The cultural politics of anti-elitism between populism, pop culture and everyday life: an introduction

Moritz Ege

The introductory chapter lays out a framework for conceptualising the recent wave of anti-elite rhetoric and sentiments in different arenas. It suggests analytical distinctions between a variety of forms of anti-elite articulations – which allows a better understanding of how they interacted and resonated – and also between egalitarian and non-egalitarian forms of anti-elitism. It situates the recent interest in these matters not only in responses to the populist wave of the mid-2010s but also in more general dynamics of societies structured in dominance, discussing the ways in which cultural politics in different fields have been shaped by anti-elitism at different conjunctures, including the spread of extreme conspiracy theories about hidden elites – and it poses the question how different forms of anti-elitism may have contributed to multiple and interconnected crises. Furthermore, particular attention is paid to anti-elitism as an argument in explanations of the populist wave, as well as the role and the epistemological status of diagnostic narratives of different types and the notion of conjunctural analysis and its purchase. Overall, the chapter discusses anti-elitism not only as an ambiguous pattern in cultural politics but also as an object of normative reflection from which academics – who are targeted by anti-elitism, but may hold egalitarian views themselves – should not refrain. In closing, the chapter asks what happened to anti-elite articulations and what their role might be after that specific historical “moment”.

1 The cultural politics of anti-elitism between populism, pop culture and everyday life An introduction Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer This is a book about anti-elite rhetoric, narratives, imagery and movements. It asks: What is characteristic of anti-elite articulations, be it in populist politics, pop culture or everyday life more broadly? Which kinds of elites are being imagined, caricatured and criticised by whom, through which media and why? What social actors, parties, movements, artists, subcultures, technologies and milieus are involved in producing, shaping and mediating anti-elite articulations? To what ends and with which results? And how are relationships of power and dominance challenged and reconfigured in that process? In providing answers to these questions, the chapters most of them were finalized in 2021 (they go back to a series of events, including a conference under the title “Against the elites!” The cultural politics of anti-elitism in the current conjuncture held in 2018), contribute to a socio-cultural analysis of current conjunctures.1 For this purpose, we do not define who “the elite” really are. Instead, we pursue the usages of the term in different contexts and try to understand better what image critics of the elites have of their adversaries. The concept “elite” itself, to us, is a subordinate category of socio-cultural analysis. It can be useful as a heuristic tool and in precisely defined circumstances, but it can also be misleading as an overstretched analytical concept: It allows a dubious self-aggrandisement for those who believe in the existence and rightful claim to power of an elite in the sense of “the select few” (and, usually, consider themselves part of it). For those who decry “the elites”, the term may have uses that we would categorise as progressive or reactionary, but it often also leads to questionable slippages, as we will show. It runs the danger of replacing other critical concepts and analyses that are more structurally grounded or more phenomenologically acute. In focusing on anti-elite articulations of different types, the book also aims at circumventing the “programmatic bias” (Caiani and Padoan, 2020, p.6) of many studies into populism that neglect the spheres of cultural production, ways of life, aesthetics or affects. And, at the same time, it also intends to avoid a mere culturalism that ignores the role of politics and the economic sphere or reduces them to mere cultural dynamics. In this introduction, we will sketch out the overall concerns of the book and present the argument that anti-elitism is a crucial, cross-domain theme of contemporary societies that can serve as an entry point for new, interdisciplinary analyses of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003141150-1 4 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer contemporary, combining cultural and social research. Consequently, we will go back and forth, in a sort of hermeneutic spiral, between a prominent example, its broader political and cultural contexts and the methodological and conceptual tools that we suggest are necessary for making sense of them. In the first section, we will follow the term “elite” in political rhetoric and introduce the overall problematic. The second section begins by putting that rhetoric in the context of a specific historical situation, i.e. the political upheavals around the middle of the 2010s, more broadly. It then discusses the ways in which cultural politics in recent times have been shaped by anti-elitism and poses the question how this may have contributed to crises that are multiple and interconnected. The third section returns to a peculiar “moment” of anti-elitism between 2015 and 2018, giving an overview of journalistic and academic attempts at explaining the scepticism and enmity towards elites, primarily in the US and Europe – also highlighting the different meanings attached to the term in that discourse. In the fourth section, we introduce theoretical background assumptions that are particularly important regarding our approach to studying anti-elite articulations, focusing on the epistemological status of diagnostic narratives of different types and the notion of conjunctural analysis and its purchase. The fifth section asks what happened to anti-elite articulations and what their role might be after this historical “moment”. Instead of summarising the chapters of this volume at the end of this text, we highlight throughout this introduction how the chapters expand on the book’s overall themes and topics. Anti-elitism and its moment A book on anti-elite articulations with a focus on the late 2010s and early 2020s must almost inevitably begin with Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States of America. Trump’s was a very public, epoch-shifting – or at least so it seemed – discourse about and against “the elites”, the political and cultural “establishment”, imbued with the ambiguities of calculated vilification, open resentment, reasonable critique and a palpable desire for the status, recognition and accoutrements of the chosen few. Trump’s anti-elite rhetoric seems to have caught the mood of hundreds of millions or even billions worldwide and stunned and shocked at least an equal number. It also popularised specific ways of speaking and thinking about “elites”. A 2018 article on Politico documents Trump’s shifting use of the term at length and spells out some of its basic tensions. “For Donald Trump, ‘elite’ used to mean a modeling agency”, the article begins. “She was with Elite,” he said of Anna Nicole Smith four days after her death in 2007 in an interview with Howard Stern, the same way some might say a person had won a prestigious prize. “She had the best body. She had the best face. She had the best hair I’ve ever seen.” (Kruse, 2018) The cultural politics of anti-elitism 5 As a celebrity businessman, Politico author Michael Kruse writes, “Trump used the world ‘elite’ the way the agency did, as a bit of marketing boilerplate more or less interchangeable with ‘classy’ or ‘luxury.’” His own properties and developments were praised as “elite”; “applied to people, it was an unvarnished compliment: Eli Manning was an ‘elite’ quarterback.” Then came Trump’s nomination and election campaigns in 2015 and 2016, where – following the global populist handbook, sophisticated electoral research and, apparently, his intuitive social analysis – he attacked “the elites”, the “media elite”, the “political elite”, “the establishment” and so on, promising to drain the Washington “swamp”, “lock up” Hilary Clinton and, equally importantly, take all these self-righteous progressives, liberal celebrities, artists and professors to whom the term was applied (by people like Trump, to a large extent) down a notch or two, promising a sort of cultural revenge in the name of ordinary, common people.2 He railed against the elites on Twitter and in campaign rally after campaign rally. This was not only a matter of discursive content. As cultural anthropologists Kira Hall, Donna Goldstein and Matthew Ingram pointed out, it was also a matter of linguistic style and bodily performance, for example, his contortions and gestures as he ridiculed the stiff bodies of establishment politicians – or, infamously, the physical impairments of a reporter (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram, 2016). In mocking those whom he labelled the elite, their pretensions and their corporeal inadequacies, Trump exemplified a cultural strategy that Pierre Ostiguy (2017) calls the “flaunting of the low”: pleasurably exhibiting the seemingly unconstrained, “base”, “mean”, “vulgar”, prejudiced behaviour – in content and form – that educators and modernisers of different kinds say we should overcome, like a clichéd rebellion of id against super-ego. However offensive it all was, however much it was permeated with racist and sexist messages, Trump also cleverly identified the hypocrisies, contradictions and weaknesses that characterised the self-image and the socio-political position of many liberals in the US and elsewhere – and of progressive neo-liberal formations more broadly, or, at least, some crucial tendencies within them (Fraser, 2017; see also Beyer, Wietschorke and others in this volume). Addressing them as “elites” was a crucial element of this strategy. After the president’s inauguration and its aftermath, however, came another phase in Trumpian rhetoric – one often overlooked by observers – in which a more ambiguous usage took hold. Since about 2017, the US president had been reclaiming the word “elite” with an almost vengeful pride. Having vanquished his opponents at the polls, having slammed the “elites” as corrupt, incompetent and out of touch, Trump now has bestowed upon himself, as well as his most fervent supporters, the mantle of “elite” as if it were a spoil of war. (Kruse, 2018) The president often – in a first step – introduced “the elite” in a satirical and polemical tone in his speeches in 2017 and 2018: the so-called elites, enemies 6 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer of the people and so forth. Then, however, he went on to make his own claims on the term: “Why are they elite?” he said in Minnesota. “I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president, and they didn’t. And I’m representing the greatest, smartest, most loyal, best people on earth – the deplorables.” (ibid.) Somewhat stunned, the Politico writer summarised the shift thus: “He and his voters are now the elite, the new elite, ‘the super-elite,’ Trump said in South Carolina.” “Can he really run as the elite instead of against the elite?”, the article asked. With the benefit of hindsight, one could say that he tried, but failed. The journalist’s incredulousness about the seemingly contradictory way of relating to elites, however, was closely intertwined with a wider issue: The question as to how Trump, a billionaire and serial fraudster, could present himself as a true man of the people and a champion of the working class – and, put more simply, how those who in recent decades had not been the beneficiaries of ever more capitalism could fall for it.3 (It seemed almost natural to many observers, on the other hand, that most Republicans from the upper middle and upper classes would support him.) Did they not see that he himself – like other right-wing populists globally – was part of the ruling class, that he had seriously ripped off workers, other businesses and ordinary people, for example, at his so-called university – and that his policies, such as tax reforms planned and administered by Wall Street insiders and industry lobbyists, would benefit the rich?4 Was not this anti-elite rhetoric so full of contradictions that it should defeat anyone’s ability to live with cognitive dissonance? Apparently, it was not – and attempts to explain this seeming paradox soon began to proliferate. In our view, the success of Trump’s anti-elite rhetoric should not be read as implying that people understood insufficiently what the slippery term “really” meant. Rather, it illustrates that the ascriptions to elites, and the attitudes many people have towards them, are more ambiguous than they seem at first sight. In a psychological register, the Politico author concludes that, Trump’s “acrobatic use of ‘elite’” represented a key to his “abiding sense of grievance, his unconcealed mix of envy and resentment of this class of person”. Importantly, Kruse argues that this was not only a matter of an individual character, the story often told of the real estate heir from Queens to whom old money and society hotshots in Manhattan had given the cold shoulder. Rather, Trump’s personal baggage allowed him to tap “into a deep American history of anti-elitism as a potent political tool” that – over a hundred years earlier – had produced the original Populists, then figures such as Huey P. Long and, later on, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan or less significant figures such as Sarah Palin, who had all prominently attacked the cultural, political and media elites as well, even if they did not necessarily call them by The cultural politics of anti-elitism 7 that name. Richard Hofstadter’s (1964) “paranoid tradition” was apparently alive and well – and people such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, Trump’s mentors and advisers, represented direct links into that past. In these older instances of populist anti-elite rhetoric in the US, there had been similar juxtapositions of fake elites and true heroes of the people – and the latter could include the deservedly rich.5 Crucially, that tradition often also recurred to a racial pecking order that becomes ideologically legitimised by the construction of moral boundaries. Figures of elite decadence and popular decency, and of the moral and economic dangers posed by racial others, belong to the same imaginary, the same process of symbolic boundary-drawing with all its material implications (Hartigan, 1997; Hochschild, 2016). Therefore, Trump made manifest latent meanings and desires inherent in an important strand of the broader populist tradition when he announced that he not only wanted to win a fight against the elites for ordinary Americans, he and those he represented actually were what the others only claimed to be, the elite, and, thus, truly deserved riches and recognition.6 For understanding the current situation and its genealogy, including the ambiguities inherent in the term “elite”, it is important to also remember another connection. The key protagonists of the neo-liberal political–economic turn since the 1970s and 1980s also relied on a specific form of antielite rhetoric and an outspoken enmity to intellectuals, the state bureaucracy and labour unions and their leaders, whom they depicted as elites. As the neo-liberals – politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan – argued, these elites arrogantly claimed to know better than ordinary citizens and consumers. They stood in the way of their market-democratic self-determination. Therefore, markets had to be freed from restrictive state regulations. Furthermore, democracy had to be restricted in order to ensure that competition would not be disturbed (see, inter alia, Slobodian, 2018; Slobodian and Plehwe, 2020) and “true”, deserved elites could prosper. It was with this anti-state, -bureaucracy, -intellectual, pro-entrepreneurial, -consumer rhetoric – and its policy substance – in mind that Stuart Hall had famously termed Thatcher et al. a new breed of right-wing authoritarian populists, as opposed to the older formation of authoritarian statism.7 Neo-liberal reforms and deregulation helped bring about a new class of super-rich. Culturally, they fostered a sense of consumer subjectivity, and they also brought about precarity and a strong sense of threat and loss for large parts of the population, for which they also offered specific kinds of explanations (on the connections, see, e.g. work by ethnographers in Europe, such as Kalb, 2009; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos, 2019; Narotzky, 2019). This is a crucial background for subsequent waves of anti-elitism. Since the 1990s, the basic ideological suppositions of neo-liberalism have increasingly pervaded everyday consciousness and common sense: Competition is key for progress, the profit maximisation motive should permeate all spheres of action, families and traditional “communities” are needed to buffer the social costs and those that threaten or evade these principles must be repressed by 8 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer authoritarian means. These attitudes became strengthened and normalised as neo-liberal “common sense” (Hall, 2011; Hall and O’Shea, 2013). In that sense, contemporary anti-elite articulations in the Trumpian vein, which present themselves as populist rebellion against the status quo, are as much inside the neo-liberal configuration as they are outside of it – but they are also pushing it in new directions. A break-up of hegemony in politics – and in culture? While historical contextualisations and longer-term developments, such as the ones we briefly sketched out here, are crucial for understanding recent goings-on, there was clearly something new, something emergent to this massive wave of anti-elite sentiments and rhetoric during Trump’s rise. The years 2015 to 2018 seemed like the