Mediatisation, neoliberalism and populisms: the case of Trump

This article examines the historical conditions for the electoral victory of Donald Trump and contemporary populist movements more generally, focusing on neoliberalism and populism. Populism is understood here according to the discourseanalytic perspective of Ernesto Laclau. After discussing the way in which neoliberalism undermined the legitimacy of political systems based on the “politics of difference,” the article goes on to elaborate an argument that although populist movements like the Trump movement can be said to be a product of the mediatisation of politics, they reflect a very different form of mediatisation from the form analyzed in the classic literature in political communication. That literature focuses on the history of Europe, especially, in the 1960s–1980s, when centralized media like commercial newspapers and television became more autonomous and displaced the influence of political parties and similar mass organizations. Contemporary populist movements develop within a fragmented media ecology in which it is possible for populist leaders to bypass these legacy media institutions and challenge their legitimacy.