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.

He does look briefly at past populist moments, such as the 19th-century agrarian socialism of the Narodniks in Russia and the People’s Party in America. But his focus is squarely on the 21st-century phenomenon of ‘national populism’ – a mass movement that defends national sovereignty in the face of globalist cosmopolitanism represented by institutions like the European Union. He sets out to explain what has created a mass demand among largely working-class sections of society for the kind of policies represented by the likes of Reform UK, France’s National Rally or the MAGA movement in the US.

In a field dominated by anti-populist academics, who invariably share the prejudices and outlook of the political class itself, Furedi’s exploration of the emergence of national populism stands out for its clarity and insight. Not for him the Nazism-redux narratives of anti-populist hackademics. Instead, he locates national populism’s emergence in the response to what he calls the ‘double betrayal of the people’ – his shorthand for the two mutually reinforcing socio-cultural processes that have transformed Western political life over the past half-century.

The first betrayal develops with the formation of a new generation of elites during the 1960s. Nourished by the counterculture of the era, the political and cultural cohorts that began their ascent during the 1960s and 1970s positioned themselves against what they saw as the deadening, restrictive conformism of their societies’ traditions, mores and common culture. In doing so, they simultaneously began setting themselves against the majority who still cleaved to those traditions, values and ways of life.

Furedi attributes the second betrayal to the left – in particular, the graduate-dominated, middle-class sections of the Western left that began to emerge also during the 1960s and 1970s. From the start, this so-called New Left was marked by its growing distance and estrangement from the working class and its concerns. The New Left, as it gained in influence, slowly but surely transformed the left’s broader worldview. Once shaped by the material, economic imperatives of class politics, the left was being effectively re-oriented around the post-material concerns of the credentialed middle classes. Little wonder a focus on industrial disputes soon gave way to an obsession with ‘identity-related issues’.

Furedi’s betrayal narrative is compelling. He captures well that broad, double-edged cultural turn against the traditions, mores and folkways that had shaped national life in Europe and America for decades.

In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the new political and cultural elites produced by this ‘double betrayal’, this ‘cultural turn’, consolidated their social and political ascendancy.

Politically, they were technocratic and managerial. They ruled in the name of ‘expertise’, taking decision-making power away from the people, and investing it in the hands of external bodies, be they quangos, the judiciary or other unaccountable ‘expert’ entities.

Ideologically, these new elites were identitarian and globalist. They preached the creed of diversity and multiculturalism, saw national states as outmoded, and talked endlessly of issues that transcended the national sphere, especially global warming, which was later rebranded as climate change.

As the 21st century started to take shape, these transnationally oriented, identity-focussed elites were effectively engaged in a culture war against largely working-class and conservative sections of their own societies. Although Furedi himself doesn’t quote it, this conflict is captured well by Britain’s then prime minister Tony Blair in his 2005 Labour Party conference speech:

‘The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.’

This was the essence of the new elites’ worldview. They saw themselves as ‘open’ and ‘swift to adapt’ to the new globalising, increasingly borderless world. At the same time, they cast their opponents as ‘closed’, desperately clinging to national customs and traditions – or to ‘guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, when talking of small-town voters.

It’s this decades-long culture war that explains the birth of national populism. The elite attempt to ‘discredit the way of life through which millions of people gained meaning and understood their place in the world’, as Furedi puts it, produced in people a deep sense of ‘cultural insecurity’, indeed, of cultural loss – and therefore a desire to affirm and retrieve that common culture.

Furedi accepts that the disruptive, revolutionary processes of capitalist modernity, melting all that’s solid into air, have long induced a sense of ‘ontological insecurity’ among individual members of society, as they find their place and roles in the world upended by social, economic and technological change. But the ‘cultural insecurity’ experienced by millions of people throughout the West over the past few decades has been of a different magnitude. Political and cultural elites have, in one Blair-ish breath, welcomed the alienating, upending forces of so-called globalisation, from mass migration to the movement of capital. In the other breath, they have actively sought to estrange people from their own common culture, casting their views, values and ways of life as backwards and bigoted.

