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Populism As Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment
Populism As Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment
Populism As Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment
1–25
I N the last decade populism has gone viral. The label “populist” has been
attached to all sorts of leaders and groups appealing to “the people,” from
left-leaning leaders and parties such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bernie
Sanders in the USA, Podemos (Spain), and Syriza (Greece), to ethnonationalist
ones such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in
Turkey, Donald Trump in the USA, and Jobbik (Hungary). So far, academia has
been unable to determine if populism is a democratizing force1 or a pathology
of democracy.2 This normative ambiguity is partially rooted in the identification
of populism mostly with a style of politics, the repertoires used to canvass
votes and achieve power. I argue that conceiving populism exclusively as a
form of political discourse,3 performance,4 or strategy5 neglects the fact that
these supposedly populist parties and leaders have very different conceptions
of the people, goals, and relations to liberal democracy. Why should we lump
together under the same label such radically different political projects?
In what follows, I first offer a brief materialist history of populism and
then a critical engagement with the recent theories that have in some sense
contributed to a “totalitarian turn” in the conception of populism towards an
*I am grateful for comments on previous drafts from Jérémie Barthas, Jeremy Kessler, Thea
Riofrancos, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Nadia Urbinati, and to the anonymous reviewer of this journal
who suggested I develop the relation between populism and socialism, which greatly improved the
article.
1
Margaret Canovan, “Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy,” Political
Studies, 47 (1999), 2–16.
2
Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014).
3
David Howarth, Aletta Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political
Analysis: Identities, Hegemony and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000);
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005); Kirk Hawkins and Cristobal Rovira,
“What the (ideational) study of populism can teach us, and what it can't,” Swiss Political Science
Review, 23 (2017), 526–42.
4
Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
5
Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American poli-
tics,” Comparative Politics, 34 (2001), 1–22; Robert Jansen, “Populist mobilization: a new theoretical
approach to populism,” Sociological Theory, 29 (2011), 75–96.
6
As Lenin called them in his 1894 pamphlet, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They
Fight the Social-Democrats, V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: Verso, 2017),
pp. 129–332.
7
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, La Possession Communale du Sol (Paris: G. Jacques, 1903).
8
Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in
Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 573. See also Margaret Canovan, Populism
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 79.
9
Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are, p. 213.
10
V. I. Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr Struve’s Book,
Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 368.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 3
from the state protection against the economic violence “of the nascent
plutocracy.”11 Narodniks promoted reformist policies sponsoring common land
tenure and land redistribution, tax reform, and access to cheap credit and subsidies
for farmers. For Lenin, populism was a flawed socialist ideology because, by
furthering the immediate welfare of the people, it “cannot see the wood for the
trees,” missing how the organization of the Russian economy turns “the peasant
into a commodity producer, transforms him into a petty bourgeois, a petty isolated
farmer producing for the market.”12 By 1883 the most prominent Narodnik
leaders had defected to Marxism. Nevertheless, the reformist strategy of the
populists endured and was institutionalized in the Socialist Revolutionary Party,
which in 1917 won a plurality of the national vote for the Russian constituent
assembly. The Narodnik leader, Viktor Chernov, served as chairman of the
assembly until it was disbanded by the Bolsheviks.
Almost in parallel with the populist experience in Russia, the concept began to
be consistently used in the USA, with the establishment in 1891 of the People's
Party, an electoral coalition of the protest movements of the Southern Farmers'
Alliance, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance, and the Knights of Labor.13 In
the aftermath of the Civil War, low agricultural prices and droughts caused the
impoverishment of yeomen and tenants, who by the early 1880s were deep in
debt. The increasing dispossession of the working classes enabled a popular
movement organized across racial and gender lines against planter and financial
elites.14
The first Populist leaders were egalitarian abolitionists, who opposed a system
of power that allowed commercial and financial elites to use the state for their
own benefit. Their appeal to equality and the moral character of the laboring
classes against plutocracy was what originally defined populism in America. Self-
styled populist preachers, many of them women, spread an egalitarian and anti-
oligarchic gospel demanding the state protect the independence of farmers from
predatory plutocrats. Mary Elizabeth Lease, a lawyer and organizer in the Knights
of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance, became involved in the social unrest in
Kansas over high mortgages and railroad rates, in 1890 helping create the “party
of the people” in Topeka.15 In a campaign trail speech that year, she told the
crowd that Wall Street owned the country and that “the great common people”
were in fact slaves to monopoly.
