We The People and The 99%

In the US and Germany the protests against the politics of crisis cluster around two poles: The Tea Party in the US and right-wing Euro-skepticism in Germany and the Occupy-movement in both countries. While both mobilizations have been understood as being the articulation of the grievances of a middle-class in distress, I argue that framing them this way veils rather than illuminates the specific social conditions that gave rise to these two peculiar ‘populisms’. Using Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, the aim is, based mainly on in-depth interviews, to reconstruct the interpretative dispositions that resonated with these movements. The comparison of their social compositions shows that these two ‘populist poles’ are in fact dominated by different social classes. The transatlantic contrast allows highlighting the importance of the different trajectories of the respective national economies through the crises as shaping the ground on which the outlined mobilizations were able to unfold.