The Populist Moment

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"Populism" is what democracy is called when the people vote for the "wrong" things, like Brexit or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Since 2015, populisms of both the Right and the Left have been challenging Western liberal democratic elites. Thus we are living in "the populist moment." But what does populism mean, and where is it likely to take us?

In The Populist Moment: The End of Right vs. Left, Alain de Benoist argues that populism is not a political ideology like Marxism or liberalism. Nor can it be fundamentally understood in terms of the distinction between Right and Left. Instead, populism is a confrontation between "the people" and political "elites" that have become estranged from or hostile to the people. At the core of populism is the demand that governments actually reflect the interests and identities of the people they are supposed to serve.

The Populist Moment is a unique contribution to contemporary debates on populism. Scholarly treatments of populism tend to be hostile, while friendly treatments tend to be naive. Benoist, however, combines down-to-earth populist sympathies with high-level debates in political theory, including extensive discussions of important thinkers like Jean-Claude Michea, who are little-known outside of the French-speaking world.