Seven Essays on Populism

For a Renewed Theoretical Perspective

Paula Biglieri, Luciana Cadahia

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509542222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

This important intervention interrogates keystone features of the dominant European theoretical landscape in the field of populism studies, advancing existing debates and introducing new avenues of thought, in conjunction with insights from the contemporary Latin American political experience and perspectives. In each essay – the title a nod to the influential socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, from whom the authors draw inspiration – leading Argentine scholars Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia pair key dimensions of populism with diverse themes such as modern-day feminism, militancy, and neoliberalism, in order to stimulate discussion surrounding the constitutive nature, goals, and potential of populist social movements.

Biglieri and Cadahia are unafraid to court provocation in their frank assessment of populism as a force which could bring about essential emancipatory social change to confront emerging right-wing trends in policy and leadership. At the same time, this fresh interpretation of a much-maligned political articulation is balanced by their denunciation of right-aligned populisms and their failure to bring to bear a sustainable alternative to contemporary neo-authoritarian forms of neoliberalism. In their place, they articulate a populism which offers a viable means of mobilizing a response to hegemonic forms of neoliberal discourse and government.

Essay 1
The Secret of Populism

The returns of populism

“Populism” is an insistent word, one that returns to us every time we try to store it away in the chest (arcón) of disused terms in the political lexicon. As we know, a chest can serve as a coffin or a jewelry box; it can bury a corpse or guard a treasure. Or perhaps it can be both things at once, and what dies is capable of guarding a secret to be deciphered in our present. Let’s not forget that the etymology of arcón is related to the arcane, meaning a secret or a mystery, i.e. something that remains closed and hidden. We could ask ourselves what it is about populism that remains hidden, or the secret of why it returns to the field of politics every time its death is announced. We might even wonder why there is so much interest in declaring its death and what the unspoken fear is that hides away its existence. As the word itself indicates, populism expresses a tendency or movement toward the popular, an adjective indicating that which refers to the people. So populism, as the storage chest of the political, holds the secret of the people. And perhaps that is the secret of its strength and its condemnation – perhaps that’s why it divides the social field and lays bare antagonistic struggle through the establishment of a frontier between those on top and those on the bottom. If populism returns, if populism persists despite attempts to lock it away and make it disappear, this is most likely because those on the bottom resist domination by those on top, because those on top never cease to perpetuate mechanisms for the dispossession and exclusion of those on the bottom. Perhaps populism is the chest that those on the bottom store within their bodies and their memory every time they have the opportunity to contest the oligarchic meaning of the republic, because, in the end, populism can be understood as the way in which plebeians fight for the res publica, that public thing that oligarchies want to preserve as a treasure for themselves.

That’s why, when the Washington Consensus¹ overwhelmingly shrank the terrain of political intervention in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the populist secret made a comeback in Latin America. Of course, this was initially considered an isolated anachronism, or merely an atavistic vice specific to peripheral countries and without broader global significance. But the rapid spread of populist governments across much of Latin America, and the subsequent appearance of populist leaders, movements, and governments in Europe and the United States, have again granted the term a prominent role in public debates and international discussion forums on the inter-regional level. In this context, the proliferation of political formations characterized as populist since the beginning of the twenty-first century has led different authors – even those with political positions as different as Chantal Mouffe (2018) and Éric Fassin (2018b) – to argue that we are experiencing a “populist moment.” While these authors limit their analyis to the case of Western Europe, we can clearly also extend such a diagnosis to other latitudes. It only takes a brief review of the present or the recent past for an entire list of political experiences characterized as populist to come to light quickly. If, by the “populist moment” in Western Europe, we include the most well-known cases such as DiEM25, SYRIZA, and Golden Dawn in Greece, Podemos and Vox in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage in England, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise in France, Matteo Salvini and the Five Star Movement in Italy, we could also refer to cases like Sweden Democrats led by Jimmie Åkesson, Víktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. And if we move over to the Americas, in the North we find Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States; in South America, we have many examples, including the governments of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the recent administrations of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff also in Brazil, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, among others.

