To many, “populism” is a shorthand term for pandering to people’s baser instincts, exemplified in Donald Trump’s presidency and the Brexit groundswell. It inflames a desire to blame ethnic and religious minorities; it is a lust for cheap popularity and it is a phony hostility to the establishment and to “the elite” – such is the common understanding. Populist leaders are seen to be posing as outsiders and as representatives of the underdog. Above all, populism is regarded as a rightwing phenomenon. But it’s not that simple – a progressive version of populism exists too.



I first discovered populism when I began teaching investigative journalism in the late 1990s at university. Investigative journalism (originally called muckraking) began in the US around 1900 during what Americans call the Progressive Era. One expression of this was the emergence of a new political party, the People’s party, in 1890–91. It stood for the interests of ordinary people – farmers and workers – against the robber barons in the privately-owned banking, oil and railway industries. Friends and enemies alike described the approach of the People’s party as Populism and its supporters as Populists.

Neoliberalism in Australia has failed to produce a good society

The muckraking journalists were crusaders on issues which they shared with the Populists. For example, in his book The Jungle, writer Upton Sinclair exposed the dangerous and filthy conditions endured by the Chicago meatworkers. Years later his book was recognised as one of the forces behind the introduction of food safety laws.

One of the first female muckrakers, Ida Tarbell, exposed the ruthless practices of Standard Oil in crushing rival companies, in a series of articles published in McClure’s Magazine, and eventually a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. Today, Standard Oil is better known as Exxon and remains a ruthless corporation.

Lincoln Steffens’s book The Shame of the Cities exposed the corruption of political machines linked to gambling, prostitution and bribery. Other muckrakers attacked the role of big money in government and the power of Wall Street. Their journalism, I realised, was a key contribution to the progressive causes shared with the Populists.

The key idea of the Populists was that the interests of ordinary people were in conflict with those of the elite. Some of the Populists had conspiratorial ideas about money and power but their movement was a powerful challenge to aggressive, unregulated big business. To the Australian Labor party, emerging in the same tumultuous decade of the 1890s, the US People’s party was something of a model and there were early proposals to call the new Australian party the People’s party, rather than the Labor party. Having been on the left of politics since my teens, I was fascinated by this history of a forgotten reform movement.

Bernie Sanders attacked the 1% of super-rich who benefited enormously from the globalised economy while others struggled to survive. Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

This progressive strand within American populism re-emerged in 2015–16 when Bernie Sanders competed with Hillary Clinton to become the Democrats’ presidential candidate. At the start of that campaign he was seen as little more than an eccentric man running an unusual campaign. As time went on, observers began to note the cheering, youthful crowds that he drew, his calls for a “political revolution” and his strong social media campaign on Facebook.

Bernie Sanders surprised everyone by doing well enough in the battle for the presidential nomination to win 23 primary and caucus races to Clinton’s 34. Most surprising of all were his campaign’s public statements and appeals. Sanders attacked the 1% of super-rich people who had benefited enormously from the globalised economy while others struggled to survive. In one speech at Liberty University, he said: “In my view there is no economic justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years saw their wealth increase by $170bn”. It was a fact he repeated all through his energetic campaign.

The groundswell of populism soon saw Sanders joined by the leader of the British Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn. From the start of the 2017 election campaign Corbyn framed the contest in the language of progressive populism. He described the election as a battle of the establishment versus the people and promised to overturn “a rigged system” that favoured the rich and powerful. Under him, Labour would not be part of the “cosy club” whose members think it is natural for Britain to be “governed by a ruling elite, the City and the tax dodgers”, he said. His opponents believed such deeply controversial rhetoric was guaranteed to result in a huge loss. But his message cut through the spin and PR fog of traditional political rhetoric.

Driving the emergence of both right- and leftwing populism is the set of policies known as neoliberalism. This became the mindset of the political class in the 1980s and was a very deliberate project to wind back the welfare state, reducing the public sphere with its public goods of health, education, transport and culture, along with the tax system which paid for it. But neoliberal globalisation meant much more than a loosening of trade. It means the unplanned transfer of blue- and white-collar jobs from erstwhile industrial countries to less developed nations. It also means national governments are less able to control what happens in their own society and economy.

‘Small government and deregulation is impeding our response to climate change despite warning signs such as bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef.’ Photograph: BBC NHU

The populist groundswell in the US, Britain and Europe and elsewhere is reflected by similar movements in Australia, prompted by similar causes.

First and most significantly, 30 years of neoliberal globalisation and deregulation have produced a polarisation of wealth which has undermined Australia’s egalitarian ethos. The gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us is widening. We are becoming a more divided society with a tiny wealthy elite at one extreme and a significant group of poor at the other. Neoliberalism in Australia has failed to produce a good society.

The ideology of small government and deregulation is impeding our response to accelerating climate change despite the clear warning signs in record high temperatures and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Whatever combination of market and state arrangements is best at fostering renewable energy, it will need tough government action to defeat the power of the coal and oil industries. To demand such action we need a broad populist coalition of all the diverse forces demanding real action on climate.

As it has in the US and Britain, privatisation is spreading throughout Australian society, changing services that used to be provided to all citizens into profit-making enterprises. The sale of public assets such as seaports, airports and electricity poles and wires has simply created expensive monopolies. Billions have also been wasted in attempting to privatise technical and vocational education. Despite these failures, private companies are now being encouraged to move deeper into education, aged care and disability services.

Likewise, Australia has its own rustbelt of closed factories and, for those in employment, jobs are increasingly casual, part-time and less secure. And thanks to a variety of temporary overseas visa schemes, a casualised, cash-in-hand underclass is spreading in the agriculture, retail and hospitality sectors. Such workers are exploited and their labour conditions undermine those of local workers. The resulting job insecurity combined with low wages is one factor stoking a rightwing populist backlash based on xenophobia and hostility to overseas workers.

At the other end of the scale big corporations do everything they can to avoid paying tax, a practice made easier in the globalised world of neoliberalism. In 2014, the Australian branch of the tech giant Apple paid $80m in tax – just 1% of its total Australian income of $6bn. Similar stories exist about many other corporations. Meanwhile, ordinary Australians are left to pick up the tab for hospitals, roads and schools, effectively subsidising those who refuse to pay their share.

Finally, compounding the problem of wealth inequality, the banking and finance sector has swollen enormously since it was deregulated.

Overall, the spread of neoliberal orthodoxy through society has corroded many of the institutions and relationships on which citizens rely and which offer protection from the vagaries of the market. This orthodoxy has shrunk the democratic space by removing all sorts of functions from the public to the private sphere. The real meaning of “small government” is that we have ended up with a small democracy.

Some see progressive populism as the natural continuation and revival of social democratic and labour politics which have been compromised by their turn to “third way” politics. One political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, argues that the neoliberal consensus between conservative and once-radical workers’ parties has helped create populism because many people feel their voices are unheard in the representative system. The problem is that this often takes the form of a rightwing populism which sees “the people” defined to exclude immigrants and minorities. On this basis many people criticise populism negatively. She responds:

This is a mistake, because populism represents an important dimension of democracy. Democracy understood as “the power of the people” requires the existence of a “demos” – a people. Instead of rejecting the term populist, we should reclaim it.

Populism can be reclaimed – by fostering a progressive version of it which puts the interest of the common man and woman first, ahead of the priorities of a wealthy global elite whose interests and priorities have dominated for far too long.