ABSTRACT
From an early-twenty-first-century vantage point, the tiredness of the people idea seems self-evident. The grotesqueness of the concept of the Nazi Volk (from which Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were excluded: no Volkswagen for them) was matched, for cynicism, by that of the “People’s Democracies” of the Soviet bloc; Brecht’s ironic advice to his masters, on the occasion of the failed East Berlin uprising of 1953, that they should perhaps dissolve the people and elect another, was the definitive riposte to “totalitarian populism” (Esslin 1959, 165). Popular Fronts for the Liberation of X (and, usually, the oppression of Y) have lost their allure (as marked by the comic demolition job on the phenomenon in the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian). Those of us living in Blairite Britain, with the reality of the “people’s lottery” and “the people’s Millennium Dome,” not to mention the memory of the “people’s princess” and of Margaret Thatcher’s invocation of “the people” in the service of a multitude of reactionary causes, inhabit that farcical stage that, in familiar historical style, follows tragedy. Everywhere, distinctions between “the popular” and its others struggle to survive, it would seem, amid the assumptions of a vulgar relativism.
