Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

24 Twenty-First Century Populism
workers who were attracted by the Nazis. Third, they may be too much preoccupied
with making a living to join any organization, and the few existing
organizations might either seem unappealing and/or reluctant to take in new
members. In this scenario, individuals therefore find themselves socially isolated
and more exposed to populist leaders offering an experience of (albeit
subordinate) involvement and participation.
In the absence of horizontal ties among their peers, individuals are left to
rely on vertical ties with a leader and long for a sense of, otherwise impossible,
belonging to a community. The overall situation described here is
strongly influenced by the theory of mass society formulated by William
Kornhauser. More precisely, he suggests that those in a mass society ‘lack
attachments to independent groups’ (Kornhauser, 1959: 40) and that ‘the
population is available in that its members lack all those independent social
formations that could serve as a basis of resistance to the elite’ (ibid.: 41).
Most importantly, ‘populism is cause as well as effect in the operation of
mass society’ (ibid.: 103). As a note of caution, given that too few studies exist
on the psycho-sociological conditions of those individuals involved in populist
mobilizations, we could add that, perhaps, it is the very success of populist
propaganda that breaks old associational ties and opens the way for the
direct relationship between newly detached individuals and the populist
leader. In the past, the radio was the very important instrument through
which political propaganda and populist messages could be broadcast. Today,
as indicated by Mazzoleni in his contribution to this book, television has
become paramount in providing resources to populist politicians and in possibly
broadening the audience exposed to their messages and vulnerable.
As regards the conditions making a society especially exposed to populism,
that is, more susceptible to populist incursions, the most important
one is certainly an overall sense of collective malaise. In some extreme cases,
this malaise may turn into a widely shared situation of anxiety, which helps
provide an environment in which any kind of populist/authoritarian experiment
has the opportunity to appear and flourish. The level of authoritarianism
will depend on the degree of existing social and political differentiation,
as well as on the quality of the available technology. In static societies, such
as nineteenth-century Russia, for example, populism is either an intellectual
fantasy or a colossal failure. Only a society in transition may harbour a
more or less modest dose of viable populism. At any point in time in a transitional
society, masses of dislocated individuals represent an obvious target
group for the populist solutions of ambitious political leaders. Today, we
know that, in transitional societies, it is the theocracies in particular that
stand to offer a plausible alternative to populism. And theocracies will try
either to destroy most existing associations or to infiltrate them.
In the past, the most important transitions (Lerner, 1958; Deutsch, 1961)
were those taking place from rural to urban areas, from agricultural to
non-agricultural occupations, from traditional ties to some modern form of