Zohran, Zack and the necessity - and limits - of left populism

💚 Zohran and Zack 💚

Is there a symbolism we can find in the fact that these two excitingly energetic, righteously angry, charmingly smiling outsiders shaking up global left politics both have names starting with Z?*

Does it mean we've reached the end of the line? That, after this, we need to find a new political alphabet altogether?

I hope so.

I feel more than a bit churlish, given how much hope these new left populists are generating, to be making a critique. And, as usual at the moment, I don't claim to have clear answers. I have thoughts and concerns and ideas that are struggling to find a path through contradictory feelings. And, given how much their populism is inspiring people here in Australia and around the world, it seems important to make time to puzzle through those thoughts and concerns and ideas. Which is the point of this blogletter, facing up to reality here between the no longer and the not yet.**

To be clear: what Mamdani and Polanski and co are doing is necessary - and genuinely awesome!

It's so crucial that we have politicians who are willing to shine a bright, clear light on the corruption and evils of the kleptocratic politics of capitalism, exposing how it misdirects legitimate anger away from the billionaires and onto marginalised communities.

It's so crucial that we cultivate and energise movements that bring together huge numbers of people with clear goals and a broad sense of solidarity, a recognition of their collective interests - movements that, rather than blaming voters (calling them deplorables), blames those who distort and misdirect, and reaches across the abyss to find common humanity (see MAGA for Mamdani).

It's so crucial that we build political movements that focus on issues that matter to people in their lives, and draw the connections to systemic barriers and structures of power.

It's so crucial that we push past the standard offer of the centre/left that says nothing good is possible, that you have to settle for less, that asking for a better world is unreasonable, childish, and causing problems for the adults in the room.

It's so wonderful that, for the first time in goodness knows how long, we have some leaders on the left who are relentlessly positive and upbeat - smiling and excited about opportunities, filling their campaigns with fun and joy! What a YUUUGE change from Bernie and Corbyn, with their tendency to be powerfully grumpy!

But I wonder...

While left populism helps break open our imaginations of what is possible in politics, does it also limit our imaginations to the constraints of the existing political system? Does it create hope only to inevitably disappoint, blowing up the possible and leading to fascist reaction? Or can it carefully carve out and cultivate space in which a better world can actually grow?

Are its core contradictions - being an adversarial process that aims towards coexistence; being a critique of the system that needs the system to work - too great? How could the approach be finessed to transform those contradictions into pathways to something beyond the end of the political alphabet?

Before we go any further, we'd better define this word.

In her excellent small book, For A Left Populism, Chantal Mouffe uses her colleague Ernesto Laclau's definition of populism as:

a discursive strategy of constructing a political frontier dividing society into two camps and calling for the mobilisation of the 'underdog' against 'those in power'. It is not an ideology and cannot be attributed a specific programmatic content. Nor is it a political regime. It is a way of doing politics...

So, populism is a way of presenting your politics that sets "the people" against an elite other. It's not about policies or ideology, structures or systems.

Mouffe identifies (back in 2018) that we're in a "populist moment" because "the dominant hegemony is being destabilised by the multiplication of unsatisfied demands." Populism emerges because politics is broken, because it is failing to fix the very real crises in people's lives. And populism grows because populists are willing to actually name the fact of broken politics that people are experiencing.

Importantly, it also does this by rallying around a charismatic leader.

In this populist moment, we see "the people" against the shadowy and powerful "other" in the Trumpist "drain the swamp", pointing at "the deep state" and various QAnon conspiracies, and embracing the fascist Great Replacement narrative. We see it in Orban's targeting of Soros, Modi's Hindutva, and the particularly Aussie "immigrants are making the traffic worse". And we see the same approach, with a completely different political program and ideology, in Bernie Sanders' pitting "the people" against Wall Street and Zack Polanski's "we're all running to keep up" while the wealth is gushing to the billionaires.

There are vital differences, of course, between right and left populism.

