For a Left Populism

Chantal Mouffe

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786637567
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786637574
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

We are seeing the rise of a populist moment around the world on both the left and the right. Movements like Bernie Sander, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have emerged in the midst of the neoliberal crisis. In this book, leading political thinker Chantal Mouffe proposes a left-populist strategy that could bring together the manifold struggles against subordination, oppression and discrimination. In redrawing political frontiers, this "populist moment" points to a "return of the political" after years of postpolitics. This return may open the way for authoritarian solutions-through regimes that weaken liberal-democratic institutions-but it could also lead to a reaffirmation and extension of democratic values.

1

The Populist Moment

I would like to make clear at the outset that my aim is not to add another contribution to the already plethoric field of ‘populism studies’ and I have no intention to enter the sterile academic debate about the ‘true nature’ of populism. This book is meant to be a political intervention and it openly acknowledges its partisan nature. I will define what I understand by ‘left populism’ and argue that in the present conjuncture it provides the adequate strategy to recover and deepen the ideals of equality and popular sovereignty that are constitutive of a democratic politics.

As a political theorist, my mode of theorizing takes its bearing from Machiavelli, who, as Althusser reminded us, always situated himself ‘in the conjuncture’ instead of reflecting ‘over the conjuncture’. Following Machiavelli’s example, I will inscribe my reflection in a particular conjuncture, looking for what he called the verita effetuale de la cosa (the effectual truth of the thing) of the ‘populist moment’ we are currently witnessing in Western European countries. I limit my analysis to Western Europe because, although the question of populism is, no doubt, also relevant in Eastern Europe, those countries necessitate a special analysis. They are marked by their specific history under communism and their political culture presents different features. This is also the case with the various forms of Latin American populism. While there are ‘family resemblances’ between the various populisms, they correspond to characteristic conjunctures and they need to be apprehended according to their various contexts. Hopefully, my reflections on the Western European conjuncture will provide some useful insights to address other populist situations.

Even if my objective is a political one, a significant part of my reflections will be of a theoretical nature because the left populist strategy that I am going to defend is informed by an anti-essentialist theoretical approach that asserts that society is always divided and discursively constructed through hegemonic practices. Many criticisms addressed to ‘left populism’ are based on a lack of understanding of this approach and this is why it is important to make it explicit here. I will refer to the central tenets of the anti-essentialist approach at several points in my argument and further clarifications will be provided in a theoretical appendix at the end of the book.

To dispel any possible confusion, I will begin by specifying what I understand by ‘populism’. Discarding the derogatory meaning of that term that has been imposed by the media to disqualify all those who oppose the status quo, I will follow the analytical approach developed by Ernesto Laclau that permits addressing the question of populism in a way that I find particularly fruitful.

In his book On Populist Reason, Laclau defines populism as a discursive strategy of constructing a political frontier dividing society into two camps and calling for the mobilization of the ‘underdog’ against ‘those in power’.¹ It is not an ideology and cannot be attributed a specific programmatic content. Nor is it a political regime. It is a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms according to both time and place, and is compatible with a variety of institutional frameworks. We can speak of a ‘populist moment’ when, under the pressure of political or socioeconomic transformations, the dominant hegemony is being destabilized by the multiplication of unsatisfied demands. In such situations, the existing institutions fail to secure the allegiance of the people as they attempt to defend the existing order. As a result, the historical bloc that provides the social basis of a hegemonic formation is being disarticulated and the possibility arises of constructing a new subject of collective action – the people – capable of reconfiguring a social order experienced as unjust.

This, I contend, is precisely what characterizes our present conjuncture and this is why it is apposite to call it a ‘populist moment’. This populist moment signals the crisis of the neoliberal hegemonic formation that was progressively implemented in Western Europe through the 1980s. This neoliberal hegemonic formation replaced the social-democratic Keynesian welfare state that, in the thirty years after the end of the Second World War, provided the principal socioeconomic model in the democratic countries in Western Europe. The core of this new hegemonic formation is constituted by a set of political-economic practices aimed at imposing the rule of the market – deregulation, privatization, fiscal austerity – and limiting the role of the state to the protection of private property rights, free markets and free trade. Neoliberalism is the term currently used to refer to this new hegemonic formation which, far from being limited to the economic domain, also connotes a whole conception of society and of the individual grounded on a philosophy of possessive individualism.