11
Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are, p. 237.
12
Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism, p. 341.
13
Jack Abramowitz, “The negro in the populist movement,” Journal of Negro History, 38 (1953),
257–89.
14
Even if racial and gender integration was not part of the official populist platform, non-
discrimination was “a point of pride” especially among KoL members. For an account of the uneasy
accommodation of egalitarian ideas and white supremacist ideology coming from the White Farmers
Alliance, see Laura Grattan, Populism's Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 2.
15
She allegedly gave the name to the nascent political group; Dorothy Blumberg, “Mary Elizabeth
Lease, populist orator: a profile,” Kansas History, 1 (1978), 3–15.
4 Camila Vergara
Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in
rags … We want money, land and transportation … We want the foreclosure system
wiped out … We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if
necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the
government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of
money who dogged us thus far beware.16
16
Mary Elizabeth Lease, “Wall Street Owns the Country” [c.1890], William E. Connelley, History
of Kansas State and People (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1928), vol. 2, p. 1167.
17
Robert Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2015).
18
William Hesseltine, The Rise and Fall of Third Parties (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press,
1948), p. 17.
19
Frank McVey, “The Populist Movement,” Economic Studies, 1 (1896), 131–209; Frederick
Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920).
20
Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 305.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 5
status through the writing of a new constitution (1947) containing a workers' bill
of rights, and expansive economic policies.27 As with the Russian and American
experiences, increasing industrialization and migration of peasants into cities
shaped populism in Argentina as a form of working-class politics centered on the
“struggle to redefine property in a context of indeterminate political change.”28
Perón constitutionalized workers' rights to welfare and social security,29 and
enforced these rights through policies aimed at increasing the immediate welfare
of the working classes: from the establishment of a universal pension system, paid
maternity leave, free medical care, and paid vacations, to funding low-income
housing projects, building workers' recreational centers, and expropriating land
and redistributing it to indigenous peasants.30 His second term ended in a military
coup in 1955 after he opened the country to foreign investors and proposed to
legalize divorce and prostitution.
After dependency theory fell into disuse and neoliberalism began to go
mainstream in the 1980s, “populist politics unexpectedly reappeared” in Latin
America,31 albeit this time in a new form that departed from the original thrust
of populism. In this new wave of populism, political outsiders with an anti-elite
rhetoric proposed vague promises to deal with economic crisis and the
immiseration of the popular sectors, embracing neoliberal reforms when in
government.32 The most common example of this new strand of populism in the
literature is Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000). Fujimori appealed to the
popular sectors mainly through the radio, which was the most common platform
of information for the Peruvian lower classes.33 Shortly after winning the
presidency, he implemented neoliberal policies; poverty effectively doubled and
inequality increased.34 Two years into his term, and after a self-coup, Fujimori
governed in an increasingly autocratic manner, and was accused of human rights
violations ranging from execution-style massacres of alleged terrorists to a
27
Jeremy Adelman, “Reflections on Argentine labour and the rise of Perón,” Bulletin of Latin
American Research, 11 (1992), 243–59.
28
Ibid, p. 256.
29
Perón himself introduced the “Bill of Rights of the Workers of Argentina” into the new
constitution.
30
Ian Rutledge, “Perón’s little-known land reform,” Bulletin of the Society for Latin American
Studies, 15 (1972), 20–6. By 1951, Perónism had expanded its constituency in “previously conserva-
tive-dominated, highly rural areas characterized by great social inequalities”; Walter Little, “Electoral
aspects of Perónism, 1946–1954,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 15 (1973),
267–84, at p. 274.
31
Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American poli-
tics,” Comparative Politics, 34 (2001), 1–22.
32
Kenneth Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the transformation of populism in Latin America,” World
Politics, 48 (1995), 82–116; Kurt Weyland, “Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America,”
Studies in Comparative International Development, 31 (1996), 3–31; Alan Knight, “Populism and
neo-populism in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 30 (1998), 223–48.
