This chapter examines the resurfacing of populism and its muchdiscussed and documented adoption and enactment by leaders and citizens. More specifically and in the Freirean (1970) ‘problem posing’ tradition, this chapter discusses reasons for this (re-)emergence and its effects on people's daily lives and their participation in community life against the wider political–economic background, two areas central to much community development theory and practice.

Trying to understand the genesis of contemporary ‘populism(s)’, the study focuses on the ‘populus’, the ‘people’, both as ‘objects’ of populist impositions and processes and as their ‘subjects’, indeed, their co-producers. The first question posed is: what is going on with and around people – especially their modalities of ‘being’ and ‘relating’ – rendering them more ‘prone’ to being influenced by populisms and become populisms’ ‘accomplices’? Second, what role do social media play in this imposition/complicity dialectic? Indeed, social media powerfully invade and interpenetrate all levels and processes of the political economy, of people's everyday experiences and their subjective-affective lives, and they infest the mediating institutions operating ‘between’ the virtual global and the imperceptible hereand-now. Finally, a third question: what is the effect of such socially mediated populism on communities and on efforts to (re)develop and maintain them? Some ideas about ways to resist the (combined) assault of populism and social media and restart the project of democracy conclude the chapter.

Understanding modern populism(s): revisiting Arendt, Orwell and others

I wonder what Hannah Arendt would say about politics, power, the ‘mob’ and the ‘masses’ today, nearly 70 years after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) appeared. She saw the rise of totalitarianism occurring in a context where social pathologies had accumulated, eroding the conditions for a viable public life and destroying the necessary balance between personal autonomy and collective will. For Arendt, pathologies rendering populations amenable to ‘totalitarian’ ideas in the early part of the 20th century included the violent spread of imperialist capital(ism) and colonial suppression and how the ruling classes had transformed the state into an instrument to protect and further their own interests.