The Risks of Populism

It must not have gone unnoticed to most social scientists that the hypothesis of a crisis of democracy has generated, in recent years, a remarkable expansion of publications and use in the public debate of the idea of 'populism.' There are various symptomatic processes about the calamity of popular sovereignty: nationalism, criticism of globalization, exclusionary discourses of minority identities, and charismatic leadership against the political system - to cite a few examples. In a recent article published by the Annual Review of Political Science, the head of the Division of Social Science at New York University, Abdul Noury (2020, p. 421), reports that the annual average of written works on the topic of populism rose from 95 to 615 between the years 2000 and 2015 in the Web of Science database. As the sociologist Mabel Berezin (2019, p. 1-18) points out, it cannot be said that the contributions with prominence and broad appeal from this publishing "mini-industry" on populism are necessarily accompanied by analytical and empirical rigor. They often include various movements, parties, and leadership under the same category, concealing specific differences. In this sense, the Brazilian historian Jorge Ferreira (2001, p. 469) explains that it is possible to wonder about the explanatory and analytical efficiency of concepts stretched to encompass such politically distinct experiences.

In general terms, it is possible to claim that populism refers to the need to express some "dysfunction" in the practice of democracy. As the Japanese-American philosopher and political economist Francis Fukuyama (2015, p. 11) explains, this could have its origin in purely institutional reasons, derived from insufficient participation or from a low level of recognition by voters. In this case, as stated by Pierre Rosanvallon (2006, p. 19-20), a French historian, those difficulties would be remedied by the improvement and re-establishment of the proper functioning of democratic institutions or the formulation of new forms of participation and citizen control over politics. Internal reasons are also given for producing political identities in globalised capitalism. Thus, for some readings, such as the one from the American philosopher Nancy Fraser (2017, p. 54-60), 'reactionary populism' would be opposed to 'progressive neoliberalism.' The truncated ideal of emancipation, mixed with lethal forms of economic financialization, would have produced a reaction on sectors excluded from hegemonic social identities in contemporary capitalism. Finally, the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2017, p. 16-27) suggests that more recent hypotheses present populism as a transition in the face of the exhaustion of liberal democracy towards a new post-liberal, post-deliberative, and post-inclusive political form (Appadurai, 2017, p. 16-27). In short, despite the type of explanation offered, they all point to a complex and conflictual relationship between populism and democracy.

Figure 1: Former President Donald Trump in Dallas. Newsweek.

This article explores the idea that the application of populism's concept consistently articulates a particular conception of what democracy is and what kind of conflict populist practice arouses within it. Thus, it is impossible to dissociate the theoretical effort to formulate this concept without some understanding of its interaction with democracy. Different uses of populism presuppose different readings of the relationship between representation, identities, institutions, and democracy. Moreover, it expresses interpretations of the democratic foundations and expectations concerning the future of democracy and, hence, its relation with the idea of crisis.

Populism as Strategy

Given that the identity of the people requires overcoming the purely differential aspects of democratic parties, the appeal to any aspects of institutional mediation to limit the possible anti-democratic conversion of populist representation must be ruled out on principle. The way to escape the possibility of populism being associated with authoritarian regression is to reaffirm the identity between emancipation and democracy in Marxism, as expressed by the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau (2005, p. 40): "The plebs, whose partial demands are inscribed in a horizon of totality - a just society that exists only ideally—can aspire to constitute the truly universal people that the present situation denies." It is only the wager on the normative horizon of an identity between the demands of the plebs and their universal content. This is articulated in a populist political action of emancipatory content, which enables Ernesto Laclau to differentiate populism as an emancipatory potential from its authoritarian perversion. What would prevent populist mobilization from totalizing the political experience of society into an authoritarian result is none other than the contingent dimension of the concept of hegemony. In the words of the political scientist Nadia Urbinati:

Although Ernesto Laclau claims that the populist occupation of the seat of power is "partial" and never complete, the impression one gets is that its incompleteness is more a practical limit in the formation of consent that human beings cannot avoid or overcome than a normative rule of principle (Urbinati, 2014).

Figure 2: Getúlio Vargas is considered by many to be the great example of a populist leader in Brazil. FGV/CPDOC.

In the end, Ernesto Laclau's argument can only be sustained if it is possible to separate the claim of democracy as the exercise of potentially emancipatory sovereignty of the people from the institutional forms which mediate representation and the formal guarantees of law. Laclau's (2005, p. 43-45) starting point in discussing the relationship between populism and democracy is the distinction made by the political scientist Chantal Mouffe. He explores the difference between democracy as a form of government based on the principle of the people's sovereignty and the symbolic structure through which democracy is exercised.