33
Luis Peirano, “Peruvian media in the 1990s: from deregulation to reorganization,” Elizabeth
Fox and Silvio Waisbord (eds), Latin Politics, Global Media (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
34
David Palmer, “‘Fujipopulism’ and Peru's progress,” Current History, 95, no. 598 (1996),
70–5.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 7
35
For a detailed analysis of this new wave of populism, see Carlos de la Torre, Latin American
Populism in the Twenty-first Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Note that
de la Torre analyzes populism as an embodiment of power, emphasizing leadership over movements.
36
Edgardo Lander, “The impact of neoliberal adjustment in Venezuela, 1989–1993,” Latin
American Perspectives, 23 (1996), 50–73. at p. 65. For a brief account of the socio-economic state
before Chávez, see George Ciccariello-Maher, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in
Venezuela (New York: Verso, 2016), pp. 1–13.
37
“Intelligence Unit country report: Venezuela,” Economist (2000), p. 16.
8 Camila Vergara
38
UN, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2010–2011 (Santiago: United
Nations, 2011), ch. 2. For poverty reduction, see Mark Weisbrot, Luis Sandoval, and David Rosnick
“Poverty rates in Venezuela: getting the numbers right,” International Journal of Health Services, 36
(2006), 813–23. Economic and political disarray after Chávez's death should not taint the analysis of
his populist achievements. How corruption undermined them, however, should be central to it.
39
Ciccariello-Maher, Building the Commune, p. 26.
40
Spain's unemployment rate had reached 21.3% with almost 5 million people out of a job. The
youth unemployment rate was 43.5%, the highest in the European Union; OECD Data, <https://data.
oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm>.
41
For accounts of this ambivalence, see Nadia Urbinati, “Democracy and populism,” Constellations,
5 (1998), 110–24; Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
42
Canovan, ‘Trust the people!”.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 9
ideas and values of the society,” and thus the populist leader is often an outsider
who runs against political parties and predominant elite values.43 According to
this view, populism is a democratizing phenomenon aimed at perfecting
democratic representativeness, renewing the political system from within. This
normative dimension of populism, as a “corrective,” was gradually lost within
the theoretical discussion especially after the “discursive turn” in the interpretation
of the concept in the late 2000s.
Perhaps influenced by the idiosyncratic case of Perónism—a form of populism
that became institutionalized in Argentina in a party that has been able to
accommodate different tendencies along the ideological spectrum in its more
than seven decades of existence—Ernesto Laclau proposed a theory of populism
detached from both ideology and material conditions. As a founder of the Essex
School of discourse theory, Laclau conceived of populism as a discursive process
of identity formation that is open to accommodate popular identities on both the
left and the right. In On Populist Reason (2005)—the point of departure for most
of the theoretical literature on populism coming from the left—Laclau analyzes
the process through which “the people” become a political subject. According to
him, when unsatisfied demands enter into a “logic of equivalence” and the
populist leader emerges by appealing directly to the people as a collective identity,
these demands are retrospectively unified and sublimated under an empty
signifier. This “radical retroactive ontology” is central to Laclau's theory of
populism, in which the reconstruction of a collective identity out of the
heterogeneity of the social allows for “the people” to become itself an empty
signifier without the need for any previous unity.44
Attempting to depart from democratic theory, Laclau engages with the
republican tradition by arguing that “the people” of populism relates to the
Roman plebs, a collective subject that was defined against the nobility. However,
by abstracting “the people” from the plebeian experience, Laclau formulates a
theory of populism that is still trapped in the logic of the people-as-one, which is
rooted not in the Roman republic, but in the medieval embodiment of power and
the myth of popular sovereignty coming out of 17th-century social contract
theory. “The people” of populism is for him “a plebs who claims to be the only
legitimate populus—that is, a partiality which wants to function as the totality of
the community.”45 This pars pro toto logic (partiality supplanting the totality)
would make populism a politico-theological form of power aimed at the
embodiment of power.46
Even if Laclau's theory of political identity formation—as a prevalence of
equivalence over difference through an empty signifier—is certainly the most
43
Canovan, “Trust the people!”, p. 3.
44
Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 69.
45
Ibid., p. 81.
46
For a critique of Laclau's theologizing of populism, see Andrew Arato, “Political theology and
populism,” Social Research, 80 (2013), 143–72.
10 Camila Vergara
47
Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 70, 94.
48
Ibid., pp. 154, 164.
49
Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (New York: Verso, 2017), p. 17.
50
Giovanni Sartori, “Concept misformation in comparative politics,” American Political Science
Review, 64 (1970), 1033–53.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 11
51
For an analysis of Laclau's inability to separate plebeian and totalitarian politics, see Miguel
Vatter, “The quarrel between populism and republicanism: Machiavelli and the antinomies of plebe-
ian politics,” Contemporary Political Theory, 11 (2012), 246–8.
52
Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 166.
53
Ibid., p. 78.
54
Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p. 51.
55
Ibid., p. 71.
12 Camila Vergara
veiled by the gentrifying veneer of its liberal format.”56 But the fantasy of radical
unity is present in populism only as a temptation “to confuse the government
with the state,” a possibility that appears connected to the nature of democracy
and not necessarily to populism, which, despite its authoritarian excesses, would
remain in democracy's “internal periphery.”57 In other words, for Arditi, populism
is a specter of democracy, not because it actively seeks to permanently fill the
empty space of symbolic power, but because it is a vivid reminder of democracy's
totalitarian tendencies.
Building on Arditi's notion of populism as a specter in the internal periphery
of democracy, Nadia Urbinati argues populism should be considered as a
disfigurement, having a “parasitical” relation to representative democracy.58
Even though Urbinati, like Laclau, also seeks to escape democratic theory and
embraces republican thought as the key to understanding populism, she follows
Laclau's politico-theological conception of the plebs as the people-as-one, defined
by a totalizing antagonistic frontier. Within this logic, she rightly criticizes
Laclau's conceptualization of populism as an inherently democratic force by
arguing that, despite its natural identification with the demos, populism does not
promote equal liberty—the principle of democracy—because it springs and feeds
from polarization. Urbinati argues populism is then better understood as a form
of politics of exclusion that competes with democracy for the “meaning and use
of representation,” a disfigurement that could even “open the door to regime
change.”59 Because “the people” of populism is identified through a splitting of
the plural body politic, imposing a Schmittian friend–enemy-style relation in
which “the minority is no longer honored as a partisan-friend but treated as
partisan-enemy,” Urbinati conceives populism as an hegemonic unifying ideology
that is “meant to erase” pluralism and “make the people a crowd with one voice,
leader, or opinion.”60
Even if “populism as disfigurement” is for Urbinati a corrupt form of politics—a
republican version of Aristotle's tyrannical democracy of demagogues—it is not
clear how the transition from corrupt to totalitarian politics takes place, and why
such a corrupt regime would aim at undermining minority rights to impose “a
totalizing unity of society.”61 Even if for Urbinati, as for Arditi, the leap from
Caesarist politics into the totalitarian embodiment of power is only presented as
a possibility, her view of populism as an inherently anti-pluralist political force
undergirds the theoretical conception of populism as disfigurement. Through this
56
Ibid., p. 60.
57
Ibid., p. 84.
58
Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, p. 2.
59
Ibid., p.135.
60
Ibid., pp. 143, 162. The influence of Carl Schmitt is also present in Laclau and in Chantal
Mouffe's work on populism.
61
Ibid., p. 167. For another critique of this argument, see John McCormick, “The new ochlopho-
bia? Populism, majority rule and prospects for democratic republicanism,” Yiftah Elazar and
Geneviève Rousselière (eds), Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019).
Populism as Plebeian Politics 13
For Mudde, the anti-elitism that is at the core of the concept is what makes
populism the “direct opposite” of pluralism. He argues that, due to populism's
Manichean “distinction of society” and consequent drive for creating a
“homogenous ‘good’ and a homogenous ‘evil,’” populist actors weaken the
“broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and
interests” that characterizes pluralism.69 However, this false opposition between
populism and pluralism stems from his own definition, which introduces the
element of homogeneity as part of the concept's core. Even if an anti-pluralist
tendency is evident in cases he labels “right-wing populism”—his subject of
expertise—the claim that it is appropriate to interpret populism as intrinsically
opposed to pluralism falls apart when analyzing the most paradigmatic cases of
populist governments in Latin America, which constitutionally recognized
minority rights.70 Even if a minimal definition based on populism's undisputed
anti-elitism has produced fruitful research, due to its easy operationalization, it
has also reinforced the premise that populism is in essence a form of anti-
pluralism, resulting in the further conflation of populist and ethnocentric leaders
and parties. I would argue this anti-pluralist premise, based on populism's
supposed drive toward homogeneity and the establishment of a totalizing
hegemonic logic, should not be deployed in the study of populist politics.
