historical narrative takes in Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society in the 1930s the presidential campaigns of George Wallace in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the ‘90s and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements of the recent Great Recession era.īetween these various expressions of populism, Judis draws an elegant conceptual distinction: At the same time, Judis traces populist politics back historically: in Europe to right-wing anti-tax parties of the ‘70s, and in the United States to the left-leaning People’s Party of the 1890s. Judis relates this international upsurge to the Great Recession that began in 2008 but also to the neoliberal economic policies that have prevailed in both western Europe and the United States since the 1970s or ‘80s: cutting social spending, weakening labor unions, deregulating business, reducing corporate taxes as well as barriers to the movement of capital and workers across international boundaries. Judis is a tightly framed analysis of populism’s recent advances on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has seen comparable surprises in recent years: the sudden rise of left-populist parties Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, a near victory of the right-wing populist Freedom Party candidate in Austria’s 2016 presidential election, and the upset win for Brexit in Britain’s June 2016 referendum, in which the right-populist UK Independence Party played a key role. At the beginning of 2016, not many people expected Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency, nor Bernie Sanders to give Hillary Clinton such strong competition in the Democratic primaries. Populist upsurges can be hard to predict.

Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016)

The populist explosion by john b judis