Therefore, what the historian and French philosopher Claude Lefort perceives as being distinctive of the modern democratic revolution, Mouffe (2000, p. 167) points to as "being a merely contingent conjunction between two traditions: the liberal tradition of the rule of law, the defense of human rights and respect for individual freedom, and the democratic tradition, based on the ideas of equality and popular sovereignty". In this sense, these two traditions have no necessary relationship - only a contingent historical articulation. In Lefort's theory, the centrality of human rights and individual guarantees is not only a normative bet on the content liberalism would bring to democracy. However, as stated by political philosopher James Ingram (2006, p. 33-50), it is instead the recognition that the modern conception of democracy presupposes a relation between the ideas of an "empty place of power" and a "new symbolic constitution of the social."

Figure 3: Juan Domingo Perón is regarded by historians as the politician with the greatest populist appeal in Argentina.

Populism as Representation

The symbolic mediation mechanisms are proper to the Lefortian democratic revolution regarding the law, human rights, and individual guarantees. Those are precisely the way to make a difference in the name of an absolute equivalence that could be presupposed in the idea of democracy as an empty signifier (the 'empty place' of sovereignty). As explained by the philosopher Facundo Nahuel Martin (2019), the assertion of a plural equivalence does not exist in Laclau's theory. That said, the possibility of a variety of views that would retain their diversity even if integrated into a superior identity is, in the end, a purely normative wager on the emancipatory promise of left-wing populist action.

There is no doubt that Laclau's (2005, p. 70-71) theory of populism deals precisely with constructing the idea of representation as the construction of the national people. Moreover, this construction occurs through a mechanism of "representation of the equivalent chain by an empty signifier." It is from this perception of populism as a way of building the representation of subaltern demands that some political theorists have considered the democratic potentialities of populism. This perception already appeared in the work mentioned above by the economist and Sovietologist Peter Wiles (1969, p. 166-179), for whom "insofar as populism defends the rights of majorities to ensure - by intervening - that they are not ignored, populism is profoundly compatible with democracy."

Figure 4: Former Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Populism - Left and Right, Progressive and Regressive. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

Conclusion

Likewise, this article intends not to definitively deny the concept of populism nor to offer an improved view but to understand that this conception suffers from some fundamental, analytical ambiguities and inefficiencies which make its use considerably problematic. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that, despite these inefficiencies and ambiguities, a considerable part of the literature on populism - as expressed in this article - provides fundamental analyses for understanding the critique and crisis of our democracies. Thus, if it is possible to say something about populism common to all the texts, it refers to a certain kind of tension within the democracy.

This is why efforts to make the concept of populism useful for analysis appear at moments interpreted as crises. However, it seems necessary to avoid reducing the analysis to reference the structuring dualities of the political. Otherwise, there would be nothing to be explained, neither social change nor institutional change, and it would be up to the researcher to seek this "eternal return" in the analysis. To unfold the tensions that current political movements create with democratic parties is a fundamental task for contemporary political theory, as well as to explore the possible causes of the crisis or transformation of democracies beyond the contemporary obsession with the concept of populism.

Bibliographical References

Appadurai, Arjun. Democracy Fatigue. In: Diamond, Larry; Plattner (eds). Democracy in Decline? Chicago: John Hopkins University Press, 2015. p. 16-27.

Berezin, Mabel. Fascism and populism: are they useful categories for comparative sociological analysis? Annual Review of Sociology, Palo Alto, v. 45, n. 18, p. 1-18, 2019.

Ferreira, Jorge (org.). Populism and its story. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001.

Fraser, Nancy. Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Hobson’s Choice. In: Geiselberger, Hans (ed.). The great regression. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. p. 54-60.

Fukuyama, Francis. Why is Democracy Performing So Poorly? In: Diamond, Larry; Plattner (eds). Democracy in Decline? Chicago: John Hopkins University Press, 2015. p. 11-24.

Ingram, James. The politics of Claude Lefort’s political: between liberalism and radical democracy. Thesis Eleven, London, v. 87, n. 1, p. 33-50, Nov. 2006.

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Laclau, Ernesto; Mouffe, Chantal. Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso, 1985.

Martín, Facundo Nahuel. The logic of capital and hegemonic logic. Novos estudos Cebrap, São Paulo, v. 38, n. 2, p. 459-475, May/Aug. 2019.

Mouffe, Chantal. The democratic paradox. London: Verso, 2000.

Noury, Abdul; Roland, Gerard. Identity politics and populism in Europe. Annual Review of Political Science, Palo Alto, v. 23, p. 421-439, 2020.

Rosanvallon, Pierre. La contre-democratie. Paris: Seuil, 2006.

Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy desfigured: opinion, truth and the people. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Wiles, Peter. A syndrome, not a doctrine. In: Ionescu. Gellner, Ernest (ed.). Populism: its meanings and national characteristics. New York: Macmillan, 1969. p. 166-179.

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