Moreover, if we look retrospectively and extend our inquiry to approximately the last 100 years of political life on a global scale, we can see that this “populist moment” was preceded by at least two others. We can locate a first “populist moment” in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a period marked by the Russian Narodniki agrarian movement and the People’s Party of rural movements in the southern USA, both traditionally considered to be pioneering examples of populism. We can locate the second populist moment in the period marked by the great movements that emerged in Latin America in the mid twentieth century (whose most paradigmatic cases, although not the only ones, were Varguism in Brazil, Peronism in Argentina, and Cardenism in Mexico). But, if we pay close attention to the intervals between these two moments, we can also find various political experiences that were classified as populist. For example, the astonishingly succesful Boulangist movement in France, the cases of early Ibañism in Chile, Yrigoyenism in Argentina, the Fort Copacabana revolt and the Prestes Column in Brazil (antecedents of Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo), and Kemalism in Turkey. We could also add the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in Bolivia, Velasquism in Ecuador, Gaitanism in Colombia, Nasserism in Egypt, the experience of Tito in Yugoslavia, and Mao Tse-Tung’s “Long March” in China. We could even include the cases of Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru and Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya.

This whole enumeration of moments and experiences that have been classified as populist allows us to see that these have included both right-wing and left-wing formations, peasant and urban movements, and liberal-democratic, socialist, and authoritarian political regimes in the so-called “core” or “developed countries” as well as in the “periphery” or “developing countries.” It seems as though this heterogeneous list could be extended indefinitely in an endless dissemination of examples, with moments marked by a greater concentration of cases. Perhaps we should, therefore, ask ourselves whether it is useful to continue thinking about populism simply in terms of “populist moments,” or whether we need instead another sort of distinction that will help us better grasp that secret of populism that seems to spread across different geographies and historical moments. Along these lines, defining populism turns out to be difficult, given the variety and breadth of cases falling under that name, and this task only becomes more difficult given the well-known prejudice and disdain with which the subject is treated in the literature. If anything has thrown the debate on populism into the fray, it is its pervasively negative charge. Populism is immediately associated with the aesthetically ugly, the morally evil, a lack of civic culture, contempt for institutions, demagoguery, and irrationality. It has been described as a perversion or a pathology, accused of always containing proto-fascism, of being a fraud, a hoax, or a deviation. But in order to better differentiate between the various levels on which this disdain toward populism functions, we need to distinguish between three perspectives regarding its use: mediatic, empirical, and ontological.

We speak of a mediatic perspective because, at present, the word “populism” is usually used uncritically to group together all political experiences that don’t fit within the model of liberal market democracy. So much so that, in 2016, the Foundation of Urgent Spanish – sponsored by the news agency EFE and BBVA bank – declared “populism” to be the word of the year (Martín, 2016). But the problem with this usage is that it encourages us to form a knee-jerk common sense that is more interested in generating immediate aversion to those processes deemed populist than in understanding the specificity of the phenomenon. It generates a series of confusions around the word’s use that unfortunately permeate academia and hinder efforts to understand the different evolutions of populism and the rationality specific to it. With regard to this use of populism, then, we need to distinguish between the mediatically constructed spontaneous and pejorative dimension and the situational strength of populism as an experience that transcends the classic aspects and spatialities of populism.

The empirical perspective, in turn, sets out from the practical study of concrete political experiences characterized by: (a) a break with oligarchic and elitist states; (b) a very specific type of modernity; and (c) a linkage between the popular and state power (Germani, 2019). One characteristic of this kind of approach is that, despite focusing on the strictly empirical dimension of populism, it has led to a series of prejudices that conditioned its findings regarding populist experiences. Regardless of the author in question, the common denominator is the assumption that populism represents an unsatisfactory deviation. The particularity of this approach, then, is that populism never acquires the status of a political concept capable of serving as an explanatory paradigm – instead becoming an unsatisfactory response to a purported European model delineating the horizon of progress for any kind of democracy.

It was not until Ernesto Laclau’s intervention, in his famous text “Toward a Theory of Populism” (Laclau, 1977), that “historical studies of populism” became a “general theory of populism” (Laclau, 2005a). This meant, on the one hand, abandoning the assumption that populism represents a failed historical form in peripheral countries and, on the other hand, understanding populism as a political logic that coincides with a form of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) – in other words, to grant populism the dignity of a theory and to turn it into a political ontology for theorizing political articulations in general (Laclau, 2005a). Thus, and without wanting to simplify things, we can say that it is Laclau who introduces the ontological approach to populism, thanks to the astuteness of taking a term traditionally used to explain Latin American backwardness and elevating it into a form of political thought. Far from considering populism an imperfection, Laclau instead wondered if it wasn’t time to stop comparing ourselves to supposed models – of which populism could only be a lesser copy – and begin to theoretically build the logic of populism itself.

