The Rise of Civilisational Populism

Civilisational populism is emerging as a dominant force in the United Kingdom and beyond, as the Green Party and Reform UK compete to define the authentic interests of the people. This ideological shift transcends traditional economic divides, focusing instead on a struggle to identify which social groups truly represent the nation.

When Green MP Hannah Spencer criticized the prevalence of taxpayer-funded alcohol in Parliament, the reaction from Nigel Farage and Labour MPs underscored a sharp divide in perceived legitimacy. Nigel Farage and his parliamentary colleagues defended the status quo, effectively positioning themselves as defenders of established parliamentary culture against an outsider critique. This incident highlights how specific politicians utilize small, symbolic conflicts to signal their alignment with or opposition to the existing power structure.

The Green Party’s attempt to frame this issue as a populist struggle against elite excess met with resistance from those who viewed the intervention as an intrusion into personal liberties. Sarah Pochin of Reform UK dismissed the critique, illustrating how populist rhetoric can be deployed to characterize opponents as out-of-touch moralists. This dynamic suggests that populism functions as a flexible tool for mobilizing identity, rather than a fixed set of policy goals.

Wolfgang Streeck, a prominent sociologist and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, notes that the term populism often serves as a placeholder for broader anxieties regarding the failure of the current social and economic order. By filtering complex experiences through a language of antagonism, political leaders attempt to build a coherent constituency from a heterogeneous public. This process requires defining friends and enemies, a task that remains the central challenge for any movement seeking to challenge the status quo.

The reliance on the nation-state as the primary site of political contestation forces movements to adopt nationalist framing, even when their underlying objectives differ significantly. Right-wing populists frequently define their mission as the defense of Western civilisation against perceived threats from foreign influence and domestic elites. This narrative connects local grievances, such as economic stagnation in regions like Stoke-on-Trent, to a global struggle for cultural and civilisational preservation.

Attempts to integrate socialist goals with nationalist sentiment, such as those proposed by Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, have struggled to gain traction. The nationalist populism that has found more success often aligns with hostility toward the welfare state and support for deregulated capital. This suggests that the concept of the nation is currently being harnessed to support a specific set of right-wing commitments, rather than serving as an organizing principle for the left.

The concept of civilisational defense provides a vocabulary for communicating the experience of decline in the Global North. By narrating the loss of social cohesion and the peripheralisation of once-prosperous regions, political actors link individual suffering to a grand, existential struggle. This framing allows the right to address both class-based grievances and identity-based anxieties within a single, cohesive narrative of restoration.

The tragic death of Henry Nowak in Southampton serves as a stark example of how these narratives are weaponized to interpret local events as symptoms of civilisational collapse. Figures like JD Vance have utilized such incidents to argue that institutions are actively participating in the destruction of their own societies. This rhetoric transforms specific instances of violence into metaphors for a broader, perceived suicide of Western values.

Ultimately, this form of populism roots its opposition to the present not in a vision of a new future, but in the defense of a reconstructed, idealized past. It offers a hegemonic project that mirrors neoliberal structures while intensifying the focus on cultural and demographic anxieties. The long-term impact of this shift remains uncertain, as the parliamentary and electoral arena continues to fracture under the weight of these competing visions of national and civilisational identity.