midst of an interregnum, in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of the term (Hall, 2015; Fraser, 2017; Grossberg, 2018; Massey, 2018), when “long-simmering discontent suddenly shape-shifted into a full-bore crisis” (Fraser, 2017, unp.), a crisis of authority and even, possibly, of hegemony – political, but also cultural. This was a broader anti-elite “moment” in US politics and many other places as well: Brexit was supposed to return control from European Union bureaucrats to the British people, or, at least, so the rhetoric went. The crisis of political representation in countries such as Italy, Greece or France escalated and well-established parties shrunk almost into oblivion. New movements emerged: The French gilets jaunes (yellow vests), for example, were an unforeseen, forceful and programmatically as well as affectively and habitually anti-elite movement (Lem, 2020; Susser, 2021) that observers in France called a sign of a broader “twilight of the elites” (Guilluy, 2015, 2019).8 At the very least, a rearrangement of leading blocs or societal–political coalitions was taking place. Other rightwing populist leaders – many of whom are extreme rightists and neofascists – famously employed similar anti-elite rhetoric as well, whether in the opposition or in government: Salvini, Orban, Farage, Johnson, Kaczynski, Le Pen, Babis, Blocher, Strache, Wilders, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Duterte or Bolsonaro. These years also saw consistent left-wing agitation against “the one percent”, “for the many, not the few”, where the elites, “the one percent”, “the rich”, “the caste”, figured as the beneficiaries and the agents of a class struggle from above. The elites were primarily defined in the politics of Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders, Mélenchon and others in economic terms and in reference to their political power (national and international ones, such as EU leaders) and also, culturally, their detachment from the lived experience and reality of ordinary people.9 The “populism of the centre” is a much less popular topic among political scientists than right and left populism, but it also certainly exists – even technocrats such as Emmanuel Macron (see, inter alia, Curini, 2019, p.1416) or Matteo Renzi have railed against state elites and left-wing intellectuals; New Labour/Third Way social democrats such as Gerhard Schröder had not been all that different in that respect.10 The cultural politics of anti-elitism 9 Anti-elitism, as a political strategy, style and discourse, was articulated with a wide range of political positions and goals in these turbulences. More generally speaking, anti-elitism in political rhetoric is accompanied by promises that can be defined as progressive in an optimistic sense of that term, such as the levelling of undeserved privileges and the realisation of an egalitarian, democratic spirit and collective sovereignty. There are also equally constant dangers, such as bad social analysis, a reinforcement of prejudices and the many connections between anti-elitism, certain critiques of capitalism, conspiracy theories and “coded” anti-Semitism (see, inter alia, Reznikova in this volume). Our starting supposition, however, is that the actual meanings and effects of this strategy are, at least on this general level, open and indeterminate in important ways. This is because they depend on the concrete articulations of which they are part – nationalist or anti-nationalist, sexist or anti-sexist, anti-Semitic or not, for example – and because they were in many ways being articulated anew and along very different lines in this specific “moment”. In pragmatic terms, political actors were, therefore, well-advised to fight over them rather than to leave them to their adversaries.11 Anti-elitism, anti-elite articulations and cultural politics The phrase “against the elites” and the term “anti-elitism” that we have been using require some further clarification. Being against elites, against the elites, being anti-elitist and anti-elitism have been used as synonyms so far, but they can also mean different things and their usage can perform different forms of critiques. Listening to media figures, vox pop interviewees, protagonists in ethnographic writing, internet commenters, populist politicians and others castigate “elites”, one may think that these complaints came from a place of egalitarianism: Down with the elites – there should be no elites! And indeed, anti-elite sentiments can be egalitarian and anti-elite in such a strong and universal sense. The anti-authoritarian tradition of the Left has had a strong and programmatic anti-elitist bent in that sense.12 The protagonists of 1960s left-leaning, anti-authoritarian pop culture, for example, found colourful expressions against the idea and the institutions that maintain that there are legitimate elites and that they deserve to be privileged. However, anti-elite sentiments can be highly ambiguous, critical of “these elites” or “pseudo-elites” (see Dümling in this volume), while calling for “true elites” to rise to power. They can also be anti-elitist, in a slightly weaker sense, i.e. opposed primarily to condescending, exclusionary behaviour or regulations of a specific kind. In that framing, the problem with elites is understood primarily as a matter of conduct, rhetoric (elitist language and other cultural codes) and institutional policies, such as membership rules in a club or admission regulations to a school or university. Speaking of an “-ism” here connotes the speaker’s critical attitude to an excess of elite-ness, not necessarily a problem with the existence and high standing of elites. Anti-elitists, in that sense, can also be supportive of elites, be they supremely competent or supremely rich, who do not behave in elitist ways – down-to-earth scientists, hands-on 10 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer entrepreneurs, deserving celebrities, politicians who are “demotic” and folksy or just matter-of-fact (on celebrities, see also Luthar in this volume). In order to be terminologically precise, we use the term “anti-elite articulations” as an umbrella for these different expressions of opposition to elites and elitism, be they anti-elite or -elitist. We also use the term to refer to phenomena of different kinds, be they attitudes, sentiments, styles, rhetoric, arguments, images or narratives. The term “articulation” stands both for bringing-to-speech and the connection (as process and result) of separate, heterogeneous elements, be they fragments of meaning or cultural practices (see Clarke in this volume). “Articulation”, thus, highlights the importance of cultural forms, practices and representations (media and others), as well as the contingency and complexity of meaning. Despite these terminological considerations, however, we do not always make these distinctions here. It would be cumbersome, for example, to always speak of “anti-elite articulations” instead of “anti-elitism”. Hopefully, the terminological caution expressed here will suffice and meanings will be conveyed by the arguments. Anti-elite articulations in culture While political dynamics of the kind we mentioned above were relatively easy to follow and to name, there has also been a culmination of cultural anti-elite phenomena. In order to situate political rhetoric such as Trump’s and its societal resonance, we must also spell out different kinds of cultural anti-elitism. For our purposes, the term “culture” can be understood as comprising not only systems or assemblages of meaning/representation (including, but not limited to, aesthetic ones; see Gilbert, 2019a, 2019b) and affect, practices of meaning-making and “affecting” but also the practical side of relating to and constituting those systems of meaning. This takes place in the realm that we usually call everyday life. It is through culture in this wide sense that consensus with a status quo is created, reinforced, challenged, rejected and reconfigured.13 Anti-elite articulations in culture span a broad spectrum of forms. The term “cultural politics” serves as a placeholder for processes, relations and struggles that are relevant in that context. It refers to political implications of processes that take place outside the narrowly defined sphere of politics, and it also points to the question of how hegemony, prestige and dissent are being produced culturally and play out in support for movements and parties, electoral behaviour and so forth. It also refers to expressive forms and sensibilities in ordinary life and to less clearly defined, more qualitative textural-atmospheric implications and consequences of culture whose political effects are impossible to pin down exactly.14 Cultural forms of anti-elitism are much more heterogeneous and also more difficult to periodise than the obviously “political” forms on which we have focused so far – but ultimately no less important. The understanding of culture that we employ here – building primarily on cultural studies and socio-cultural anthropology and an updated version of hegemony theory that connects both – is not entirely The cultural politics of anti-elitism 11 congruent with the sense of culture that is used in many debates about populism, identity and political strategy. In the latter, there is often a strict contrast between “cultural issues” and “economic issues” (see, inter alia, Manow, 2018; Rodrik, 2021). In contrast to many positions in the cultural versus economic causes problematic and also the related cultural versus economic strategies debate, we do not claim, for example, that questions that relate to collective identities should be situated outside of the economic sphere. Gender, for example, is as much an economic as it is a cultural category. At the same time, cultural processes and questions of identity necessarily co-constitute any sense of “economic” class consciousness. Furthermore, there is a “cultural” side to the everyday worlds of work as much as there is to so-called private life. Pop-cultural representations are cultural in our sense of the term; they are an important part of the field of cultural politics, but they are also part of cultural industries and a cultural economy. In what sense, then, is anti-elitism expressed in contemporary culture, shaping contemporary culture and shaping the current conjuncture – including on the political level – culturally? To begin to answer these questions, this section of the introduction will highlight some exemplary phenomena and processes. Overall, it has become somewhat of a cliché that we live in an age of participation and an ever-wider democratisation of expertise (Jenkins, 2006; Kelty, 2008, 2019; Maasen and Weingart, 2008; Carpentier, 2011; Barney et al., 2016; Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017; Fuchs, 2017). This is not only a matter of knowing but of doing: People are also “against elites”, it can be argued, because their everyday practices have strong and increasingly egalitarian elements. They work just fine without the presence of elites – who nonetheless, often enough, claim authority over them. A lot of information that used to be esoteric and shielded is now widely accessible and can be turned into knowledge, in many cases, regardless of professional or educational status – while ongoing restrictions of information, commercial or bureaucratic, receive justified criticism (Hall, 2008). This continuously raises questions about whose knowledge and expertise counts, how it is authorised or, put differently, why some people get transferred opportunities, recognition and pay as artists, experts, intellectuals or critics and others do not (Clarke and Newman, 2017; Newman and Clarke, 2018; Hall, 2021). In that context, the claim that people in their online lives are caught up in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers”, where their views and dispositions are being confirmed, reinforced and radicalised, has become part of contemporary common sense (Pariser, 2011; Nguyen, 2020). Commentators mostly, and for reasons that are quite understandable, view this development as highly problematic for political discourse and societal cohesion. It is relevant, however, for much broader circles than QAnon conspiracy theorists and the like, and it is usually experienced in a much more positive sense. Contemporary social media, with all its flaws, is not only about becoming passively exposed to influencers of various kinds. It offers affordances for communication that are structured in an at least somewhat horizontal way, especially when 12 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer compared with one-way communication that is controlled directly by broadcasters who are invested with (state) authority or large amounts of private capital. So, passing information on and adding to it, expressing one’s views and publicising them and having highly specialised forums for direct and trans-local communication are now popular, not elite or niche practices, even if they are, of course, also usually shaped by profit-oriented infrastructures (Fuchs, 2017; Gerbaudo, 2018; Miller and Venkatraman, 2018) and actors with strategic goals. This (restricted) participatory and popular element exists in platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, in mass messaging services, such as Telegram, and in more specialised forums and boards, such as Reddit (Massanari, 2014), where self-organisation and, in some ways, self-governance (i.e. through volunteer community moderators) are practiced by millions. Overall, in sociological terms, there seems to be an abstract homology between these kinds of participatory forms of sociality and knowledge, the networked character of late modern, post-Fordist forms of production and governance (for a classic account of this, see Castells, 2000, 2015) and a decline of respect for elites which are defined by older forms of cultural capital and their role in older institutions. Well-worn sociological metanarratives hint at some aspects of these processes that cumulatively contribute to an anti-elite moment in the cultural sense: Narratives of individualisation and value change, the informalisation of language and customs and the decline of deference, the transformation of forms of governing towards participatory regimes and the tendency towards neo-liberal governmentality that focuses on a free, self-responsible subject. A sort of habitual anti-elitism is reinforced by dispositifs that address citizens as participants and as consumers who make their own choices rather than having their choices made for them by experts and paternalists of different sorts. At the same time, motifs and themes prevalent in the entertainment world are equally relevant here, including blockbuster films such as The Hunger Games series (2012–2015) or Joker (2019), with their stories of rebellions against privileged castes or classes. They serve as indicators and popularisers of anti-elite attitudes. Such films reiterate a high-versus-low distinction that has long been a central aspect of the structural grammar of popular (and older, “folk”) cultural narratives. A number of authors have spelled out their anti-elitist implications. Mark Fisher (2013) described the affective dimensions of watching Catching Fire, the second part in The Hunger Games tetralogy, as a film that offers as its set-up a world split into “neo-Roman cybergothic barbarism, with lurid cosmetics and costumery for the rich” and “hard labour for the poor”. For Fisher, it offers nothing less than a counter-narrative to capitalist realism: Feelings such as “rage, horror, grim resolve” merge into a “delirious experience. More than once I thought: How can I be watching this? How can this be allowed? Will everyone want to be a revolutionary after recognizing the world and the modes elites live and rule after this?”, he asks. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 13 Elites are also explicitly or implicitly denounced in smaller, “realist”, thematically focused films, such as UK-based The Riot Club (2014; about young, deeply classist and sexist Oxford students), in TV series like the German Bad Banks (2018–), in advertising campaigns that spoof the rich and pretentious and confront them with a more diverse, popular world15 or in TV series whose plots start out from conflicts ordinary people have with corrupt, arrogant elites, such as the Spanish high-school series Élite (2018–) or the Korean hip-youth-against-chaebol-conglomerates Itaewon Class (2020). In all of those works and in many other pop-cultural productions as well,16 elites are ridiculed, lampooned, cast as the problem, fought – but also desired and replaced by “worthier” successors. From a historical viewpoint, it is striking how the anti-elite motif’s popularity seems to mirror economic cycles. Times of depression have produced remarkable anti-elite films and auteurs – in the 1930s, Frank Capra with his little man trilogy; Preston Sturges17 – and major transformative periods have spawned whole genre cycles such as trucker or strike films in the 1970s. Mapping the field of anti-elitist articulations through popular art forms such as film points to the ambiguities and emerging forces in these conjunctures. It also illustrates how figurations of gender, race and sexuality have been overlaying the low-versus-high axis: Figures of the popular and of elites are “racialised” and gendered in specific ways. Films such as Dirty Harry (1971) showcase a right-wing perspective on countercultural movements, minorities and liberal politicians in San Francisco as straight, white, male backlash “from below”.18 Strike films, on the other hand, have often represented an insurgent, multi-ethnic, feminist working-class anti-elitism (with negative images of rich elites and male bosses) in labour struggles, such as in French independent classic Coup pour Coup (1972) or more mainstream US films Norma Rae (1979) and Nine to Five (1980). The anti-elite motif entails a rather conservative aesthetic of sexuality in many of the most popular examples of the field, such as in The Hunger Games films, where the privileged are depicted as camp-y and queer-like, whereas ordinary workers are as morally straightforward as they are sexually “straight”. This resonates with widespread patterns of heteronormativity in the populist imaginary and the culturally conservative implications of rhetorics of the “ordinary” and communitarian. On the other hand, there is another pattern which has become more prominent recently (i.e. in the TV series and advertisement campaigns mentioned above) where affirmative images of diversity, equality, non-normativity and creativity on the “popular” side are contrasted with bland, white, sexually repressed and normative “elites”. Here, the “elite” merges with the upper-class “square”.19 Film history also offers insight into the continuities of certain core themes and cleavages, such as the city/country divide which have been at the forefront of New Deal films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as much as of more recent ones as Hillbilly Elegy (see Wietschorke in this volume; Phelps, 1979; Rogan and Morin, 2003; Walsh, 2014; Seeßlen, 2017, p.20ff.).20 The rural/urban and periphery/centre dichotomies have also been brought up 14 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer time and again in recent times to explain Trumpism, Brexit and inter alia. However, to treat these questions only in electoral terms – or merely as a continuous motif in film history – would mean to underestimate their cultural and life-world qualities. Researchers have highlighted new patterns of anti-urban resentment and anti-elite critique in that sense in many countries and conflicts (for the US Midwest, see Cramer, 2016; also see Schmidt-Lauber and Roohi in this volume on Austria and India, respectively). Skogen and Krange, for example, in a Norwegian case study on the reintroduction of wolves, point to the emergence of “counterpublics” among hunters and a more general sense of rural disenfranchisement where illegal wolf hunting is perceived as “more-or less-legitimate resistance against power that not only controls wolf management, but is also seen as underlying unfair urban-rural relations and advancing the interests of social segments branded as ‘elites’” (2020, p.568). In stories of rural anti-elitism like this, decline manifests itself in economic terms, shrinking processes (depopulation, the deterioration of public services) and social fragmentation. All this meets with a nature conservation discourse that is perceived as jarring and orchestrated from the centres. Spatial–economic–cultural cleavages also permeate debates around climate change, environmental and conservation politics (see Schwell in this volume) and their consequences for livelihoods and traditions within local rural populations that have little representation in many of these negotiations. Against that backdrop, recent scholarship (Mamonova and Franquesa, 2020; Pied, 2021) underlines the need to understand the forces behind rightwing movements in rural contexts and calls for sounding out progressive agrarian populisms. The forms of a broader field of anti-elite sentiments understood as everyday life also require further exploration and analytical consideration. An important way of approaching this field is through everyday sentiments and affects, where scepticism, disenchantment and resentment towards elites can build up, or through the informal culture of conversation and storytelling, be it online or offline, in which elites and the self-important are “levelled”. This field encompasses feelings of inferiority or “secondariness” (Hall et al., 2013, pp. 333–341; also see Hürtgen in this volume), misrecognition, being on the receiving end of paternalism and tutelage from higher-ups, being exploited, talked down to, i.e. the “hidden injuries of class” (Sennett and Cobb, 1977; Bourdieu, 1999), and other aspects of inequality as they are experienced and made sense of “from below”.21 These patterns are constituted by multiple axes of inequality and oppression (e.g. class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, urban/rural), and are intersectional in that sense, but these categories are usually not kept separate on the plane of experience. Instead, they exist as “underdetermined” affect and are represented and articulated in condensed, “overdetermined” cultural figures. There is beneath and within the history of anti-elite social and political movements and rhetoric, then, a micropolitical cultural archive and a folklore of relating to these figures and the social relationships they symbolise: Through jokes and knowing glances, shared laughs, brief comments, eye-rolling, shrugs and idioms, sometimes defensive, The cultural politics of anti-elitism 15 sometimes more aggressive, that people use to keep the more powerful, distant “elites” and their representatives at bay. The objects and targets of such sentiments and expressions are not necessarily elites in a social–scientific sense of the term: They can be hierarchical superiors, small-scale authorities or street-level bureaucrats. They can also be mediated figures, including politicians and celebrities. Such figures often blend into one image or figure, or, more precisely, they are blended/articulated through mediated cultural work of many kinds, across the divides of “representations” and “everyday life” (see Roohi and Ege/Springer in this volume).22 As historians and social scientists, particularly in the UK, have diagnosed a general “decline of deference” of ordinary people towards the privileged and elites of all kinds over the post-war decades (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 2018), these old forms of anti-elite sentiments and knowledge come to the fore. The attitudes and relationships that people have towards institutions and official figures of authority, especially those in matters of knowledge or aesthetic judgement, also contribute to the broader cultural anti-elitist wave. This includes attitudes towards journalists, cultural critics in academia and “legacy media”, high-prestige cultural producers or policy administrators whose authority results from processes of institutional legitimation (Bourdieu, 1984). Compared to the high points of their prestige in previous decades, these relationships have tended towards increasing scepticism and disinterest and towards anti-elitism in that sense – even if there are recent countertendencies as well, such as the divisive popularity of medical experts in the coronavirus pandemic.23 The right wing’s fight against the legitimacy of public service media is also implicated in this trend. They have brought emerging media systems under pressure not only in countries such as Hungary and Poland but also ones which were held in high esteem over decades, such as the BBC in the UK or the SRF in Switzerland. In all of these cases, accusations abound that proximity to the state makes these broadcasters complicit in an alleged “corrupt elite power complex” (Holtz-Bacha, 2021, p.5) or that as intermediaries they pose an impediment to the direct implementation of the “people’s will” (Krämer and Holtz-Bacha, 2020). Gatekeepers, canons and cultural institutions are being challenged from different angles and genealogies. This includes the declining role and position of professional cultural criticism and journalism, their symbolic power and authority as arbiters of good taste and their economic base.24 On German public television, for example, Das literarische Quartett, where four literary critics discussed the merits of contemporary novels, had been a mainstay of cultural debate since the late 1980s. It turned Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the lead critic, into a widely known and often caricatured public intellectual. In its recent relaunch, the critics were replaced by novelists, celebrities, athletes and other pundits. Public television channel ZDF explained that “the principle of the authority […] of master critics (Großkritiker)” was no longer valid “in a transformed societal situation” (Rüther, 2021). Instead, the debate should be between more relatable “passionate readers”. According to journalist Tobias Rüther (2021), the presenter and some guests in the new version of the show 16 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer use more seminar-style, technical language in talking about books than the literary critics did in the old version, pointing perhaps to insecurities and uncertainties over what counts as legitimate knowledge and authority. Whether or not this is the case, this kind of programming shift illustrates that decision makers in cultural institutions feel the need to distance themselves from what they see as elite culture. What takes its place is not necessarily less elitist but follows different principles, such as personal experience, celebrity, increasing diversity (especially in terms of gender, in this case) and a conservative sense of what are assumed to be popular taste sentiments. One important context here is that rating and counting systems of various kinds, algorithmic decision-making and alternative, “lay” or “amateur” experts (e.g. bloggers, podcasters) amplify, confirm and shape many people’s experiences and opinions. In that sense, they formally orchestrate the questioning of elite judgements and the need for them more generally. Controversies over the 2019 edition of the Sanremo Italian Song festival provide a prototypical case for these dynamics. The broader public’s taste, expressed through audience voting from home (for singer Ultimo), was overturned by the votes of a jury of journalists and other experts who gave the victory to the singer and rapper Mahmood. Political actors, including right-wing Matteo Salvini and politicians from the neither-left-nor-right populist Movimento Cinque Stelle, immediately took this occasion to diagnose an antagonism between “the people” and their taste, on the one hand, and “the elites” in media and other cultural industries, on the other – with undertones of a paternalistic and “politically correct” choice having been made by the latter. To some extent, the rift was diagnosed on grounds of ethno-nationalist understandings of Italianness. Equally significantly, this was a procedural and technical question, especially for representatives of Cinque Stelle. Their questioning of the voting system and its “betrayal” of the audience’s tastes was embedded in a broader argument for more direct, digital democracy. Different, intersecting forms of anti-elitism are at play in cases like this. The “emergence and legitimation of new systems for expressing judgements” (Magaudda, 2020, p.149) and their relationship to populism and anti-elitism in the realm of music and pop culture deserve closer study. Regarding the field of art, Julian Stallabrass observed that the market’s recent speculative boom went along with “the rise of a great deal of populist art – that is, an art of simple character, wide popular appeal, and an enthusiastic engagement with commercial mass culture delivered through branded artistic persona” (2012, p.42), sweeping both private collections and museums. According to this argument, the rise of street art, most prominently the artist Banksy, and similar registers, which are constituted by anti-elite gestures, exemplifies how specific forms of the popular have gained a foothold in the circles of elite culture. In aesthetic terms, Stallabrass traces this pattern back to what Fredric Jameson in the 1980s dubbed “aesthetic populism”, The cultural politics of anti-elitism 17 referring to the rise of postmodernism in the previous two decades, particularly in architecture. He recounts this trajectory’s primal scene: Robert Venturi […] took a group of students on a field trip, not to see the wonders of Rome or the modernist towers of Chicago, but to Las Vegas to examine the architecture of the Strip. The students dubbed the course “The Great Proletarian Cultural Locomotive”, and this gives a clue to one of its most important aspects, which was a defence of popular culture against the taste of the cultural elite. The casino architecture of the Strip was designed to entertain popular tastes: in this way, argued the authors, it was more democratic than modernist buildings whose makers insisted that an absence of decoration and a concentration upon unadorned form imbued them with moral rectitude. They celebrated the extraordinary mix of styles and pastiched histories to be found on the Strip. (Ibid., p.40) The Venturi example illustrates how anti-elite critique, far from being restricted to politics, a few works of cultural production or the world of media technologies, is intertwined with central aesthetic metanarratives and cultural formations that have shaped recent decades. What makes this argument about the 1970s also particularly translatable to the present and to other fields of cultural production is that the “populism” of Learning from Las Vegas, as with so much in postmodernism, conflated the operations of big business with popular taste, in a familiar move to which populist sentiment is often subject. What Venturi and his collaborators asked us to accept as “almost all right” was not popular taste, but popular taste as imagined by casino owners. (Ibid., p.44) Anti-elite gestures in this tradition of aesthetic populism represent a highly ambiguous form of the democratisation of taste and recognition. Similarly, the “vulgar” is a negative criterion often used in the classification practices of the arbiters of “good taste and good pleasure” (Phillips, 2016, p.11) in the fashion world (see Eismann in this volume) and in the realm of aesthetic judgements more widely (see Weis in this volume). But it can also function as a form of subversive, ostentatious and pleasurable excess that is employed self-reflexively, be it in the medium of style, symbolic communication or discursive legitimation – using the provocation of one’s “vulgar” enjoyment to stick it to the elites and their supposed refinement.25 Similar dynamics are at play in the broader culture of taste and consumption, where many people denounce older, residual aesthetics of distinction, respectability and the established upper class as overly formal, stuffy and elitist. Newly emergent forms and aesthetic practices are often no less elitist, but differently so – for example, in the world of “fine dining”, when 18 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer white-linen Michelin-starred restaurants serving classic French haute cuisine are being replaced by hipper, equally Michelin-starred restaurants serving local fare in a more informal atmosphere at similar prices. In the terminology of cultural sociology, a habitus of constant exclusivity is being replaced by an “omnivore” attitude (Peterson and Kern, 1996). The latter also provides distinction towards the “unsophisticated” who appear stuck in their traditions and univorousness (Johnston and Baumann, 2015). Observations of “emerging cultural capital” point towards a remaking of elite culture. New objects and practices of distinction are being established, often as expressions of generational conflict and challenge (Friedman et al., 2015, pp.3–6). Such reconfigurations of distinction-providing tastes under the banner of an antielite aesthetic are not new, but they have become particularly relevant in recent years. Dynamics of digitalisation permeate many of these fields. Their cumulative effects are making themselves felt more strongly than ever, but the moment of single-minded the-internet-will-make-us-free enthusiasm of earlier decades (Shirky, 2009) and the rhetoric of the democratisation of knowledge through the digital is, nevertheless, over, as the destructive dynamics of platform and surveillance capitalism have become as apparent as have their manipulative and limiting aspects (Morozov, 2012; Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). Similar ambiguities and scepticism are at play in non-digital forms of participation: Even if citizens in many contexts now expect participation in decision-making processes, for example, in urban or rural spatial planning (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017; Farías, 2020; Müller, Sutter, and Wohlgemuth, 2020; Bikbov, 2021), this often remains limited to a narrow range of actual options and can take on a tokenistic quality.26 There is usually little room in such processes for challenging ownership structures, for example. Furthermore, a model of the consumer citizen, of approaching the state as a consumer and taxpayer, often prevails over more emphatically democratic senses of what it means to be a citizen (Clarke, 2013). The point in mentioning such debates over broader cultural diagnoses is not to attempt to provide definite answers to them. These discussions take place on a higher level of generality than our approach in this book, which seeks answers to smaller-scale questions and prioritises case studies over theory-building. The processes summarised here are not about a straightforward, secular process of cultural democratisation and improvement or a movement towards egalitarianism and emancipation in strong senses of these terms. Two dynamics are particularly important: Firstly, as all that is solid melts away, the new and emergent must, at some point, also move through the field of social forces of contemporary power structures and is shaped by it – surely not exclusively, but more often than not, decisively. Secondly, as we have begun to show, authority and elitism tend to reappear in new forms. Nevertheless, the new configurations that emerge are not fully determined by these dynamics either. These spotlights highlight the breadth of current forms of anti-elitism. In the realm of the cultural, however, there has been no clearly identifiable The cultural politics of anti-elitism 19 anti-elite “event” on the scale of Trump´s election. Cultural transformations usually take place more slowly, they are difficult to quantify and – given the polysemy and instability of meaning and affect more broadly – are not very clearly