Benjamin Studebaker on Populism, Rupert Lowe, and Christopher Nolan.

So the right is definitely populist in much the same way that the left has been populist.

Indeed, you might remember some years ago, populism was assumed to be right-coded much of the time, and people on the left who wanted to be populist had to explain how it was possible to be populist from the left.

So populism, uh, involves a kind of floating signifier.

It can be a term, but often it's, it's a particular leader who can be many different things to many different parts of the populist coalition.

Why do you need this floating signifier leader? Populism arises when the unit that you used to take as the unit that was the base of your activity has fractured or gone away or ceased to be sufficient in itself, and you have to make up for the loss of this unit by constructing an alliance or coalition of other things that don't agree with each other.

And in the course of constructing that alliance, you have to be all things to all the different parts of the alliance.

Now, once you win and you take office, you then have to do certain things, and in doing certain things, you can no longer do everything.

So when you're running for office, each of the parts of the populist coalition imagines, "Yes, we all agree with each other, but I really understand the leader, and the leader really understands me.

And when we get into office, the leader's gonna listen to me.

He's not gonna listen to those other people.

I know the leader.

I've talked to the leader." And this is the case especially for people in the inner circle.

It's not just that ordinary people are deceived in populism.

It's that people in the inner circle think that they know the leader And you see this with Trump.

You know, there's this court politics where the different parts of the populist coalition each think, "Oh, don't worry.

Yes, yes, he says all these other wacky things, but when the time comes, I'll be the one in the room with him, and he'll listen to me.

He's reasonable.

He's a smart guy.

I know him.

I've talked to him." That's what these people say to themselves ultimately.

Uh, so when you're in opposition, it's easy to do populism on the basis of a popular front.

So you say, "Hey, yes, we all disagree with each other, but you know, we all agree that we have to stop the current thing that's in office that we don't like." So when you're in opposition, it's really easy to do populism because you just do it in a negative way and you make a popular front.

But once you approach power or get into office or even if you don't do that, if you run this thing for a long period of time, it tends to be difficult to sustain the level of unity that you start out with.

In the case of Nigel Farage, you know, Nigel Farage has done populism by making himself the floating signifier.

So there are libertarians who want to see the UK Americanized who love Nigel Farage, and then there are also nationalists who are, uh, committed to an old antique version, you know, uh, from, you know, the post-war era of what Britain should be, and they like Nigel Farage.