Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause - Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift - Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.

This has bewildered and dismayed liberals - and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," he said.

He continued: "Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren't convinced by it.

She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be "laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class".

This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.

Words of blood and thunder resonated

Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders' claims, saying:

"[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime - saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line."

But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?

Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people's lived experience - more effectively than Trump's right-wing populism.

Harris's genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages.

And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow's criticism of the left as "too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures" after Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election loss.

By contrast, Trump's words of blood and thunder hit the spot - not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier.

The greatest threat to America, he said, was from "the enemy from within". He defined them as: "All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that's a bigger enemy than China and Russia."

Harris's attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly.

In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump's emphasis on law and order and border control.

Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.

This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.

Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns.

In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media news feeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.

Is populism the new class?

In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.

These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement.

In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.

The language of populism - the people versus the elites - is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.

Trump's political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots.

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," he told a Veteran's Day rally last year.

He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages.

There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the "morals of an alley cat", as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.

The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the "laptop class", as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the "deep state" (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).

According to Trump's narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.

Australian populism

In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that "Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better".

The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese - whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion - is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year's election campaign.

The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so.

• First published in The Conversation
• George H Morgan is Associate Professor Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

In a speech to an online conference, he opened up about his thinking on how to combat populist trends.

Francis's vision is for a "popularism" that focuses on "finding the means to guarantee a life for all people that is worthy of being called human" when it comes to work, wages and housing. This involves walking the people's path with them and listening to them.

His message was sent to an online event reflecting on the Pope's recent book, Let Us Dream.

It was organised by the Centre for Theology and Community in East London and six other Catholic institutions from the UK, US, Germany and Italy.

Francis's message also discussed "inclusive populism". This is a type of populism put forward in writings by Anglican priest, Angus Ritchie (pictured).

As the Theology and Community Centre's leader, Ritchie's aim is to engage grassroots communities in the public square to combat two extremes.

These are the exploitative populism of the far-right and the failure of liberal politics to engage a broad cross-section of groups in decision making.

He says the Pope has inspired his thinking.

A renewed political vision, Francis explained in his speech, is a "politics with a capital P" which is not "just for the people, but with the people, rooted in their communities and in their values".

By contrast, populism is a form of "political paternalism", controlled by ideology and which goes by the slogan "everything for the people, nothing with the people".

Politics which has "contempt" for the culture of the people, including their "cultural, religious and spiritual values" is the beginnings of the abuse of power, he said.

"A politics that turns its back on the poor will never be able to promote the common good. A politics that turns its back on the peripheries will never be able to understand the centre and will confuse the future with a self-projection, as if in a mirror," he said.

"Some accuse you of being too political, others of trying to impose religion.

"But you understand that respect for the people means respect also for their institutions, including their religious ones; and that the role of those institutions is not to impose anything but to walk with the people, reminding them of the face of God who always goes before us."

Source

• The Tablet
• Image:YouTube

They are doing this by sowing division and exploiting the anger of those who feel excluded, he says.

The Filipino prelate (pictured), who is the prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, aired his concerns - and some opportunities to improve matters - at the 2021 Trócaire St Patrick's College Maynooth annual Lenten lecture.

Speaking via Zoom from Rome after delivering his lecture, he turned to the topic of populist leaders 'hijacking' religion, saying:

"There is a growing sense in the world today of divisiveness, and unfortunately religion is being used to further division; sometimes even within the same religious affiliation you have divisions."

Tagle described the recent rise of populist leaders as "the return of the powerful big-boss-type of people" some of whom "hijack religion".

They know where the pockets of disgruntled people are and they present themselves as messiahs, he said. They use religion as a "convenient way" of getting followers.

"We need to study carefully why these leaders get followers; why do they become popular?"

Times of confusion such as during a pandemic could, in particular, make the exclusion of people such as the poor and migrants be more susceptible to these influences, Tagle warned.

Source

• The Tablet
• Image: La Croix Internationl

Speaking off script to staff and members of a Jesuit magazine "Aggiornamenti Sociali" ("Social Updates"), Francis said ignoring the reality lived by men and women today has caused a resurgence of old ideologies that inevitably do more harm than good.

These involve prejudices, as certain "schools of thought and positions taken do so much harm" in the world - just as they did during the Second World War .

"Today for example in Europe...countries ... close in on themselves and turn to ideologies."

"But not just new ideologies — there are a few — but to the old ones, the old ideologies that created the Second World War."