delineated. Nonetheless, molecular cultural processes and conflicts accrue and may fundamentally transform the social through slower processes of “drift” (Stewart, 2007; Grossberg, 2018, p.39). Individual and collective actors can activate, strengthen, make use of or defuse them through strategic cultural politics. One more point is apposite here: In what we have reviewed in this section, metanarratives about socio-cultural processes intertwine with normative arguments about what is good and bad about them. The normative arguments made in critique of “elite” gatekeepers of “legitimate” tastes, cultural canons and institutions have their own heterogeneous (intellectual–political) sources: They come from (neo-)liberal and libertarian thinkers who make consumer choice the only legitimate paradigm of estimation; they come from anti-authoritarian leftists and radical democrats and from critics of identity-based privileges (of older, white, cis-gendered men, in particular). Just as the confluence of different processes that are referenced through these metanarratives has increased the vehemence and impact of cultural anti-elitism, so does the convergence of these radically different arguments in the realm of normative discourse. Both, however, are important. Taken together, they also lead to new conflicts over the meanings, effects and legitimacy of anti-elitist articulations. The former makes their consequences more difficult to surmise, the latter should complicate facile judgements. Observers of anti-elitism observed What are the consequences of such cultural processes and struggles for political matters in a more restricted sense? How do they converge, resonate and interfere? Given the difficulty of providing general answers to questions of this sort, we want to take a step back in this third section of the introduction and shift the order of observation by explicitly observing other observers. By doing so, we ask a seemingly simpler question: How were these questions and interactions discussed in early attempts at diagnosing the current series of crises? In response to recent political crises, an explanatory discourse about the interplay of the political, economic and cultural dynamics of anti-elitism with a limited number of themes, subject positions and expectable utterances has built up. Without getting overly technical, we want to highlight nine of its strands. We do this in order to give a quick overview of the state of the debate about resonances and interactions between different forms of anti-elitism and illustrate the need for more integrated perspectives. For this purpose, we first need to have a quick look at the time after the banking and financial collapse around 2007, arguably the beginning of recent crisis cycles in the US and Europe and certainly a cause of a later malaise. In the aftermath and during the Occupy and other place occupation protests, 20 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer critical analysts with an intellectual background in hegemony theory (see, inter alia, Bader et al., 2011; Candeias, 2011; Demirović, 2011, p.65, 2013; Hall, 2011, 2015) downplayed the role of culture as a factor in the escalation of the crisis. This is the first strand we want to mention. According to these writings, there was clearly an economic crisis, for which – to the extent that they can be personalised – elites were responsible, and there was ongoing ecological collapse and a crisis of social reproduction, and, hence, a “multiple crisis”. But there was, as of yet, relative stability in everyday life, politics and the state. Writing about Germany and the UK, respectively, Alex Demirović and Stuart Hall stated in 2011 that, so far, no real crisis of hegemony had occurred, even if there were “moments of a crisis of legitimation, the political crisis, and the state crisis” (Demirović, 2011, p.74). Hall, who – unlike other hegemony theorists – paid significant attention to the cultural in his analyses of a 30-year-long “neo-liberal conjuncture” that culminated in the banking and fiscal crisis, suggested that everyday consciousness and pop culture were to be seen primarily as conservative forces at this point. They stopped an actual hegemonic crisis from emerging, as they were thoroughly imbued, for example, with the ideology of consumption, profit-seeking and meritocracy. Countertendencies received relatively scant attention in these diagnoses.27 Research on cultures of participation, democratisation, the decline of deference and so forth and conjunctural analyses of economic and political crises remained separate. Since then, the overall crisis deepened and shape-shifted. The cross-domain ascent of anti-elitism was part of this process. Commentators in leading Western media outlets quickly picked up on anti-elite dynamics during Trump’s rise and the populist wave that it was part of, offering initial interpretations, focusing mostly on the political side of this broader theme but asking about its cultural aspects and potentially root causes as well. In many cases, attempts at making sense of seemingly similar developments in other countries took this (initially US-based) discourse as a starting point. The ways in which different media – newspaper articles and op-ed pieces, blog and social media (particularly Twitter) posts, academic journal texts, electoral campaign communications and so forth – came together and involved lay people, such as Twitter users and podcasters, and “legacy” media, was new and exciting and in itself part of these cultural shifts. One strand that emerged in this context – the second one we want to mention here – was concerned primarily with the historical contextualisation of anti-elite rhetoric. Historian Beverly Gage, for example, explained in the New York Times “How ‘elites’ became one of the nastiest epithets in American politics” (2017), tracing anti-elite rhetoric back to the Founding Fathers in the 18th century, making the general point that there is a close and positive connection between anti-elite impulses, democracy and popular sovereignty. She argued that the decisive turning point in anti-elite discourse in the US had occurred during the 1990s when “bashing ‘the liberal elite’ had become a favorite blood sport of the American right” – even if similar utterances could The cultural politics of anti-elitism 21 also, if less frequently, be found in the 1970s in the context of the “silent majority” discourse. In a third, particularly influential strand of the explanatory discourse, the term “elite” is given a wide, vaguely sociological definition. Christopher Lasch’s politically ambiguous, communitarianist jeremiad “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” – reportedly a favourite book of Steven Bannon and other leading figures of the alt-right, but also many liberals and leftists (Lehmann, 2017) – had been published in 1996. It cemented the link between the term “elites” and the wider strata of the professional– managerial or “knowledge classes”, “all those professions that produce and manipulate information” (Lasch, 1996, p.5) with their apparent tendencies to self-isolate among themselves in suburbs and gentrified urban neighbourhoods, fall for new forms of consumer and lifestyle distinction, and their cosmopolitan self-image. The link between this group – actually, in our view, too heterogenous a formation to really be called a “group” – and the term “elite” had been much less self-evident before that time.28 This relatively new usage picked up on actual changes in class structures, such as the increasing importance of middle-class professions and the people who hold these positions, and the concomitant decline of working-class jobs and the recognition they used to command. It presented them in polemical, accusatory narratives of decline and gave them a very specific structure. In this sociologising strand, the “elite” – again, conceived of much more broadly than in earlier decades – is contrasted with popular antagonists whose anti-elite sentiments are explained economically and culturally. This leads back to the question, briefly raised above, why Trump appealed to working-class voters. Trump’s son Donald Jr., also a contributor to and commentator on these debates, had rhetorically solved the issue simply by presenting his father as a “working-class billionaire” (see Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram, 2016, p.71). In an influential piece of Trump explanation in the Harvard Business Review, legal scholar Joan C. Williams (2016) made a similar point. She argued that in cultural terms, Trump was indeed closer to many in the (particularly white) working class than upper-middle-class professionals would like to believe: to their aspirations, tastes, sense of a good life and of what being a successful and admirable person meant, and also to their dislike and distaste for certain social types or figures whom they perceived as condescending and undeservedly privileged. Furthermore, of course, there was a material aspect to Trump’s appeal as he also promised a revival of manufacturing and higher wages through tariffs – the rise of China, other competitive economic pressures and the expectation to be protected from them surely play a role (Rosenberg and Boyle, 2019) – and less competition on the labour market from immigrants. Quoting cultural sociologist Michèle Lamont’s qualitative interview-based study The Dignity of Working Men from the mid-1990s, Williams pointed out that many working-class people generally resented professionals whose credentials are strongly based on educational degrees, i.e. teachers, doctors, lawyers or professors, more than they resented “deservedly” rich businesspeople (Williams, 2016; see also Lamont, Park, and 22 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer Ayala-Hurtado, 2017).29 Exploiting this constellation, one basic technique of recent right-wing discourse has been a terminological slippage where the vaguely defined group of upper-middle-class, college-educated and credentialed professionals (or, in a slightly different terminology, the knowledge class or professional–managerial class, see Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 2012; Graeber, 2014), and particularly those among them who identify with a politically “progressive” worldview, merges with the elite in the sense of the “power elite”, well-connected billionaires, the Davos set.30 This slippage reliably puzzles and enrages progressives and the Left. It is both a result of successful political–ideological work of the organised right and based on a relatively long-standing “structural” enmity that many people – across different social classes – sense towards people who may not be part of the ruling class or elite in a stricter sense of the term but who, nonetheless, reap some of the benefits of the current economic order, administer it and also wield forms of cultural domination that they tend to underestimate and deny, as artist Andrea Fraser (2018) put it in one of the relatively few texts written in a mode of leftist self-critique.31 A few years earlier, anthropologist David Graeber had gone so far as to claim that “members of the professional-managerial classes themselves – who typically inhabit the top fifth of the income scale” were “the traditional enemies of the working classes” (Graeber, 2014). Quoting older work by political activist and author Michael Albert, Graeber claimed that actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another and that “members of the working class (or, in America and Europe at least, the white working class) have become increasingly prone to identify, out of sheer rejection of the values of the professionals and administrators, with the populist right” (Graeber, 2014, p.77).32 Such a strong causal connection (“out of sheer rejection”), or, at least, its immediacy, is debatable – there is little hard evidence for it. Claims like these also lack differentiation – it is unlikely, for example, that managers and supervisors in different industries by default embody progressive–liberal values. Furthermore, the borders of the term (are teachers part of the professional–managerial class?) are difficult to define as well. However, acknowledging these complications should not lead to a facile denial of the overall problem of cultural and economic domination through different fractions of the middle and upper classes and their association with progressive and left politics, which remains virulent either way. This, then, was a third major discursive strand. A fourth emerged through the work of more positivist-inclined political scientists with quantitative methodologies who began to measure the geographic spread of what they called “anti-elite parties” (Marx and Nguyen, 2018), “anti-elite rhetoric” (Curini, 2019) or the “anti-elite” and “anti-European vote” (Ferrante and Pontarollo, 2020) and correlated them with the usual variables of psephology. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 23 In doing so, they built on authors such as Cas Mudde or Jan Werner Müller and an older tradition of populism research in which anti-elitism is a defining feature of that political style and related movements and ideologies (Mudde, 2004). This produced some interesting insights, but – at least as seen from the perspective of our undertaking – it also remained limited to a fairly narrow sense of (electoral) politics. More problematically, it also reified anti-elitism into an evident-seeming concept or variable that supposedly stood for something clearly definable out there in the world, and often built on hypotheses that were derived from and embedded in debatable diagnostic narratives.33 Just as the question what kind of “thing” populism really is – an ideology, a style, a strategy, a political logic – remains hotly debated in populism studies, anti-elitism was conceptualised in different ways in studies about such patterns as well: Curini, for example, terms it a “non-policy vote-winning strategy” (2019) that attracts voters of otherwise very different persuasions. Others conceptualise it as a specific style or as part of a (“weak”) ideology that can articulate with more specific left or right ideologies. However, the different implications of these definitions are hardly spelled out. “Elite” quickly becomes a quasi-common sense, seemingly self-evident term in these contexts. Prominent political scientists and “cultural cleavage” theorists (Koopmans and Zürn, 2019; Merkel and Zürn, 2019) even designed a survey study so as to directly compare “elite” and “mass” opinion.34 In doing so, they tend to make the cultural cleavage they seek to prove – in their case: communitarian masses, cosmopolitan elites – seem self-evident by design, presupposing these categories and examining one data set for each of the two, “elite” and “mass”, as if these were unproblematic sociological categories. Academic and feuilletonistic observations of the anti-elite moment also had other central themes. We want to briefly shift the focus to Germanspeaking countries, our own primary context, where this was initially, to a large extent, an imported and recontextualised discussion (e.g. see the contributions in Geiselberger, 2017). Here, one prominent strand of the debate in reaction to worldwide anti-elite rhetoric in politics – the fifth in our list – was primarily defensive: Liberal-conservative authors, such as political scientist and geopolitical strategist Herfried Münkler (2018) or philosophy journalist Wolfram Eilenberger (2018), quickly stepped in to defend “the elites”, the irreducible complexity of functionally differentiated society, the necessity of specialised expertise, the benefits brought to society by great achievers and so forth, in newspapers and magazines such as Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Die Zeit, in the popular pose of the contrarian but serious realist: against too much idealism, too much democracy, too much egalitarianism and equality. Mainstream Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel – a centrist, corporatist, at times also populist – warned that anti-elitism from right and left would undermine democracy (Gabriel, 2018). Philosophie Magazin defensively asked “Do we need elites?” (Brauchen wir Eliten?) and collected suggestions on how “the legitimation crisis” of elites could be overcome – the elites should do better, then dangerous anti-elitists would go away.35 24 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer In Germany, too, there were also a few authors and political strategists who – a sixth strand – suggested and also tried to direct anti-elite energies in a different, left-populist direction. Sanders, Mélenchon, Corbyn and Podemos had at least been able to gather and gain some of the ground usually occupied by the liberal centre. In Germany, however, the “Aufstehen” (rise up) campaign made few inroads, despite its very obvious attempt to benefit from antielite attitudes. In the aftermath of the 2015 “summer of migration”, it became positioned particularly strongly against the pro-migration fraction within society and particularly within the Left party, which it attacked in the name of the welfare state and the national working class; some of its spokespeople, such as Bernd Stegemann and Sahra Wagenknecht, increasingly spent their time criticising the Merkel government for its perceived pro-immigration stance, bashing “identity politics”, “cancel culture” and what they took to be the loony left, primarily for right-wing audiences in newspapers like Die Welt (Ege and Gallas, 2019; Slobodian and Callison, 2019). Political activists of very different backgrounds – primarily anti-racist, pro-migrant, anti-sexist – were labelled “elite”. In the post-2015 backlash, right-wing activists had worked to merge the pro-migration position with the figure of an out-oftouch, privileged elite (in the sense discussed in the previous paragraphs). Many liberals and economically left-wing social democrats, both populist and more traditionally corporatist, followed suit. This resultant post-left political formation was a seventh