This model, implemented in various countries from the 1980s onwards, did not face any significant challenge until the financial crisis of 2008, when it began to seriously show its limits. This crisis, initiated in 2007 in the US with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, developed into a full-blown international banking crisis with the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers the following year. Massive bailouts of financial institutions had to be initiated to impede the breakdown of the world financial system. The global economic downturn that followed deeply affected several European economies and provoked a European debt crisis. In order to deal with this crisis, policies of austerity were implemented in most European countries, with drastic effects, particularly in the Southern countries.

On the occasion of the economic crisis, a series of contradictions condensed, leading to what Gramsci calls an interregnum: a period of crisis during which several tenets of the consensus established around a hegemonic project are challenged. A solution to the crisis is not yet in sight and this characterizes the ‘populist moment’ in which we find ourselves today. The ‘populist moment’, therefore, is the expression of a variety of resistances to the political and economic transformations seen during the years of neoliberal hegemony. These transformations have led to a situation that we could call ‘post-democracy’ to indicate the erosion of the two pillars of the democratic ideal: equality and popular sovereignty. I will explain in a moment how such an erosion took place but before that, it is worth examining what is meant by ‘post-democracy’.

‘Post-democracy’, first proposed by Colin Crouch, signals the decline in the role of parliaments and the loss of sovereignty that is the consequence of neoliberal globalization. According to Crouch:

The fundamental cause of democratic decline in contemporary politics is the major imbalance now developing between the role of corporate interests and those of virtually all other groups. Taken alongside the inevitable entropy of democracy, this is leading to politics once again becoming an affair of closed elites, as it was in pre-democratic times.²

Jacques Rancière also uses this term, which he defines in the following way:

Post-democracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.³

While not disagreeing with either definition, my use of the term is somewhat different because, through a reflection on the nature of liberal democracy, I aim to bring to the fore a different feature of neoliberalism. As is well known, etymologically speaking, ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek demos/kratos, which means ‘the power of the people’. When we speak of ‘democracy’ in Europe, we refer, however, to a specific model: the Western model that results from the inscription of the democratic principle in a particular historical context. This model has received a variety of names: representative democracy, constitutional democracy, liberal democracy, pluralist democracy.

In all cases what is in question is a political regime characterized by the articulation of two different traditions. On the one hand, the tradition of political liberalism: the rule of law, the separation of powers and the defence of individual freedom; on the other hand, the democratic tradition, whose central ideas are equality and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relationship between these two traditions but only a contingent historical articulation that, as CB Macpherson has shown, took place through the joint struggles of the liberals and the democrats against absolutist regimes.⁴

Some authors, like Carl Schmitt, affirm that this articulation produced an unviable regime because liberalism denies democracy and democracy denies liberalism. Others, following Jürgen Habermas, maintain the ‘co-originality’ of the principles of freedom and equality. Schmitt is certainly right in pointing out the existence of a conflict between the liberal ‘grammar,’ which postulates universality and the reference to ‘humanity’, and the ‘grammar’ of democratic equality, which requires the construction of a people and a frontier between a ‘we’ and a ‘they’. But I think he is mistaken in presenting that conflict as a contradiction that must inevitably lead a pluralistic liberal democracy to self-destruction.

In The Democratic Paradox, I conceived the articulation of these two traditions – indeed, ultimately irreconcilable – on the mode of a paradoxical configuration, as the locus of a tension that defines the originality of liberal democracy as a politeia, a form of political community, that guarantees its pluralistic character.⁵ The democratic logic of constructing a people and defending egalitarian practices is necessary to define a demos and to subvert the tendency of liberal discourse to abstract universalism. But its articulation with liberal logic allows us to challenge the forms of exclusion that are inherent in the political practices of determining the people that will govern.

