Another day another perry anderson banger

The reason populism of the right has enjoyed an advantage over populism of the left is not hard to see. In the neoliberal order, inequality, oligarchy and factor mobility form an interconnected system. Populisms of the right and left can, in differing ways, attack the first two with more or less equally uninhibited vigour. But only the right can assail the third with still greater vehemence, xenophobia towards immigrants operating as its trump card. There, populisms of the left cannot follow without moral suicide. Nor can they easily finesse the problem of immigration, for two reasons. It is not pure myth that business imports cheap labour from abroad – that is, workers typically unprotected by citizenship rights – to depress wages and in some cases to take jobs from local workers, whom any left must seek to defend. Nor is it the case that, in a neoliberal society, voters have usually been consulted about either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad: this has virtually always happened behind their backs, becoming a political issue not ex ante but ex post facto.

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An international regime being lowered into the ground, or rising anew like Lazarus? The stand-off in such expert verdicts has its correlate in the political landscape, where the conflict between neoliberalism and populism, the adversaries that have confronted each other across the West since the turn of the century, has become steadily more explosive, as events of the past weeks show – even if, for all its apparent compromises or setbacks, neoliberalism retains the upper hand. The first has survived only by continuing to reproduce what threatens to bring it down, while the second has grown in magnitude without advancing in meaningful strategy. The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.