strand, which branched off from the sixth (left populist). It is closely connected to the sociological explanation of antielite populism, the third strand mentioned above. It was the radical right that had led the way. Alexander Gauland, a figurehead for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and long a card-carrying member of the conservative political and media establishment, in an opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled “Why it must be populism” (Gauland, 2018) appropriated the language of the Lasch-inspired anti-elite intellectual right-wing discourse from the US (or the anywhere-somewhere pop sociology from the UK, see Goodhart, 2017) and the types of arguments against anti-discrimination policy that became known in the US and elsewhere as the “antiwoke” position. He presented the AfD’s overall project and strategy as a defence of both the traditional bourgeoisie and the lower middle and working class against “a new urban elite”, a “globalist class” or “globalist elite”, whose members lived in an aloof society of their own (“abgehobene Parallelgesellschaft”) and looked down upon those with a strong sense of home (Heimat), locality and regional and national identity. They felt at home in London or Singapore as much as in Berlin, Gauland – or someone on his staff – wrote. Critics pointed out that while the language of the “urban elite” and the “global elite” seemed borrowed from an international discourse, the gist of Gauland’s anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan argument was reminiscent of something very close to home, i.e. Hitler and Goebbels speeches from the Nazi era.36 In an address to workers at a Siemens plant in 1933, for example, Hitler – not using the word “elite”, but evoking its semantics – had hailed the ordinary German working people bound to their soil, the factory, the Heimat The cultural politics of anti-elitism 25 and the nation. These people needed a strong state for protection from global economic forces, he argued, whereas a “rootless international clique” was creating strife among the peoples of the world and had no need for a nation. His tropes and even the cities he mentions overlap with Gauland’s: These are the people who are at home everywhere and nowhere but live in Berlin today, may well be in Brussels tomorrow, in Paris the day after, and then again in Prague or Vienna and London, and who feel at home everywhere. (translation M.E.)37 At this point, people in the audience yelled “Jews!”, according to a transcript.38 As political scientist and blogger Floris Biskamp (2019) noted, Gauland probably had not actually consulted Hitler’s speech there, and, as always, the “argument ad hitlerem” (ibid.) had its limits. The tropes, however, had been and continued to be popular among conservative and reactionary writers much more broadly; they diffused into broader discourses, were repeated by the reactionary wing of would-be left populists and continued to reiterate anti-Semitic codes. Even if they were at best superficial as social science, they needed to be taken seriously as a political strategy. In that context, many German public intellectuals and politicians felt the need to line up in one of two camps, either progressive–liberal–cosmopolitan (and, rhetorically, anti-anti-elite) or national–communitarian (rhetorically anti-elite), accepting the way the field had been construed by Gauland and the like.39 At the same time, some analyses also provided narrower definitions of the “elite” or of different elite and elite-like groups and came to different conclusions. In doing so, they shifted the focus to other social domains than politics proper and the economy, especially to the realm of knowledge and its social and technological organisation. Some particularly insightful analyses – which for the sake of simplification we subsume as an eighth strand here – could be found in the UK. Social and political theorist Will Davies (2018) provided a diagnosis that also took into account “molecular” transformations in culture, technology and knowledge. Firstly, he argued that trust in politicians had declined particularly rapidly in the early 2010s, after the 2007–2009 crises and in the midst of their austerity aftermath and the places and Occupy movements. Sketching out an answer to the rhetorical question “why we stopped trusting the elites”, particularly in the UK, Davies reminds us of the rational core of that scepticism as it was expressed in recent elite failures and misdeeds, particularly as they were uncovered through “leaks” of data to the press (see Bramall in this volume): from politicians’ expense scandals, the discovery of long ongoing sexual abuse by celebrities, such as Jimmy Savile, corporate reporting scandals, LIBOR rate fixing, Volkswagen’s emissions fraud or the WikiLeaks complex. There was famously little in terms of punishment of the perpetrators within the financial industry or its regulators and enablers.40 Popular distrust in elites, Davies points out, is closely related to a distrust in media reporting and conventional news about them. Rather than people 26 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer believing in their credibility, “truth is now assumed to reside in hidden archives of data, rather than in publicly available facts” (Davies, 2018, unp.). As “the elites” are the only ones who are thought to be capable of hiding these reservoirs of truth, “suspicions of this nature – that the truth is being deliberately hidden by an alliance of ‘elites’ – are no longer the preserve of conspiracy theorists, but becoming increasingly common” (ibid.). Here, we return to a narrative of shifting regimes of knowledge and authority. The decline of trust in politics and politicians corresponds, thus, to a new regime of truth in Foucault’s sense of the term: The conditions for believing that something can be true have changed. Davies’s sketch of an explanation of anti-elitism’s recent rise sees the latter as not primarily motivated in economic, cultural or political terms, but in relation to this regime of truth, media technologies and broader “diagrams” of knowledge and power that cross those domains. In that respect, he argues that anti-elite tendencies are part of long-running, epochal transformations in the organisation of knowledge – rather than limited to more contingent, superficial developments or, again, to political–economic transformations alone. This was also connected to a different make-up and structure of the people who had inherited the role of the “power elite”, as C. Wright Mills had defined it in the 1950s (see Gerbaudo in this volume). A ninth strand we want to mention here concerns this sense of shifting elites in a much narrower sense – and brings forth the argument that these shifts precipitated new forms of anti-elitism as well. Davies argued (2016) that “financial intermediaries” in banking and related industries, an important segment of the new super-rich, represented a novel type of elite: In comparison to their predecessors, they were much less preoccupied with their own cultural authority and with the normative legitimation of the social order in public discourse more broadly. These virtuosos of coding and deciphering data in a deregulated, digitally financialised environment “lose their extraordinary public status, and gain extraordinary profitability instead”.41 This is a very different “group” than corporate barons, but also than the broader professional–managerial class, much less recognisable through a sociology of lifestyles. In highlighting this, Davies’s account stands for a broader literature that stresses the abstract and invisible character of contemporary economic elites. Building on the work of Italian post-operaist theorist Maurizio Lazzarato and Gilles Deleuze’s classic opposition between disciplinary modern societies and a new society of control, Davies argued that today’s most powerful elites are “post-juridicial” in that the systems upon which their power is built – financial markets and especially price-setting mechanisms arrived at through vast computer networks – in important ways operate outside of the realm of juridical norms, disciplinary apparatuses and even conscious reflection: “This elite inhabits and interprets an encoded semiotic system which derives from machines, rather than from political or juridical discourse” (ibid.). At its core, the power of these new elites is, therefore, neither disciplinary, nor about shaping subjectivities, nor about ideological or hegemonic consensus. Instead, it is “machinic”, automatic and distributed.42 Importantly, according to Davies, the critical presentation of The cultural politics of anti-elitism 27 new facts and scandalisations of elite misdeeds in the media cannot truly challenge this elite formation and its resources. Conjunctural diagnoses and anti-elitism as an entry point These strands have illustrated the ways in which the recent wave of anti-elitism has been made sense of in journalistic, essayistic and academic writing, and they have given a first overview of some particularly relevant positions and patterns. Through them, we have identified an initial range of definitions, interpretations and contextualisations of anti-elitism and anti-elite articulations. They are “diagnostic stories” (Grossberg, 2018, p.28): Narratives that are supposed to describe a malady and its aetiology. Such diagnostic stories attempt to make sense of a historical moment. They ask which kinds of symptoms stand for which kinds of conditions, what is fading away and what is emerging, what societal forces are gaining influence and why. Crucially, diagnostic stories such as these are inevitably also part of and contribute to the shape of that historical moment itself: They express the worldview and the ideological strategies of particularly “positioned” intellectuals, the ways in which they organise and produce knowledge and the groups they represent or want to represent or bring about. It has been said that ethnographies are always and necessarily “partial truths” (Clifford, 1986). The same is true for diagnostic and conjunctural narratives. The point in highlighting this is not to dwell on epistemic scepticism or to want to limit legitimate intellectual to the deconstruction of such narratives, a rather tired gesture at this point. Instead, it is a call to pay close attention to the performativity of such representations within broader hegemonic struggles and an overall war of position. Diagnostic stories and the figures that populate them become part of the common sense through which people make sense of their own and others’ place in the world (Sutter, 2016). They contribute to shaping identities and selves, stereotypes of others (“the left-behind”, “cosmopolitans”), affects (resentment, anger, concern, care), self-reflections (“am I really an elite? How can I be/not be one?” “they really think I’m deplorable?”), forms of mobilisation and other political strategies. A variety of agents use diagnostic stories to shape a conjuncture and its future and shift the balance of political forces. Morally loaded terms such as “betrayal”, “abandonment” or “ignorance” (of ordinary people or the working class from the side of the elites) that find their way into such diagnostic stories are striking examples; the dividing up of the world into the old-fashioned and to-be-overcome and the “more advanced” and truly contemporary is another. Again, the point is not that this is necessarily wrong, the point is that it matters. How it matters remains to be spelled out in light of more specific situations and research questions. Conjunctural analysis requires a concrete entry point into its object of analysis. Following this approach, we take anti-elitism as our entry point for a collection of independent but thematically interconnected chapters. These chapters consider how a wide range of anti-elite phenomena is connected to a range of contexts characteristic for the current conjuncture and its vectors 28 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer of change. Thereby, the authors of the chapters suggest new readings and new diagnostic stories that, hopefully, are helpful for making sense of this conjuncture and gaining a better sense of how to act in it politically.43 As explained above, anti-elitism is not strictly defined as one thing or another but heuristically understood as a conjunctural “theme” or motif. For that reason, it also cannot be sufficiently claimed as an object by any one disciplinary perspective, be it political science, cultural studies, sociology, media studies, anthropology or history. The challenge – both for this book and future research – is to explore these articulations, in a phenomenological sense, and to learn more about the ways in which these articulations interact, resonate and interfere, without, on the other hand, producing overly grand (and thereby analytically worthless) declarations about everything being connected to everything else.44 The editors and many of the authors of the chapters come to these topics from the interdisciplinary cultural studies and conjunctural analysis tradition, be it more from an ethnographic or from a media studies angle. They therefore share, at least to some extent, a common analytical framework across their disciplines. In Clarke’s contribution to this volume, some implications of this overall approach are spelled out in more detail (also see Hall, 2011; Clarke, 2014; Grossberg, 2018, 2019; Massey, 2018; Ege and Gallas, 2019; Gilbert, 2019b).45 Conjunctural analysis requires empirical work, be it ethnographic-qualitative, historical, discourse-centred or quantitative. It requires further work to assemble them for broader analyses. This common conjunctural interest – an interest, briefly put, in the ways in which political, cultural, economic and other forces interact in specific historical situations – also allows distinct theoretical approaches in other respects. Bramall and Gerbaudo, in their chapters, rely particularly on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, the former more strongly within a conjunctural framework, the latter in combination with a classic sociology of elites. The chapters by Hürtgen, Reznikova, Schwell, Weis, Eismann, Luthar, Schmidt-Lauber and Dümling bring other theoretical approaches into the mix, such as critical psychology and Marxist labour sociology, Frankfurt School critical theory, securitisation studies, feminist media studies, sociological systems theory and narratology. This is not to argue that these are completely distinct or even incompatible with conjunctural analysis but to stress that the book also implicitly includes a debate about appropriate concepts and theoretical approaches. Can the accounts of anti-elitism presented in this book, then, be of a higher order of observation than the diagnostic stories we have highlighted above? Ultimately, we do not claim that these analyses are categorically on a different analytical plane than the texts they take as their data. We do not present a unified theory of anti-elite articulations – in our view, no such theory exists, and a combination of domain-specific approaches is more useful than an attempt at a grand synthesis. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 29 Similarly, in his reflections on the Trump moment and the need for a new conjunctural analysis of the present, Lawrence Grossberg, a pioneering author in this line of thought, stated that Cultural Studies is made for moments where we don’t know what’s going on, and we don’t yet know what theories, concepts and methods may enable us to find useful answers, or even to specify the questions. Profound changes with high stakes are taking place, and we cannot fuse the many struggles, contradictions and crises together into a neat, predefined totality or narrative. (Grossberg, 2018, p.35) We also cannot fuse all the diagnostic narratives into a single, overarching one – for good reasons: All such stories define moments of unity (identities) and relations of difference: white vs. people of color, rural vs. urban, parochial vs. cosmopolitan, educated vs. ignorant, self-conscious vs. duped, open-minded vs. close-minded, good people vs. racists, reasonable vs. fanatical people, reason vs. emotion, etc. Such identities and relations are not illusory; they are real but contingent. Reality is an organized multiplicity (chaos) but any particular organization is neither necessary nor guaranteed. Conjunctural stories are expressions of and responses to the lived realities, struggles and crises of people’s lives. (Grossberg, 2018, p.31) Grossberg, thereby, highlights the grounded nature of all conjunctural diagnoses. Conjunctural analyses can only depict and narrate conjunctures in light of specific interests (i.e. concrete research questions and Erkenntnisinteressen: epistemic interest) and thought objects. The all-seeing position that construes a conjunctural totality will remain imaginary and inaccessible. This is the reason why, in theoretical terms, it is so difficult to categorically distinguish one conjunctural account from another – even if, of course, by all sorts of gradual measures, they can be better or worse, more or less supported by evidence, and worthy of defence or critique in light of their normative presuppositions and reasonings. In that sense, our accounts are on the same level as the ones we write about – even if they employ different strategies to gain analytical distance, will hopefully provide new insights, and the conclusions will be supported by transparent methods of data gathering and interpretation. Conjunctural analysis also has a practical, interventionist bent: the “commitment to politicising the conjuncture in the first instance is defined by cultural studies’ project itself: to offer better knowledges, better understandings or narratives of the conjuncture in order to provide resources for changing the world”, as Grossberg puts it (2018, p.45; see also Gilbert, 2019b). “Cultural studies completes its conjunctural analysis by entering into 30 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer the struggle over whether and how to construct an organic crisis (and thus a conjunctural unity)” (Grossberg, 2018, p.54). This also raises questions about geography and scale. It is no coincidence that we have chosen a geographically somewhat rambling approach in this introduction, moving from Trump and his analysts in the US to German newspaper articles to British reflections to the goings-on in many other countries. To put it slightly differently: If anti-elitism as an entry point can lead into analyses of specific situations in many different countries separately, then this fact alone also suggests that the phenomenon, the theme, points towards a conjuncture on a larger, “more global” scale and towards connected and common processes and forces. We mean this in two senses: Firstly, in the sense of existing connections between units that we otherwise consider separately (i.e. parallel processes and convergences; the collaboration between concrete agents, such as political circles and movements; the transnational – if strongly hierarchy-based – reach of technology and media, such as movies or Tweets or academic papers; the transfer and recontextualisations of, for example, political strategies and technologies, and arguments and narratives in style and in substance). Secondly, in the sense that larger blocs of countries can be seen as forming an interdependent conjuncture where there are relations of forces between a range of actors and forces, and developments in one area (e.g. China’s increasing economic power, the long-standing primarily German hold over European fiscal policy, the Arab spring, movements of migration or even Korean pop-cultural influence) lead to anti-elite reactions in another. That being said, this book cannot do justice to all of these connections. The introduction has taken the US as a starting point and an over-proportional number of chapters focus on the UK and German-speaking countries. Some of the book’s chapters will bypass the Anglo- and, to some extent, German-/Austrian-centric approach, inner-European differences will also be highlighted, but there are certainly large lacunae. While these considerations betray some serious limitations to which we must admit, they also connect – we hope productively – to the difficult methodological question regarding what kind of reach a particular conjuncture is assumed to have. Post-2016: a new conjuncture? At the end of this introduction, we return to the course of chronology. Around 2019, the anti-elite wave was starting to ebb in many countries. In the US, Trump’s reversals, and his defeat in the election in 2020, could be read as signs of this. There, the anti-elite wave apparently crested somewhere between 2015 and 2018. Has that “moment” ended? If so, why? And is this a new conjuncture in a broader sense as well? By 2020, it seemed as if the old regime was back, even if it promised real political changes, not only from Trump’s time, but from the previous version of neo-liberalism as well (on the US, the UK and the Eurozone, see Watkins, The cultural politics of anti-elitism 31 2021). There seemed to be no new wave of anti-elite “content” in popular culture overall either, even if, for example, films such as Hillbilly Elegy popularised the by now well-known diagnostic narratives about white working-class conservatism, and superhero movies continued to present political elites as clueless to the extreme. As a topic, however, anti-elitism had apparently lost the lustre of the new, even if there was still a baseline of anti-elitism and the overall semantics remain in place, ready to be used for new purposes. Progressives and the Left in many countries focused their political energies more strongly on anti-racist and -sexist politics, and on averting further climate change, and attacked the police, sexists of all classes and milieus, and an overall “society of externalization” (Lessenich, 2016) in which millions partake. These political struggles are critical of power structures of different kinds, but they are not primarily directed against “the elites” – by contrast, for example, to the left-populist election campaigns and mobilisations before. Nevertheless, anti-elitism went into overdrive again in the last two years, in the late phase of the 2020 US election and among denialists about the coronavirus pandemic. What had smouldered subterraneously – the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, for example – turned into a firestorm. The QAnon complex, according to which “elite” cliques are secretly feasting on adrenochrome harvested from tortured children, received ever more popularity. With the coronavirus pandemic came newly visible medical elites and a backlash against them, but also against the Chinese, the pharmaceutical industry, philanthropical capitalists and the media. As we have shown in this introduction, between the mid-2010s (and, arguably, earlier from the 1990s) and around 2019, anti-elitism had in many cases turned primarily sociological: relatively large parts of society – the professional–managerial class, the knowledge class, whichever word one uses to signal them – were “the elites”, according to widespread rhetoric and the discourse of which it forms part.46 Now, a few years later, among anti-vaxxers and Trump “dead-enders”, “the elite” again primarily appeared as a small, sinister clique pulling strings. It probably helped that there were prominent and very real cases, such as the Jeffrey Epstein saga, where “elites” were again shown to be evil and its members connected. However, this was not necessary for anti-elitism to turn full-throttle paranoid during the pandemic and in the “Covid conjuncture” (Means and Slater, 2021; Morley, 2021), where the “oligarchic plunder of public wealth” during the pandemic (Means and Slater, 2021, p.517) was much less debated than alleged plots by secret powers. Anti-Semitic dog whistles were in many cases replaced by straightforward anti-Semitic tirades.47 These movements were closely intertwined with the radical right. The latter has its own complex and contradictory relationship to anti-elitism, given its belief in “true”, natural elites (see Dümling and Gebhardt in this volume). But these movements also offered something else, a do-it-yourself epistemic tool-kit where those who were open to it could discover “the truth”, to a large extent in messenger service group chats. Truth and – particularly among the anti-vaxxers – “love” would conquer alienation, abstraction and disease. In that sense, an emphatically anti-elitist theme – primarily in a cultural and 32 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer epistemic sense – shapes and powers these amorphous groups and formations just as much as older radical right ideology, with which it to some extent merges. It seems, then, that anti-elite articulations are here to stay, and they will continue to take on new forms. Many structures remained remarkably stable in the economic and political order. Levelling and reconfiguration processes in the logic of digitalisation under capitalism/neo-liberalism are moving ahead continuously. In the terminology of hegemony theory, even if there had been something like a hegemonic crisis, at least in the US, and a “settlement” was coming undone, there was certainly no revolution, no “ruptural unity” (Althusser), even if some elements of capitalist globalisation are being recalibrated and regulations of international trade on a national level have again gained greater legitimacy, especially in relatively powerful countries (Slobodian, 2021; Watkins, 2021). Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that this was more than just a surface movement. On the political right, the anti-elite pattern has, in many cases, become indissoluble from the overall war of position. There was no return to the normalcy of centrist-leaning politics and a relatively broad consensus, be it on trade policy or the conditions for truth, but a deepening cleavage and polarisation, for which anti-elite rhetoric remains instrumental. In our view, it is primarily the political Left that does not know what to do with the wide spectrum of anti-elite articulations at this point. During the left-populist wave, its potential power was acknowledged and made use of, but its dangers became increasingly manifest as well, as some would-be left populists, not least in Germany, moved ever more strongly towards resentment politics against so-called woke elites and nostalgia for earlier stages of capitalism. Furthermore, the strategy usually worked much better on the political right, as many aspiring left populists found out. Rhetoric – this rhetoric included – could not compensate for a weakness in organising and media access, for example, and many potential Left supporters and voters were turned off by populist exercises. Equally importantly, this is not only a tactical matter. The political analyses of many current Left movements have no real use for an explicit anti-elite mode. To some extent, this is because of the aforementioned dangers and the equally sound reason that Left movements have better and more complex analytical tools and analyses of the situation at hand. However, the Left seems partially hesitant to make use of anti-elite articulations, despite their power, for two reasons: Out of a fear of popular anger and because it explicitly or implicitly sees the formation of a new bloc that includes liberal-leaning centrist upper-middle-class milieus, and revolves around them, as the inevitable way forward. A progressive-egalitarian anti-elitism that embraces difference, a “cosmopolitism from below” and radical economic and ecological demands, seems out of reach. This might be even more dangerous, however, because it leaves the anti-elitist tool-kit, and also the promise of an egalitarianism that starts here and now, for others to use. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 33 Notes 1 We will return to the concept “conjuncture” and conjunctural analysis as an approach below. 2 On the populist strategy, see, inter alia, Worsley (1969), Laclau (2005) and Kapferer and Theodossopoulos (2019). 3 We will not go deeper into voter analysis here. Trump’s electorate included large numbers of well-off Republicans, but his win was also made possible by (primarily white) Rustbelt working-class voters, many of whom had voted for Obama before (see Grossberg, 2018; Karp, 2020). 4 The role played by industries or factions of capital and their representatives who were discontent with some elements of neo-liberalism will probably play a larger role in future political–economic analyses. Quinn Slobodian stresses that “the contemporary challenge to neoliberal globalization […] is not simply a backlash from below; it is also a back-lash from above” (Slobodian, 2021, p.5), using the steel industry as his main case. 5 Because of these different meanings of the term, it seemed beside the point when, for example, Trump-sceptic conservative pundits tried to poke fun at his new elites that seemed worse than the old ones (Brooks, 2017), or when Republican primary candidate and US senator Ted Cruz called Trump “an elite”, just like Hilary Clinton (Corasaniti, 2016). People knew Trump was rich; that was part of his appeal. 6 Leo Lowenthal (2015) documented similar usages in his classic analyses of the rhetoric of quasi-fascist “agitators”, such as Charles Edward “Father” Coughlin in the US during the 1940s. 7 See Hall (1979, p.15, 1985). 8 US journalist Chris Hayes had published a book with the same title in 2012. 9 These recent anti-elite populist positions on the Left resonate, to some extent, with a longer tradition of left-wing politics and the democratic–majoritarian impulse (“for all”, the “popular”). The class struggle, after all, almost inevitably targets the economic elite. The terms “ruling class” and “bourgeoisie” are, however, conceptually quite distinct. “Elite” has not been a prominent term in Marxism and many other left-wing theories. On the other hand, at least in many Western European countries, Left-wing anti-elite populism’s tendency to speak in the name of “the people” rather than in the name of a class, social movement or other identity and naming “the elite” as the main antagonist is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is not only instinctual but also, in many cases, calculated and strategic (Stavrakakis, 2014; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014; Errejon and Mouffe, 2016). However, when, by 2020, Bernie Sanders had failed to secure the nomination as presidential candidate to Joseph Biden, Jeremy Corbyn was ousted by centrist Keir Starmer and movements such as Podemos lost their lustre, while others such as “Aufstehen” (rise up) in Germany failed to gain momentum, the “Left populist moment” seems to have passed. 10 In the French context, Macron’s announcement in 2021 that he will close down – or significantly reform and rename – the École nationale d’administration, the school for elite civil servants (from which he also graduated) and politicians, seems like a public gesture towards meeting anti-elite demands. 11 The distinction between popular–democratic and authoritarian–populist approaches has been one way of articulating this (Hall, 1980; Grossberg, 2018, pp.5–6). See Reznikova in this volume for a critique. 12 More authoritarian traditions of the Left, be they Leninist or social democratic, proclaim universal-egalitarian values but see a strong necessity of (primarily party) cadres (or, in other strands, experts) and, thereby, implicitly a counter-elite. 13 This view of culture and the cultural is based primarily on Stuart Hall’s “conjunctural” version of Gramscian hegemony theory (see below) and subsequent 34 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer positions in cultural studies and social and cultural anthropology that have attempted to strengthen the connections to related theoretical strands. This implies that all politics is also in some way cultural. At the same time, to highlight cultural politics is not to be in denial of political economy (or its critique) or to pretend the tools of cultural analysis would suffice for understanding entire conjunctures. These kinds of reductionism (be they economistic or culturalist/ideologist) are counterproductive. The methodological point here is not to overstretch the concept, but to elaborate non-reductionistic analyses that, ideally, also reflect the historicity of their own terms. As culture is always in danger of being reified and used instrumentally for the construction of collective identities and differences, particularly in ethnic terms, it can make sense to use the concept cautiously, for example, by primarily employing it as an adjective or as the designation of something like a level or dimension, “the cultural”, in order to stress the processual, non-homogeneous, diffuse nature of cultural processes. Any designation of culture as a specific domain is of a heuristic nature, as the economy and politics, for example, are always and necessarily also “cultural” (i.e. dependent upon meanings and everyday practices) and vice versa, and the distinction between these domains remains a historical and political struggle. They are, nevertheless, heuristically indispensable. German-market advertisements for French-Romanian car maker Dacia were a case in point: They positioned lively, diverse families driving relatively inexpensive Dacias against a lifeless country club elite in need of conspicuous consumption. We leave out popular music here – this would be too large a field (for instance, country music, punk and rap having developed quite distinct anti-elite vocabularies). While there are certainly examples of direct anti-elite texts and imagery (see, inter alia, the beginning of Bramall’s chapter), our sense is that (a) anti-elite sentiments find different, less obvious forms of expression in contemporary popular music and (b) critiques of power and inequalities that are not primarily articulated as anti-elite struggles (for example, the “Black Lives Matter” movement) have become more relevant than anti-elite narratives in public statements by pop musicians. Whereas Capra, his conservative personal politics notwithstanding, arguably produced very New Deal-friendly, progressively inclusionary films in those years, contemporary German films such as Paracelsus (G.W. Pabst, 1943) showed the much more dangerous, anti-Semitic side of anti-elitist affects at that time. We put the term “white” in italics as a signal that it is not a self-explanatory designation of skin colour or biological “race”, but a complex, historically somewhat variable (but nonetheless powerful) social construction. This fits well with the pattern of austerity and gender representations outlined in Negra and Tasker (2014) and Davies and O’Callaghan (2017). A similar story could be told about many other media and pop-cultural registers, such as the music video, where it was the electronic musician John Maus, now infamous for his presence at the January 2021 MAGA rally, who produced a widely received single in 2017 that carried the lyrics “I see the combine coming, I see the combine coming, It’s gonna dust us all to nothing”. This, of course, cannot be wholly disentangled from economic conflicts and class struggles in a narrower sense – but it makes little sense to subsume the latter under the cultural, and the reverse strategy would be reductionist as well. See the classic writings by John Fiske (2011), building on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White and many others; Laura Kipnis’s exemplary analysis on gender, sexuality and anti-elitist aesthetics (1992). Alex Niven (2012) has attempted an essayistic synthesis of cultural and political anti-elitism from the populist Left based on similar diagnoses. Upon closer inspection, of course, many seemingly anti-elite representations in the pop-cultural sphere are – like Trump’s rhetoric – ambivalent: while the gaze upon “the The cultural politics of anti-elitism 35 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 