

It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt. (p. 132)

As I will argue, it was this ability to connect biographies to histories by binding together the felt dislocations of everyday life with a sense of national decline that invested the political platforms of both Trump and the Brexiteers with an emotional resonance their opponents failed to match.

To this, we need to add the Frankfurt group’s essential argument that under modern conditions, political platforms are never simply stated; they are performed at live events and photo opportunities and through media outlets that offer access to audiences that is either direct and unmediated or provided by compliant media outlets that filter out criticism or dismiss it out of hand. Trump, Johnson and Farage all employed carefully crafted performative styles to present themselves as belonging to ‘the people’ air brushing away their membership of a privileged economic elite wedded to policies that would do little or nothing to improve the lives and life chances of many of their core supporters.

The radio interview Boris Johnson gave while campaigning for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019 exemplifies this strategy perfectly. His salary as a member of parliament, supplemented by substantial earnings from his regular opinion column in the Daily Telegraph and topped up by after-dinner speaking fees and publishing income from his biography of Winston Churchill, placed him solidly within the economic elite. His Oxford University degree in classical literature and civilisations, with reading Greek texts and painting among his relaxations, conferred membership of the traditional cultural elite. In the interview, however, this background of privilege disappeared to be replaced by the concerted projection of ordinariness as he claimed that one of his main hobbies was making model buses out of old wine boxes, adding, in a populist and self-publicising flourish, that he particularly enjoyed including the passengers: ‘I paint the passengers enjoying themselves in a wonderful bus - low carbon, of the kind we brought to the streets of London’, during his term as the capital city’s mayor (quoted in Walker, 2019a).

As a first step to understanding right-wing populism’s popular support, however, we need to take a step back and follow Jim McGuigan’s call to integrate political economy into our analysis and ground the discontents they speak to, in the deepening social impacts of the financialised ‘free’ market version of capitalism, the shifting balance of power in the international order and the intensifying fracture in democratic governance.

Divided democracy

Extending rights to voice and vote with the arrival of the popular press and the universal adult franchise should, in theory, have rendered demonstrations and direct action for change redundant, but, as Robert Michels noted in Political Parties, written in 1911 just as western democracies were moving unevenly towards modern electoral competition, relations between parties and publics are continually open to rupture and breakdown. He sees the emergence of political representation as a relatively well-paid professional occupation, coupled with the increasing organisational complexity and bureaucracy of government, generating ‘a continuous enlargement of the gulf which divides the leaders from the masses’ (Michels, 2001 [1911]: 25). Accusations of self-interest, political careerism, nepotism, capture by special interests and lobbies, and outright corruption open the way for the populist movements that permanently shadow representative politics and for the emergence of political actors claiming ‘to speak in the name of the “real people” as a way of contesting currently powerful elites’ (Muller, 2017: 101).

Opportunities for populist mobilisations expand when people’s material conditions decline and expectations of betterment are dashed. The Nazi Party secured only just over two percent of the vote in the German federal elections of 1928. By 1932, they commanded more than 38 percent, making them the largest parliamentary party. Recent research reveals a strong association between this surge in support and the economic polarisation provoked by the austerity measures introduced by the government between 1930 and 1932 to balance national finances. As the authors note, ‘It was not just the absence of a coherent response to social suffering from government, but also the austerity policies that would worsen suffering’ that led ‘the electorate to radicalise and polarize’ (Galofre-Vila et al., 2019: 3). ‘The lowest status groups and the unemployed turned to the Communist Party’. It was ‘those just above in the economic hierarchy’ who had more to lose who were drawn to the Nazis (Galofre-Vila et al., 2019: 3). The resentment on the right, stoked by eroded material conditions, was amplified by a sense of cultural displacement.

Evictions

In 1929, Sigfried Kracauer (1998 [1929]), one of Weimar Germany’s leading journalists, published a series of articles exploring the changing condition of the Berlin middle class, concluding that they were ‘spiritually homeless’, haunted ‘by a vanished way of life’ and a sense of being forcibly evicted (pp. 88–82). A combination of increasing economic rationalisation and cultural change had eroded their sense of security and personal worth and undermined their hope that the future would be better than the past, fermenting a resentment that Hitler was later to mobilise with devastating effect, promising to replace the national humiliation imposed by the terms of the armistice at the end of World War I with a new resurgent Germany.

This same combination of worsening economic conditions and cultural dispossession was also active in the Brexit debate. In the 1999 elections to the European Parliament, UKIP, launched with the express purpose of campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, attracted only 7 percent of the national vote. By the European election in May 2014, this figure has climbed to 26.6 percent, the largest share of any party, marking UKIP’s transition from the margins to the mainstream of national political life (Ford and Goodwin, 2014: 278). The party found its core base among older, white, workers with minimal education. Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin argue that this group has been ‘left behind’ twice over, first by an erosion in economic security caused by the long-term decline in manufacturing employment compounded by the government’s austerity measures introduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, and second by the marginalisation of their core values ‘once seen as mainstream’ but now ‘regarded as parochial and intolerant’ (Ford and Goodwin, 2014: 277). The rapid expansion of higher education and the growth in professional occupations embedded in globalised cultural circuits has, they argue, opened up a fundamental value divide ‘over national identity, diversity, multiculturalism and social liberalism more generally’ (Ford and Goodwin, 2017: 19).

Research on support for Trump and Brexit by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris underlines the key role played by cultural displacement and a sense of ‘homelessness’, confirming that reaction to deteriorating economic conditions is only part of the explanation and that a full account needs to confront the rising resentment and ‘existential insecurity’ felt by ‘sectors once culturally predominant’ who see ‘their privileges and status’ eroded and ‘familiar traditional norms’ displaced by a rising tide of progressive values. This sense of loss is felt most acutely by the older generation and white men (Inglehart and Norris, 2016). This helps to account for the 61 percent of Conservative Party supporters who voted alongside the 95 percent of UKIP supporters to leave the EU. Their shared sense of cultural erosion and national decline cut across differences in economic circumstance (Moore, 2016).

Other studies confirm that it was the residents of Middle America and Middle England who responded most readily to the solutions to their personal and national discontents proposed by right-wing populism.

The exit polls taken after voting in the 2016 American presidential election showed a clear pattern, with Trump’s support coming disproportionately from white males (67%), those over 45 and those in the middle-income band earning between $50,000 and $99,000. It was lowest among the poorest group with annual incomes of less than $30,000. The great majority of Trump voters believed that their family’s financial situation is worse today than before (78%), were angry about the performance of the federal government (77%) and ranked immigration as the most important problem facing the country (Huang et al., 2016). Trump also garnered overwhelming 81 percent support from evangelical Christians opposed to the liberal cultural turn (Smith and Martinez, 2016).

