by Tim Black, spiked
Frank Furedi’s In Defence of Populism is the definitive guide to the forces upending the status quo across the West.
The populist revolt may have gripped Western nations for over a decade now, but it has remained wilfully misunderstood by our political and cultural elites. Countless academics and commentators have portrayed everything from Brexit to MAGA as proto-fascist phenomena – movements of the ill-educated, irrational masses, led by unscrupulous demagogues intent on painting the governing classes as corrupt. The sometimes tenured, always tedious critics offering up these stillborn ‘analyses’ are far more interested in pathologising and demonising populism than in actually understanding it.
This is what makes sociologist Frank Furedi’s new book, In Defence of Populism, such vital, necessary reading. A spiked regular and president of the just-launched think tank, the Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe, Furedi has written easily the most insightful, politically compassionate work available on the socio-political force that has been upending the status quo across the West. An unabashed ‘supporter’ of populism, he sees in it a yearning for social solidarity, for a voice, and for a defence of ‘traditional values in the face of elite hostility’.
As Furedi explains in the introduction, In Defence of Populism was inspired by the Europe-wide farmers’ revolt – that tractor-blockading pushback against an aloof, out-of-touch technocratic elite, intent on imposing way-of-life-destroying measures on agricultural communities, be it in the name of Net Zero in the EU or raising tax revenue in the UK.