populism

A term that entered the vocabulary of American politics with the formation in 1892 of the Populist Party. Most of the party's supporters were small farmers in the South and especially the West of the country. The principal plank in the party's platform was the idea that their supporters' grievances against the banks (who always seemed far too keen to foreclose on their mortgages) and the railroad companies (who were able to charge exorbitant haulage rates because of their monopoly positions) would be best resolved if the state nationalized the land and the railways.

Today, the term is most often used within Marxist and neo-Marxist circles in a broadened and transformed sense to refer to any political movement which seeks to mobilize the people as individuals, rather than as members of a particular socio-economic group, against a state which is considered to be either controlled by vested interests or too powerful in itself (see, for example,, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 1978). For this reason, too, and somewhat ironically since they were promoted by the state itself, the policies of British governments during the 1980s, and the ideology which informed them (so-called Thatcherism), were sometimes described by those on the political left as ‘authoritarian populism’.

Populism has been a potent political force in developing countries-Peronism in Argentina is an obvious example-and has emerged as a major phenomenon in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. In both cases the connections with nationalism are important.