Religious affiliation was not a significant factor in the Brexit vote, but the social class composition shows a similar pattern with less than a quarter of those voting to Leave (24%) coming from the bottom two social classes as against 59 percent from the non-manual ‘middle’ classes (Dorling, 2016). A more fine-grained analysis reveals that it was people, particularly older people, living in Conservative constituencies that ‘were not doing anything like as well as other Tory areas’ that overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU (Dorling and Tomlinson, 2019: 302).

The populist paradox

Analysis of contested values and identities offers a solution to what otherwise might appear as the paradoxical finding that some of the staunchest support for right-wing populist platforms comes from groups who are likely to see little improvement in their living standards from the economic impact of the policies being advocated.

The ascendency of market fundamentalist economic policies since the early 1980s has installed economic polarisation as the defining feature of social organisation on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, ‘the majority of incomes stagnated or grew only slowly’ from 1979 ‘while the top 0.01 [enjoyed] a 685% rise in real incomes’ and almost quadrupled their share of wealth ‘from less than 3% in the mid 1970’s to over 11% in 2013’ (Sayer, 2015: 5–6). Britain displays a similar pattern with the top 1 percent commanding 53 percent of the country’s personal tradeable wealth, and the bottom half only 6 percent (Dorling, 2014: 22–23).

Trump and the leading proponents of leaving the EU are all securely embedded in the top 1 percent advocating policies that extend neo-liberalism’s assault on corporate regulation and the redirection of wealth upwards. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman (2019) noted, after Trump’s first budget, ‘one clear overwhelming result’ of the proposed tax cuts ‘is a big break for corporations’ and the ‘near-certainty that the vast majority of Americans will be worse off’ as tax receipts to pay for public provision fall further. In Britain, the Government’s own calculations estimated that domestic growth in Britain will decline in the immediate future under all Leave scenarios (House of Commons, 2018).

As Marx and Engels famously argued in their discussion of ideology, any class that aspires to rule ‘is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interests as the common interest’ (Marx and Engels, 1974 [1846]: 65). And as Antonio Gramsci later observed, this is accomplished by selectively orchestrating already embedded popular anxieties and beliefs to construct a new common sense which, as Trump claimed in the quotation that heads this piece, can be presented not as ‘a partisan agenda’ but as the ‘mainstream agenda of the people’.

As argued earlier, this elision of sectional interests is accomplished not only by crafting narratives that connect situated experience to the state of the nation but by establishing an immediate, personalised, connection that liquidates social distance through carefully orchestrated rallies and live appearances, together with mediated spaces offering direct or privileged access to the public domain on terms of intimacy.

As mentioned earlier, one essential resource for exploring these communicative strategies is offered by the work of the critical theorists grouped around the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research as they pursued the explorations of authoritarian populism they had begun in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power during their war-time exile in the United Sates (see Fuchs, 2018; Morelock, 2018).

Anatomies of agitation

Many commentators saw the onset of the severe economic depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash providing fertile soil for the growth of authoritarian populism in the United States. Anxieties crystallised in the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here by the best-selling author Sinclair Lewis published 3 years after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany. It charts the emergence of a United States captured by an authoritarian capitalism draped in the American flag headed by a dictatorial president implacably opposed to open intellectual debate and a liberal press.

Forced into exile when Hitler closed the Institute for Social Research, its members were centrally involved in a comprehensive programme of inquiry into the roots and dynamics of American authoritarianism. This work included Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit, analysing the central themes in the speeches of American right-wing populists. Some were evangelical Christians evoking the fire and brimstone rhetoric of the Bible, but even those who were not called for repentance and promised redemption. Echoing Kracauer’s emphasis on the homelessness felt by citizens whose lives had been dislocated by rapid change, the chapter headed ‘A home for the homeless’ presents populism’s promised national restoration as a decisive rejection of the ‘scourge of internationalism’. In the words of one speaker, they quote, ‘If anything has gone wrong it can be only because we Americans have bothered with concerns that are not American or have strayed from the American way’ (Lowenthal and Guterman, 1949: 96).

Some of the speeches analysed in Prophets of Deceit were delivered at rallies; others were radio broadcasts. Both were forms of direct address designed to forge a personal bond between speaker and audience. Their deployment prefigures many of the techniques later adopted by right-wing cable hosts and Twitter posts, which we will return to presently. Both rallies and radio had been central to Hitler’s propaganda strategy, with the speeches made at his meticulously staged rallies achieving mass distribution through cheap receivers in homes and public spaces. As the two leading members of the Frankfurt group, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (1972) noted, ‘The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer’ enabling him to become ‘omnipresent’ (p. 159). America’s broadcasting system was the opposite of centrally directed but its commercially based pluralism provided a ready platform for populists.

One of the best known was Gerald K Smith, founder of the America First Party. Morris Janowitz’s detailed analysis of his radio broadcasts in Detroit in 1941–1942 revealed a series of recurrent motifs. They included assertions that the government ‘is controlled by undesirable and immoral bureaucrats’, that the ‘United States should not sacrifice its national sovereignty to other members of the United Nations’ and that his ‘enemies are persecuting him’ and deliberately obstructing his plan for restoring the nation (Janowitz, 1944). There are striking continuities here with Trump’s promise to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington bureaucracy, his assertion that multilateral institutions are eroding America’s power and autonomy, his insistence on putting ‘America First’, and his dismissal of media and legal scrutiny of his actions as a ‘witch hunt’ informed by malign motives.

At the same time as Janowitz was detailing the core themes in Smith’s speeches, Theodore Adorno was analysing the radio broadcasts of another leading evangelical populist, Martin Luther Thomas. His performances stood in marked contrast to the routine products of the mass entertainment industry he and Horkheimer dissected in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). Where they saw hit songs and soap operas working with a recurrent store of formulas and formats and promising ‘that nothing changes and nothing unsuitable will appear’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972: 134), Thomas and the other radio agitators were militantly disruptive, disrespectful of authority, revelling in name calling and demanding radical change.

Many accounts of right-wing populism dismiss their followers as politically naive and open to manipulation. Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as ‘deplorables’ is a typical example. This ignores the fact that those crowding his rallies have each made a personal decision to attend often after careful deliberation and sometimes in defiance of friends and family. It also downplays the ‘role of emotion in political life’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018: 766) and Trump’s ability to dramatise deeply rooted structures of feeling.

