Fascist legacies and populist presents: interrogating the historicity of populism

The relationship between populism and a much more virulent politics that marked, especially though not exclusively, European societies almost ninety years ago – fascism – has been a contentious one. Many scholars have rejected possible connections, while others shied away from engaging with comparisons as, despite the compelling parallels and echoes, the idea of comparing ideologies, movements and organizations that gave rise to the horrific atrocities of WWII to the anti-liberal politics of today seemed oversimplifying. Some, such as Finkelstein (2017), stress connections between populism and fascism in terms of aesthetics, discourse and technologies of governing, suggesting that we disregard such aspects of the genealogy of populism at our peril. So, assuming we accept that this is a path worth following, what can the history and theory of fascism offer to the study of populism and what can we make out of their noteworthy divergences? 

Luca Mannucci’s Populism and Collective Memory constitutes an attempt to engage with such questions in a systematic and innovative way. Premised on the consideration of fascism and populism as contiguous phenomena, marked and largely defined by their shared aversion to liberal democratic politics, but, for the most part belonging to distinct historical eras, Mannucci’s monograph proposes ways of linking the two and learning more about contemporary populism from their experience of fascism in those societies that either populism becomes rooted within, or fails to do so. Mannucci’s central hypothesis is that contemporary populist surges may be explained to a large extent through an analysis of the fascist past of those societies affected, and the ways in which this has been confronted in societal narratives.

To do this, he interestingly distinguishes between the social acceptability of populist discourse from another aspect of populism often used to gauge its success – notably electoral performance. The emphasis on social acceptability provides indeed a better measure of populism’s rootedness in a society as acceptability denotes a more diffuse positive predisposition that may not necessarily translate into a political (in the strict sense) act such as voting, or even activism. In his search for measurable indicators of social acceptability, Mannucci differentiates between ‘the percentage of populist statements in a manifesto’, the ‘degree of radicalism of the party author of the manifesto’ and “the vote share of the party” whose manifesto he examines – what he calls the discursive, political/ideological and electoral dimensions of acceptability. This formula is indeed interesting as it challenges the emphasis on election results and captures the possibility of populist discourse finding its way into other (nonpopulist) party manifestos, transmuting into votes for other parties that do not overtly espouse populist politics. This methodological innovation allows the author to trace populist themes in political discourse since the 1970s among eight countries and across parties of both the left and the right and thus establish a genealogy of populism that election outcomes would not be able to. Yet, despite the original intention to go beyond readily detectable political action and discourse, methodologically, the research underpinning Mannucci’s research does not go far enough, beyond politics-writ-small, as it cannot detect populist elements in the realm of plebeian discontent and indignation that do not eventually find their way into party politics. A telling example from a country that is not included in the eight-country sample of his study is the Spanish Indignados whose supporters and activists eventually voted for substantially diverse political parties – established and new, and whose anti-elitism might have not translated into political manifestos but were reflected in more localized and immediate communications and exchanges. To make up for this, Mannucci relies on long-term historical analysis that allows him to see the emergence and resilience of populist themes over time and allow time for the more amorphous and pre-political expressions of indignation to find their way to the realm of conventional politics. 

Resorting to fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fQCA), the author tests the most common explanations for the success of populism in the literature and suggests that these – most notably high corruption, low accountability and responsiveness, high ideological convergences of the political system, and poor economic performance – fail to consistently account for the social acceptability of populism. Mannucci turns instead to the fascism/populism relation to account for different ways in, and degrees to which, populism has become acceptable in the eight societies in question, suggesting a typology of the ways the former is ingrained in collective memory. Distinguishing between culpabilization, heroization, cancellation, and victimization he suggests that the more stigmatized in collective memory fascism has been the less acceptable right-wing populism becomes, whereas, where fascism is externalized from society through victimization discourses, rightwing populism is more acceptable and carries less stigma. The absence of populism when it is clad in left rhetoric from Mannucci’s analysis is as telling as the correlation of the memory of fascism and rightwing populism and requires discussion that extends beyond the limits of this review but is worth noting nevertheless. 

Despite its reliance on the ideational approach being in some ways contradicted by his assumption that fascism (a contiguous to populism phenomenon) and the concrete ways it has become part of the collective identity and memory (therefore not being a thin ideology but something more), Populism and Collective Memory attempts to ground and historicize the study of populism in a novel way. By asking why populism has found more fertile ground in some Western European countries while, in others, it has not fared as well, despite organizational and rhetorical similarities, it introduces much needed nuance in the analysis of populism. Mannucci’s emphasis, not on electoral politics, but on the social acceptability of populism, and turn to the past in order to make sense of contemporary populist politics points to interesting and promising avenues for much-needed social-historical research. 

References 

Finkelstein, Federico (2017). From Fascism to Populism in History. Oakland: University of California Press.