Populist Discourse in Venezuela and the United States

American Unexceptionalism and Political Identity Formation

Ritchie Savage

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319726632
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319726649
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

Using the conceptual framework of populism as discourse, Ritchie Savage provides a comparative analysis of U.S. and Latin American speeches and articles covering Betancourt's Acción Democrática, Chávez, McCarthyism, and the Tea Party. In so doing, he reveals an essential structure to populist discourse: reference to the "opposition" as a representation of the persistence of social conflict, posed against a collective memory of the origins of democracy and struggle for equality, is present in all cases. This discursive formation of populism is carried out in comparisons of political discourse in the United States and Venezuela, two countries that are typically classified as empirically specific in their economic and political development and ideological orientation. Populist Discourse in Venezuela and the United States explores how instances of populism, once exceptional phenomena within modern forms of political rule, are becoming increasingly integrated with the structure of democratic politics.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ritchie SavagePopulist Discourse in Venezuela and the United Stateshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72664-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ritchie Savage¹

(1)

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, USA

Abstract

In my book, I compare four cases labeled as “populism” in academic literature and found in Venezuela and the United States. From the immediate postwar period, I chose to focus on Acción Democrática (AD) (1945–1948) and Senator McCarthy, and concerning the contemporary period, I examine the Chávez administration and the Tea Party. The comparisons made between the two movements within each country are more widely acceptable and easily intuited. Neither is a social democratic and reformist revolutionary junta, invoking the name of the “people” and attempting to redistribute oil profits, entirely different from the spirit of the Chávez administration, nor is a Senator who searches for Communists in the State Department, a far cry from a member of the House who finds the Muslim Brotherhood in the Whitehouse. Yet making comparisons between AD and McCarthy, or Chávez and the Tea Party, at first glance, proves more difficult. The main argument of my book then is that populism is a case of a universal discursive formation, which does not suggest that it appears everywhere and at all times, but that the symbolic structure found in cases of populism actually reveals something about general constitution of the political. With this definition I seek to provide a framework capable of analyzing the common discursive structure found in my cases, as they correspond not only to different time periods and regions, but also to different ideological positions and organizational varieties.

Keywords

PopulismDiscourseVenezuelaUnited States

End Abstract

What Is Populism?

This book presents a comparative analysis of four cases of populist discourse in Venezuela and the United States: Acción Democrática (AD) under Rómulo Betancourt from 1945 to 1948, McCarthyism, Chavismo , and the Tea Party . The project is born out of my interest in social theories of discourse that are derived from structural linguistics. I am interested in using structural linguistics, not only as a theory, but also as an interpretive methodology for analyzing political discourse. I am drawn to how the “social” is conceived of within the formation of political identities —that is, how political discourses construct a certain conception of society in the act of forming political identities . I have made the choice to analyze cases of populism, because it seems to be the quintessential and most basic form of political identity formation, in its invocation of the “people,” and already at the point at which I began this project around 2005, the term itself was steadily gaining popularity in its application to forms of politics around the world. In constructing this project, I was very much influenced by the work of Ernesto Laclau , who pioneered the approach of using structural linguistics to understand political identity formation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. And in an oeuvre that spans from Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory to On Populist Reason, Laclau has also developed the paradigm of populism as a discourse, as a counter to Germani’s modernization paradigm, which has spawned a whole body of literature.

When I began my book project, my plan was to adopt Laclau’s discursive definition of populism and give empirical evidence for his theory by applying it to cases in Latin America and the United States. This would make me the first political and comparative-historical sociologist, not to mention one of the first academics in general, to endeavor a systematic comparison of cases of populism in Latin America and the United States. The point of constructing this comparison would not only be to embark on new territory but also to empirically substantiate the discursive model of populism and finally put the nail in the coffin of modernization theory.

