Why Populism? Why Now? An Introduction

Abstract

On behalf of the engaged and insightful Editorial Board, the remarkable staff at Brill, and myself as Managing Editor, welcome to this first issue of Populism, a new journal published by Brill. As Managing Editor, I appreciate this opportunity to discuss the journal’s genesis and its vision—to articulate its goals and its purpose as we grow and develop what we hope will be a central resource on one of the most significant issues influencing political, social and economic life today: populism. Populism is an international academic journal, grounded in the social sciences but addressing a phenomenon that is as much cultural as it is economic, ideological, social or psychological. Moreover, populism is a local, national, transnational and global phenomenon as well. We seek to understand and analyze populism wherever it occurs, in whatever context it appears. Populism is grounded on the sense that we—all of us living in contemporary society—are in a noteworthy, and perhaps crucial, moment in human history. Where once it was possible for scholars like Francis Fukuyama to imagine that history—defined as the contest between liberal, capitalist democracy and other forms of social organization—had come to its “end,” or where it was once possible for a political commentator like Thomas Friedman to imagine that the world had grown “flat” as the rising tide of globalization lifted all boats into a prosperous, free future, such imaginaries no longer seem credible. History found a way to matter, after all, whether in the rise of political challenges to liberal democracy like that posed by al-Qaeda and similar organizations, or in the near-collapse of the capitalist economy after the US housing crisis in 2008. Subsequent global population shifts in response to economic crisis, climate change, political chaos, and war have intensified nascent or formerly repressed tensions in communities across the world. One response to these varied economic, social, environmental, and political pressures has been the emergence, or re-emergence, of populism in many societies around the globe. Beset by seemingly intractable problems and embedded in political systems in which leaders have offered few if any solutions to contemporary challenges such as deindustrialization, the diminishing of the value of blue-collar labor, and increased intercultural exchanges as populations shift across the world, significant numbers of people worldwide have seemingly decided that elites of some form or another are the cause of society’s