### On populism, collective fantasy, the unconscious, and the curious political career of jhumka proselytism
*Clout Economics | Studies in the Political Economy of Resentment*
There is something rather touching about the belief that the ruling classes can be defeated by making them feel embarrassed.
For several decades, a considerable amount of political energy has been devoted to exposing privilege, denouncing hypocrisy, correcting language, recovering cultural authenticity and identifying the various people responsible for ruining civilisation.
The results have been mixed.
The privileged have become exceptionally good at discussing privilege. The culturally dispossessed have acquired an impressive collection of symbols through which to announce their rediscovered dignity. The political establishment has learned to speak in the language of rebellion.
Meanwhile, property continues to enjoy excellent health.
This is not because criticism is useless, or because popular resentment is necessarily misguided. On the contrary, resentment frequently begins with an accurate perception: society is unequal, its institutions are exclusionary, and its official explanations of success are often self-serving.
The problem begins when an explanation of inequality is replaced by a drama of humiliation.
The question of who owns what becomes the question of who has offended whom.
The question of political power becomes the question of cultural respect.
And the struggle to transform society becomes an elaborate competition to establish who is entitled to feel wronged.
It is at this point that political economy becomes psychoanalysis.
Not because the population has gone mad, but because the social order has developed an extraordinary talent for making its contradictions emotionally satisfying.
## I. THE UNCONSCIOUS HAS A CLASS POSITION
Freud's great discovery was not simply that people possess secret desires. It was that human beings are not fully transparent to themselves.
We do not always understand why we want what we want. Our convictions may be sustained by attachments that exceed their stated reasons. We can remain loyal to arrangements that make us unhappy, repeat conflicts that never resolve themselves, and derive satisfaction from activities we consciously experience as unpleasant.
Politics is no exception.
People do not participate in political movements solely because they have calculated their economic interests.
They also participate because movements offer belonging, recognition, identity and a way of explaining their disappointments.
This does not make political convictions irrational. It means that political life is never purely intellectual.
Consider the person who has experienced genuine exclusion from elite institutions.
Their resentment may be justified. The institutions may indeed be organised through inherited wealth, caste privilege, professional networks and cultural distinctions that masquerade as merit.
But resentment can take different political forms.
It may produce a demand for broader access to education.
It may produce a struggle for redistribution.
It may produce collective organisation against exclusion.
Or it may produce an intense desire to see the people associated with those institutions publicly humiliated.
These are not the same political project.
The first three seek to alter social relations.
The fourth may leave those relations intact while providing an immediate emotional reward.
Psychoanalysis helps us understand why the reward can be compelling.
Political economy helps us understand why it may be insufficient.
## II. THE ENEMY IS DOING VERY WELL
Lacan understood that desire is organised around a lack that cannot simply be eliminated by obtaining the correct object.
We imagine that something stands between us and satisfaction.
A person. An institution. A rival. An obstacle.
If only it could be removed, we might finally become complete.
Political fantasies often reproduce this structure.
The nation would be harmonious if not for the corrupt elite.
The economy would be fair if not for the foreign influence.
The culture would flourish if not for the Westernised intellectual.
The people would recover their dignity if not for those who have allegedly stolen it.
The enemy becomes an explanation for everything that is missing.
This is the appeal of what might loosely be called a collective delusion. Not a clinical psychosis, which is a specific psychiatric phenomenon, but an ideological fantasy that offers a single emotionally satisfying explanation for complicated historical problems.
The fantasy has one particularly useful feature: it can survive its own failure.
Suppose the corrupt elite is defeated.
Suppose the populist movement enters government.
Suppose its leaders acquire enormous institutional authority.
If inequality persists, the explanation need not be reconsidered.
The enemy must still be operating somewhere.
Perhaps in universities.
Perhaps in the media.
Perhaps in the judiciary.
Perhaps in the arts.
Perhaps in the suspiciously cosmopolitan behaviour of somebody eating a croissant.
The fantasy can continue indefinitely because the enemy is required not merely to explain the problem but to sustain the movement's identity.
The enemy has become indispensable.
This is a strange form of political dependence.
A movement that promises liberation from an adversary may become emotionally invested in ensuring that the adversary never entirely disappears.
## III. CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE. KEEP YOUR PROPERTY.
The phrase *check your privilege* began as a useful demand to recognise the social conditions that shape individual experience.
It belongs to a longer intellectual history of feminist, anti-racist and anti-caste criticism.
Its central insight is sound: people do not encounter society from equal positions.