Adorno’s study of Thomas remained unpublished at the time (see Apostolidis, 2000), but in a later essay, he reflected on his experience, arguing that while detailed dissection of the ways right-wing populist rhetoric activated popular prejudices and distrust of power remained essential, it was also necessary to approach their speeches as performances. ‘Their achievement’, he argued, ‘is a performance reminiscent of the theatre, of sport, and of so-called religious revivals’ which borrows from their rumbustious tone to deliberately ‘violate the taboos which middle-class society has put upon any expressive behaviour on the part of the normal, matter-of-fact citizen’ (Adorno, 1994 [1946]: 166).

Adorno’s emphasis on performance points to the participatory and collaborative nature of populism directing attention to the logics of ‘political recognition’ (Garrido, 2017: 682) that anchor its appeals in lived experience, the pleasures of popular culture, and carnivalesque celebrations of challenges to the established order.

Both the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit debate revived and reworked the core themes the Frankfurt group identified as central to right-wing populist platforms and underlined the importance of performative styles and live and mediated forms of direct address in dramatising and promoting them.

Right-wing populist platforms are organised around three central themes: exclusory definitions of the ‘true’ people; pledges to restore lost glories and implacable opposition to all institutions seen to be questioning or thwarting the popular will.

Assembling ‘the people’

Right-wing populist imaginaries assemble coalitions of support around an absolute binary division between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, promoting an essentialist and exclusive definitions of the ‘people’ based on narratives of shared and unique national histories, conditions, and culture. Elements that do not fit are classified as polluting or threatening, to justify that they be expunged. Calls for greater vigilance in policing physical and cultural borders converge in the demonization of immigrants.

Promises to impose stricter controls on inward migration and expel illegal immigrants were pivotal themes in both Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit debate. Trump’s repeated pledge to build a solid wall along the border with Mexico was matched by the hostility to immigrants that featured prominently in the Brexit campaign, most blatantly in the billboard poster issued by the Leave.EU campaign captioned ‘Breaking Point: The EU has failed us All’, showing a column of refugees who were fleeing the war in Syria approaching the Croatia Slovenia border in 2015. As commentators pointed out, the visual composition was almost identical to footage from a Nazi newsreel depicting a forced march of Bessarabian Jews in Romania in 1941 carrying captions reading ‘parasites undermining their host communities, threatening thousand year-old cultures and bringing with them crime, corruption and chaos’, shown earlier on British television as part of a documentary on the Holocaust (quoted in Bartlett, 2016). Although the poster was immediately condemned by the official Vote Leave campaign, its own publicity continued to insist, fallaciously, that Turkey might join the EU in the near future, opening Britain’s borders to a significant influx of new Muslim migrants.

Restricting immigration and displaying ‘zero tolerance’ towards undocumented and illegal migrants had been central to Conservative Party policy for some time before the referendum. In the summer of 2013, Teresa May as Home Secretary dispatched two vans to tour selected London boroughs displaying large posters reading, ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’, prompting widespread accusations of creating a hostile environment towards migrants. This hostility extended to West Indian citizens who had entered the country as children with parents in the first wave of migration from the Caribbean, invited to fill labour shortages after World War II. Although they had a legal right of residence, they had never been issued with official papers and were redefined as illegal immigrants. Over 80 were forcibly deported and many more lost their jobs or had their state benefits withdrawn (Gentleman, 2019).

Ending the free movement of labour from the EU was central to both Leave campaigns but the emphasis on Turkey, a largely Muslim country, resonated strongly with an already embedded current of Islamophobia (Petley and Richardson, 2011).

In January 1989, a crowd from Bradford’s Muslim community gathered outside the city’s town hall to burn copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous, followed a month later by Ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwa, a sentence of death, against both the author and his publisher. In his chapter in Cultural Populism exploring the event, Jim McGuigan points to the ways that public commentary across the British media rapidly coalesced around a fundamentalist opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’, ossifying ‘meaning, setting it in ideational concrete’. Members of the literati joined the tabloid press in labelling Islam as ‘repulsive’ with little or no recognition of its multiple currents (McGuigan, 1992: 197). Six years later, on 7 July 2005, 52 people were killed by bombs detonated in the London Underground and the top deck of a London bus by the sons of Pakistani migrants, adding violent jihadism to the already firmly embedded image of the Muslim community as indelibly foreign and ‘other’. By 2008, however, British newspapers were carrying marginally more stories highlighting cultural differences between Muslims and the majority population, than items on terrorism (Moore et al., 2008).

By continually recycling images of Islam as symbolic as well as a security threat to ‘our’ values and way of life, press coverage reinforced the binary division at the core of right-wing populist imaginaries, moving it to the centre of public discourse as an entirely normalised position, a position that was further legitimated by senior Conservative politicians. Soon after being dismissed as Foreign Secretary, in August 2018, Boris Johnson used his regular Daily Telegraph column to dismiss Muslim women wearing the burqa, claiming that it was ‘absolutely ridiculous’ to ‘go around looking like letter boxes’ or ‘bank robbers’. Despite criticism, he refused to apologise.

In the wake of the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers in New York, the political threat of Islamic terrorism joined the long-standing fear of cultural displacement in American popular discourse. The assertion that higher birth rates among migrant populations would inevitably install them as the majority, marginalising the white population, was central to the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory promoted by alt-right American media (Hawley, 2019). The Muslim population was singled out for particular attention by Tea Party activists on the right wing of the Republican Party, not only as potential terrorists but as undermining the Christian culture on which the United States was originally based. This resentment fed into a concerted antagonism to Obama who was presented as both a socialist intent on enlarging the scope of the state and a secret Muslim and therefore not a ‘real American’. As one activist told listeners to her radio show, Obama is ‘a closet secular type Muslim, but he’s still a Muslim. He’s no Christian . . . [he’s] a Socialist Communist . . . pretending to be an American’ (quoted in Parker and Barreto, 2013: 2). This deep distrust crystallised in the ‘birther movement’, which claimed that Obama was born in Kenya and not a natural born US citizen and therefore disqualified from being President, and demanded to see his birth certificate. Trump enthusiastically embraced the movement, and when Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate, Trump claimed it was a forged.

