ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a number of political perspectives that have utilised the concept of ‘forgotten people’ through a lens attentive to the relationship between populism and population in a globalising cultural framework. Robert Menzies’, mostly benign, articulation of a ‘forgotten people’ among the Australian population was built upon and followed by a far more malevolent discourse that billed exclusion of otherness as the core ‘moral activity’ of the middle class. The Australian populist articulation of the forgotten members among its people is a way of framing population in terms not of belonging to a people but as a set of arguments of who should be counted among the remembered, and who should be forgotten. The ‘forgotten people’ to whom Donald Trump appealed both before and after his election as president in 2016 was of a different construction from those of Menzies, Thatcher and Reagan.