Mouffe usefully articulates how, while the right defines "the people" racially and nationalistically, the left defines it democratically. This also underpins the difference between the left's systemic anger at the other and the right's personal hate (Mouffe's agonism (struggle) vs antagonism).

I think it's important also to recognise that left populism actually needs a "people" to rise, whereas the right can manufacture it, at least at various stages of its growth. The media narrative obscures the role of power and money behind right wing "populism". One Nation's current rise isn't because Pauline Hanson is suddenly great at politics. It's because, in addition to the context of the populist moment, Gina Rinehart and The Australian and Advance and others have decided to throw their enormous heft behind her.

But I think there's another key difference between left and right populism - one that presents a huge problem to the left and goes to the core of my question. Right wing populism is internally consistent, while left wing has a contradiction at its heart.

The right needs the chaos. They want to prove the failure of the system and build (willing or cynical) acceptance of authoritarian rule.

Left wing populism, on the other hand, needs to deliver on its promises. While saying the system is broken, it needs the system to be made to work for us.

Left wing populists say "if you join us, if we do this thing together, we can fix politics and make government work to improve our lives!" But... can we? There is a HUGE responsibility then to actually succeed, against enormous odds - against entrenched forces of power, but also against the tremendous inertia of a sclerotic system. And the consequences of failure are dire.

So many people in the Greens here in Australia, and in the left around the world, are looking at Zohran and Zack and wishing desperately that we could replicate their success, wanting to know the secret sauce to making it happen here. It's reinvigorating their trust... in a dead system.

That genuinely scares me.

Let's go a bit deeper.

Left wing populism needs a whole lot of things to go very right. You can't just replicate messages and tactics in a new place.

Thinking about both Mamdani and Polanski, it's undeniable that both are extraordinarily charismatic leaders, with their megawatt smiles and natural ability to connect with people at a human level. Without in any way being rude about the many highly talented political leaders I've had the privilege to know around the Australian Green left over decades, this isn't something that you see often. And in the absence of that charisma, the same messages and tactics find it harder to cut through. Populism does need a charismatic leader to carry the movement's hopes and energies. Even if we don't always recognise charisma across political difference (Yes, to some people, Pauline Hanson actually is...). And especially if it doesn't have money behind it to manufacture the cut through.

There's a challenge waiting for us in the person of charismatic leaders, too, though, isn't there? As adrienne marie brown writes, “Lifting people up based on personality replicates the dynamics of power and hierarchy that movements claim to be dismantling” (Emergent Strategy p100). Left populism is democratic movement building, relying on not just widespread engagement but on helping people cultivate their own agency. The presence of a charismatic leader can inspire that, but can easily also put it in jeopardy if that leader isn't willing to be held to account, and be truly answerable to the movement, and if the movement isn't truly willing to hold them to account rather than fall in behind them, trusting them to fix stuff.

So charisma is necessary as well as potentially problematic. But, without an enabling context, it also isn't enough. And both Mamdani and Polanski have benefited from ideal context, both economically and politically. Not only are we in a powerful populist moment, with the broad failure of the political system, but consider the alternatives each has been pitted against. Mamdani faced the awful opponent from central casting in Cuomo, and the panicked response of the Democratic establishment only helped his campaign (in the same way that Clinton - the establishment candidate par excellence - was the best opponent Trump could have wished for in 2016). For Polanski, if the atrociously poor Labour government weren't enough, the excitement and immediate implosion of the Corbyn/Sultana Your Party experiment sealed the deal. (See also One Nation rising because the Coalition is such a hot mess).***

You can't plan for this stuff. You can be ready, but you can't plan. Waiting for luck is not a strategy.

Similar to the risks of a democratic movement relying on a charismatic leader, there's a structural contradiction in the fundamentally adversarial nature of left populism. Again, while right populism needs a divided community, the left inherently wants cooperative coexistence. As I wrote in Living Democracy, this doesn't imply magical-thinking assumptions about everyone getting along. It understands and needs conflict across difference, but with skills and structures for working through conflict effectively.

So, yes, all politics needs some adversarialism, but a politics which is structurally adversarial drives us into what Sarah Stein Lubrano calls "wildly unhelpful binaries" which then risk encouraging inanity and discouraging serious conversation, discouraging actually working to change people's minds rather than telling them they're wrong so you feel better about yourself. Consequently, at its worst, it often doesn't just sideline but actively distrusts genuine community-building that seeks to bring people together across difference, opening our doors and hearts to people to change their minds (not just to enter a coalition of convenience with their prejudices). To be clear, I'm not saying either the Mamdani or Polanski projects are currently doing this. They're actually doing a remarkable job so far of avoiding it. But the "the people vs the powerful" structure of populism presents it as a risk to be managed.

I'm going to return to this rather large and tricky question of adversarialism in campaigning in the hopefully not too distant future, so forgive me for raising it and moving on for now.

A related risk here is that this binary structure of populism is necessarily simplifying - both of causes and solutions. And this is a trap which I do worry both Zohran and Zack fall into. There is a sophisticated systemic critique underpinning their politics, but the rhetoric boils it down to oversimplified lines about donations and taxes. Instead of grappling with complexity, recognising how fundamentally entangled capital and liberal democracy are, they encourage supporters to believe a simple fix is feasible. That only takes you so far before you hit structural barriers and need to start dismantling systems and constructing new ones.

Importantly, following that critique a bit further, neither of the campaigns actually has particularly radical political programs, despite being predictably attacked as such. If you're going to be called a communist anyway, maybe you should propose more than a 2% wealth tax, cheaper childcare, and a handful of cooperative grocery stores? Not that these policies wouldn't be incredibly welcome, but they couldn't be called truly be transformative. And I'm not complaining about that simply because I want them to be more radical. I'm making the point because it could be a big problem. There's a fundamental mismatch between the rhetoric and the actual difference these policies will make in people's lives. And if voters are expecting great change and don't get it, their disappointment is likely to manifest in backlash. Backlash which, right now, is the highway to fascism.

Even without going that far, these less-than-transformative policies betray a problematic limiting of the imaginary of what is politically possible sitting at the core of a politics which is supposed to blast the possibilities wide open. Or at least its rhetoric tells us it's supposed to.

Which brings me back to the core of my critique. Left populism says politics is broken, government is failing people - and it is. But then it says "vote for us and we'll fix it for you".

There's a cultural question here about how we relate to each other, to power, and to politics. The left populist approach is still what, in Living Democracy, I call supplicant politics - it is still building power, cultivating people's agency, only to abdicate that power, abandon that agency, to a system that we simply cannot control.

Mamdani's powerful election night speech acknowledged this tension. Telling his adoring supporters that the campaign "started with an electoral project and became so much more", he declared: "No longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do." He effectively told the crowd to keep the movement going - not only to pressure their opponents and those they will need to negotiate outcomes with, but to hold him to account. I'm sure he knows that the system will grab him and try to hold him back, tell him it's not possible, give him poor advice, or even lie to him. Or, if all that fails, act to overthrow him.

He has to know that, because he understands history. His parents have famously witnessed, observed, and recorded the cooption and corruption of both revolutionary and reformist movements. In recent years, he will have seen the rise and fall of Syriza in Greece - bursting onto the scene with such promise and collapsing around its internal contradictions and the external pressures of the EU.

As we've seen with the ALP over decades now, and are beginning to see with Greens parties that find their way into government (hello), it's remarkable and confronting how quickly you get to "well, somebody has to make the decisions, and it's better for it to be us, even if we are compromising our values when we do so because we have to hold onto power..." The challenges of shared government, the inertia and conservatism of the public service, the sclerosis of the system as a whole, drag very good people with wonderful principles into managerialist incrementalism.

That's before we even get to the Allende (or even Whitlam?) scenario. The entwined power of capital and state will attack and destroy efforts to rein it in, whether by gumming up the wheels or staging a coup.

The system is broken. To the extent that it ever "worked". Populism declares it so.

But can populism make something else possible?

Can it, as I suggested at the start, transform its contradictions into pathways towards a new world?

I'm not sure. But I have two ideas I want to briefly test out before finishing.

Firstly, what if the new left populism could truly embrace the ideas and practices of politics that goes beyond electoralism?

Consider the way Zack's leadership has driven a spectacular increase in membership of the Green Party of England and Wales. Last I saw reported, active financial membership of the party had nearly tripled to 180,000!

What could you do if you mobilised that membership to do more than deliver letterbox drops, or even doorknock people?

Imagine - 180,000 active members! What if...

What if you said, "yes, politics is broken. It works for the big end of town, at your expense. But we can do it better, together. We can look after each other, and get on with improving everyone's lives, collectively"?

What if you had 10,000 affinity groups of a dozen to 20 people, gathering in towns and cities and municipalities all around that small, damp island, challenging each other to come up with creative, engaging ways to actually help the communities they live in come together and make life better? What if the Green Party of England and Wales launched decentralised mutual aid hubs and drop-in centres, walking school buses and community gardens, river clean-ups and rewilding projects, household support working bees and, yes, community assemblies?

What if you said "the people" can best challenge "power" by dissolving it, by decentralising it, by taking hold of it and using it together and not giving it back?

I am convinced that, by doing that, you're also more likely to actually get elected. And, once elected, you're more likely to recognise that power doesn't belong in parliaments and councils, and be ready to use those spaces to devolve it back into the streets and suburbs. And the communities will be more ready, and better equipped, to hold you and your colleagues in those parliaments and councils to account.

Which brings me to my final question - and one I'm struggling with a lot.

Can you use government effectively to devolve power into the streets and suburbs? How does it work, to use a system designed to centralise and control both physical spaces and decision-making spaces, to decentralise and give up control?

There are a few obvious ideas, mostly around creating better social and democratic infrastructure, like Sarah Stein Lubrano suggests, and like Mamdani is starting on. Free public transport and affordable childcare and capped rent are examples of this - government actually directing funds into spaces that don't just directly help people in their day-to-day lives but enable people to do more in those lives. They open up more space for cultivating and holding power in the community.

But they only do that if those spaces exist. And if those spaces are more attractive and more available than ordering Uber Eats and watching Netflix, which is all most of us have the energy for in late capitalism.

Yes, government can make more accessible green space and more libraries; it can open up more land for urban farming and create tax breaks or use contracting policies to support co-ops. But only people can make them actually come alive. And stay alive.

All of this requires people with energy and commitment to bring their communities together and to hold them together. And when those people are distracted by electoralism, trying to change the bums on seats making decisions, they have less time for the truly important work of changing the world from the ground up, of actually helping people improve their lives where they live.

"If our questions are about how we win the next political campaign, we may "figure it out," but it won't lead us to liberation". So wrote nonviolence practitioner and trainer, Kazu Haga, in his new book, Fierce Vulnerability (p179).

That's the challenge for left populism.

We have to figure out a way to be hopeful, and run hopeful campaigns that inspire hope for a better world, without investing that hope in a system that cannot deliver (the no longer), instead redirecting that hope into the possibility of something new (the not yet).

Is it possible to be honest that this system cannot deliver while still being relentlessly upbeat and engaging and inspiring and creative?

I think it is.

But only once we're ready to say that we're done trying to fix the system, we're done managing its decline, and we're here only to the extent that we can use it to cultivate spaces for its replacement!

That's when we'll be past Z, into a whole new political alphabet.

* I'm not including Zarah Sultana, because I don't see her as a left populist, nor is her project with fellow old skool socialist Jeremy Corbyn doing anything much to shake up politics. Other, of course, than its utter implosion, which, as noted, is partly what is opening space for Zack to move into.

** Obligatory mention of Hannah Arendt relegated to footnote. If you're new here, welcome(!) and please read this introduction to this concept.

*** It's also worth mentioning that the existence of alternative / dissenting Jewish voices, stronger now than at any time since 1967, has provided both cover and support for Mamdani and Polanski that Jeremy Corbyn (and previous Australian Greens campaigns) might have wished for.