(Ibid., p. 159)
[c] My argument is that the construction of the ‘people’ as a collective actor entails extending the notion of ‘populism’ to many movements and phenomena that traditionally were not considered so. And, from this viewpoint, there is no doubt that the American civil rights movement extended equivalential logics in a variety of new directions and made possible the incorporation of previously excluded underdogs into the public sphere.
(Ibid., pp. 173–174)
The distinction between “the people” and “a people”, in quotes a and b above, the use of the signifier “people” in quotation marks and the attribution of the concept of populism (here in quotation marks, in unusual fashion in Laclau’s work) warrant two conclusions that will be consequential in my subsequent discussion of the question of religion: (a) if “the people” is the name of a politically constructed collective actor, this actor should not be confused with the mass of citizens of a national state or with its general population, and must be specified, characterised, narrated contextually; (b) “a people” describes an equally politically constructed collective actor, but one that has not asserted itself or become the locus and the name of a general refusal of the institutional order, presenting itself as aspiring to this function, but still situated on a terrain where other actors may be more successful in this intent. More than that, “the people”, Laclau argues in Populist Reason, strictly speaking, is not a referent of a group, but a way of building the unity of the group. It is not an ideological expression, but a form of relationship between social agents (Laclau, 2005, p. 97). How, then, does this construction take place?
Laclau does not start with a substantive definition of the people, but proposes that, as we are faced with a relational process, the construction of the people, of a people, be analysed from the articulation of demands, or rather from the passage of requests to claims, due to non-attendance or dissatisfaction with the form or the extent of fulfilment of these demands by the institutional order. The fulfilment of demands includes them as differences internal to the system, thus “pacifying” them. Rejection or partial compliance with them may lead, depending on the rhythm, delay or virulence with which the demands are answered, to the perception that there are other demands equally unsatisfied, partially met in an unjustified or unacceptable way, or plainly dismissed, and that they are equivalent through their common opposition to the established order. It is the crystallisation of these equivalences and their opposition to a common enemy that Laclau identifies as the elementary process of populism’s formation.
We will see in the last section that the rising tide of recent right-wing populisms in Europe, the United States and Brazil indicate a variant of this formal description, which refers to the manifestation of reactive responses to experiences of identity displacement of traditional actors or failure of the hegemonic order. But here, it is worth outlining the basic contours of the Laclauian discursive approach. It is the equivalential articulation of unmet needs, constituting “a broader social subjectivity” (Laclau, 2005, p. 99), which defines the beginning of the constitution of a people “as a potential historical actor” (ibid.). But only the beginning. This is not yet a sufficient characterisation. For the articulation is not automatic or independent of an agency and the emergence of a “stable system of signification” (ibid.). A project that points to and seeks to institute a new hegemony: a “popular identity” (ibid., p. 102).
Distinct from an institutionalist articulation, which “attempts to make the limits of discursive formation coincide with the limits of the community” (ibid., p. 107), as differences within the system, populist articulation draws a boundary dividing society into two camps. “The ‘people’ in this case is something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (ibid., pp. 107–108). In populism, a party that sees itself as underprivileged, a plebs, intends to be/represent all the members of the community, the populus, in the terminology inherited from Roman law: a part for the whole (ibid., p. 108).
I have argued, in previous works (Burity, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017), that in the context of a broad activation of political subjectivities alongside the democratising processes across Latin America, since the 1980s, there has been a growing politicisation of religion. This has brought to light new public actors, the most successful being the evangélicos (largely comprising Pentecostals, but also naming historical Protestants). Brazil has been the most significant case in the region, but the examples are everywhere (Freston, 2008; Barrera Rivera and Pérez, 2013; López Rodriguez, 2014; Wynarczyk et al., 2016; Pérez Guadalupe, 2017). Given the invisibility of Pentecostalism as a public phenomenon, and the internal competition with traditional Protestantism, the activation of a politicised Pentecostal identity and what came after involved a process of self-assertion that was from the beginning both relational and contested. It was a response to the possibilities opened by the final stages of the struggle for democracy as of the late 1970s, but also the expression of their own fear of a left-wing advance that might restrict religious freedom and of mistrust from politicians and radical social activists who would only see in them conservatism, subservience and a likely threat of “confessionalisation of politics”.
In carving a space for themselves in the midst of myriad m...