The wealthy experience institutions differently from the poor. Dominant castes may enjoy advantages that others are systematically denied. Gender, religion, language and social networks shape the possibilities available to individuals.
To recognise these differences is necessary for any serious account of equality.
But the internet has a remarkable capacity to transform political analysis into social etiquette.
A demand to examine structural advantage can become an instruction to demonstrate personal awareness.
The privileged subject must acknowledge privilege.
The acknowledgement must be appropriately phrased.
The phrasing must be recognised by an audience.
Recognition becomes evidence of moral sophistication.
And the individual has successfully completed the ceremony.
Nothing necessarily happens to the privilege itself.
This is the difference between consciousness and transformation.
The recognition of an unequal social relation does not automatically abolish that relation.
A landlord can acknowledge the injustice of inherited property while continuing to collect rent.
An employer can speak eloquently about inequality while maintaining exploitative working conditions.
An institution can celebrate marginalised identities while leaving its distribution of authority unchanged.
None of this makes the criticism of privilege mistaken.
It reveals the danger of converting structural criticism into a ritual of individual moral certification.
The social order is perfectly capable of accommodating a population that understands inequality, provided understanding does not become a demand to reorganise it.
The revolutionary slogan has become an excellent conversation starter.
The balance sheet remains undisturbed.
## IV. THE RETURN OF THE OFFENDED MASSES
The populist backlash against liberal elites emerges partly from this contradiction.
A society organised through unequal access to education, property and cultural recognition develops a class of people authorised to explain inequality.
Those excluded from these institutions may experience the explanations themselves as another form of exclusion.
The educated elite speaks the language of universal justice.
But its authority is sustained by institutions that are not universally accessible.
It celebrates diversity.
But its social networks remain narrow.
It condemns inherited privilege.
But inherited privilege frequently finances the conditions under which its criticism is produced.
The resentment generated by this arrangement is not necessarily irrational.
There is something genuinely absurd about being instructed in equality by people who appear to have inherited the microphone.
Yet populism can turn this contradiction into a different kind of political theatre.
Instead of asking why the microphone is unequally distributed, it may promise to give the microphone to somebody who speaks more authentically.
The old elite is accused of arrogance.
The new elite claims humility.
The old elite speaks in the language of expertise.
The new elite speaks in the language of the people.
The old elite claims moral superiority.
The new elite claims moral injury.
But the fundamental question remains unanswered.
Who owns the microphone?
This is the difficulty with anti-elitism as an independent political programme.
It can become a struggle over the cultural identity of those who exercise power rather than the distribution of power itself.
The elite is not abolished.
It changes costume.
## V. THE JHUMKA HAS ENTERED POLITICS
Now consider the jhumka.
An innocent object, one might imagine.
A piece of jewellery. A matter of taste. An ornament with varied histories across South Asian cultures.
Yet in the political imagination, ordinary objects can acquire extraordinary responsibilities.
The jhumka may become evidence of authenticity.
The sari may become a declaration of civilisational confidence.
The bindi may become a symbol of cultural recovery.
The domestic kitchen may become the last surviving institution of national virtue.
None of these meanings is inherent in the objects themselves.
They are produced through social interpretation.
This is where aesthetics becomes political.
The question is not simply what people wear, but what their appearance is made to signify.
An aesthetic preference becomes a moral position when it is treated as evidence of belonging to the correct cultural community.
The person wearing the object is no longer merely expressing taste.
They may be invited to embody a collective ideal.
Call this **jhumka proselytism**: the conversion of cultural appearance into a gentle but persistent demand for ideological identification.
Its genius is that it need not look like propaganda.
It can look like a wedding reel.
A family photograph.
A cooking video.
A nostalgic song.
A beautifully arranged collection of bangles.
The audience is not necessarily asked to accept a political argument.
It is asked to feel at home.
And feeling at home can become a powerful way of establishing what belongs—and what does not.
This does not mean traditional clothing or jewellery is inherently nationalist. Much of its contemporary use is playful, hybrid, commercial, secular or personally meaningful.
The political transformation occurs when cultural enjoyment is turned into a standard of moral authenticity.
The jhumka is not the problem.
The problem begins when the jhumka acquires the authority to decide who is sufficiently Indian.
## VI. THE NATION AS A FAMILY ROMANCE
Freud used the idea of the family romance to describe fantasies through which individuals reimagine their origins and their relationship to parental authority.
Nationalism frequently possesses a comparable imaginative structure.
The nation is represented as a family.
