The Social Bases of Political Resentment

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapter, most radical right-wing populist parties rode to success in the 1980s on a platform that included strong elements of neo-liberalism. Not only genuinely right-libertarian parties like the Scandinavian Progress parties, the Swedish New Democracy party, or the Austrian Freedom Party, but also the French Front National and the Swiss Automobile Party appealed to individual initiative and entrepreneurial spirit while promoting privatization, deregulation, and generally free-market forces. Their programmatic proposals were primarily directed against the power of the central state and the established parties. What the different versions of this program had in common was their productivist bias. Like Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, neoliberal populist parties promoted an enterprise culture, founded on the notion that the productive “be rewarded through the market for their contribution to production (or at least to the provision of profitable marketed goods and services)” whereas “the parasitic must suffer for their failure to contribute adequately (if at all) to the market (with little regard to the question of whether they are ‘deserving’ or otherwise)” (Jessop, Bonnet, Bromley, and Ling, 1984, p. 51). This productivist ideology allowed the populist Right not only to appeal to fundamentally bourgeois values, like individualism and free market liberalism, but also to more pragmatic interests, which generally can be assumed to transcend class lines, even if they might not necessarily be in the interest of all social strata (such as lower direct taxation, lower non-wage labor costs, no more subsidies for unproductive sectors, budget cuts).