Before joining the University of Glasgow as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in September 2025, I was a lecturer, tutor, and PGT coordinator at the University of Warwick. During my time there, I was interviewed by Politics and International Studies PGT students for the new student-led PAIS podcast, where I discussed my doctoral research on populism and anti-populism. The episode offers a rich and historically grounded conversation about what populism is, how its meaning has shifted, and why it remains central to understanding the intertwined crises of capitalism and democracy in France, Britain, and beyond.

In the episode, host Thomas Whelan invited me to trace the early history of populism, beginning with its progressive origins in late 19th-century America. Populism did not emerge from the far right: the American People’s Party advanced demands for economic justice, calling for progressive taxation, nationalisation of key industries, union rights, and the eight-hour workday, while also supporting direct democracy, public education, women’s suffrage, and cross-racial alliances among poorer farmers. Similar dynamics later developed in Latin America, where populist movements emerged as anti-imperialist and egalitarian responses to deep inequality and global marginalisation.

Historically, then, populism was a claim for more democracy, especially for groups excluded from political power – racialised, gendered, and working-class communities. I contrasted this history with the mid-20th-century reinterpretation of populism shaped heavily by Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955). Hofstadter recast the People’s Party as driven by resentment and nativism, a reading influenced by Cold War liberalism and its defence of a ‘vital centre’ against both left and right alternatives. This reinterpretation strongly influenced European debates, including at the London School of Economics – already debating the definition of populism in 1967 – and contributed to today’s common association between populism and the far right.

Turning to the present, I distinguish between reactionary right-wing populism, which threatens democracy through exclusionary and racialised definitions of ‘the people,’ and left-wing populism, which draws on grassroots mobilisations and democratic empowerment. But I also emphasise that the supposed ‘crisis of liberal democracy’ often attributed to, or linked with, populism masks deeper structural issues: rising inequalities, declining political agency, the erosion of human rights and liberties, and a widespread recognition that neoliberalism – and capitalism more broadly – are failing to deliver their promises of growth and ‘freedom,’ and are instead destroying us and our planet. These dynamics create what Gramsci called an organic crisis, in which competing actors struggle to reinterpret and ‘remake’ the world.

A final theme we explored is my work on anti-populism, which formed the core of my doctoral research at Queen Mary University of London. Anti-populism – often promoted by political and media elites – portrays ‘the people’ as overly emotional, misinformed, or hopelessly divided, and therefore unfit for shared and democratic governance. I argue that this framing not only reinforces elitism but also obscures the underlying social and economic conditions that generate political (often indeed and justifiably emotional) dissatisfaction in the first place. Yet, paradoxically, these same anti-populists also increasingly borrow from far-right rhetorics and policies in an effort to satisfy what they interpret as a ‘populist mood’ or to address their own declining electoral appeal. This dual manoeuvre – simultaneously denouncing populism while selectively adopting far-right demands – contributes to the legitimisation of exclusionary politics (often described as the ‘mainstreaming’ of the far right) and marginalising the many anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and feminist demands emerging from the left as supposedly ‘unreasonable.’

Navigating and challenging this mutually reinforcing dynamic between right-wing populism and anti-populism is, in my view, a crucial task for any progressive populist politics. It requires distinguishing between emancipatory and reactionary demands while recognising how grievances are shaped by structures of power and media environments that make right-wing interpretations look more plausible or ‘credible.’ The challenge lies in acknowledging these structural pressures while also identifying and amplifying the progressive elements within people’s demands – including when they are expressed through conservative channels – and linking them to broader emancipatory struggles that take aim at the very structures dividing and exploiting us.

My current Leverhulme-funded project at the University of Glasgow extends this work within a sociological framework grounded in a Marxist understanding of racial capitalism. I analyse contemporary understandings of the ‘working class,’ challenging far-right – and increasingly mainstream – claims about a supposedly endangered ‘white working class’ in need of protection from immigration and cultural difference. By examining how such narratives take shape in France and Britain under neoliberalism, my research supports efforts to articulate class-based, anti-racist, and feminist struggles together, and to advance emancipatory, anti-capitalist politics capable of resisting the divisive logics reinforced by both right-wing populism and anti-populism.

The full episode is available now on the PAIS Podcast page – and I want to thank the PAIS students for their work, and the University of Warwick and the PAIS department for hosting this discussion.

Image credit: Zeno Hind (@zeno_hind) on Unsplash.

First published: 15 December 2025

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