elites” may be critical and disarming, it turns out as envious and desiring as well. The rebel becomes the new tyrant, and the “moral of the story” is that power corrupts and there will always be rulers and ruled. On the public’s declining confidence in educational, media and medical institutions in the US, see Funk and Kennedy (2020). Trust in science and scientists, on the other hand, has remained constant since the 1970s – but is strongly polarised and politicised. On declining trust, see snapshots such as Brenan (2020). Maak (2016) recounts the mostly American phenomenon of “rolling coal”: diesel trucks that are manipulated into emitting larger than normal amounts of thick black smoke in order to anger, for example, drivers of hybrid or electric cars – a conspicuous form of anti-moral anti-environmentalism. Calls for a participatory paradigm also strongly shape academic research. There are obviously many ambiguities and opportunities in all of these domains. For a defence of the participation paradigm, see, inter alia, Carpentier, Duarte Melo and Ribeiro (2019). This was different in the literature on commons/commoning, protests and new forms of solidarity, which usually had a much more optimistic bent but had less to say about the actual shape of the crisis. See Lemann (1996): “Populists used to hate the rich, but now they hate the elite. This shift has made possible the migration of populism from the Democratic to the Republican Party.” The debate also connects with older right-wing versions of the sociology of intellectuals and “new class” discourse, such as German sociologist Helmut Schelsky’s anti-New Left book Die Arbeit tun die anderen: Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen (And the others do the work. The intellectuals’ class rule and rule of the priests) (1975). The connections between the new right’s anti-elite discourse and the intellectual history of the sociology of the middle class and the intellectuals are yet to be written. The view of professionals as being clearly on the side of “them” rather than the working-class “us” is already mentioned by Richard Hoggart (1957). Williams, however, leaves out many ambiguities that the authors she cites highlight in an update on their previous research: “On one hand, working-class men in the 1990s often expressed respect for economic success, and when queried about possible heroes, a number mentioned Donald Trump due to their belief that “becoming rich” is proof of intelligence. At the same time, Lamont “[…] found that 75 percent of her respondents were critical of the morality of ‘people above’, who are perceived as too self-centred and ambitious, lacking in sincerity, and not concerned enough ‘with people’” (Lamont, Park, and Ayala-Hurtado, 2017, p.162). The latter could be defined in a more precise sense, as in the sociology and journalism of elites (Rothkopf, 2008), or in the style of conspiracy theories. Andrea Fraser calls for a “reflexive resistance” where cultural producers on the political Left “recognize cultural capital [including and particularly their own, M.E. and J.S.], not only as a socially effective form of power but also as a form of domination, not only substantively, in its particular forms, but also structurally and relationally, in its distributions and through the social differences and hierarchies that it articulates and performs” (2018). Graeber’s point is part of a traditional anarchist critique of bureaucratic socialism that threatens to empower professionals and intellectuals rather than workers. The list of anti-elite parties is debatable. The arguments are certainly of great interest: “the incentive to adopt a strong anti-elite stance grows as the ideological space separating one party from the other(s) shrinks”, argues Curini (2019, p.1416). Marx and Nguyen show that “anti-elite rhetoric tends to reduce the gap between the poor and the rich” (Marx and Nguyen, 2018, p.935) in voting patterns. 36 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer 34 In this research, “elites” basically refers to what is usually called functional elites; in concrete terms, a survey among “more than 1,600 occupants of leading positions across twelve societal sectors (politics, administration, justice, military and police, labour unions, finance and economy, other lobbyism, research, religion, culture, media and other civil society)” (Koopmans and Zürn, 2019, p.25). It is unclear whether this sample stands for the broader social groups that anti-elite discourse addresses and helps constitute. This, however, seems to be at least their implicit message to policymakers, political strategists and social analysts. 35 An American (and sarcastic-humoristic) version of this was articulated by P.J. O’Rourke in the (by now old-school) neo-conservative magazine Weekly Standard (2017). 36 https://twitter.com/znuznu/status/1048912907612934144 37 See Benz (2018). It then turned out that the text was also very close to some passages from an article in Der Tagesspiegel from two years before, during the apparent apex of the anti-elite conjuncture in the US. In that article, progressive author Michael Seemann had summarised the right-wing critique of elites and reflected upon its justification and the necessity for urban progressives to be self-critical (Seemann, 2016). 38 Speech held on November 10, 1933. Transcript by the film archive at Bundesarchiv Koblenz, available at http://www.filmarchives-online.eu/ viewDetailForm?FilmworkID=aaa546b529f11070db805811df326094. 39 See Beyer and Wietschorke in this volume. A particularly important figure here was renowned political scientist Wolfgang Merkel, a director at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, who highlighted the communitarians-against-cosmopolitans cultural cleavage (Merkel, 2017; Merkel and Zürn, 2019). 40 Empirical sociologists of corporate elites, such as Michael Hartmann (2018), also came to the conclusion that corporate elites are difficult to visualise and represent (aside from images of celebrity wealth, etc.), as will become clearer in a few chapters of this book as well (see, inter alia, Bramall). A brilliant filmic exploration of these questions can be found, for example, in Gerhard Friedl’s Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen? (2004), a reflection on the invisibility of capital ownership in 20th-century Germany. 41 Davies highlights the contrast to “traditional professions (such as doctor, teacher, lawyer)”, often termed “elites” in political discourse: They “retain their epistemological jurisdictions, but are no longer amongst the beneficiaries of capitalist expansion […].” (Davies, 2016, p.238). 42 In this regard, Davies’s argument is reminiscent of Scott Lash’s claims about a post-hegemonic phase of political and economic domination (2007). We remain sceptical about the epochal reach of such diagnoses. 43 Broadly speaking, in our view, there are two primary directions in conjunctural analysis. In the first paradigm, which is, on the face of it, the “critical” and “political–economic” one, it is particularly relevant to figure out strategies of powerful agents, be they within or outside the state – and, in this case, how anti-elite articulations connect with them. In the second, more “culturalist” one, cultural dynamics and the conjunctural nature of meanings and practices play a larger role. Matters of strategy from the centre of power (and also from self-reflexive counterhegemonic oppositional forces) take a back seat, to some extent, because they are assumed to have a more limited reach. These paradigms need not necessarily be in contradiction, but it is helpful to be able to distinguish them so as not to raise false expectations. Both are present in the book. 44 Similar stories can be told about other countries and parts of the world in recent years and decades as well: Islamists and Ottoman revivalists denouncing Kemalist, secular elites in Turkey; self-described ethno-nationalist illiberals denouncing liberal reformers, the European Union, communists and George Soros in Hungary or Poland; Bolsonaro and his ilk fighting leftists, intellectuals The cultural politics of anti-elitism 37 and activists in Brazil; the Israeli right wing garnering much of the Sephardic and Mizrahi vote and that of recent Russian immigrants against the Ashkenazi establishment. Different kinds of Left anti-elitism dominated Latin American politics for much of the 2000s and proved highly influential on other continents as well. 45 Conjunctural analysis as a methodology or an approach flourished particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s in analyses of early neoliberalism (Hall, 1985; Hall et al., 2013). For this tradition, the study Policing the Crisis. Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al., 2013), a conjunctural analysis of 1970s Britain and its crises first published in 1978, remains an important resource and inspiration. After the 2008/2009 crash and the subsequent upheaval, a number of authors – some of whom had been working within this approach in the meantime – revived the concept and called for new conjunctural analyses, which was perhaps also indicative of a search for different forms of collaboration and cumulative work in cultural studies and critical political economy in the neo-liberal academy. 46 This, admittedly, has recently intensified in “anti-woke” polemics, primarily from the side of contrarian-conformist neo-communitarians. 47 German vegan chef turned conspiracy theorist and right-wing extremist Attila Hildmann (Callison and Slobodian, 2021) was a case in point. Bibliography Bader, P., Becker, F., Demirović, A. and Dück, J., 2011. Die multiple Krise – Krisendynamiken im neo-liberalen Kapitalismus. In: A. Demirović, J. Dück, F. Becker and P. Bader, eds. Vielfachkrise im finanzmarktdominierten Kapitalismus. Hamburg: VSA, pp. 11–28. Baiocchi, G. and Ganuza, E., 2017. Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barney, D., Coleman, G., Ross, C., Sterne, J. and Tembeck, T., 2016. The participatory condition: an introduction. In: D. Barney, G. Coleman, C. Ross, J. Sterne and T. Tembeck, eds. The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Electronic mediations, 51), pp. vii–xxxix. Benz, W., 2018. Wie Gauland sich an Hitlers Rede anschmiegt. Der Tagesspiegel [online] 10 October. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/analyse-deshistorikers-wolfgang-benz-wie-gauland-sich-an-hitlers-rede-anschmiegt/23166272. html [Accessed 13 April 2021]. Bikbov, A., 2021. Keep the city clean: the ambivalent ethics of ownership in urban routine and non-violent protest in Moscow. In: M. Ege and J. Moser, eds. Urban Ethics. Conflicts about the “Good” and “Proper” Life in Cities. London; New York: Routledge, pp. 243–260. Biskamp, F., 2019. Rechter Ideologe und schlechter Soziologe. Alexander Gaulands Rede über Populismus und Demokratie gelesen als Theorie, Ideologie und politische Herausforderung. Available at: https://florisbiskamp.com/2019/02/11/rechterideologe-und-schlechter-soziologe-alexander-gaulands-rede-ueber-populismusund-demokratie-gelesen-als-theorie-ideologie-und-politische-herausforderung/ #more-517 [Accessed 13 April 2021]. Bourdieu, P., 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London; New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P., 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Translated by A. Accardo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 38 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer Brenan, M., 2020. Americans remain distrustful of mass media. Gallup [online] 30 September. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remaindistrustful-mass-media.aspx [Accessed 18 April 2021]. Brooks, D., 2017. The Trump elite. Like the old elite, but worse! The New York Times [online] 24 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/opinion/thetrump-elite-like-the-old-elite-but-worse.html [Accessed 24 March 2017]. Caiani, M. and Padoan, E., 2020. Populism and the (Italian) crisis. the voters and context. Politics, online first, pp. 1–17. Callison, W. and Slobodian, Q., 2021. Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol. Boston Review[online] 12 January. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/ politics/william-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol [Accessed 11 April 2021]. Candeias, M., 2011. Interregnum – Molekulare Verdichtung und organische Krise. In: A. Demirović, J. Dück, F. Becker and P. Bader, eds. Vielfachkrise im finanzmarktdominierten Kapitalismus. Hamburg: VSA, pp. 45–62. Carpentier, N., 2011. Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-democratic Struggle. Bristol: Intellect. Carpentier, N., Duarte Melo, A. and Ribeiro, F., 2019. Resgatar a participação: para uma crítica sobre o lado oculto do conceito. Comunicação e Sociedade, 36, pp. 17–35. Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Castells, M., 2015. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clarke, J., 2013. In search of ordinary people: the problematic politics of popular participation. Communication, Culture & Critique, 6 (2), pp. 208–226. Clarke, J., 2014. Conjunctures, crises, and cultures. Focaal, 2014 (70), pp. 113–122. Clarke, J. and Newman, J., 2017. “People in this country have had enough of experts”: Brexit and the paradoxes of populism. Critical Policy Studies, 11 (1), pp. 1–16. Clifford, J., 1986. Introduction: partial truths. In: J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Corasaniti, N., 2016. Ted Cruz ad says Donald Trump is an elite, just like Hillary Clinton. The New York Times [online] 21 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes. com/2016/04/22/us/politics/ted-cruz-ad.html [Accessed 10 April 2021]. Cramer, K., 2016. The Politics of Resentment. Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Curini, L., 2019. The spatial determinants of the prevalence of anti-elite rhetoric across parties. West European Politics, 43 (7), pp. 1415–1435. Davies, H. and O’Callaghan, C., 2017. Introduction: boom and bust? Gender and austerity in popular culture. In: H. Davies and C. O’Callaghan, eds. Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity & Recession in Film & Television. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–19. Davies, W., 2016. Elite power under advanced neoliberalism. Theory Culture and Society, 34 (5–6), pp. 227–250. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/18744/ [Accessed 13 March 2017]. Davies, W., 2018. Why we stopped trusting elites. The Guardian [online] 29 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we-stoppedtrusting-elites-the-new-populism [Accessed 2 December 2018]. Demirović, A., 2011. Ökonomische Krise – Krise der Politik? In: A. Demirović, J. Dück, F. Becker and P. Bader, eds. Vielfachkrise im finanzmarktdominierten Kapitalismus. Hamburg: VSA, pp. 63–78. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 39 Demirović, A., 2013. Multiple Krise, autoritäre Demokratie und radikaldemokratische Erneuerung. PROKLA. Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 43 (171), pp. 193–215. doi: 10.32387/prokla.v43i171.266. Ege, M., 2011. Carrot-cut jeans: an ethnographic account of assertiveness, embarrassment and ambiguity in the figuration of working-class male youth identities in Berlin. In: D. Miller and S. Woodward, eds. Global Denim. Oxford: Berg, pp. 159–180. Ege, M., 2013. “Ein Proll mit Klasse”: Mode, Popkultur und soziale Ungleichheiten unter jungen Männern in Berlin. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Ege, M. and Gallas, A., 2019. The exhaustion of Merkelism: a conjunctural analysis. New Formations, 96 (96), pp. 89–131. Ehrenreich, B. and Ehrenreich, J., 2012. Death of a yuppie dream. The rise and fall of the professional-managerial class. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation New York Office [online] Available at: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_ publikationen/ehrenreich_death_of_a_yuppie_dream90.pdf [Accessed 31 May 2021]. Eilenberger, W., 2018. Elite: Asozial, autonom, autark! ZEIT Online, 24 September. Available at: https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2018-09/elite-exzellenz-gesellschaftlichebedeutung [Accessed 8 April 2021]. Errejon, I. and Mouffe, C., 2016. Constructing a new politics. Soundings, (62), pp. 43–56. Farías, I., 2020. Für eine Anthropologie des Urbanismus. Ethnographisch Städte bauen. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 2020 (2), pp. 171–192. Fenster, M., 1988. Country music video. Popular Music, 7 (3), pp. 285–302. Ferrante, C. and Pontarollo, N., 2020. Regional voting dynamics in Europe: the rise of anti-elite and anti-European parties. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52 (6), pp. 1019–1022. Fisher, M., 2013. Remember who the enemy is. k-punk [online], 25 November. Available at: https://k-punk.org/remember-who-the-enemy-is/ [Accessed 21 May 2021]. Fiske, J., 2011. Reading the Popular. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge. Fraser, A., 2018. Artist writes no. 2 toward a reflexive resistance, X-TRA, 20 (2). Available at: https://www.x-traonline.org/article/artist-writes-no-2-toward-areflexive-resistance/ [Accessed 10 June 2019]. Fraser, N., 2017. From progressive neo-liberalism to Trump – and beyond. American Affairs Journal, 1 (4). Available at: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/ progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/ [Accessed 9 April 2021]. Friedman, S., Savage, M., Hanquinet, L. and Miles, A., 2015. Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction. Poetics, 53, pp.1–8. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2015.10.002. Fuchs, C., 2017. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781446270066. Funk, C. and Kennedy, B., 2020. Public confidence in scientists has remained stable for decades. Pew Research Center Fact Tank [online] 27 August. Available at: https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/27/public-confidence-in-scientists-hasremained-stable-for-decades/ [Accessed 16 May 2021]. Gabriel, S., 2018. Gaulands Plädoyer ist im Kern antidemokratisch. Der Tagesspiegel [online] 10 October. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/populismusbeitrag-in-der-faz-gaulands-plaedoyer-ist-im-kern-antidemokratisch/23166172. html [Accessed 10 April 2021]. 40 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer Gage, B., 2017. How “Elites” became one of the nastiest epithets in American politics. New York Times Magazine. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/ magazine/how-elites-became-one-of-the-nastiest-epithets-in-american-politics. html [Accessed 10 April 2021]. Gauland, A., 2018. Fremde Federn: Warum muss es Populismus sein? Frankfurter Allgemeine [online] 6 October. Available at: https://www.faz.net/1.5823206 [Accessed 10 April 2021]. Geiselberger, H., ed., 2017. Die grosse Regression: eine internationale Debatte über die geistige Situation der Zeit. 2nd ed. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Gerbaudo, P., 2018. Social media and populism: an elective affinity? Media, Culture & Society, 40 (5), pp. 745–753. Gilbert, J., 2019a. Das Kulturelle in politischen Konjunkturen. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, (2), pp. 104–114, 128–136. Gilbert, J., 2019b. This conjuncture: for Stuart Hall. New Formations, 96 (96), pp. 5–37. Goodhart, D., 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London: Hurst & Company. Graeber, D., 2014. Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4 (3), pp. 73–88. Grossberg, L., 2018. Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right. London: Pluto Press. Grossberg, L., 2019. Cultural studies in search of a method, or looking for conjunctural analysis. New Formations, 96 (96), pp. 38–68. Guilluy, C., 2015. La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires. Paris: Flammarion. Guilluy, C., 2019. Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hall, G., 2008. Digitize this Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Electronic mediations, 24). Hall, G., 2021. A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain. London: Open Humanites Press. Available at: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/astubborn-fury/ [Accessed 18 April 2021]. Hall, K., Goldstein, D.M. and Ingram, M.B., 2016. The hands of Donald Trump: entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (2), pp. 71–100. Hall, S., 1979. The great moving right show. Marxism Today, (January), pp. 14–20. Available at: https://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/744/files/2012/03/GreatMoving-Right-ShowHALL.pdf [Accessed 31 May 2021]. Hall, S., 1980. Popular democratic vs. authoritarian populism: two ways of taking democracy seriously. In: A. Hunt, ed. Marxism and Democracy. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 157–185. Hall, S., 1985. Authoritarian populism: a reply. New Left Review, (151), pp. 115–124. Hall, S., 2011. The neo-liberal revolution. Cultural Studies, 25 (6), pp. 705–728. Hall, S., ed., 2015. After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto. London: Lawrence and Wishart (Soundings). Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B., 2013. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan International Higher Education. Hall, S. and O’Shea, A., 2013. Common-sense neoliberalism. Soundings, 55, pp. 9–25. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 41 Hartigan, J., 1997. Unpopular culture: the case of “white trash”. Cultural Studies, 11 (2), pp. 316–343. Hartmann, M., 2018. Die Abgehobenen: wie die Eliten die Demokratie gefährden. Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag. Hayes, C., 2012. Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy. 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers. Hochschild, A.R., 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press. Hofstadter, R., 1964. The paranoid style in American politics. Harper’s Magazine, (November), pp. 77–86. Hoggart, R., 1957. The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working-class Life with Special References to Publications and Entertainment. London: Chatto and Windus. Holtz-Bacha, C., 2021. The kiss of death. Public service media under right-wing populist attack. European Journal of Communication 44 (320), pp. 221–237. Jenkins, H., 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Johnston, J. and Baumann, S., 2015. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge (Cultural spaces). Kalb, D., 2009. Conversations with a Polish populist: tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond). American Ethnologist, 36 (2), pp. 207–223. Kapferer, B. and Theodossopoulos, D., 2019. Introduction: populism and its paradox. In: B. Kapferer and D. Theodossopoulos, eds. Democracy’s Paradox. Populism and Its Contemporary Crisis. New York; Oxford: Berghahn (Critical Interventions. A Forum for Social Analysis), pp.1–34. Karp, M., 2020. Bernie Sanders’s five-year war. Jacobin [online] 28 August. Available at: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-five-year-war [Accessed 8 September 2020]. Kelty, C.M., 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (Experimental futures). Kelty, C.M., 2019. The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Kipnis, L., 1992. (Male) Desire and (female) disgust: reading hustler. In: L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London; New York: Routledge, pp. 373–391. Koopmans, R. and Zürn, M., 2019. Cosmopolitanism and communitarianism – How globalization is reshaping politics in the twenty-first century. In: P. de Wilde, R. Koopmans, W. Merkel, O. Strijbis and M. Zürn, eds. The Struggle Over Borders: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.1–34. Kruse, M., 2018. Trump Reclaims the Word “Elite” with Vengeful Pride, POLITICO Magazine [online] November/December. Available at: https://politi.co/2EVyEsG [Accessed 15 March 2021]. Laclau, E., 2005. On Populist Reason. London; New York: Verso. Lamont, M., Park, B.Y. and Ayala-Hurtado, E., 2017. Trump’s electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working class. British Journal of Sociology, 68, pp. 153–180. Lasch, C., 1996. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. First published as a Norton paperback. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lash, S., 2007. Power after hegemony: cultural studies in mutation? Theory, Culture & Society, 24 (3), pp. 55–78. 42 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer Lehmann, C., 2017. The betrayal of democracy. The Baffler [online] 13 March. Available at: https://thebaffler.com/latest/revolt-lasch-bannon-lehmann [Accessed 11 April 2021]. Lem, W., 2020. Notes on militant populism in contemporary France: contextualizing the gilets jaunes. Dialectical Anthropology, 44 (4), pp. 397–413. Lemann, N., 1996. A cartoon elite. The Atlantic [online] November. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/11/a-cartoon-elite/376719/ [Accessed 10 June 2019]. Lessenich, S., 2016. Neben uns die Sintflut: die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis. München: Hanser Berlin, Carl Hanser Verlag. Lowenthal, L., 2015. False Prophets. Studies on Authoritarianism. London; New York: Routledge. Maak, N., 2016. Ganz unten. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 20 (11), pp. 45–46. Maasen, S. and Weingart, P., eds., 2008. Democratization of Expertise? Exploring Novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-making. Dordrecht; London: Springer. Magaudda, P., 2020. Populism, music and the media. The Sanremo Festival and the circulation of populist discourses. Partecipazione e Conflitto, 13 (1), pp. 132–153. Mamonova, N.; Franquesa, J. 2020. Populism, Neoliberalism and Agrarian Movements in Europe. Understanding rural support for right-wing politics and looking for progressive solutions. Sociologia Ruralis, 60 (4), pp. 710–731. Manow, P., 2018. Die politische Ökonomie des Populismus. 1st ed. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Marx, P. and Nguyen, C., 2018. Anti-elite parties and political inequality: how challenges to the political mainstream reduce income gaps in internal efficacy. European Journal of Political Research, 57 (4), pp. 919–940. Massanari, A.L., 2014. Participatory Culture, Community, and Play Learning from Reddit. New York: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers. Available at: https:// www.peterlang.com/view/product/30949?format=EPDF (Accessed 18 April 2021). Massey, D., 2018. The Soundings Conjuncture Projects: the challenge right now. In: J. Henriques and D. Morley, eds. Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies. London: Goldsmiths Press, pp. 64–71. Means, A.J.; Slater, G.B., 2021. Collective disorientation in the pandemic conjuncture. Cultural Studies 35 (2–3), pp. 514–522. Merkel, W., 2017. Kosmopolitismus versus Kommunitarismus: Ein neuer Konflikt in der Demokratie. In: P. Harfst, I. Kubbe and T. Poguntke, eds. Parties, Governments and Elites. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 9–23. Merkel, W. and Zürn, M., 2019. Conclusion: the defects of sosmopolitan and communitarian democracy. In: P. de Wilde, R. Koopmans, W. Merkel, O. Strijbis and M. Zürn, eds. The Struggle over Borders: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–237. Miller, D. and Venkatraman, pp., 2018. Facebook interactions: an ethnographic perspective. Social Media + Society, 4 (3). Morley, D., 2021. In a viral conjuncture. Cultural Politics, 17 (1), pp. 17–27. Morozov, E., 2012. The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Penguin Books. Mudde, C., 2004. The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39 (4), pp. 541–563. Müller, O., Sutter, O. and Wohlgemuth, S., 2020. Learning to LEADER. Ritualised performances of “participation” in local arenas of participatory rural governance. Sociologia Ruralis, 60(1), pp. 222–242. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 43 Münkler, H., 2018. Elitenkritik ist zum Volkssport geworden. Dabei erweist sie sich als wohlfeile Spiegelfechterei. Die Konsequenzen trägt – das Volk | NZZ. Neue Zürcher Zeitung [online] 14 June. Available at: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/elitekritik-istzum-volkssport-geworden-dabei-erweist-sie-sich-als-wohlfeile-spiegelfechterei-diekonsequenzen-traegt-das-volk-ld. 1394211 [Accessed 14 June 2018]. Narotzky, S., 2019. Populism’s claims: the struggle between privilege and equality. In: B. Kapferer and D. Theodossopoulos, eds. Democracy’s Paradox: Populism and the Contemporary Crisis. New York; Oxford: Berghahn (Critical interventions), pp. 97–121. Negra, D. and Tasker, Y., 2014. Introduction: gender and recessionary culture. In: D. Negra and Y. Tasker, eds. Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp.1–30. Newman, J. and Clarke, J., 2018. The instabilities of expertise: remaking knowledge, power and politics in unsettled times. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31 (1), pp. 40–54. Nguyen, C.T., 2020. Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme, 17 (2), pp. 141–161. Niven, A., 2012. Folk Opposition. Winchester; Washington: Zero Books. O’Rourke, P.J., 2017. The revolt against the elites. The Weekly Standard [online] 3 February. Available at: https://www.weeklystandard.com/pj-orourke/the-revoltagainst-the-elites [Accessed 10 June 2019]. Ostiguy, P., 2017. Populism: a socio-cultural approach. In: C.R. Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo and P. Ostoguy, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 73–98. Pariser, E., 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin Press. Peterson, R.A. and Kern, R.M., 1996. Changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review, 61 (5), pp. 900–907. Phelps, G., 1979. The “Populist” Films of Frank Capra. Journal of American Studies 13 (3), pp. 377–392. Phillips, A., 2016. The Vulgar. In: S. McCarthy and J. Alison, eds. The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined. Exhibition “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined”. London: Koenig Books, pp. 10–15. Pied, C., 2021. Negotiating the Northwoods: anti-establishment rural politics in the Northeastern United States. Journal of Rural Studies 82 (2), S. 294–302. Rodrik, D., 2021. Why does globalization fuel populism? Economics, culture, and the rise of right-wing populism. Annual Review of Economics, 13 (1), pp. 6.1–6.38. Rogin, M.; Moran, K. 2003. Mr. Capra goes to Washington. Representations, 84 (1), pp. 213–248. Rosenberg, J. and Boyle, C., 2019. Understanding 2016: China, Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development. Journal of Historical Sociology, 32 (1), pp. e32–e58. Rothkopf, D., 2008. Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rüther, T., 2021. Lesekreis Lockdown-Kritik. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung [online] 17 May. Available at: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/ themen/was-ist-aus-dem-literarischen-quartett-im-zdf-geworden-17341127.html [Accessed 31 May 2021]. Schelsky, H., 1975. Die Arbeit tun die anderen: Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen. 2nd ed. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 44 Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer Seemann, M., 2016. Eine andere Welt ist möglich – aber als Drohung. Der Tagesspiegel [online] 25 October. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/die-globaleklasse-eine-andere-welt-ist-moeglich-aber-als-drohung/14737914.html [Accessed 13 April 2021]. Seeßlen, G., 2017. Trump! Populismus als Politik. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Sennett, R. and Cobb, J., 1977. The Hidden Injuries of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shirky, C., 2009. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: [with an updated epilogue]. New York; Toronto; London: Penguin Books. Skogen, K. and Krange, O., 2020. The political dimensions of illegal wolf hunting: anti-elitism, lack of trust in institutions and acceptance of iilegal wolf killing among Norwegian hunters. Sociologia Ruralis, 60 (3), pp. 551–573. Slobodian, Q., 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Slobodian, Q., 2021. The backlash against neoliberal globalization from above: elite origins of the crisis of the new constitutionalism. Theory, Culture & Society, pp.1–19. Slobodian, Q. and Callison, W., 2019. Pop-up populism: the failure of left-wing nationalism in Germany. Dissent Magazine [online] Summer. Available at: https:// www.dissentmagazine.org/article/pop-up-populism-the-failure-of-left-wingnationalism-in-germany [Accessed 11 April 2021]. Slobodian, Q. and Plehwe, D., 2020. Introduction. In: D. Plehwe, Q. Slobodian, and P. Mirowski, eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, pp.1–18. Srnicek, N., 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity (Theory redux). Stallabrass, J., 2012. Elite art in an age of populism. In: A. Dumbadze and S. Hudson, eds. Contemporary Art. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 39–49. Stavrakakis, Y., 2014. The return of “the people”: populism and antipopulism in the shadow of the European crisis. Constellations, 21 (4), pp. 505–517. Stavrakakis, Y. and Katsambekis, G., 2014. Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA. Journal of Political Ideologies, 19 (2), pp. 119–142. Stewart, K., 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi: 10.1215/9780822390404. Susser, I., 2021. “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: M. Ege and J. Moser, eds. Urban Ethics: Conflicts over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. Abingdon; Oxon; New York: Routledge, pp. 277–294. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F., 2018. Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Sutter, O., 2016. Alltagsverstand. Zu einem hegemonietheoretischen Verständnis alltäglicher Sichtweisen und Deutungen. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, (1–2), pp. 42–70. Walsh, R.A., 2014: Frank Capra. In: A. Kindell and E. Demers, eds. Encyclopedia of Populism in America. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, pp. 109–111. Watkins, S., 2021. Paradigm shifts. New Left Review, 128 (March/April). Watson, J., 2019. Rural-urban imagery in country music video: identity, space, and place. In: L. Burns and S. Hawkins, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 277–296. Williams, J.C., 2016. What so many people don’t get about the U.S. working class. Harvard Business Review [online] November 10. Available at: https://hbr. org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class [Accessed 13 March 2017]. The cultural politics of anti-elitism 45 Worsley, P., 1969. The concept of populism. In: G. Ionescu and E. Gellner, eds. Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. London: Macmillan, pp. 212–250. Zuboff, S., 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books. Filmography Bad Banks, 2018 – present. [series] Directed by Christian Schwochow, GER. Coup pour Coup, 1972. [film] Directed by Marin Karmitz, FRA Dirty Harry, 1971. [film] Directed by Don Siegel, USA. Élite, 2018 – present. [series] Directed by Dani de la Orden et al, ESP. Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen?, 2004. [film] Directed by Gerhard Friedl, GER. Hillbilly Elegy, 2020. [film] Directed by Ron Howard, US. Itaewon Class, 2020. [series] Directed by Kim Sung-yoon, KOR. Joker, 2019. [film] Directed by Todd Phillips, USA. Meet John Doe, 1941. [film] Directed by Frank Capra, USA. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939. [film] Directed by Frank Capra, USA. Nine to Five, 1980. [film] Directed by Colin Higgins, USA. Norma Rae, 1979. [film] Directed by Martin Ritt, USA. Paracelsus, 1943. [film] Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, GER. The Hunger Games, 2012–2015 [film series] Directed by Gary Ross, USA. The Riot Club. 2014. [film] Directed by Lone Scherfig, USA.

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

The cultural politics of anti-elitism between populism, pop culture and everyday life: an introduction

The cultural politics of anti-elitism between populism, pop culture and everyday life: an introduction

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS