Populism in the Civil Sphere

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Peter Kivisto, Giuseppe Sciortino, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Peter Kivisto, Giuseppe Sciortino

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781509544745
  9781509544738
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509544752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Even as the specter of populism haunts contemporary societies, scholars have not been able to agree about what it is. Except for one thing: a deviation from democracy, the source, it seems, of the precarious position in which so many societies find themselves today. This volume aims to break the Gordian knot of "populism" by bringing a new social theory to bear and, in so doing so, suggesting that normative judgments about this misunderstood phenomenon need to be reconsidered as well. Populism is not a democratic deviation but a naturally occurring dimension of civil sphere dynamics, fatal to democracy only at the extremes.   

Because populism is highly polarizing, it has the effect of inducing anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking apart. Left populists feel as if civil solidarity is an illusion, that democratic discourse is a fig leaf for private interests, and that the social and cultural differentiation that vouchsafes the independence of the civil sphere merely reflects the hegemony of narrow professional interests or those of a ruling class. Right populists share the same distrust, even repulsion, for the civil sphere. What seems civil to the center and left, like affirmative action or open immigration, they call out as particularistic; honored civil icons, such as Holocaust memorials, they trash. How can the sense of a vital civil center survive such censure from populism on the left and the right?    

Populism in the Civil Sphere provides compelling answers to these fundamental questions. Its contributions are both sophisticated theoretical interventions and deeply researched empirical studies, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the most important political developments of our time.

1
Populism’s Cultural and Civil Dynamics

Marcus Morgan

This chapter interrogates dominant definitions of “populism” found in the social sciences, focusing on the term’s conceptual utility in understanding recent changes in Western polities. Though populism is typically treated as a deviant form of politics, this chapter finds that it in fact holds remarkable continuities with conventional politics, and indeed culture more generally. It argues that these more general cultural processes can be illuminated by cultural sociology, just as the more specific but still routine political processes can be illuminated by civil sphere theory (CST). The chapter goes on to argue that when populism is understood as a formal mode of public signification, rather than a substantive ideology, the substance it signifies becomes crucial to determining its civility. It suggests that while populism can certainly have anticivil effects, there is nothing inherent in it that precludes it from also acting to promote civil repair.

Populism: Politics as Usual

One way of characterizing “culture” is as an ever-evolving repository of efforts toward meaning-making. Meaning-making reduces complexity so that communication – and, if successful, understanding – can take place. Politics likewise aims toward reducing complexity so as to legitimate efforts to shift, or maintain, power relations. This chapter will suggest that what has been called “populism” may exaggerate these processes but does not break from them. CST teaches us how this reduction of complexity typically takes place on the basis of organizing meaning around a binary structure of motives, relationships, and institutions (Alexander 2006: 53–67). This chapter will argue that populism is unique only in its accentuation of these binaries; its drawing of an explicit frontier between a construction of the “people” – in progressive populism one that is inclusively defined, in regressive populism exclusively so (Judis 2016) – and an “elite” (Laclau 2005; Mouffe and Errejón 2016; Mouffe 2018); its development of polarization; its provocation to an audience to decide on which side of the boundary it chooses to stand; and its invitation toward this audience to actively participate in the unfolding political drama, typically through direct, rather than representative, democratic mechanisms.

While the chapter agrees that useful definitions exclude as much as possible to increase their conceptual grasp, it argues that the difficulty of coming up with a tight, restrictive definition of “populism” is that it is not as tight, restrictive, or discrete a phenomenon as most academic or journalistic accounts present it as being. Rather, populism is best understood as an intensification of routine political dynamics, which are themselves part and parcel of more generalized cultural mechanisms through which social signification takes place; group identities are forged in relation to those they oppose; and collective agency is mobilized in the process. Populism can therefore be understood within CST, which can itself be understood as following the structures and dynamics of meaning-making illuminated by cultural sociology. From this perspective, different examples of political behavior come to be seen as more or less populist by degree, rather than populist or not by categorization.

The chapter reviews five key features shared across dominant definitions: populism’s binary logic, its ideological nature, its moralism, its antirationalism, and its antipluralism. It both critiques each feature’s definitional centrality and stresses each feature’s continuities with “conventional” politics, demonstrating how populism functions in ways that CST, and cultural sociology, would expect it to. The chapter concludes that populism is compatible with both progressive and regressive political programs, and indeed suggests that if certain criteria are met, there is nothing precluding it from playing a similar role to the social movements described in Part III of The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006) in translating restricted political grievances into more universal civil issues, in the process initiating civil repair. Overall, the chapter argues against the independence not only of populism, but also of politics more generally, from culture. It suggests that beyond violence and coercion, though frequently even within these, power, and the struggles that take place over it, must be seen as operating always and everywhere through culture.

Populism as a Binary

Attempts to define populism have a long, fraught, and inconclusive history (e.g., Berlin et al. 1968; Ionescu and Gellner 1969). So much so that many sociologists have deemed it wisest to set the ill-defined term aside (e.g., Jansen 2011). Events over the past few years have, however, predictably propelled the concept back into academic and public prominence. Though the phenomenon is arguably ancient, the term itself was first used to describe two political movements that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century: in Tsarist Russia, a largely unsuccessful effort at mobilizing peasants against feudal exploitation, and in the United States, the movement of mainly farmworkers who rose up to challenge, via the People’s Party, what they conceived of as an elite of bankers, railway owners, and the two-party system of government. In a similar sequence of events to that witnessed with the term more recently, it was first used as a pejorative in the US context, but was then quickly reappropriated by those it was intended to deride. Although some prominent observers argue that the movement around the American People’s Party fails the test of a genuine populism (e.g., Müller 2016: 88), there is fairly broad consensus that one feature it illustrates – a politics built around a dualistic opposition between an “elite” and some conception of a “people,” with whom legitimate democratic power belongs – is the basis on which a minimal definition might be agreed upon (e.g., Kriesi 2014; Bonikowski and Gidron 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018).