Open antagonism to Muslims played a central role in Trump’s presidential campaign. He promised to consider closing all mosques and presented refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria as a particular threat, telling a rally in 2015: ‘They could be ISIS, I don’t know. A 200,000-man army maybe. This could make the Trojan horse look like peanuts’ (quoted in Johnson and Hausloher, 2017). This rhetoric resonated powerfully with his core electoral base, who, despite their differences on other issues, were united in their demand for tough measures to control illegal immigration and their distrust of Muslim migrants (Ekins, 2017). Within weeks of entering the White House, Trump issued Executive Order 13769 (subsequently overturned by the Court of Appeal) suspending entry to all migrants from Syria and six other countries with Muslim majorities.

Restoring old glories

Drives to purge the nation of supposed pollutants are an essential support for right-wing populism’s central promise to restore past glories.

In her first foray into electioneering, Margaret Thatcher lamented that ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of world has gone down and down’ and affirmed her ‘earnest desire to make Great Britain great again’ (quoted in O’Toole, 2019a: 12). She was speaking in 1950, 3 years after Indian independence initiated the long and often bloody retreat from empire when it was already clear that Britain’s position as a major world power was slipping away. Efforts to arrest decline took two forms. The first aimed to continue the close war-time relation with the United States, the new global power, based on shared strategic interests and an assumed common culture. As the historian Linda Colley has pointed out, however, in ‘pursuing empire vicariously’ Britain could only ever be a subordinate partner, ‘clambering like a mouse on the eagle’s head’ (Colley, 2002: 376). The second option was to join the newly formed association of European states offering an extended market for British goods to offset the loss of imperial possessions. In 1973, a Conservative government made the pragmatic decision to join. From the outset, however, a substantial minority within the party were opposed, suspecting that the economic arrangements of the ‘Common Market’ opened the way for greater political integration. There was a growing feeling that Britain had won the war but lost the peace, with a defeated Germany re-emerging as the new economic and political power in Europe intent on unification. This motif resurfaced in the Brexit campaign. A month before the referendum vote, Boris Johnson told readers of the Daily Telegraph that ‘Hitler, various people, tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different means’ (quoted in O’Toole, 2019b: 40). A later Internet post by Leave. EU, during the protracted parliamentary debates on the terms of leaving, made this string of associations explicit. It carried a photograph of the German chancellor Angela Merkel with one arm raised in a pose reminiscent of the Nazi salute with the caption ‘We Didn’t Win Two World Wars to be Pushed Around by a Kraut’ (quoted in Jones 2019).

Presenting England as an ‘island race’, set apart but subject to unwarranted oversight from the EU, was at the core of Nigel Farage’s UKIP platform. As he told supporters in 2013, ‘Britain is different. Our geography puts us apart. Our history puts us apart . . . Let’s stand up and say Give us our country back’ (quoted in Block and Negrine, 2017: 185). His frequent and carefully orchestrated photo opportunities during the referendum campaign pictured him holding an iconic pint of British beer, often surrounded by military veterans and the flag of St George, England’s patron saint. His membership of the European Parliament since 1999 paying him a substantial salary and expenses, his German wife and the German passports held by his children, slid quietly out of shot.

Liberating the nation from the alleged constraints imposed by membership of the EU was also central to the official Leave campaign’s call for Britain to ‘Take Back Control’ over its borders, laws and finances. Boris Johnson took the message around the county in a red bus emblazoned with the slogan, ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’ across its side. It was a hugely successful publicity ploy, trading on the overwhelming popular support for the health service, but deliberately failing to allow for the money returned to Britain every week, which reduced the figure by almost a half, to £1.81 million, or to mention that the bus was manufactured in Germany. Pressing a case for Leave that all authoritative analysis demonstrated was false, and would leave most people worse off, however, required claims to be more than economical with the truth and for awkward questions and alternative arguments to be dismissed as antagonistic to the true will of the people as expressed in the results of the referendum.

During his 5-year tenure as European correspondent of the euro-sceptic national daily newspaper, The Telegraph, Boris Johnson had manufactured a continuous series of false and misleading accounts of EU decisions claiming, among other things, that the ‘directive on bus safety would banish the double-decker, the very emblem of Britain, from London’ (Johnson, 2003). A number of these supposed threats to Britishness resurfaced during the referendum campaign and featured prominently in the targeted Facebook advertising aimed at potential Leave voters. One image, headed ‘The Europeans want to kill our cuppa’, depicted a blue fist draped in the EU flag about to smash a brimming cup of tea with a miniature double-decker London bus and iconic red public telephone box balanced on the saucer. Later, as Foreign Secretary, a post he assumed after the referendum vote, he frequently evoked the past power of empire. While visiting the most sacred Buddhist temple in Myanmar, until restrained by the British Ambassador, he began to recite Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’, written when Myanmar was the British colony of Burma, in which the poem’s cockney narrator mocks the ‘Great God Budd’ and describes a statute of Buddha as a ‘Bloomin idol made of mud’.

The diffuse but deep-rooted nostalgia for the era of empire, when Britain was a major world power, resonated with feelings of declining personal circumstances. Advocates of exiting the EU mobilised this structure of feeling to promote leaving as an opportunity for Britain to regain its central economic position by reinventing ‘its open trading heritage, harnessing its colonial history to integrate itself in the new global economy of the Asian century’ (Kenny and Pearce, 2015). The International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, pursued deeper economic relations with a range of former colonies, now members of the Commonwealth, a project dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’ by sceptical civil servants. Others adamant Leavers saw Britain’s economic future centred on a narrower ‘Anglosphere’ of major English-speaking former colonies: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

Despite his insistence that he is not a racist, Trump’s imagined America is overwhelmingly white. In August 2017, the Unite the Right movement called on supporters to converge on Charlottesville in West Virginia to protest the proposal to remove the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee from the main public park. Many were carrying white supremacist emblems and swastikas. They were met by counter demonstrators, and following a confrontation, a car drove into the crowd killing a young woman and injuring over a dozen others. Trump immediately condemned the violence but when asked for a comment the following week, while conceding that ‘you had some very bad people’ in the Unite the Right ranks, went on to claim that ‘you also had people who were very fine people on both sides’ and that some had simply come to protest the removal of Lee’s statue, adding ‘is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?’. Equating imagined objections to one of the primary contributors to the founding documents of American democracy with opposition to a general who led an insurgency in defence of slavery, and labelling his contemporary defenders as ‘very fine people’, displays a callous dismissal of the continuing legacy of slavery and its multiple injuries.

A selective reading of history also underpinned Trump’s central campaign promise to ‘Make America Great Again’, trading on anxieties that China was overtaking the United States as the world’s leading economic power and claims that the array of international institutions and agreements that America had signed up to were now operating to its disadvantage and detriment. There is no recognition here that America’s post-war supremacy was based on control of global economic arrangements that it had devised, backed where deemed necessary by military force. Since assuming the presidency, Trump has withdrawn from UNESCO and the Paris climate agreement, cancelled the nuclear arms control pact with Russia, withdrawn from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, renegotiated existing trade agreements and imposed sanctions on Chinese imports. This concerted attempt to remake the international order by jettisoning multilateralism and striking new deals on more advantageous terms is central to Trump’s populist promise of national restoration, insistently promoted under the slogan ‘America First’, echoed and amplified by the ubiquitous chants of ‘USA,USA’ at his rallies.

Checking balances

Cementing ties between populist leaders and their supporters requires the intermediate institutions that check abuses of power to be presented as betraying the popular will. Drawing on images from horror and science films, the impartial advice and evidence provided by career civil servants and scientists is characterised as both biased and malign, as a ‘swamp’ in Donald Trump’s words, or a ‘Blob’ in the words of Dominic Cummings, the main organiser of the Vote Leave campaign.

The judicial system is also a major target. When British high court judges ruled that parliament must be consulted before triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, initiating the formal process of leaving the EU, the right-wing Daily Mail carried a banner front-page headline denouncing them as ‘Enemies of the People’.

The violence of these attacks on the professional integrity of judges, civil servants and scientists was reinforced by the precariousness of the mandates secured by both Trump and the Brexiteers. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and owed his presidency to the Electoral College. Referenda frequently require endorsements to secure a clearly specified majority of the vote before ratification. The Leave majority of 51.9 percent would not have passed this test. Added to which, 13 million registered voters ‘did not turn out at the ballot boxes and . . . a further seven million eligible adults’, disproportionately young and members of ethnic communities, ‘were not registered to vote’ (Dorling and Tomlinson, 2019: 23). Under the British constitution, referenda are advisory rather than mandatory, with the final decision on implementation resting with parliament, generating a permanent tension between representative and direct democracy.

Despite the 20 million absent votes and the narrowness of the majority, the government presented leaving the EU as the unchallengeable will of the British people expressed in Prime Minister Teresa May’s tautological declaration that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and her adamant refusal to take account of public and parliamentary support for a remain position that advocated Britain staying in the EU customs union and single market. Pursuing this fundamentalist position entailed repeated attempts to deny parliament a vote on key issues and efforts to deploy archaic provisions introduced before the advent of modern democracy.

In 1539, King Henry VIII reserved for himself powers permitting the monarch to proclaim laws without consulting parliament. Teresa May tried, unsuccessfully, to reactivate these provisions to enable ministers to make unilateral amendments to European laws as they passed onto the British statute book. The appeal to feudal privilege took a surreal turn when, in January 2019, Gerald Batten, the recently elected new leader of UKIP, wrote to the Queen asking her to exercise her monarchical prerogative and suspend parliament to prevent members using ‘any and all means to thwart’ the referendum result in breach of their constitutional obligation to ‘implement the will of the people expressed in a popular vote’ (quoted in Walker, 2019b). A similar pattern of side-stepping open debate in legislative chambers has also marked Donald Trump’s presidency with his frequent resort to executive orders to pursue favoured policies.

The disappearing public sphere

This tension between representative democracy and populist insurgency is fought out on a daily basis in the public spaces provided by the multiple live meetings and media that Jürgen Habermas, the leading member of the second generation of the Frankfurt group, nominated as the essential foundations of a public sphere where citizens come together to work through issues of common concern. In his hugely influential work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1991 [1962]), he imagines them patiently listening to an array of arguments and proposals, carefully weighing them against the available evidence, and prepared to change their position. By the time the book was published, in 1962, however, it was evident that this was an unrealisable ideal. Its partial pursuit within Germany’s public service broadcasting system was offset by the Springer Group’s militantly conservative and image-oriented tabloid newspaper, Bild, launched in 1952. Its huge circulation pointed to a popular politics organised around entertainment and spectacle rather than deliberation. Habermas makes three observations on this trend that are directly relevant to my argument here.

First, he sees political promises being made ‘without placing any obligation whatever on the persons who secure plebiscitary agreement’ to demonstrate their feasibility (Habermas, 1991 [1962]: 217). As mentioned earlier, the pledges made by Trump and Brexiteers to restore lost glories made no mention of the social costs entailed in the radical neo-liberal agendas underpinning their projects.

Second, Habermas (1991 [1962]) argues, popular appeals are orchestrated ‘according to carefully investigated and experimentally tested “psychological parameters” that anchor them in “symbols of identification” rather than “issue-related arguments”’ (p. 217). He was writing at a time when political campaigns were based on mapping electorates by basic markers of social location: class, gender, age. The mass harvesting of Facebook personal data and its deployment in both the Trump and Brexit campaigns to micro manage appeals offered unprecedented new opportunities to link ‘psychological parameters’ and ‘symbols of identification’ (see Wylie, 2019).

Third, Habermas (1991 [1962]) sees ‘press and radio “deployed in the usual manner” [having] practically no effect within the framework of the manufactured public sphere’ (p. 217), since the obligation to provide comprehensive and disinterested coverage of contentious issues has been displaced by partisan media–promoting parties that ‘address themselves to the “people”’ (p. 217). The central role played by Fox News in the Trump campaign and presidency and the Daily Mail’s militant promotion of Brexit have confirmed the prescience of this observation.

As argued earlier, these openly partisan outlets belonged to an ensemble of promotional spaces in which live performance played a central role in dramatising populist platforms.

Wrestling with devils

Trump is not the first prominent American politician to have enjoyed a career in popular media before assuming office. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were both well-known Hollywood actors before successfully running for the governorship of California. He is, however, the first whose image and performance style has been crafted by popular television. From 2004, for the first 14 seasons of its run, he hosted the reality show The Apprentice in which competitors vied for a paid position working on one his property or entertainment projects. It was instrumental in remaking his public image (Braun, 2019). As one staff member working on the show later recalled, ‘he had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king’ (quoted in Frum, 2019).

As Jim McGuigan has argued in his deconstruction of the show, every element was designed to celebrate Trump’s business acumen and the wealth and control it had brought him, from the prominence of Trump Tower in the opening aerial shot over Manhattan, to the suite in the Tower where the contestants go to rest, to the final decision on the winner before an invited audience. As he notes, this climatic presentation, with its celebration of the ‘leader’ and adoring crowds, borrows elements from Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious depiction of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will, to present a denouement to the series that she ‘could not have stage-managed . . . better and filmed . . . to more startling, though cheap effect’ (McGuigan, 2010: 136).

This carefully reconstructed image of a successful entrepreneur prepared to dismiss anyone who failed to rise to challenges was repeatedly anchored by the programme’s signature catch-phrase, ‘You’re fired’, while the on-screen exhortations, at the end of each episode, to ‘Never Settle’ and ‘Let Nothing Get in Your Way’ offered advice on the qualities needed to succeed worthy of a Victorian self-help manual. Taken together, they enabled Trump, like Silvio Berlusconi before him, to present himself as a businessman who got things done, an outsider with no ties to the political establishment, prepared to confront vested interests.

As Naomi Klein (2017) has pointed out, however, the performative style, Trump employed in his rallies owed as much, if not more, to his long association with the televised spectacle of professional wrestling organised by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) under its flamboyant director, Vince McMahon (pp. 51–55). In 1988, Trump successfully bid to host the WWE annual extravaganza, Wrestlemania, at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, and became a regular attendee at matches. In 2007, he interrupted one of McMahon’s prime events by dropping thousands of dollars from the rafters of the auditorium and was challenged to a ‘Battle of the Billionaires’. He and McMahon each nominated a wrestler to represent them with the losing sponsor consenting to have their head shaved in full public view. Trump’s fighter won and he was televised laughingly removing McMahon’s hair. In 2013, Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Trump’s rally performances borrow four key features from his long involvement with professional wrestling. There is the presentation of arguments as an absolute struggle between heroes and villains in which there can only be one victor. There is the frequent use of insulting and demeaning nicknames for opponents: ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘Crazy Joe Biden’, ‘Cheatin’ Obama’. There is the continual encouragement to the crowd to chant abuse: ‘Lock her up’. And there is tolerance, even admiration, for physical violence. In 2017, Greg Gianforte, a Republican candidate for Congress in Montana, annoyed at questioning by a reporter from The Guardian body slammed and punched him, both standard moves in wrestling. The following year, with Gianforte successfully elected, Trump held a rally in Montana remarking that ‘any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my guy’ (quoted BBC News, 2018).

In July 2017, Trump gleefully confirmed his own violent antagonism to critical media coverage, posting a re-edited video on his Twitter feed showing him punching McMahon on the floor during Wrestlemania 23 with the CNN logo substituted for McMahon’s head and the caption ‘FNN Fraud News Network’ running along the bottom of the screen. Attacks on the mainstream media have been a constant theme in his public pronouncements. In February 2017, after an ill-tempered press conference, he posted a particularly aggressive Tweet: ‘The FAKE NEWS media (the failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it’s the enemy of the American People!’. Conflating personal interests with the national interest is central to right-wing populism’s claim to be the only true expression of the popular will. It is a claim now bolstered through multiple channels of direct address, as talk radio has been joined by partisan television, proliferating web sites and Twitter posts.

Performative politics

Right-wing talk radio continued to command mass audiences, led by Russ Limbaugh’s national broadcasts from New York launched in 1988. In 2009, he employed groundless accusations that climate change scientists had falsified data on global warming to present academia, science, government and the media as ‘Four Corners of deceit’. ‘We live’, he insisted, ‘in two universes. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated and controlled by the left is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme’ (quoted in Roberts, 2017). This image of established discourse captured by ‘fake’ claims engineered by a politically motivated establishment was enthusiastically embraced by Trump and deployed relentlessly to discredit critics.

By 2009, reactionary positions were being promoted by an expanding pool of right-wing media pundits. As Limbaugh later noted, ‘It was not until the mid-nineties that [he] was joined by other people nationally doing conservatism in the media’ (quoted in Brown 2017: 498). In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine requiring broadcasts on controversial issues to represent competing views was abolished, opening the way for overtly partisan current affairs television. Fox News, launched in 1996, moved into this new discursive space to address a conservative audience that the three established networks had largely neglected.

The panoply of right-wing populist preoccupations was vigorously promoted by an array of Fox presenters, most notably Glenn Beck. Between 2009 and 2011, his 20-minute monologues to camera employed the classic emotive performative style outlined by Adorno, ranging ‘from deep apocalypticism to the warmth of a prayer meeting’ delivered with wild gestures interspersed with tears, in a calculated violation of the accepted professional conventions of measured delivery governing current affairs television (Jutel, 2017: 376). Fox News also took a leading role in promoting the radical right Republican Tea Party movement, giving its rallies extensive advanced publicity and live coverage and acting as a ‘mechanism to mainstream the far right’ by presenting its arguments as non-partisan common sense (Neiwert, 2017: 116), a claim, as noted earlier, Trump later made for his own platform. The Tea Party reciprocated by endorsing that Trump’s presidential campaign (Green, 2018; 186).

Since he assumed the Presidency, Fox News has been Trump’s preferred national television platform by a substantial margin, with, at the time of writing, Fox presenters hosting 42 exclusive interviews with him, as against 10 granted to the other three major networks combined and none to CNN (Mayer, 2019). It is a calculated choice. In 2014, almost half (47%) of those defining themselves as consistently conservative nominated Fox News as their main source of information on politics and government, with 88 percent trusting its coverage (Mitchell et al., 2014). This bond with his core base is extended and reinforced by a continuous stream of tweets. In 2018, he posted 2843 tweets to his 56.6 million Twitter followers, veering between celebrating his accomplishments and denigrating and mocking his critics, often in successive posts (Jin et al., 2018). Observing right-wing radio broadcasts in the 1940s, Adorno (1994 [1946]) noted that that they offered listeners a ‘flight of ideas’ in place of ‘discursive logic’ (p. 165). Trump’s stream of consciousness tweets repeat this pattern. By mimicking the abrupt changes of topic and abusive terms employed in everyday speech, he lays claim to being a ‘regular guy’ with nothing to hide, a true son of the ‘people’ rather than a member of a remote and manipulative political elite.

British broadcast news and current affairs remain subject to regulations requiring balance, ruling out the overt partisanship of Fox News. The national daily press, however, remains dominated by two militantly conservative tabloid titles, the Sun and Mail, that, taken together, accounted in July 2015 for 51.5 percent of total circulation. When the four other conservative supporting titles are added, the total reaches 79.7 percent (Media Reform Coalition, 2015). These titles all supported the Leave position during the referendum campaign, ensuring that it dominated national press coverage, accounting for 41 percent of all articles published in the 6 months before the vote as against 27 percent for Remain (Levy et al., 2016). During and after the referendum, they drew repeatedly on images evoking the Second World War, casting remain supporters as enemies within, labelling made explicit in the boldtype message, ‘Damn the unpatriotic Bemoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the people’ on the Daily Mail front page of 12 October 2016. When Teresa May called a General Election in April 2017 in an effort to bolster her parliamentary majority, the paper’s front page was dominated by her portrait staring out at readers steely eyed, headlined ‘Crush the Saboteurs’.

Analysis of press and broadcast coverage in the crucial last 2 months of Brexit campaigning revealed a debate dominated by two men, both Conservative politicians, the Prime Minister David Cameron arguing for remaining in the EU and Boris Johnson leading the official Leave campaign. Together, they appeared in 44.8 percent of all the items coded. Nigel Farage, heading the unofficial Leave campaign, appeared more often than Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the main parliamentary opposition Labour party, who was campaigning to remain (Deacon et al., 2016).

Both Cameron and Johnson were products of the twin pinnacles of Britain’s elite education system, Eton and Oxford, and both were wealthy, but in the competition to present themselves as representing the best interest of the ‘people’, Johnson enjoyed the advantage. Cameron headed a government that had imposed a regime of austerity and presented leaving the EU as compounding the miseries. An argument his opponents derided as ‘Project Fear’. Johnson offered hope, championing leaving as a new start, drawing on his carefully crafted public image as the opposite of a remote politician, amusing and approachable but willing to bluntly voice popular anxieties and desires. As mayor of London, suspended in mid-air in the Olympic Park when a travelling wire malfunctioned, he was photographed waving two small union jack flags, evoking the mythical war-time spirit of keeping calm and carrying on. During the referendum campaign, he was pictured defending the rights of British fisherman, holding a huge fish next to his cheek. It was a classic populist performance. As Adorno (1994 [1946]) observed of Hitler, he ‘was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics, but just because of them’ (p. 167).

The introduction of commercial radio in Britain in 1973 opened spaces for talk radio and phone-in programmes offering vernacular expressions of right-wing populism a platform they had not enjoyed before. It also introduced presenters with avowedly partisan views. In 2017, Nigel Farage became the host of a show on London’s leading commercial talk station, LBC (2019), promoted as ‘giving listeners the chance to make their point to the man nicknamed Mr Brexit’.

Donald Trump used the same nickname when he called Farage to the podium at a rally in Jackson Mississippi during his presidential campaign. The public association between the two men, and their ideological affinity, was further cemented when Farage became the first overseas politician to be invited to meet Trump after he had secured the presidency, and the two were photographed standing side-by-side in the gold-plated lift in Trump Tower. Both men are smiling broadly, Trump giving the thumbs-up and Farage gesturing to him open-handed like a television host introducing the winner of a game show.

The image is not a ‘selfie’ taken by the men themselves nor a professional posed photograph, but an informal image taken by the director of Farage’s Leave EU campaign, mimicking the intimate moments recorded in family albums. As Jo Littler has argued, it belongs to the genre of images through which the ultra-wealthy perform ordinariness. The two men’s looks of apparent surprise at being where they are render the privileges conferred by social background and education invisible, displaced by an image of two ordinary blokes who ‘made it not just up the ladder but into the gold plated lift’ (Littler, 2019: 12). It speaks to the core neo-liberal meritocratic promise that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough. It is a promise that resonates strongly. When Dave Eggers asked a black vendor of merchandise at a Trump campaign rally if he supported higher taxes for millionaires to pay for free healthcare, he ‘didn’t hesitate’ to answer: ‘No, because one day we might be the millionaires’ (Eggers, 2019: 8).

As mentioned earlier, the forms of direct social address offered by established media are now supplemented and reinforced by carefully targeted messages on social media. As its Campaign Director Dominic Cummings explained, over half of Vote Leave’s officially permitted budget was spent ‘on digital marketing’ aimed particularly at the ‘9 million “persuadables” identified by the data scientists from a variety of sources’ (quoted in Barnett, 2017: 64). The main ‘source’ was information culled, controversially, from Facebook profiles without their owners’ knowledge and used to construct psychological profiles employed in micro-targeting online messages (Cadwalladr, 2017). The resulting personalisation of appeals tapped into individual anxieties and prejudices in ways not possible before.

‘Government for the profits’

Reflecting on Hitler’s rise, Walter Benjamin, a close associate of the Frankfurt group, noted that he had given people ‘an expression while preserving property’ (Benjamin, 1973 [1936]: 243). The quotation heading this section, from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, mentioned earlier makes the same point (quoted in Churchwell, 2019: 11).

Neither Trump nor the Brexiteers advanced critiques of the market fundamentalist variant of financialised capitalism that has destroyed popular prospects of betterment. Their ire is trained on critics and experts who point to market failures and distortions and on the laws and regulatory agencies that place restraints on corporate action. Their policies are designed to grant companies even more freedom while accelerating the redistribution of income to the already wealthy.

Trump’s calculated promotion of his personal business interests by choosing to hold official meetings in Trump-branded hotels and resorts is indicative of an animating capital centric world view while the British Brexiteers call to cut all ties with the EU and trade on World Trade Organisation Rules draws on a long-standing market fundamentalist view that regards EU proposals on corporate taxation and established protocols on workers’ rights, food safety, and environmental protection as unwarranted and wholly objectional restraints on corporate action. While creating conditions that depress living standards and restrict mobility for the majority, they reserve the right to direct investments and funds to wherever they will secure the best return.

This ambition has deep roots. The quotation from GK Chesterton that heads this piece was written against the massive concentrations of wealth at the turn of the 20th century. Recent writers have promoted the rights of the monied to invest and travel wherever they please with unapologetic evangelical zeal. In their 1999 book, The Sovereign Individual, the American investor James Davidson and the editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981, William Rees-Mogg, welcome the advent of a radically polarised world. They imagine the sovereign individuals of the new capitalism living ‘like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion’, free to make and take their money anywhere (Davidson and Rees-Mogg, 1999: 20).

As Andrew Sayer (2015) has pointed out, the militant reassertion of this world view is indicative of a ‘shift in power within the rich: from those whose money comes primarily from control of the production of goods and services, to those who get most of their income from control of existing assets that yield rent, interest or capital gains’ (p. 18).

Donald Trump owes his fortune to the property empire he inherited from his father. Substantial donations to his presidential campaign came from Robert Mercer, the former CEO of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. Mercer was also a leading financial backer of Cambridge Analytica, the company that facilitated the data analytics project that allowed Nigel Farage’s Leave EU campaign to micro-target referendum voters. Farage himself traded on the London Metals Exchange for two decades.