The national-populist demand emerges from this experience of cultural insecurity and loss. It arrives, as Furedi puts it, as a ‘response to the attempt by an increasingly distrusted elite to impose a way of life foreign to the traditions and outlook of millions of people’. Furedi doesn’t ignore the economic factors at play, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. But these economic travails merely compounded the pre-existing cultural insecurity of the working-class bedrock of populism.

It’s in Furedi’s discussion of the substance of the populist revolt that we arrive at arguably the richest, most suggestive parts of In Defence of Populism. For it is here that he turns his attention to that which the populist spirit seeks to retrieve, conserve and affirm – namely, the ‘pre-political realm’.

For Furedi, the pre-political sphere refers to the informal, non-state social relationships that have always been historically and logically prior to the establishment of a formal political community. Indeed, as Furedi has it, the bonds forged in the pre-political realm, through the experience of generations inhabiting a common space, ‘provide the sense of belonging, common heritage and way of life’ on which the political community of the nation itself rests.

As Furedi explains, drawing on a tradition of thought from Aristotle to JS Mill, this informal, pre-political sphere used to be left alone by both the left and right of politics. The pre-political was effectively accepted as a private realm – a space in which people were largely free to pursue life as they saw fit, sustaining a rich, variegated common culture through the church, trade unions, neighbourhood networks, private associations and so on.

The double betrayal changed all that. From that point on, the pre-political realm began to appear in the eyes of the new elites as the problem, the obstacle to the new world heralded by ‘globalisation’. From at least the 1990s onwards, the pre-political became, in effect, the object of constant political intervention. And so slowly but surely, the informal ways of life, the values and taken-for-granted beliefs shared by members of society in this pre-political realm, were recast as exclusionary, as sources of prejudice towards non-members. They became the principal target for elite social re-engineering and New Leftist cultural politics, from racial identitarianism to transgenderism.

The national-populist revolt can thus be understood as the spirit of the pre-political reasserting itself – the return of that which the new elites have been desperate to repress. National populism shores up, and draws on, these pre-political resources. It seeks to reaffirm the national traditions, common heritage and cultural norms that have long been under assault. And it rejects the new elites’ project of social transformation, writ large in the consciously deracinating ideologies of racial identitarianism and transgenderism.

Furedi gives short shrift to the idea that this national populism is racial. ‘No doubt there are individuals who have attached themselves to the populist camps who share the racial obsessions of their anti-populist adversaries’, he writes pointedly. ‘But these individuals do not represent the movement to which they attached themselves.’ Populism, he continues, ‘can appeal to a variety of ethnic constituencies, not based on celebrating heterogeneity but on the foundation of uniting around a common political culture’.

Indeed, the populist act of retrieving and affirming these pre-political sources of fellow feeling and common culture is crucial to resisting the identitarian balkanisation and dissolution of society. ‘The challenge confronting all contemporary multi-ethnic societies’, writes Furedi, ‘is how to establish a common civic culture around which everyone can unite’.

The populist pushback – the attempt to defend and reaffirm the cultural moorings of Western societies – has already transformed and revitalised democratic politics. It has given largely working-class sections of society precisely what the double-betrayal had deprived them of: a voice.

And for Furedi, this is captured in the key political motif of populism – ‘the goal of taking back control’. This is a motivation that, as left-wing academic Paolo Gerbaudo explains, has fired the populist political imagination with ideas of democracy, power and sovereignty.

We now stand at a pivotal moment, Furedi argues. He recognises the tremendous resources the elites are marshalling in defence of the status quo. After all, they know what’s at stake – the desire of mainly working-class people to assert themselves, to exert influence over their own communities, poses a direct threat to the power and status of our political and cultural elites. They will do everything necessary to insulate ‘democracy’ from those now finding their voice, from banning or drawing up cordons sanitaires around certain populist parties, to relentlessly seeking to delegitimise populist movements.

This, then, is where we are today. Furedi writes that populism versus anti-populism is now the defining conflict of our era, displacing that of left versus right. If so, then his In Defence of Populism is the definitive guide.

In Defence of Populism, by Frank Furedi, is published by Polity.