Democratic liberal politics consists of a constant process of negotiation through different hegemonic configurations of this constitutive tension. This tension, expressed in political terms along the frontier between right and left, can only be stabilized temporarily through pragmatic negotiations between political forces. These negotiations always establish the hegemony of one of them over the other. Revisiting the history of liberal democracy, we find that on some occasions the liberal logic prevailed, while in others it was the democratic. Nonetheless the two logics remained in force, and the possibility of an ‘agonistic’ negotiation between right and left, which is specific to the liberal-democratic regime, always remained active.

The previous considerations only concern liberal democracy envisaged as a political regime, but it is evident that those political institutions never exist independently of their inscription in an economic system. In the case of neoliberalism, for instance, we are dealing with a social formation that articulates a particular form of liberal democracy with financial capitalism. Although this articulation needs to be taken into account when studying a specific social formation, it is possible, at the analytical level, to examine the evolution of the liberal-democratic regime as a political form of society, so as to bring to the fore some of its characteristics.

The current situation can be described as ‘post-democracy’ because in recent years, as a consequence of neoliberal hegemony, the agonistic tension between the liberal and the democratic principles, which is constitutive of liberal democracy, has been eliminated. With the demise of the democratic values of equality and popular sovereignty, the agonistic spaces where different projects of society could confront each other have disappeared and citizens have been deprived of the possibility of exercising their democratic rights. To be sure, ‘democracy’ is still spoken of, but it has been reduced to its liberal component and it only signifies the presence of free elections and the defence of human rights. What has become increasingly central is economic liberalism with its defence of the free market and many aspects of political liberalism have been relegated to second place, if not simply eliminated. This is what I mean by ‘post-democracy’.

In the political arena, the evolution towards post-democracy was made manifest through what I proposed in On the Political to call ‘post-politics’, which blurs the political frontier between the right and the left.⁶ Under the pretext of the ‘modernization’ imposed by globalization, social-democratic parties have accepted the diktats of financial capitalism and the limits they imposed to state interventions and their redistributive policies.

As a result the role of parliaments and institutions that allow citizens to influence political decisions has been drastically reduced. Elections no longer offer any opportunity to decide on real alternatives through the traditional ‘parties of government’. The only thing that post-politics allows is a bipartisan alternation of power between centre-right and centre-left parties. All those who oppose the ‘consensus in the centre’ and the dogma that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization are presented as ‘extremists’ or disqualified as ‘populists’.

Politics therefore has become a mere issue of managing the established order, a domain reserved for experts, and popular sovereignty has been declared obsolete. One of the fundamental symbolic pillars of the democratic ideal – the power of the people – has been undermined because post-politics eliminates the possibility of an agonistic struggle between different projects of society which is the very condition for the exercise of popular sovereignty.

Next to post-politics, there is another development that needs to be taken into account when understanding the causes of the post-democratic condition: the growing ‘oligarchization’ of Western European societies. Changes at the political level have taken place in the context of a new mode of regulation of capitalism, where financial capital occupies a central place. With the financialization of the economy, there was a great expansion of the financial sector at the expense of the productive economy. This explains the exponential increase in inequalities we have witnessed in recent years.

Privatization and deregulation policies contributed to a drastic deterioration in the conditions of the workers. Under the combined effects of deindustrialization, the promotion of technological changes and processes of relocation of industries to countries where labour was cheaper, many jobs were lost.

With the effects of the austerity policies that were imposed after the 2008 crisis, this situation also affects a large part of the middle class, which has entered into a process of pauperization and precarization. As a result of this process of oligarchization, the other pillar of the democratic ideal – the defence of equality – has al...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Populist Moment
• 2. Learning from Thatcherism
• 3. Radicalizing Democracy
• 4. The Construction of a People
• Conclusion
• Theoretical Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index