Anti-pluralism is a totalitarian logic and should be recognized as such.
In what follows, I challenge the interpretation of populism as an anti-pluralist
form of politics by departing from democratic theory. Through the engagement
66
Cas Mudde, “The populist zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition, 39 (2004), 542–63.
67
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
pp. 75–82. Freeden disagrees with Mudde and Rovira's use of his theory to conceptualize populism,
arguing that, as an ideology, “it is emaciatedly thin rather than thin-centred”; Michael Freeden, “After
the Brexit referendum: revisiting populism as an ideology,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 22 (2017),
1–11, at p. 3.
68
Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), p. 6. See previous definitions by Mudde in “The populist zeitgeist” and
Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a
critique of Mudde, see Paris Aslanidis, “Is populism an ideology? A refutation and a new perspective,”
Political Studies, 64 (2015), 88–104.
69
Mudde and Rovira, Populism, p. 7.
70
See e.g. the case of Chávez's policies on race; Barry Cannon, “Class/race polarisation in
Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chávez: a break with the past or the song remains the
same?”, Third World Quarterly, 29 (2008), 731–48.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 15
74
He also advocates popular political trials; John McCormick, “Machiavelli's political trials and
the ‘free way of life,’” Political Theory, 35 (2007), 385–411.
75
Martin Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. i.
76
Ibid., p. xvi.
77
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), pp. 263–5. On oligarchic harm, see Gordon Arlen, “Aristotle and the problem of oligarchic
harm: insights for democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory, 18 (2019), 393–414.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 17
electoral quotas for oppressed minorities, and new social rights.83 These actions
necessarily go against some of the rules protecting the status quo, and therefore
their acceptance would imply the erosion of the ruling power of elites, who
always fight back hard to keep their socio-economic and political dominance.
Consequently, a successful populist leader cannot become an ordinary elected
official, limited by the rules that keep democracy safe from both usurpation of
power and abrupt changes. For achieving the populist project, the populist needs
to bypass oligarchic institutional strongholds and exercise a power exceeding
legal prerogatives.
The interpretation of populism as a form of plebeian politics seems fruitful
because it imposes normativity on a concept that is currently so ambiguous that
it fails to distinguish between “good” and “bad” forms, allowing for genuine
champions of the people and tyrants to be categorized under the same banner.
A republican interpretation of populism allows us to see more clearly that “the
people” of populism is not the people-as-a-whole or the nation, but the plebeians:
those who experience deteriorating material conditions to the point of oppression
and whose interests are not being represented by traditional political parties.
Who are the plebeian masses today? I would argue the plebeian political
subject should be understood as a coalition of those who are being increasingly
oppressed by the oligarchic state, those who share a similar degree of socio-
economic oppression. In addition to precarious workers in the service sector and
the nascent gig economy, who receive low pay, no benefits, and no job security, the
plebeian ranks could be filled by those in debt and struggling to pay mortgages,
student loans, and healthcare bills. The people-as-plebs is not a specific class, but
its identity is constructed based on shared material conditions and socio-economic
demands. While in the 19th and 20th centuries the “populist people” were small
farmers and industrial laborers, in the 21st century the populist constituency has
been composed of the precarious urban labor force, indigenous communities,
students, debtors, and even parts of the impoverished middle classes in the cases
of Podemos and Syriza.
This interpretation also allows us to understand the extraordinary authority
of populist actors as crusaders, whose goal is to increase the welfare of the masses
against oligarchic domination, backed up by a plebeian authority that exceeds
the power conceded by the institutional structure. A force of radical reform,
populism is a threat to existing legality for the sake of a supposedly better, more
egalitarian legal and socio-economic framework. Rather than a disfigurement, I
would argue populism should be considered as a response to an already existing
deformity in liberal democracies: the overgrowth of oligarchic power. Populism
83
Such as indigenous, gay, and third-generation rights. For a radical democratic interpretation of
republican liberty and rights, see Jean-Fabien Spitz, “The reception of Machiavelli in contemporary
republicanism: some ambiguities and paradoxes,” David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila
Vergara (eds), Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Populism as Plebeian Politics 19
84
Eliana Cardoso and Ann Helwege, “Populism, profligacy, and redistribution,” Rudiger
Dornbusch and Sebastián Edwards (eds), The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
85
Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 166.
86
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
87
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 438.
20 Camila Vergara
88
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), p. 13; Claude Lefort, “The question of democracy,” Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of
Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). For
differences between Arendt and Lefort, see Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort:
Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
89
Lefort, “The question of democracy,” p. 286.
90
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 392.
91
Lefort, “The question of democracy,” p. 287.
92
Ibid.
93
Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and articulations: a discourse theoret-
ical framework for the study of populism and nationalism,” Javnost: The Public, 24 (2017), 301–19,
at p. 309.
94
Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), pp. 95–6.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 21
The affect that seems most prevalent in the discursive construction of the
people-as-ethnos is fear—perhaps the strongest emotion one can experience,
since it is directly connected with survival. Fear plays a double role, depending on
which group it operates in: while the fear of losing a privileged position (in terms
of well-being, social status, political power) fuels the desire to reassert supremacy
in the dominant group by going back to the heartland and making it great again,
the fear of discrimination, exclusion, and domination takes hold of the “others,”
the enemies against which the identity of “the people” is constructed. According
to Arendt, the full realization of the totalitarian project is only possible under
absolute fear in the concentration camps, the “only form of society in which it is
possible to dominate man entirely,”95 where humans are stripped of their natural
solidarity and spontaneity.
Different from the construction of the people-as-ethnos through fear, “the
people” of populism would be defined not by their belonging to a heartland, but
by their exclusion from the political and economic power that remains the
privilege of the few. The recognition of this exclusion allows for a “dichotomic
discourse in which ‘the people’ are juxtaposed to ‘the elite’ along the lines of a
down/up antagonism.”96 The people-as-plebs appears as a collective subject,
constructed not against a parasitical outsider, but in opposition to the establishment
that rules the state and the economy. Unlike the essentialist, exclusionary
conception of the “nation” or the “true people,”97 the people-as-plebs is an
inherently heterogeneous, inclusionary subject, determined by material conditions
of exclusion and second-class citizenship rather than substantive, uncompromising
traits.98 Even if the people-as-plebs materially share in their oppression, they only
become a subject through the politicization of inequality, when the division
between the few who rule and the many who are oppressed is reconstructed and
made evident and inescapable.
Following Breaugh's conception of the plebeian experience, if we consider the
people-as-plebs as an event-bound collective subject that comes into being at the
moment of the struggle for emancipation, the people of populism appears as
contingent, fluid, and transient, determined by the struggle against exclusion and
domination at a given time. The affect that seems most prevalent in the
construction of the people-as-plebs is indignation connected to conditions of
exclusion and immiseration, a reaction to the second-class civic structures of
95
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 456. Detention centers for migrants today are examples of
such a totalitarian project.
96
Ibid., p. 310.
97
Etienne Balibar, “Racism as universalism,” New Political Science, 8 (1989), 9–22.
98
In his reconstruction of the populist master frame from Occupy and the Greek and Spanish
Indignados, Aslanidis shows populism has a radically inclusive and thus ephemeral master frame,
since stronger identity markers—such as ideology, race, religion—are bound to resurface; Paris
Aslanidis, “Populism as a collective action master frame for transnational mobilization,” Sociological
Forum, 33 (2018), 443–64.
22 Camila Vergara
In contrast, populists tend to use propaganda the same way as the ancient
demagogues: to educate the popular sectors about interests and power,104 and to
mobilize them through rhetoric to enable their empowerment through partisan
decisions. More than disregarding facts and utility, and imposing lies as reality,
the populist message would aim at unveiling the material subordination of the
popular sectors and the injustice of the subaltern dependent position they endure
within the structure of liberal democracy, by politicizing inequality.
