Populism is often dismissed or ridiculed, but its rise reflects decades of policy choices that have deepened inequality and left many Australians behind.

In his 1963 book _The Making of the English Working Class_, EP Thompson highlighted the value of researching the experiences (and sufferings) of working class people – interpreting “history from below.” It was innovative alternative to the conventional ‘great men in history’ (and the occasional ‘great woman’) perspectives of many conventional historical narratives (“history from above”).

Populists are among the most misunderstood and denigrated participants in contemporary politics. In their MAGA form they were loftily dismissed by Hilary Clinton as a “basket of deplorables.” Her comment reflected the prevailing view among many so-called ’liberal’ ruling elites and their Greek choruses around the world. Their slavish belief in the efficacy of neoliberal and related policies blinds them to the consequences that those policies are wreaking on middle and working class people.

It’s time for serious people to try to understand the world from the populists’ point of view, not to defend populism but to understand what motivates it. While so many of the populist prejudices and demands are indeed deplorable, far too little attention has been paid to what provokes them.

The most devastating provocation arises from the rapid growth in socio-economic inequality in all of the so-called ‘advanced’ economies. This is true of Australia where inequality has grown exponentially over the past four or so decades. The growing ranks of the poor are the most worrying features of this toxic development. Few policymakers and commentators accept the fact that the roots of the present-day cost-of-living crisis are deeply embedded in neoliberal polices stretching back decades.

The hollowing-out of Australia’s economy through deregulation, the privatisation of public assets, and the vandalising of its manufacturing sector (thanks to ideologues like Joe Hockey) have resulted in unparalleled levels of profiteering and rent-seeking by corporate bosses and their political accomplices, wages and working conditions being undermined by conniving company directors and shareholders, and a monopoly-controlled media that acts as their apologists and cheerleaders. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers have become a hardcore of the under-employed and unemployed; some have given up looking for work altogether.

Meanwhile, governments of all persuasions, state and federal, persist in underfunding public education (kindergartens, schools, TAFE, universities) while subsidising privileged education providers (elite private schools, dodgy private ‘vocational’ entities). People who need access to sound educational opportunities to up-skill or change careers are being denied, even as labour markets are changing rapidly.

The pitiful reactions by state and federal governments to the Gonski Report are merely the tip of an iceberg of reactionary failure in this country to maintain an equitable and healthy education system.

Public hospitals and related healthcare facilities are struggling to keep up with demands on their emergency departments – they struggle to recruit staff, and they are forced to cope with diminishing budgets. Meanwhile specialist medical care is priced way beyond the reach of many of the working poor, pensioners and people out of work.

And then there is the housing crisis. Investors and higher-end property owners (especially those who own multiple properties, including some MPs) are doing well out of the crisis via distorted policies such as capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing. This is an area that needs comprehensive policy reforms, but no government (including the querulous Albanese government) has had the guts to accept the moral and politically necessary challenge to affect them.

All of these negative consequences of economic policy-making since the 1980s are exacerbating socio-economic inequalities in Australia today, producing a new kind of lumpenproletariat – an underclass of misinformed, disenfranchised people, many of whom are unemployed or under-employed, many who suffer from serious health problems (poor diets, obesity, addictions to tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs,  many suffering from mental health problems, some dealing with disabilities). Many are forced to live in poor accommodation or on the streets. They are the tragic victims of policies that lock them out of the benefits of a good society.

This makes them ripe for the siren songs of deviously motivated leaders like Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, or Donald Trump in the US. In the US the members of the underclass are the core constituents of the MAGA movement, as the Trump-inspired assault on the Congress on 6 January 2021 so vividly demonstrated.

In Australia the buffoonish Clive Palmer, the conniving Pauline Hanson and her oafish side-kick Barnaby Joyce, along with some right faction MPs in the Coalition, are trying to inflame and manipulate the alienation felt by Australians falling into the country’s growing underclass. Many of the alienated think that false prophets like Hanson and Palmer are their saviours. What they fail to understand is that if those leaders gain power, they will makes their lives far worse – consider the chaos that Trump’s policies are inflicting on the contemporary American underclass.

It should hardly be surprising then that many alienated populists see themselves as the ‘pure people’, the salt of the earth, who are being relentlessly exploited by society at large and especially by people at the top in politics, business and in cultural institutions – the ‘corrupt elites’ (see Cas Mudde, The Far Right).

Their blinkered view of the causes of their alienation leads them to believe that it is down to immigrants, coloured people, so-called ’experts’, queers, trans people, ‘uppity’ women, and people flouting what they believe are right values and beliefs about what is ’normal’ behaviour and acceptable morality. They seethe with resentment at those who seem to be better off than they are, whom they accuse of stealing their jobs, occupying houses that they should have, while getting preferential treatment from governments. That they are wrong about all that is beside the point.

Populism, then, is a danger to Australian society and our system of representative government. It is eating into the support base of the Coalition and is beginning to do so to the Labor side of politics.

What is to be done?

The supercilious attitude by mainstream political leaders and commentators towards Australia’s growing underclass has to change. As a loosely broad-based class it has to be acknowledged that they are the innocent victims of flawed policies devised by political elites and their accomplices, some of whom are in fact sometimes corrupt – consider the tepid state government response to the Watson report on criminal actions in the CFMEU. That response looks every bit like a cover-up.

Understanding populism “from below” does not mean condoning it. It means finding the right way to combat its invidious allure based on lies peddled by false prophets like Hanson, Joyce, Palmer and their ilk. And it means the political class and their influencers have to return to policy-making for the common good, not just for the rich and powerful.