The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram G. Rajan

At the risk of caricature, left-wing populists tend to see everyone other than the dominant elite as the oppressed. Their aim is not to overturn the system, but to get a greater share of the benefits for the masses. They do not seek revolution, only a reorientation of the system, with the government typically doing more and the market less. A left-wing populist leader like Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016, saw free trade as hurting the American people. He wanted less of it. He also campaigned for universal health care and free public college education, and for more humane treatment of immigrants. Left-wing populists do not distinguish among people in the country; they typically want a better deal for all the oppressed. Right-wing populists, on the other hand, are more discriminating in the objects of their ire. For instance, in the United States, right-wing populists do not necessarily target the very rich such as wealthy businesspeople.1 Instead, they reserve their anger for the administrative, professional, and intellectual elites, the upper middle class, whom they believe have tailored public policy to favour themselves as well as their favourites – women, minorities, and immigrants – and elevated these above the native- born non-Hispanic white male. There is both an ethnic and a nationalist component in these views.

Left wing va right wing populism