God Bless the Misfits

Both those who oppose populism and those who look at it with favor seem to broadly agree that populism is engendered by rapid and deep changes in a society. One way or another, change is supposed to trigger a sense of insecurity. This is the common ground of the left’s and the right’s account for the global rise in populism. The difference lies in their prescriptions for alleviating this insecurity. The left thinks insecurity can be alleviated by strengthening the perception that the government is ready to redistribute riches, ultimately lowering those inequalities seen as a product of the developments that triggered insecurity in the first place. The right bets on nostalgia for a better and safer past and sometimes flirts with protectionism as a means to slow the pace of change. Both tend to consider “individualism” as a problem, to equate it with consumerism or to see it as evidence of the coming apart of social structures. Walking this line you end up arguing for systems in which distribution of wealth aims to be independent from individual efforts (like communism, or a caste system) as the best way to temper the anxiety of change.