The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

Chapter 3 analyzes how economic decay and aspirational neoliberalism justify anti-Bangladeshi xenophobia in Assam. This xenophobia relies on the view that East Bengalis have historically – at least since colonial times – been a source of "economic threat," real or imagined. The segregation of Bengali Muslims in Lower Assam sustains the perception of their outsider, even illegal, status, maintaining this view of the economic threat. While Assam’s desire for national self-determination characterized its relationship with mainland India in the initial decades since (Indian) independence, in recent years fractious politics and separatist movements found resolution in anti-Bangladeshi sentiments, as it served as the common cause that would unite the various ideologically opposed sections of society. The most recent example of this is the mobilization surrounding khilonjiya or indigenous interests in the context of population registration (NRC) and the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (2019). They underscore how anti-establishment claims fit alongside nationalist ideas of strict border control and the expulsion of those deemed foreign, i.e., Bangladeshi. In effect, anti-Bangladeshi sentiments become the glue that holds together the Indian nation state.

Ancient Greece, especially Athens, provides the best documented early example of mass democracy. With the democratic reforms of the fifth century, populism – the direct mobilization of the masses – becomes an effective path to power. This chapter looks at several examples from fifth- and fourth-century Athens, which demonstrate the use of demagoguery as an efficient, if much derided, alternative to patronage-based politics. Ancient Rome provides a somewhat different context. As a republic, Rome gave the masses a more limited and indirect role in politics. Typically, politics was a purely elite affair. Yet for those elites who found the normal insider path blocked to them, direct appeals to the masses could prove effective. However, given the limited formal role for the plebs in Roman politics, this direct mobilization could often lead to violence.

Politics is first and foremost about power. Short of the recourse to violence, politicians can follow one of three strategies in the quest for power: a programmatic, patronage, or populist strategy. This book proposes that this choice is grounded in economic trade-offs. Politicians will follow a populist strategy when it represents a more efficient use of their resources than alternative strategies.

Populism is a political strategy that relies on the use of a personalistic political organization and mass communication to mobilize support in the quest for power; it will be most successful when it is more cost-effective than the alternatives of programmatic political party building or the distribution of patronage. The costs involved in this trade-off come in two forms: direct costs and indirect (or transaction) costs. In politics, very often transaction costs – search, bargaining, and enforcement costs – are the higher ones. Populists lower the costs of mobilizing support by communicating directly with voters instead of working through intermediaries such as party professionals or political brokers. The populist strategy will be most effective when two conditions are met. First, potential voters or supporters must be available for direct mobilization. This means that they must be relatively free of existing party attachments. Second, the opposition should be divided. Most populists win with the backing of a mere plurality rather than a majority. The more the opposition is split between multiple contenders, the more economically viable is the populist strategy.

This chapter brings into conversation some common themes from across the chapters to comment on the general state of Bengali Muslims and discuss implications of the analysis presented in the book.

Taking up the cases of America and France in the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates that long-term changes to the organization of a society – demographic growth, territorial expansion, industrialization, etc. – affect the relative costs and benefits of different political strategies. With America’s expansion west and south in the early nineteenth century, millions of new voters, only weakly attached to existing political parties, were available for mobilization. Andrew Jackson took advantage, combining the use of patronage and populism to become the first outsider to win the presidency. In France, political participation remained highly constrained in the wake of the monarchical restorations of the early nineteenth century. When the Orléanist monarchy was overthrown in 1848, Louis Napoleon used his illustrious name to win elections for the new office of president. With Jackson’s administration, a new, more expansive spoils system was introduced. Allegiance to the Democratic and Whig parties was almost total, rendering direct populist mobilization of the masses an unlikely route to power. The populist strategy in America began instead to be aimed at winning the leadership of a mass party.

The introduction presents the main argument, the historical relevance of the project, and provides a literature review to highlight the interventions that the book makes in a variety of subfields. This chapter also outlines the research terrain and discusses the methodology employed.

Chapter 4 examines how neoliberal development in West Bengal affected various identity markers to explain the marginalization of Bengali Muslims. English and Hindi became the privileged languages of global/national capital, effectively turning Bangla into a provincial, backward language in the popular mind. The decline of class politics and the rise of identity politics brought to the surface a kind of anti-Muslim sentiment informed by caste. The everyday marginalization of Bengali Muslims, on the one hand, relies on caste discrimination and ghrina (disgust) that reinforces the exclusion of Bengali Muslims, and on the other, is a product of conflating Bengali Muslims with Bangladeshis, effectively making them invisible, and hence justifying the lack of safety nets available to them. Using a variety of qualitative methods and a comparative analysis between West Bengal and Bangladesh regarding the hold of Bengali culture in the contemporary period, the chapter shows the various ways in which neoliberal ideas impact Bengali identity.