However, while the basic notion that “the binary structure of populist claims is largely invariant” (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016: 7) may apply to left-wing populisms, it is not so clear that it holds for right-wing variants. Judis describes how while left-wing populism conforms to dominant definitions in its “dyadic” structure, consisting of “a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top,” right-wing populism, by contrast, is “triadic,” in that such “populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group” (2016: 15).¹ This third group is typically a minority, often an immigrant group or some other relatively powerless scapegoat, revealing an exclusivist – i.e. nonuniversalizing and therefore noncivil – deployment of the “people” in such types of populism.

Definitions based upon the binary criterion also assume there is such a thing as a large-scale politics attempting to win the electoral consent of a polity that does not rely upon some construction of the “people.” This assumption is questionable. Democracy is, after all, supposed to be a system in which a people rule (demos-kratos), and even in nondemocratic or “formally democratic” systems, lip service is usually paid to this idea to ensure legitimation (Habermas 1976: 36–7). To operate effectively, such a system must therefore presumably decide who this “people” are. Laclau (2005, 2006) has famously argued that constructing a people constitutes the essence of what politics is. Others have suggested that state-formation itself was only possible through determining a “people” (Skinner 2009: 328; Peel 2018). In republics, “the people” is typically so central to grounding democracy that it becomes the cornerstone of constitutions, as in “we, the people.” In exclusionary right-wing manifestations, “naming the people” is also used, but in this instance, as a means of excluding the “third group” that Judis identifies, justifying the conviction that this group, which is not part of the essentialized “people,” is therefore undeserving of political representation. In technocracies, the “people” are also implicitly constructed, but in this iteration, often as in need of the enlightened guidance of experts, on the assumption that the people are unqualified to govern themselves.

Liberal politics is hardly immune, although it typically conceives itself as being so. This can be illustrated by the recent calls for a “People’s Vote” on Brexit in the United Kingdom. The use of the term “people” here, as in the slogan of the largest march – “Put it to the People” – and in the frequent reference to the number of people on street demonstrations, is unmistakably populist. However, it is arguably a populism against populism; a populism that emerged when a mechanism of direct democracy – a people’s referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) – failed to go the way that liberal antipopulists, who generally defend a more representative notion of democracy, had proposed, a matter that was in part blamed on the populist mold in which organized Euroskepticism took shape. More direct democracy was the liberal answer to direct democracy gone awry: we need to listen more to the people – another referendum is required to establish what the people really think.

Whether or not there is a paradoxical tension between democracy and populism, as some theorists claim (e.g., Urbinati 2017), there is perhaps a simple cultural reason why it is so hard to imagine a politics that does not construct a people. This is that political life, like cultural life more generally, tends to organize itself around either/or distinctions, which, when it comes to issues of large-scale group identity, translate into distinguishing between an “us” and a “them.” In democratic systems (or, as mentioned above, often in nondemocratic ones too), since the “people” is the chief democratic category, who is and who is not part of the people becomes paramount. Awareness of the social organization of the cosmos around binaries, the corresponding poles of which can be aligned with one another through analogy, metaphor, and allusion, has been a mainstay of cultural analysis in the social sciences (de Saussure 1966 [1893]; Lévi-Strauss 1967: 29–54; Barthes 1977; Durkheim 1995 [1912]: 33–9), and one that has been productively developed in The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006: 53–67). One need not advocate a Schmittian account of radical friend–enemy divisions (Schmitt 2007 [1932]) to acknowledge that the discourse of civil society cleaves the world into who or what “is” and who or what “is not.”² These binaries are of course a simplification of the way things really are, but this does not make them any less present within, or functional for, political or other group identity processes.

Populism as an Ideology

There has long been a social scientific perspective that considers populism to be an ideology (e.g., MacRae 1969), providing an overarching normative worldview. Recent mainstream definitions, however, have watered down this position by tending to agree with Mudde’s (2004) view of it being only a “thin-centred” ideology, which contrasts with “th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on the Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Populist Continuum from Within the Civil Sphere to Outside It
• 1 Populism’s Cultural and Civil Dynamics
• 2 #Disente and Duterte: The Cultural Bases of Antipopulism in the Philippines, 2001–2019
• 3 Uncivil Populism in Power: The Case of Erdoğanism
• 4 The Populist Transition and the Civil Sphere in Mexico
• 5 Far-Right Populism in Poland and the Construction of a Pseudocivil Sphere
• 6 The “Thirteenth Immigrant”? Migration and Populism in the 2018 Czech Presidential Election
• 7 Memory Culture, the Civil Sphere, and Right-Wing Populism in Germany: The Resistible Rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
• 8 Populism and the Particularization of Solidarity: On the Sweden Democrats
• 9 Left Populism in a Communist Civil Sphere: The Lesson of Bo Xilai
• 10 A Civil Sphere Theory of Populism: American Forms and Templates, from the Red Scare to Donald Trump
• Commentary: Demarcating Constructive from Destructive Populisms: Civil Translation vs. Civil Mimicry
• Conclusion: Is Populism the Shadow of the Civil?
• Index
• End User License Agreement