Its history becomes an inheritance.
Its territory becomes a home.
Its traditions become ancestral obligations.
Its enemies become threats to the household.
This language is emotionally powerful because it translates abstract political relations into familiar experiences of belonging.
One does not merely support a state.
One loves a mother.
One does not merely disagree with a political position.
One betrays a family.
One does not merely question a historical narrative.
One insults an ancestor.
The transformation matters because familial obligation and democratic accountability operate according to different principles.
A government is supposed to be answerable to citizens.
A family may demand loyalty precisely when its authority is questioned.
When the nation is imagined primarily through familial relations, political criticism can become emotionally indistinguishable from disobedience.
The citizen is no longer simply a participant in collective government.
The citizen becomes a child whose gratitude is perpetually under examination.
And the state acquires the pleasant task of explaining what the family would have wanted.
The family, fortunately, is unavailable for comment.
## VII. THE PLEASURE OF BEING PERSECUTED
There is a further paradox.
Political movements that acquire substantial power may continue to describe themselves as persecuted outsiders.
This is not always fraudulent. Institutions are complex, and a movement may control one part of the state while encountering resistance elsewhere.
But the rhetoric of persecution can also become an important source of political legitimacy.
To be persecuted is to occupy the moral position of the injured.
To occupy the position of the injured is to claim recognition.
To claim recognition is to establish a distinction between the virtuous community and those responsible for its suffering.
The political movement may therefore acquire symbolic value through the continued narration of its own victimhood.
This is where Lacan's notion of *jouissance* becomes useful.
Jouissance describes an enjoyment that is not reducible to ordinary pleasure. It can be bound up with frustration, repetition and suffering.
The subject may derive satisfaction from the very grievance that appears to make satisfaction impossible.
Political resentment can operate similarly.
The repeated denunciation of an enemy produces a sense of unity.
The enemy's continued existence justifies the movement's continued mobilisation.
The failure to achieve final reconciliation becomes another occasion for collective indignation.
The movement enjoys its grievance.
Not necessarily because its members consciously wish to remain unhappy.
But because the grievance has become part of the structure through which political belonging is experienced.
This is a much more useful explanation than simply declaring the population irrational.
It asks what forms of enjoyment a political order makes available, and how those forms of enjoyment relate to material power.
## VIII. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION HAS A BRAND PARTNERSHIP
There is something historically peculiar about the contemporary revival of cultural authenticity.
It is often circulated through the very technological and commercial infrastructures associated with global capitalism.
The traditional household becomes a social-media aesthetic.
The rejection of Western influence becomes a digital content category.
The recovery of indigenous culture becomes an advertising opportunity.
The defence of family values becomes a personal brand.
The supposedly timeless past is continuously reproduced through the newest available technologies.
This is not simply hypocrisy.
It is a contradiction characteristic of capitalist modernity.
Capitalism does not require the disappearance of tradition.
It can commodify tradition.
It can sell nostalgia.
It can transform cultural identity into a market.
And it can profit from political movements that claim to oppose the cultural consequences of globalisation.
Fredric Jameson's account of postmodern culture is useful here because it understands cultural forms in relation to the historical development of capitalism.
Culture is not merely a collection of ideas floating above economic life.
It is produced and circulated through material institutions.
The aesthetic revival of tradition may therefore be entirely modern in its economic organisation.
The past becomes a product of the present.
The ancient civilisation acquires a content calendar.
The traditional household receives a sponsorship agreement.
And the rejection of consumerism is available in three convenient colourways.
## IX. WHY THE ELITES KEEP WINNING
The most consequential feature of populist backlash is not that it attacks elites.
It is that the category of the elite can become detached from the actual distribution of economic power.
An elite may be defined by education rather than ownership.
By language rather than property.
By taste rather than institutional authority.
By cosmopolitanism rather than control over production.
This allows a wealthy and powerful figure to present themselves as anti-elite because they possess the correct cultural style.
It also allows a relatively powerless individual to be classified as elite because they possess the wrong vocabulary.
The political imagination becomes increasingly occupied with signs of distinction rather than relations of domination.
The result is a peculiar inversion.
The person who owns the factory may appear to represent the people.
The person who criticises the factory may appear to represent the elite.
The question of ownership has been displaced by the question of authenticity.
This is not merely a failure of political education.
It is an ideological achievement.
It transforms class antagonism into cultural antagonism.
The unequal distribution of resources becomes a conflict over recognition.