The division between the tangible economy of material manufacture and the rentier economy that generates income from investments and assets was embedded in the fabric of modern capitalism from the outset, but the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of the finance sector initiated in London in 1986 and later taken up on Wall Street has propelled it towards the centre of economic activity and thinking – a centrality confirmed by the 2008 public bail out of the banks and the subsequent issue of additional fiat money through quantitative easing, further boosting the funds available to financial institutions to invest in global shares, financial markets and property – whereas, previously, speculation had been viewed with suspicion and moral censure, in the new cultural climate films and popular fiction celebrated winner-take-all financial dealing as the epitome of sovereign individualism (see Murdock, 2018).

In 1987, a year after the ‘Big Bang’, Gordon Gekko, the totally amoral financier at the centre of Oliver Stone’s hugely successful film Wall Street, popularised ‘Greed is Good’ as the defining slogan of the new era. Three years earlier, the British Virgin Islands had introduced provisions allowing anyone to register a company with no requirement to identify the directors or beneficial owners (see Bernstein, 2019: 22), adding to the already substantial range of financial vehicles locating wealth ‘offshore’ and avoiding national taxes. Under financialised capitalism, ‘Money moves across borders, but laws stay put’ (Bulloch, 2018: 22).

William Rees-Mogg’s son, Jacob, a leading spokesperson for the European Research Group of Conservative Party MPs supporting a fundamentalist variant of Brexit, has shares in and enjoys a substantial income from the investment fund he co-founded, Somerset Capital Management (SCM). When asked in a television interview in 2017, he conceded that ‘The overwhelming opportunity for Brexit is over the next fifty years’ (quoted in Demianyk, 2017). In the meantime, SCM has established a second fund based in Ireland for clients wishing to invest in the EU over the long term, and overall has only 2 percent of its managed assets invested in Britain (Meek, 2019).

Post-pandemic politics

Both Trump and the Brexiteers took the defining fixations of right-wing movements that were once on the margins of public debate - The Tea Party and the alt-right in the United States, UKIP in Britain, and the market fundamentalist think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic – and propelled them to the centre of the competition for control over political culture and legislative agendas, simultaneously normalising their prejudices and polarising public discourse and attitudes.

At the beginning of 2020, these populist projects appeared to be in the ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Supported by a compliant Republican-dominated Senate, Trump had successfully avoided being impeached and with employment buoyant was preparing to run for a second term as President. Following her serial failures to assemble a parliamentary majority for her bill to leave the EU, Teresa May resigned and Boris Johnson was elected as leader by the Conservative Party. Soon after taking over as Prime Minister, he called a general election and, campaigning under the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’, won a landslide majority of 80 parliamentary seats and secured endorsement for a revised bill taking Britain out of the EU. Both populist projects were about to be fundamentally disrupted, however.

2019 ended with doctors in Wuhan in China discovering a novel viral infection in patients, identified a few weeks later as COVID-19, a particularly virulent coronavirus attacking the respiratory system with potentially fatal consequences. Trump regarded it initially as a problem confined to China and, on 31 January, banned anyone who had been there in the last 14 days from entering the United States. A month later, in late February, with cases within the United States steadily mounting, he assured supporters that projections of a mass pandemic were the Democrats’ ‘new hoax’, that ‘Everything is under control’ and ‘It’s going to disappear. One day - it’s like a miracle - it will disappear’ (quoted in Bort, 2020). By late March, however, faced with the worst global health crisis since the 1918 global influenza pandemic that followed World War I, large parts of the country were locked down, with public places closed and people required to stay at home, and, on March 27, Trump signed off the largest federal stimulus package in America history, granting $2.3 trillion to businesses and employees to salvage an economy devastated by infection. Britain followed a similar pattern, relying on voluntary measures for the first 2 months of the pandemic, allowing large public events and declining to follow other countries in introducing mass testing, contact tracing and social isolation. Again, it was not until late March, confronted with rapidly rising death rates, that a nationwide lockdown was imposed, accompanied by ‘the most significant intervention in the economy ever made by a British government in peacetime’, with extensive loans and grants to business and an undertaking to pay 80 percent of furloughed workers’ wages (Butler, 2020: 34).

At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic is still unfolding, but it is already clear that the governments of Trump and Johnson have mishandled the emergency with catastrophic results. Not only has the failure to act on prior reports recommending urgent preparations for an expected pandemic, and the absence of concerted intervention in the early phases, resulted in deaths that might have been avoided, the cumulative cuts to public budgets instituted under neo-liberal economic policies have left health services without the equipment and resources they need to respond adequately to the demands the pandemic imposes.

The result is a profound contradiction. Right-wing populist movements in the United States and Britain, underpinned by a market fundamentalist commitment to increasing the degrees of freedom granted to corporations and continuing to redistribute income and wealth upwards, have been forced, once in government, to introduce programmes of state intervention and subsidy on a scale they had previously dismissed as impossible, unworkable and undesirable. This changes radically the terms of debate around a post-pandemic social order. On the one hand, there are voices stridently demanding a return to business as usual, advocating squeezed wages and reduced public spending to address damaged corporate balance sheets and the levels of national debt and incurred by the rescue packages. Added to which, the Trump and Johnson governments have already used the emergency to further centralise political power and they may be tempted to install extended measures for civil control and surveillance, initially introduced on a temporary basis, as permanent fixtures. On the other hand, the scale and depth of disruption opens space for an alternative that addresses the demands for ‘change that exploded in the form of Trump and Brexit’ (Barnett, 2017: 322) by forging a new social contact rooted in a reimagining of the ‘people’. As the analysis presented here suggests, any project for assembling a genuinely popular politics must meet three conditions. First, it needs to propose radical alternatives to financialised capitalism that redefine core resources and services as public goods, reimpose public regulation of corporations, counter inequality and discrimination and develop collective responses to the continuing risks posed by future pandemics and the accelerating climate crisis (see Murdock and Brevini, 2019). Second, it needs to implement reforms to representative democracy that close the gap between parliaments and citizens by developing citizens’ assemblies and other fora for promoting deliberative engagement and participation. Third, as Jim McGuigan (1996) has forcefully reminded us in his work on the cultural public sphere, it needs to craft shared symbolic spaces that speak convincingly to lived experience and aspirations with a vocabulary based on the recognition of mutuality and common fate. The countless acts of generosity, creativity and solidarity in the face of shared adversity that have emerged spontaneously in streets and neighbourhoods during the pandemic offer a promising place to start.