The relation totalitarian movements have with liberal democracy is intrinsically
antagonistic, since they strive for a homogeneity that is constructed against an
internal enemy. The principle of total domination demands the negation of rights
to the “enemies” against which the “true nation” coalesces as an absolute unity,
violating the most fundamental liberal democratic principle of equal liberty. As in
Nazi Germany “this new community was based on the absolute equality of all
Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference
from all other people.”105 Consequently, constitutional safeguards protecting
minorities from the violation of their rights by the state necessarily need to be
undermined, disregarded, and destroyed. The totalitarian government aspires to
absolute power and thus it is in a “permanent state of lawlessness,” defying all
positive laws “even to the extreme of defying those which it has itself created.”106
Despite the claims of populism being illiberal, there appears to be much
confusion on what is precisely meant by liberal. As an electoral form of plebeian
politics, populism is determined both by the nature of the electoral system—
which is representative, based on the leadership of politicians who compete for
the popular vote—and the opposition it encounters in the established order. Even
if populists could behave “illiberally”—challenging limits on executive power,
exerting control over the market, curtailing private property rights—the relation
of populism with liberal democracy appears to be one of reform, aiming at legally
innovating to achieve the popular agenda of establishing more socio-economic
and political equality.107 Given that the most common instruments to bypass the
rules that allow the oligarchic establishment to block change are plebiscites and
referendums, the populist in government is likely to behave like a plebiscitarian
leader, governing by decree with the periodic electoral acclamation of the majority.
However, the need to work around oligarchic strongholds in parliament does not
necessarily make populism an illiberal or anti-democratic political phenomenon.
In contrast to a totalitarian government, which, according to Arendt, has a
complete disregard for legality, the populist is a systemic actor who aims at
104
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), IV.4 §25–
31, pp. 168–9.
105
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 360.
106
Ibid., p. 461.
107
For an empirical study on the relation between inequality, poverty, and populist mobilization,
see Rafael Piñeiro, Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, and Fernando Rosenblatt, “The engagement curve: pop-
ulism and political engagement in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, 51, no. 4 (2016),
3–23.
24 Camila Vergara
reforming the legal and political structure in order to make it more inclusive. The
populist should be considered as a revolutionary reformer seeking to set new
rules to make politics and the distribution of resources more beneficial to the
excluded and immiserated popular sectors. Unlike the totalitarian leader, the
populist would not seek to destroy the constitutional order, render it superfluous,
or use it as a tool to impose plebeian supremacy, stripping elites from equal
rights, but to empower the popular sectors within the existing constitutional
paradigm based on equal liberty. Perón’s 1947 Bill of Workers’ Rights and
Chávez’s pluralist 1999 Constitution, enshrining social rights, equal protection
clauses, and self-determination for indigenous peoples, are evidence not only of
the extraordinary constituent authority exercised by populist leaders to empower
the masses, but also of their reverence for constitutionalism and its rule of law.
Nevertheless, the empowerment of the masses cannot be achieved without
bending and even disregarding some of the rules of procedural democracy
protecting vested interests.108
The populist aims at deepening the equality of rights, which necessarily entails
the intervention of the state in relations of domination in society. Through a
positive interpretation of socio-economic and political rights, the populist project
aims at finally realizing the promise of democracy by delivering the necessary
means for the popular sectors to exercise the rights that until then had been only
formal, only enjoyed by a wealthy minority. From property, health, and education
to political decision making, rights conceived in this way impose a duty on the
state to enable their full enjoyment by all citizens. While this duty not only to
respect rights, but also to guarantee their equal enjoyment, could demand some
illiberal measures (for example, expropriation without compensation)109 these
abridgments of individual liberties and limitations on power would be means to
an end, and not intrinsic to populism. Totalitarian forms of politics, on the other
hand, are not only illiberal but also anti-liberal, directly negating the universal
character of human rights through their imposition of ethnic-based supremacy.
V. CONCLUSION
By placing modern populism within the tradition of plebeian politics—aimed at
increasing the welfare of the masses against oligarchic domination—I have
attempted to delineate a normative interpretation of populist politics through
which we can effectively distinguish the populist not only from the tyrant, who
merely manipulates the people using populist rhetoric, but also from the proto-
totalitarian leader, who appeals to the people-as-ethnos, aiming at reasserting the
strength and supremacy of the “true people” by “purifying” the body politic.
108
For the relation between procedural democracy and populism, see Jan-Werner Müller, “Towards
a political theory of populism,” Politeia, 28 (2012), 23–58; Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured. For a
critique of this approach, see McCormick, “The new ochlophobia?”.
109
The South African parliament passed in 2018 a motion presented by the Economic Freedom
Fighters party to expropriate land from white settlers without compensation.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 25
110
For an account of the influence Italian Fascism had on Argentine Perónism, see Federico
Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–
1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).