My fundamental research questions are as follows. Which is the best definition of populism applicable across regions? What is populist discourse, and what are the features of the discourse that takes populism as its object of analysis? And my initial hypothesis is that, following Laclau , populism is a kind of universal discursive formation that can arise in regimes, administrations, and movements with vastly different organizational characteristics and ideological orientations. Part of my reasoning behind using Laclau and defining populism as a universal discursive formation comes from what I have already witnessed as a discrepancy between the use of the term “populism,” represented in the vernacular and the media , and the way in which the term is employed in the academic literature. At the time I began this project, “populism” was becoming a buzzword in the media , and this has only increased during the subsequent years I have worked on this book. I witnessed the term being thrown about during the first Obama campaign and also with the rise of the Tea Party . The US media , in this sense, uses the term to vaguely signal certain rhetorical tropes that American politicians on both sides of the political spectrum occasionally employ. Many of these articles contain some reference, albeit ambiguous, to the original People’s Party of the 1890s. Chávez , at this point, had already been in power for six years, but this was also around the time that Correa and then later Morales came to power, and the US media , in reference to these cases, still uses the term “populism” in a more pejorative sense to designate these Bolivarian leaders as dictators and their administrations as authoritarian. The historical point of reference in this usage of populism is usually to the Latin American trope of the caudillo and the legacy of clientelism . And finally, in the fallout from the economic crisis, there has also been an increased usage of the term to describe the rise of right-wing parties in Europe , which feed off the crisis, and now also left-wing parties, which have arisen in response to these right-wing parties.

Whereas “populism” has been thrown about with abandon in both the media and academic conversations, the academic literature reveals a different treatment of the term. The two bodies of academic literature I analyze in depth in my book correspond to the regions of Latin America and the United States , and the problem with the definitions of populism that are developed out of each body of literature is that they tend to be region-specific and narrow to the point of preventing comparisons to cases in the other region. I develop this argument about the literature in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4, but I will summarize the main problems here. Concerning the literature on US populism, from Hofstadter to Kazin , definitions of populism are always constructed that single out a particular style or type of “rhetoric,” which can be traced back to the Populist Party of the 1890s. Insofar as this was an agrarian-based, grassroots, anti-elite discourse, it hinders comparisons to most cases of classical Latin American populism, which had starkly contrasting centralized and top-down organization features. In another sense, the Latin American literature on populism, drawn from an interest in classical cases, such as Peronism , is more concerned with tying the phenomenon of populism to processes of modernization , following the work of Germani , and also typologizing populism as an intermediate form between authoritarianism and democracy . Insofar as the modernization paradigm, and even the later mobilization paradigms that are developed out of it, rely on the presence of large unincorporated and marginalized sectors, this also prevents a comparison with forms of US populism, in which there are no such sizeable sectors without access to forms of democratic participation.

After contemplating this discrepancy in the media and academic treatment of the “term” populism, I have come to the conclusion that, in the policing of the term, the types of restrictions that academics impose on the definition of populism often prevent the possibility of making comparisons between cases of populism found in different regions. However, the media, in another sense, seems to suffer from a constitutive lack of any conceptual exactitude when employing the term, to the point where populism is irreducible from seductive, and occasionally dangerous, politics. Confronted then with these problems in both the media and academic treatment of populism, I have decided that the only way to treat populism with social scientific and comparative-historical rigor is to define populism not as rhetoric (US literature), not as an outgrowth of modernization (Latin American literature), not as seductive or abnormal politics (the media), but as a discourse with specific components that can be isolated in order to make comparisons across cases. Given these concerns, I proceed from Laclau’s specific discursive definition, involving “empty signifiers,” “democratic demands,” and an “antagonism between the people and the power bloc.” In Chap. 2, I will elaborate more on the specifics of Laclau’s discursive model and why I believe that it is the most useful model to apply to this particular political phenomenon, but before that I would like to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Negative Proof of the Discursive Model: Populism as a Conceptual and Empirical Problem
• 3. From Betancourt to Chávez: Interpreting Venezuelan Populism in Two Revolutionary Governments
• 4. Anti-Leftist Populism in McCarthyism and the Tea Party
• 5. Comparing Populism in Venezuela and the United States
• 6. Everything in History Happens: Further Problems with Populism as a Comparative-Historical Phenomenon
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter