Review: J.A. Smith’s “Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism”

“So confident were many in the apparent neutrality and sensibility of the third way approach that the difference between Conservatives and Labour, much like the Republicans and the Democrats, started to look merely cosmetic.”

Introduction

J.A. Smith’s Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism, which was released in July 2019 and is available here, is a necessary read for understanding the contemporary political climate from a progressive standpoint. That it is also eminently readable and burgeoning with wit is a serious plus. The book is the latest in a series of works trying to explain the rise of right-wing populism—what I’ve called post-modern conservatism—in a more comprehensive manner. But Other People’s Politics goes beyond many competing volumes in attempting to explain not just populism on the Right, such as the election of President Donald Trump and Brexit—but also populism on the Left, with the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Smith is among the first to aim to systematically distinguish between populism on the Right and on the Left, and he argues persuasively for why emerging social democratic and socialist movements warrant our admiration.

While the populist right and the social democratic left are the primary antagonists in the book, Smith also spends a great deal of time arguing for why “third way” style politics eventually faltered. This came as a surprise to many, since in the aftermath of both September 11th and the Great Recession, it seemed like centrist politicians in the vein of Barack Obama and David Cameron had maintained a firm grip on power and stabilized potential resentments. Smith’s argument is that the momentary reprisal granted to third way politicians distracted from the more significant and epoch-changing development taking place beneath surface-level politics. His analysis is sweeping but never inaccessible, taking in everything from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to digital aesthetics.

The book also speaks to a real need on the part of progressives to go beyond just condemning the Right—and towards trying to understand it.

The Center Cannot Hold

Smith’s book opens with his reflections on Blairism. In the 1990s, during his own political ascension, Tony Blair famously reoriented the Labour Party towards a more centrist position as a reaction to the neoliberal reforms of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Once Labour managed to defeat the Conservative Party in 1997, Blair quickly went about propagating the apparently ideology-less “third way,” which distanced itself from the extremes of the Right and the Left. But, as the late Mark Fisher observes, this was never very true in practice. One of the features of Blairism was an acceptance of the Thatcherite dictum that there “was no alternative” to neoliberalization. All that “New” Labour could accomplish was softening its worst elements.

So confident were many in the apparent neutrality and sensibility of this approach that the difference between Conservatives and Labour, much like the Republicans and the Democrats, started to look merely cosmetic. Conservatives would come into power and slash taxes on the wealthy, cut a few social programs, and be more bellicose in supporting military force as a solution to foreign policy dilemmas. Labour and other nominally “left” parties would come in and raise taxes by a few percentage points, restore a few small-scale social programs, and express regret over the necessity of using force while still being willing to do so. Neither would try to change that much. So quiescent was this approach that when the populations of various countries came to demand radical change, third way politicians and their cultural allies were shocked. As put by Smith:

“The…problem with Blair’s imputation of the result to a ‘convergence’ of right and left and a ceding of the center ground, 3 Preface is the simple fact that it was centrism that called the referendum (Cameron’s faith in the electoral power of his personal affability and self-vision as a Blair-like maneuverer of his own party) and centrism that had established the conditions for its loss (Blair’s own historical policy of driving forward European integration while making only spectral efforts to justify it to the country). It also misses that the great organs of the political center, The Economist magazine, The Independent, and The Financial Times, conspired in the result when they endorsed a Conservative Party that had the referendum in its manifesto in the 2015 General Election. UK centrism’s high-stakes arrogance was matched only by the ‘Pied Piper strategy’ simultaneously adopted by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the US, which instructed media allies to elevate Donald Trump’s candidature in the Republican primary, on the assumption that he would be the easiest candidate for Clinton to beat.”