By Samir Gandesha, an Associate
Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the
Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. . He is
co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and
Philosophical Investigations(Stanford, 2012). He is co-editor (with
Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and
Spectacle(University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic
Marx(Bloomsbury Press, 2017) also with Johan Hartle. Originally
published at openDemocracy
Neoliberal globalization has increased
both economic insecurity and cultural anxiety. Have theories of
populism taken adequate account of such insecurity? Such
accounting is key to understanding the difference between right and
left forms of populism.
We appear to be living in an age of populism. Over the past two
decades, we have witnessed the rise of right-wing populist parties
throughout Europe such as Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria,
Victor Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary, and the Polish
Law and Justice Party. Today, the Five-Star Movement is in the process
of negotiating a coalition arrangement with the far-right Liga Nord.
Such a development hasn’t been confined to Europe but is a global
phenomenon as evinced, for example, by the electoral triumphs of
Narendra Modi in India in 2014 and that of Recep Tayyip Erdogan
in Turkey as early as 2003. But no phenomena more clearly
evince this thesis than the stunning victory of Donald J. Trump in the
2016 American presidential election and the triumph of the
Leave Campaign led by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
But there has also been a populism of the left. The Arab Spring
was widely regarded as a broad-based, if short-lived, popular revolt
and therefore as a kind of populism in the streets in 2011. The events
of Tahrir Square [Egypt] profoundly inspired the Occupy
Movement. Radiating out beyond Zuccotti Park [NYNY], the
movement spread through much of the western world. Arguably, the
Occupy Movement’s most significant and enduring effect was to be felt
five years later in the rising support for Bernie Sanders and
Jeremy Corbyn.
Latin America, moreover, has seen a dramatic revival of populism
in the Bolivarian model in the Chavez/Maduro regime in
Venezuela and in Evo Morales in Bolivia as well as in the Kirchner
governments in Argentina. The dramatic global rise of populist
parties and movements has resulted in a burgeoning
scholarshipon this most slippery of political concepts.
But can we understand populism with more precision? How can we account
for its recent pervasiveness? I will focus on two exemplary
accounts of populism before trying to arrive at some
conclusions of how to understand the difference between right and left
forms of populism in the context of neo-liberal globalization.
The first account is a recent widely-cited and discussed empirical
study by Norris and Inglehart (2016). The second is a more theoretical
account of populism by Ernesto Laclau articulated over several decades
(Laclau 1977, Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Laclau 2006). If Norris and
Inglehart struggle to come to terms with the populism of the left,
then Laclau struggles to come to adequate grips with the populism of
the right. The former draw upon
a somewhat narrow definition of populism, emphasizing its
anti-establishment, authoritarian and nativist dimensions; the latter
understands populism as a logic constituted by the establishment of an
“equivalentialchain” of differentdemands.
It appears to suggest that populism is a democratic, horizontal and
egalitarian discourse.
|
Populism Explained: Economic Insecurity
or Cultural Backlash?
A paper
widely discussed in the media by Pippa Norris of Harvard University
and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan suggests – following
Cas Mudde – that populism shares three distinct
elements: 1) anti-establishmentism, 2) authoritarianism
and 3) nativism. The first
contrasts with the
established structures of representative
democracy; the second with the principles of liberalism(in
particular with the protection of minority rights), and emphasizes the
direct expression of popular will via charismatic leadership, referenda
and plebiscites that circumvent the typical checks and balances of
liberal-democracy; and the third contrasts with cosmopolitanism.
Building on Mudde’s conceptualization, the authors develop a heuristic
model of populism based upon two distinct axes: economic and
cultural. The former has to do with the level of state management of the
economy, and the latter has to do with “conservative” versus
“progressive” values. The authors suggest three possible analytical
types of explanation for the rise of populism: 1) the rules of the
game, 2) the “supply-side” of the market of party politics and 3) the
“demand-side” of party politics. They gear their explanation to the
third dimension and suggest that this can be understood to have two
distinct – though not mutually exclusive – causes. The first is that
populism emerges in response to economic insecurity, and the
second is that populism appears as a backlash by older white
males to the erosion of traditional cultural values.
Norris and Inglehart argue that the latter is the most convincing
argument: “We believe that these are the groups most likely to feel that
they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own
country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change which
they do not share… The silent revolution of the 1970s appears to have
spawned an angry and resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today.”