Modernization, class struggle, and the constitutive dimension of the political

In this essay, we are going to set aside the mediatic perspective and focus on the tensions between the empirical and ontological approaches to populism. This will help us better understand, on the one hand, the different lines of inquiry in play around the populist question, and, on the other, how this transition from strictly empirical studies to the ontological plane took place. For us, the lines of inquiry along which the question of populism is theorized include: the problem of modernization in Latin America, the viability of the class struggle, and the constitutive dimension of the political. The first includes those works emerging from the general framework offered by modernization theory and comparative politics, predominant in the United States after the end of the Second World War. Standing out among these is the pioneering work of the Italian-Argentine Gino Germani (1968 [1956]), who understood populism as an anomalous path for transitioning from a traditional or “backward” society to a modern one. In other words, he linked populism to a specific phase of social development in modernizing countries. Through an analysis of the case of Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s – i.e. Peronism – Germani argued that the process of rapid industrialization and urbanization had created masses that were available for political action, and whose “early” intervention into politics disrupted the proper transition toward modernization, and thereby also eroded the institutionally appropriate forms of liberal democracy. He thus considered populist experiences to be the expression of an irrational relic preventing Latin American countries from following the path of European or American models of social change (i.e. a process of increasing social differentiation, specialization, and complexity, alongside a working class politicized through the organization of liberal political parties). All this led Germani to characterize populism as a phenomenon outside and hostile to representative democracy, which necessarily gave rise to authoritarian personalities.

Years later, Torcuato Di Tella (1965), a disciple of Germani, would analyze the populist aspect of Peronism in terms of the establishment of a relationship between “displaced elites” and “available masses.” The “displaced elites” (composed of intellectuals not belonging to the working class, and who instead originated in different social sectors such as the army, the clergy, sectors of the bourgeoisie, or lower-middle-class professionals) had a social status that did not correspond to their expectations. Meanwhile, the “available masses” (comprising peasants and urban workers) were easy to lead insofar as they were dazzled by access to the city, public schools, and the media. Thus, the “available masses” – eager to participate in politics and achieve upward social mobility – joined forces with the “displaced elites” to give shape to populism, defined as a political movement with significant popular support in which non-working-class elites with an anti-status-quo ideology also participated.

If Germani and Di Tella’s sociological approach turned populism into an anomaly that, of course, should be avoided, or at least corrected, this was due precisely to the fact that their works took on the perspective and categorical frameworks of mid-twentieth-century modernization theory and comparative politics. In other words, they studied populism according to a series of external criteria and assessments with serious limitations when it came to understanding specific logics produced from the Global South. These frameworks were based on the assumption that there existed a predominant pattern for modern society, toward which those societies characterized as traditional or backward should aspire and assimilate, bit by bit. This was therefore a hierarchical assimilation, since it was based on the idea that the Global North represented the only possible model for modernity, while simultaneously accepting its purported economic, political, and cultural superiority. From this perspective, modern societies were identified with the United States and Europe and were characterized as secular, adaptable to rapid change, cosmopolitan, and with a complex division of labor and a working class whose political culture was linked to liberal-democratic parties. Meanwhile, traditional societies were identified with Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and were described as religious – or even superstitious – conservative, closed, passive, economically and socially simple, and lacking a civic culture that would enable the development of liberal democracy. The only valid and possible way to achieve true modernity was to follow the trajectory of modern societies.²

Years later, Bertrand Badie and Guy Hermet (1993), despite their efforts to renovate comparative politics, did not manage to avoid the prejudices through which populist strategies had been traditionally analyzed. They argued that populist strategies, located historically and geographically in South America and Mexico – and to a lesser degree in mid-twentieth-century Asia and North Africa – “result from the reinterpretation of clientelist appeals with a plebiscitary, statist, and almost always dictatorial perspective” (1990: 203).³ To arrive at this conclusion, they distinguished populism from both fascism and the “European Bonapartist phenomenon,” insisting that what sets the former apart is “lower support ...