Listening is critical to combating this, he said.

It is the "fundamental attitude of every person who wants to do something for others.

"Listen to situations, listen to problems, openly, without prejudices."

The resurgence of ideologies like populism is a product of not listening: "it is a projection of what I want to be done, what I want to be thought, what I think should be.

"Reality is what I want it to be; we place filters. But reality is another thing, reality is sovereign. Whether we like it or not, it is sovereign. And I must dialogue with reality."

Christians must initiate "a dialogue ... starting from the values of the Gospel, from the things Jesus has taught us, without dogmatically imposing but with dialogue and discernment."

"If you start from preconceptions or pre-established positions, from dogmatic pre-decisions, you will never, never be able to give a message.

"The message must come from the Lord through us. We are Christians and the Lord speaks to us through reality, through prayer and discernment," he said.

"Continue to be with [the discarded people] listen to them, accompany them so that their voices may be the ones who speak."

"Even those who research and reflect on social questions are called to have the heart of a shepherd with the smell of the sheep."

Avoid "the temptation of abstraction, of limiting yourselves to the level of ideas while forgetting the concreteness of doing and walking together."

"Serious intellectual research is also a journey made together, especially when dealing with cutting-edge issues."

Allow "for different perspectives and disciplines to interact" and should "promote relationships of respect and friendship between those involved so that they may discover how encountering one another enriches everyone."

Source

• Catholic News Service
• Image: Rome Reports

Ramping up his message ahead of the European elections, Bannon said Francis should stay out of politics.

"He's the administrator of the church, and he's also a politician. This is the problem," Bannon - who lives in Italy - said.

"He's constantly putting all the faults in the world on the populist nationalist movement."

The Pope's remarks about social justice have long irked Bannon and those of his ideological mindset.

Swing back to April 2016, when Bannon suggested Matteo Salvini should start openly targeting Francis about migration, because Francis has made the plight of refugees a cornerstone of his papacy. (At that time, Salvini was the minister for the interior and the leader of Italy's anti-immigration League party.)

"Bannon advised [Salvini] ... the pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally," a senior League insider says.

Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming conservatives in the Vatican were on his side.

As an example, on 6 May 2016, after the pope's plea for compassion towards migrants, Salvini said: "Uncontrolled immigration, an organised and financed invasion, brings chaos and problems, not peace."

Salvini - who is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy's coalition cabinet - says he wants to bring the far right from across Europe into an alliance.

Last week, only days after meeting Bannon in Rome, Salvini revealed his "vision of Europe for the next 50 years", calling it the launch of a new right-wing coalition for the European parliamentary elections on 23 May.

Some say the timing of Italy's new coalition and Salvini's meeting with Bannon suggest Salvini has been handpicked as the informal leader of Eurosceptic populist forces in Europe.

According to Mischaël Modrikamen, the Movement's managing director, six months ago Bannon and Salvini tweeted that Italy's deputy prime minister "is in!"

Bannon also takes issue with the pope's warnings over resurgent populist movements.

"You can go around Europe and it's [populism] catching fire and the pope is just dead wrong," he says.

After Salvini and Bannon's 2016 meeting, Salvini was photographed holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Benedict is my pope."

The slogan refers to a Vatican version of the "birther" campaign waged by Trump against Barack Obama, claiming that Francis's papacy is illegitimate and that his predecessor Benedict XVI is the true pontiff.

The League source also alleged that Salvini would have attacked the pope harder but was restrained by his own party, predominantly by Giancarlo Giorgetti, the deputy federal secretary of Lega Nord who is close to senior figures in the Vatican.

Bannon has been building opposition to Francis through his Dignitatis Humanae Institute, based in a 13th-century mountaintop monastery not far from Rome.

In January 2017, Bannon became a patron of the institute, whose honorary president is Cardinal Raymond Burke, who believes organised networks of homosexuals are spreading a "gay agenda" in the Vatican.

The institute's chairman is former Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is presently on trial for corruption for accepting bribes from Azerbaijan. He has denied all charges.

Source

• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• Image: Daily Express

Populisms that make us see the other, the foreigner, as evil, as an enemy to be pushed away are to be avoided he said.

"Today populisms are fashionable, which have nothing to do with the 'popular': popular is the culture of the people that is expressed in art, in science, in celebration: every people celebrates in its own way.

"But populism is the opposite: it is a model of closure: "We are closed, we are alone", and when we are closed we cannot go forward". Read more