While the empirical data the authors cite to support their argument is
indeed impressive, it is possible to raise significant objections
about the way they frame this evidence. First, the
separation of “supply” and “demand” explanations seems deeply dubious. In
strictly economic terms, according to Say’s law of markets, for
example, aggregate production necessarily creates an equal quantity of
aggregate demand.
A second objection arises from the cultural backlash argument: by
mischaracterizing Mudde’s definition as inherently authoritarian and
nativist, Norris and Inglehart bias their conclusion towards
culturalist explanations.
A third objection is that it is deeply debatable that “progressive
values” are on the ascendant. Indeed, today it is far from clear what
comprises “progressive values,” as we saw in the recent Democratic
Presidential Nomination pitting Hilary Rodham Clinton against Bernie
Sanders. This opposition has been echoed in debates between political
theorists in terms of the relative priority between politics
of recognition versus redistribution.
Whether populism can be understood exclusively in terms of traditionalist
backlash is also debatable. If this was the predominant measure of
populist politics, one could expect recent immigrants – who themselves
hold traditional values – to the US, the UK and other parts of Europe to
join in these movements. However, far from this being the case, they are
often the targets of the backlash.
Finally, one wonders whether the authors don’t seriously underestimate
the threat right-wing populism poses to the institutions of
liberal-democracy in the United States. A worrying inference that the
authors explicitly draw from their progressivist premises is that
populism will eventually die out. The study therefore fails to
sufficiently appreciate the ways in which populist governments seek to institutionalize
their agendas, thereby changing the rules of the game. This has
become most drastically evident in the case of Poland, for
example, in which Andrzej Duda (leader of the right-populist Law and
Justice party) has significantly limited the autonomy of the judicial
branch of government. Other such examples abound.
|
Understanding Populist Reason
In his hugely influential yet profoundly
controversial work with Chantal Mouffe entitled Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Laclau seeks to develop his analysis of
populism so as to generate a new post-Marxist politics. In other words,
Laclau is developing in a British context a political strategy that is
germane to a context that has seen the rise of what StuartHall has
called “authoritarian populism” in the form of Thatcherism. Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy differs from Laclau’s earlier work in at
least two ways: 1) it breaks with Althusserian Marxism, particularly
that of Nicos Poulantzas, insofar as it no longer accords the working
class a privileged role in social transformation; and 2) it
provides a discursive account of the social. As he and Mouffe
argue:
In our view, in order to
advance in the determination of social antagonisms, it is necessary to
analyse the plurality of diverse and frequently contradictory positions,
and to discard the idea of a perfectly unified and homogenous agent,
such as the ‘working class’ of classical discourse. The search for the
‘true’ working class and its limits is a false problem, and as such
lacks any theoretical or political relevance.
The continuity, however, lies in the fact that Laclau insists upon the
centrality of the concept of hegemonic articulation of heterogeneous
political demands as the basis of a leftist political strategy.
In On
Populist Reason (2005)Laclau argues against those political
theorists who claim that populism is an irrational political discourse by
reconstructing and foregrounding, as the title suggests, populism’s own
distinctive reason. Its logic is that of an “antagonistic
synthesis,” but now understood as an equivalential articulation of
differences – that is a linking together of what different political
demands share in common – in relation to a common “antagonistic frontier”.
For Laclau, all democratic politics are, in fact, populist.In
other words, if we assume that society is inherently heterogeneous,
politics must entail the hegemonic articulation of a multiplicity of
political demands in a manner that is always provisional and open to
revision. A given hegemonic equivalential articulation of differences
is always shifting, temporary and open because based on a logic of the
empty signifier. Too much for me!
The key difference from his previous work is Laclau’s attempt to
conceptualize the affective dimension of politics via Lacanian
psychoanalysis. John Kraniauskas understands
this as the articulation of a Gramscian Lacan in contradistinction to
Žižek’s Hegelian Lacan. While the latter takes, as its point of departure,
the understanding of the “desire of the Other” (the
impossible-because-unattainable desire for intersubjective recognition),
the former can be understood in terms of political desire.
For Laclau political desire is geared to what Lacan calls the “objet petit
a,” meaning a partial object that is a fragment of the Real (that which
eludes symbolization yet is caught within the symbolic order). The “object
petit a” is often symbolized by the bountiful breast and, as such,
promises a return to an original plenitude prior to the symbolic order
based on the split between signifier and signified.