And the symbolic victory of one cultural identity over another can be experienced as political transformation even when the material relations remain substantially unchanged.
The ruling class does not necessarily need to defeat popular resentment.
It may only need to give resentment an object that does not threaten the ruling class.
## X. THE MASS PSYCHOSIS THAT ISN'T
We can now return to the provocative phrase *mass psychosis*.
It is tempting because contemporary political life often appears to involve elaborate fantasies, obsessive repetitions, collective identifications and extraordinary resistance to contradictory evidence.
But the term is misleading if taken literally.
Psychosis is a clinical phenomenon. Populism is a political form. Neither can be explained by simply borrowing the vocabulary of the other.
The stronger psychoanalytic argument concerns **the social organisation of fantasy**.
Fantasy is not necessarily a false belief.
It is a structure through which subjects organise their relationship to desire and reality.
Political fantasies can help people make sense of real suffering.
They can also displace the causes of that suffering onto imaginary obstacles.
The populist fantasy of the stolen nation is powerful because it gives historical contradictions a narrative form.
There was once a whole community.
Something was taken away.
An enemy is responsible.
The removal of the enemy will restore the lost unity.
This is an extraordinarily satisfying story.
It has a beginning, a villain and a promised resolution.
Unfortunately, society is not a novel whose contradictions disappear when the antagonist dies.
There was no original social harmony waiting to be recovered.
Caste, class, gender and regional inequalities did not enter Indian history through a single act of betrayal.
They are historical relations reproduced through institutions, economic arrangements and social practices.
The fantasy of national restoration obscures these relations by imagining that the problem lies outside the authentic community.
The enemy becomes the explanation for contradictions that the community itself must confront.
And because those contradictions cannot be abolished by eliminating the enemy, the fantasy requires continual renewal.
The political drama never ends.
The sequel is already in production.
## XI. THE RIGHT TO BE AN ORDINARY PERSON
There is an emancipatory possibility in recognising how much political energy is spent on performances of identity.
A person need not become the perfect representative of a civilisation.
A woman need not make her clothing a referendum on national authenticity.
A member of a marginalised community need not turn every personal experience into a public lesson.
A person with inherited privilege need not imagine that the correct confession constitutes a political achievement.
And an ordinary citizen need not organise their entire emotional life around the humiliation of an elite.
The point is not to abolish identity or deny the importance of cultural recognition.
It is to distinguish recognition from emancipation.
Recognition matters.
But recognition does not automatically redistribute property.
It does not necessarily improve working conditions.
It does not guarantee democratic accountability.
It does not dissolve caste hierarchy.
It does not transform the institutions through which power is reproduced.
A politics that cannot make these distinctions risks becoming a permanent struggle over symbolic status.
Everyone wants to be recognised.
Everyone wants to be authentic.
Everyone wants to be morally vindicated.
And the institutions governing material life continue operating with relatively little interruption.
The great political question is not whether people should stop caring about identity.
It is whether identity can become a basis for collective transformation rather than a substitute for it.
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## ♧♤◇ THE CLOUT ECONOMICS HYPOTHESIS
The contemporary populist backlash against elites is best understood not as collective insanity but as **the conversion of material grievance into symbolic compensation**.
An unequal society produces genuine experiences of exclusion.
Those experiences generate resentment.
Resentment seeks explanation.
Political fantasies provide enemies through which the resentment becomes intelligible.
Cultural aesthetics supply images of belonging.
Digital platforms reward the circulation of these images and antagonisms.
Political actors convert recognition into authority.
And the underlying economic relations may remain substantially intact.
This is the circuit of clout.
Its central achievement is not the abolition of inequality but the production of emotionally satisfying ways to inhabit it.
The privileged learn to confess their privilege.
The excluded learn to denounce the privileged.
The nationalist learns to perform authenticity.
The influencer learns to monetise all three.
The result is a society in which political identity becomes increasingly elaborate while the transformation of material conditions remains uncertain.
This is why a critique of populism cannot be satisfied with declaring ordinary people irrational.
Nor can a critique of liberal elites be satisfied with exposing their hypocrisy.
The task is to understand how economic inequality, cultural authority and unconscious desire become organised into forms of political belonging.
For the central problem is not that people have mistaken fantasy for reality.
It is that fantasy can become one of the ways reality is reproduced.
**WELCOME TO CLOUT ECONOMICS.**
*Check your privilege. Reclaim your culture. Humiliate the elite.*
*The property deeds are in the same drawer as before.*
**♧♤◇ CONSTANT VIGILANCE!**
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