Socially-distanced street protests, moves to impeach a president – Latin America has begun to lead the way, not only in the gravity of the Coronavirus crisis, but in the scale and character of the resistance that social movements are mounting,
American and British liberals tend to present phenomena like Donald Trump as distasteful ‘populist’ aberrations, based on the unfortunate and excluded ultra-poor. This is wrong on every count. In most places the ultra-right mass movements have their core in the comfortable (and generally older) middle classes, however much working class support they eventually garner. What is happening goes way beyond ‘populism’.