Political desire, then, is established through the Name or the coincidence
of signifier and signified that is only set retroactively. The key point
Laclau is making here is that this Lacanian understanding of political
desire enables is an alternative to Freud’s, the latter being mass
politics grounded in the love of an authoritarian leader who represents
the Imago of the father. In contrast, political desire grounded in the
utopic logic of the “objet petit a” is characterized by the horizontal
relations between brothers (and presumably, sisters).
Several criticisms can be made of Laclau’s approach to populism. Critics
have drawn attention to its formalism, stemming from its reliance on
structural linguistics in which signification is understood by way of a
system of differences with no positive terms. This formalist premise is
the basis for his understanding of the figure of the peopleas an
empty signifier that can take on radically divergent contents. What the
approach seems to elide is the historical continuity of this figure.
Secondly, it appears that Laclau thinks either we must conceive
of necessity in reductive terms that is, of a closed historical totality, orthe
social dissolves completely into an infinite, deconstructive play of
radical difference. This is untenable.
Thirdly, Laclau also downplays the role of institutions in historical
change and continuity. Can we understand the mechanism of articulation
other than through institutions such as the state, political parties,
trades unions, and the whole host of organizations and associations that
comprised what Gramsci called “civil society”?
Finally and most importantly for our purposes, the above questions are
raised by the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis upon which Laclau depends
to ground his account of populism, in particular to rescue populism from
the “denigration of the masses” of figures like Gustav
Le Bon. Laclau’s engagement with Freudian social psychology, however,
must be regarded as a missed opportunity, since he ignores the problem
that occupies such an important role in Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, namely the phenomenon of the regression of the
group through a libidinal cathexis in the figure of the leader possessed
of (real or imaginary) strength. Such an investment constitutes what Erich
Fromm called an “escape from freedom.” |
Differentiating Right and Left Populisms
According to David Harvey, neoliberal globalization is comprised of
four processes: accumulation by dispossession; de-regulation;
privatization; and an upward re-distribution of wealth. Taken together
they have increased both economic insecurity and cultural anxiety via
three features in particular: the creation of surplus peoples, rising
global inequality, and threats to identity.
The anxiety wrought by neoliberal globalization has created a rich and
fertile ground for populist politics of both right and left. Neither
Norris and Inglehart nor Laclau adequately account for such insecurity
in their theorization of populism. As we have seen, populism can be
understood as a mobilizing discourse that conceives of political
subjectivity as comprised of “the people.” Yet this figure of “the
people,” as Agamben has
indicatedin What is a people? (2000) is deeply ambivalent
insofar as it can be understood both in terms of the body politic as a
whole (as in the US Constitution’s “We the People”), or in terms of what
Ranciere calls the “part that has no part,” or the dispossessed and the
displaced; as in “The people united shall never be defeated,” or in the
Black Panthers’ famous slogan: “All Power to the People.”
In this dichotomy, the figure of “the people” can be understood in terms
of its differential deployments by right and
left, which themselves must be understood in terms of the respective enemies through
which “the people” is constructed. And this is the decisive dimension
of populism.
Right populism conflates “the people” with an
embattled nation confronting its external enemies: Islamic terrorism,
refugees, the European Commission, the International Jewish conspiracy,
and so on. The left, in marked contrast, defines “the people” in relation
to the social structures and institutions – for example, state and capital
– that thwart its aspirations for self-determination; a construction which
does not necessarily, however, preclude hospitality towards the Other.
In other words, right-wing or
authoritarian populism defines the enemy in
personalized terms, whereas, while this is not always true, left-wing
populism tends to define the enemy in
terms of bearers of socio-economic structures and rarely as particular
groups. The right, in a tradition stemming back to Hobbes,
takes insecurity and anxiety as the necessary, unavoidable, and indeed
perhaps even favourable product of capitalist social relations. It
transforms such insecurity and anxiety into the fear of the stranger and
an argument for a punitive state. In contrast, the left
seeks to provide an account of the sources of such insecurity in
the processes that have led to the dismantling of the welfare state,
and corresponding phenomena such as “zero-hours” contracts, the
casualization of labour, and generalized precarity.
It then proposes transformative and egalitarian solutions to these
problems. Of course, left populism can also turn authoritarian –
largely though not exclusively due to the interference and threatened
military intervention of the global hegemon and its allies – with an
increasing vilification of the opposition, as we saw in Venezuela and
Ecuador with Rafael Correa.
This is a much shorter version of a chapter in a forthcoming volume
edited by Jeremiah Morelock entitled Critical Theory and
Authoritarian Populism,(University of Westminster Press).
|
