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Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism

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 POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

brill.com/popu

Three Provocations concerning the Uses

of Populism

Benjamin Arditi* | ORCID: 0000-0003-3536-873X

Professor of Politics, Faculty of Politics and Social Sciences, Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
arditi@unam.mx

Received 14 August 2023 | Accepted 28 August 2023 |

Published online 2 February 2024

Abstract

This article outlines three provocations to shake up the comfort zone of populism stud-
ies. These are: that populism may have become an anachronism and we should think
about moving on; that populism may work better as a term of derision, as democracy
was for the ancient Greeks; that we should describe it as a historical phenomenon,
something that happened in the mid-twentieth century but is no longer current. So,
my suggestion to populism scholars is to drop the term, use it to disqualify opponents,
or refer to it as something that happened some time ago.

Keywords

populism – polemics – democracy – abandon populism – populism as insult

The Cambridge Dictionary declared populism the word of the year in 2017.1 It
seems to be everywhere. People talk about populism with the same confidence
they exude when talking about lineup changes the coach should have made
to stave off defeat for their team. However, if you ask what it means to call

* This article is based on chapters one through three of my forthcoming book, ¿Is there such
a thing as populism? 3 provocations and 5½ proposals, Routledge: London, 2024. Reproduced
by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
1 Art, D., “The Myth of Global Populism”. Perspectives on Politics, 20 (3) (2022), 999.
Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:10.1163/25888072-bja10058
© Benjamin Arditi, 2024 | ISSN: 2588-8064 (print) 2588-8072 (online)
2 Arditi

something or someone populist, they are likely to express a mixture of confu-

sion and irritation. One knows what populism is. Or one thinks one knows.
This is how ordinary language works. We make strong statements without
justifying them because communication depends, at least in part, on the evoc-
ative force of the words we use within a community of speakers. But this is
just an ad hoc explanation to justify the fuzziness of our everyday concepts. It
doesn’t solve the discrepancy between the ubiquity of populism and the dif-
ficulty of providing a reasonably convincing shared description of its meaning.
Carlos de la Torre sums up this predicament when he says, “While the cacoph-
ony of definitions of the past has been reduced, there is still no agreement on
what populism is”.2
David Art suggests a way to bridge the gap between the growth of populism
research and the difficulty of reaching an agreement on its meaning. It con-
sists of limiting the semantic field of the term and conceiving populism as an
epiphenomenon or a derivative political form. Populism would be the cherry
on top of nativism and racial resentment in the case of Trump’s 2016 campaign
(recall how he fueled the “birtherism” controversy over Barak Obama’s true
birthplace), nativism and authoritarianism in general in the case of Hungary’s
Viktor Orbán, and racism in the politics of former Alabama governor George
Wallace in the 1960s and 1970s.3
But part of the problem may have been that we didn’t formulate our
research question correctly. We asked ourselves, “What is populism?”, without
realizing that we were presupposing that there was such a thing and that all we
had to do was figure out what it meant. That was a mistake. We must put that
certainty on hold and start from a different premise. Instead of asking what
populism is or means, we should ask, “Is there such a thing as populism?” The
conditional “Is there such a thing” opens up other possibilities. It does not rule
out its existence, but neither does it take it for granted. We haven’t explored
this way of thinking about populism. After trying it out we might conclude that
it is still a relevant object of political thought or discover that populism as we
know it has passed its sell-by date and can be dropped, just as we have stopped
asking whether monarchs have a divine right to rule.
I want to look at the more incendiary implications of “is there such a thing”.
They consist of three provocations to shake up the comfort zone of populism
studies. These are: that populism may have become an anachronism and we

2 de la Torre, C. “The Complex Constructions of the People and the Leader in Populism”. Polity,
54 (3) (2022), 529; also, Bernhard, M., and O’Neill, D. “Populism Revisited”. Perspectives on
Politics, 20 (3) (2022), 781.
3 Art, “The Myth of Global Populism”, op. cit., 1000, 1002.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 3

should think about moving on; that populism may work better as a term of
derision, as democracy was for the ancient Greeks; and that we should describe
it as a historical phenomenon, something that happened in the mid-twentieth
century but is no longer current. So, my suggestion to populism scholars is to
drop the term, use it to disqualify opponents, or refer to it as something that
happened some time ago.

1 Say Goodbye to Populism

We should let go of the fear of a curtain falling over populism. It would not
be something radical, new, or unheard of. Ian Roxborough hinted at this in an
inspiring article published some forty years ago. He did so indirectly. He didn’t
ask us to drop populism but questioned the usefulness of the classical defini-
tion of populism as a coalition of heterogeneous subordinate class strata. This,
he said, was inconsistent with empirical evidence. The governments of Lázaro
Cárdenas in Mexico and Perón in Argentina were initially supported not by
unorganized masses but by autonomously organized workers’ organizations
in alliance with the state, so using the term populism for either government
would add nothing to the analysis.4 Roxborough also had reservations about
the minimal definition of Laclau’s first discourse-analytic interpretation of
populism as an ideology,5 which involved an appeal to the people to address
their grievances about the oligarchy or imperialism.6 The reason for this, he
argued, is that while the governments of Cárdenas and Perón fit his minimal
definition, it is so broad that one must wonder about its utility since the appeal
to the people means that “a great many otherwise diverse movements, includ-
ing Nazi Germany, must also be labeled ‘populist’”.7
I want to take Roxborough’s argument one step further by claiming that
abandoning populism means what it says: that there is no such thing as popu-
lism. This idea is not far-fetched. There are precedents concerning other con-
cepts. Four decades ago, Alain Touraine had the audacity to suggest that “the
concept of society be completely disregarded in sociological analysis”.8 He
didn’t even hint at a nuanced critique of the concept but asked us to abandon

4 Roxborough, I. “Unity and Diversity in Latin American History”. Journal of Latin American
Studies 16 (1) (1984), 12.
5 Laclau, E. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. (London: New Left Books, 1977), 143–198.
6 Roxborough, “Unity and Diversity in Latin American History”, op. cit., 10.
7 Roxborough, “Unity and Diversity in Latin American History”, op. cit., 14.
8 Touraine, A. “The Voice and the Eye: On the Relationship between Actors and Analysts”.
Political Psychology, 2 (1) (1980), 7.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

4 Arditi

it completely. This was a surprising request, considering that introductory

courses in sociology describe the study of society as the object of the disci-
pline. But it was difficult to dismiss Touraine as an outlier. He was one of the
leading sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century and was among
a handful of researchers who rewrote the script for the study of (social) move-
ments in the 1970s and 1980s. This is what he proposed:

Society is no longer an essence, but an event … an ever-changing combi-

nation of latent or manifest conflicts, of negotiations, of imposed domi-
nation, and of violence […] At last sociology can completely do away with
the concept of society. A biologist, Francois Jacob, has written that mod-
ern biology originated when biologists stopped asking questions about
life and started studying living beings. Similarly, sociology begins when
sociologists reject society as a concept and devote themselves entirely
to studying social relations […] I therefore propose that the concept of
society be completely disregarded in sociological analysis and that this
term be used solely to describe specific historical entities, such as the
“American society” or even the “industrial society”.9

Stating that society had lost its conceptual purchasing power was a bold move.
Touraine urged researchers to direct their efforts to study social relations, the
sociological equivalent of Jacob’s “living beings.” He was not alone in this con-
cern, for soon after, in 1983, Laclau made a similar claim in “The Impossibility
of Society”.10 The title alludes to Lacan’s thesis that there is no such thing as a
“woman”. To quote him: “the infinitude of the social, that is, that any structural
system is limited, that it is always surrounded by an ‘excess of meaning’ which
it is unable to master and that, consequently, ‘society’ as a unitary and intel-
ligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility”.11 The
surplus of meaning is a structural feature of social orders; it unsettles their
certainties and prevents their fullness.
Laclau refined the argument of the impossibility of society in the book
co-authored with Mouffe, in which they stated unequivocally that “we must
begin by renouncing the conception of ‘society’ as founding totality of its
partial processes” and then proceed to see “the openness of the social as the

9 Touraine, “The Voice and the Eye: On the Relationship between Actors and Analysts”,
op. cit., 7.
10 Laclau, E. “The Impossibility of Society”. New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time.
(London: Verso, 1990 [1983]), 89–92.
11 Laclau, “The Impossibility of Society”, op. cit., 90.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 5

constitutive ground or ‘negative essence’ of the existing, and the diverse ‘social
orders’ as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field
of differences”.12 Their point, as in Laclau’s “The Impossibility of Society”, was
not to abandon society but to conceive its classical formulation as a mirage.
Society as a unitary object is a mirage because we think we are dealing with
a substantive object of inquiry instead of with efforts to organize a changing
ground. Society, or, as the authors say, the various social orders, is the name for
the domestication of social relations at a particular time.
Laclau’s reference to social orders coincides with Touraine’s claim that the
word society should be reserved for naming specific conglomerates such as
the Greek and Haitian society, or consumer, post-industrial, and other societ-
ies. Both set a precedent for dispensing with terminological habits by breaking
away from a familiar mainstream term like society as we know it. Whether as a
useless concept or an impossible object, society for these authors can only be
an event (Touraine) or Nietzsche-like temporary domestication of the “open-
ness of the social” (Laclau).
Civil society is also a strong candidate for the ax, despite its popularity with
activists who distrust the party system. Its history can be traced back to the
seventeenth century, thanks to the distinction, so crucial to the natural law
tradition, between the state of nature and the civil state. It changed with Hegel,
who considered civil society as an intermediate sphere between family and
state. Later, Marx gave it a new twist by popularizing the idea that the anatomy
of civil society lies in political economy. From the mid-20th century onward,
the concept was revived, first by the emergence of new (social) movements
vis-à-vis the labor movement and then by the role of nongovernmental orga-
nizations (NGO s) and (social) organizations in the debates around the tran-
sitions from authoritarian regimes. However, its usefulness is disputable and
might also be on its way to becoming an outdated concept.
We speak of social movements and political parties (which we then locate
in their own, proper spaces of appearance) due to our penchant for topo-
graphical representations of public space as discontinuous spheres of activ-
ity. In this imagined topography, social movements and organizations operate
in civil society by strengthening and agitating for narrow or broad interests
but they fall short of seeking to partake in the administration of the state to
make them possible. In contrast, political parties operate in another space, the
political system, by attending to representation and administration in and of
the state. People know that movements are also political, but they usually refer

12 Laclau, E., and Ch. Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd ed. (Verso: London, 2001
[1985]), 95–96.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

6 Arditi

to them as social and parties as political. The sociological imagination of the

1950s and 1960s made this view of the proper space of collective actors and
functions a cognitive commonplace. The lasting effect of this is that many
researchers take it for granted that parties are political actors and movements
are residents and actors within a different milieu called civil society.
This is less convincing than it once was. Let me give two arguments to sup-
port my claim. One is based on a rather simplistic view of politics as the activ-
ity of administering the state and representing the shared interests of people
who live in a certain territory. If we accept such a definition, shouldn’t we sim-
ply put the polemic about the distinction between politics and the social on
hold and accept that the difference between (social) movements and organi-
zations and (political) parties is that the former do not aim to administer the
state, while the very goal of the latter is to do just that? There is some truth to
this, but it is also such a general assertion that it omits the history of the inter-
face between movements and parties, and between organizations and parties.
The UK Labour Party was founded by the trade unions in 1900 (although it
did not adopt its present name until 1906) to represent the interests of work-
ing men and women. The “social” status of the British trade unions, then, was
quite “political”, whether through the founding of the party or their atten-
dance as voting members at the annual party conference. From the early 1980s
until 2014, the election of the Labour leader, which in parliamentary systems
amounts to the election of the party candidate for the next general election,
was conducted by Electoral College. Under the Electoral College rules, unions
had 40% of the vote, Constituent Labour Parties (CLPs) or grassroots members
had 30%, and elected representatives or Members of Parliament (MPs) had the
remaining 30%. This shows how a (social) movement like one of the workers
and (social) organizations like trade unions play a role in the actual leadership
of a (political) party, and in shaping the electoral program and the policies
of that party. We might say something similar about the relationship between
business, trade, and agricultural organizations, all of which very often not only
founded, funded, and endorsed parties that represented their corporate inter-
ests but also designed or at least advocated laws and policies that those parties
would implement.
My second argument is more conceptual. Whatever one thinks of Carl
Schmitt’s friend-enemy criterion of the political, it has helped us think
about politics outside its institutional space of containment. The opening
line of his book, “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the
political”,13 tells us that to understand the state, one must first know what is

13 Schmitt, C. The Concept of the Political. Trans. with an introduction by G. Schwab and
foreword by T.B. Strong. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 7

the political and not the other way around. It also anticipates the thesis he
will develop, namely that friend-enemy oppositions that define the political
transcend the boundaries of state politics. This also suggests his celebrated
distinction between politics and the political. Politics refers to friend-enemy
oppositions that unfold within the state and territorial representation and the
political to those oppositions that occur anywhere, involving any collective
actor, and over any subject. In his view, then, (social) movements are political
whenever they adopt the friend-enemy format to confront each other or the
state, in which case the adjective “social” before “movements” is irrelevant
or reductionist.
Yet people still hold to well-meaning spatial apartheid by referring to move-
ments as social and parties as political even if we know things are much more
complicated than this. This is because of the intellectual inertia I mentioned
earlier, which makes it difficult for us to adapt to changes in the syntax we use
as practicing social scientists. In everyday life, things are not much different.
Three centuries after the Enlightenment, atheists write OMG in text messages
to express their wonder or amazement without making the slightest commit-
ment to otherworldly salvation, astronomers are not afraid to check their horo-
scope, and who among us has not spent a few seconds pondering the meaning
of the text inside a fortune cookie?
So, if sociologists and political theorists could ask us to abandon society, and
if the benefits of a topographical representation of civil society have become
problematic in so many ways, why can’t we at least consider the possibility of
cutting the umbilical cord that ties us to populism, another ubiquitous, often
maligned, well-researched, and career-enhancing concept? That will not go
over well with fellow researchers or the public. It is not easy to abandon a word
we’ve used so passionately and extensively. Some may even ask why we should
get rid of populism and no other concepts. Well, why not? Touraine and Laclau
proposed that we say goodbye to society without justifying why that concept
and not others such as those of subject, conflict, democracy, etc. If they could
do so, why can’t I ask that we let go of populism (or civil society) after so many
decades spent thinking about it without reaching anything close to a working
consensus on its meaning? And does it matter whether we part with it or not?
We are all talking about society decades after Touraine and Laclau claimed it
was either useless or impossible. That is why I have no illusions that people
will come to accept that civil society has become superfluous or passé, at least
not in the foreseeable future. We will continue using it despite the many short-
comings of our usual representations of totality as a series of distinct and dis-
continuous spaces, one housing the “political” actors and another the “social”
actors. A disruption of accepted wisdom is no guarantee of its efficacy, yet here
we are, arguing for such a disruption.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

8 Arditi

The same is true of populism. We will not stop considering it as an object

of thought or refuse to use it to describe political processes just because I say
there is no such thing. The term will continue to appear in the literature, news-
paper articles, and talk shows. But all kinds of ideas can persist regardless of
their usefulness. Krugman has already said as much about zombie ideas.14 Even
patently absurd ideas can survive. During the Covid 19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers
claimed that the vaccine that was supposed to protect us from Covid was
an alibi for inserting a microchip into our bloodstream to better control us.
Some of them claimed that chlorine, or even ivermectin, a drug for animal
parasites, was safer and just as effective as vaccines that had been developed
too quickly. People who believed them and used the supposed alternative
remedy became seriously ill. And laugh if you will, but the International Flat
Earth Research Society regularly draws people to symposia and conferences
to learn about the latest research supporting their claims about what they call
“the big lie” of the spherical shape of our planet. They receive donations and
get an undue amount of press coverage. According to its official website, its
mission is to “offer a home to those wayward thinkers that march bravely on
with REASON and TRUTH in recognizing the TRUE shape of the Earth – Flat”
(https://theflatearthsociety.org/; the capitalized words are in the original text).
One flat-Earther even went so far as to build a rocket to gather evidence to
finally disprove the big lie about the roundness of our planet; sadly, he died
when the rocket crashed during its maiden flight.
These examples of covid “remedies” and the belief that the earth is flat are
absurd, at least to me. I use them not to ridicule populism studies but to show
that some ideas survive despite enormous evidence to the contrary. Critiquing
populism is just as tricky. Challenging the prevailing wisdom about populism,
a word blessed with academic muscle and street cred, is like expecting to climb
the Himalayas without a rope or ice ax. Yet I want to do just that; I want to
question our fondness for populism, even knowing that it will survive in every-
day language and the conceptual imagery of one or another community of
social scientists. I am not pinning my hopes on a collective requiem for popu-
lism but I trust that if people are not willing to part ways with populism, or if
they are not swayed by the next two provocations, at least they will be willing
to reconsider the way we think about populism.

14 Krugman, Paul (2013), “Rubio and the Zombies”, The New York Times, February 14, https://
www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/opinion/krugman-rubio-and-the-zombies.html. Retrieved
December 2020.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 9

2 Use Populism to Accuse or Disqualify Adversaries

The second provocation is less dramatic. If we must use the word populism,
then let’s do so as it is used in everyday speech, that is, to demean or disqualify
a rival, a policy, a creed, certain attitudes, a candidate, a party, a government,
or a way of doing politics. We accuse our opponents of being populist; we insult
them by hurling the word at them. The tactical value of the word lies in its
power to cancel those we dislike rather than in its ability to describe complex
political phenomena.
Mudde and Rovira, two of the better-known scholars of populism, disagree.
They open their introductory book on populism by questioning the use of the
word as an insult or accusation, saying that their argument about populism
“counters two of the main criticisms of the term, namely (1) that it is essen-
tially a political Kampfbegriff (battle term) to denounce political opponents;
and (2) that it is too vague and therefore applies to every political figure”.15
I take a different view and see it as a liberating possibility: populism is simply
a word to disqualify those we do not like. We can then go on speaking of the
people, elites, and a binary division of the political field as discrete phenom-
ena or even accept their articulation, but without the compulsion to call them
populist or to say that the intervening terms add up to something called popu-
lism. Whatever it is or means, the word lends itself well to dissing someone or
something, to dismiss what someone does or does not do.
To use populism as a dirty word is tantamount to assigning it the role that
democracy once played. Jacques Rancière reminds us that democracy in
ancient Greece was a word “used as an insult by those who saw in the unnam-
able government of the multitude the ruin of any legitimate order. It remained
synonymous with abomination for everyone who thought that power fell by
rights to those whose birth had predestined them to it or whose capabilities
called them to it”.16 Populism would be the contemporary successor of democ-
racy as a word of derision. The writer Michel Houellebecq echoes this view by
saying, “The word populism was invented, or rather recovered, because it was
no longer possible to accuse certain [political] parties of fascism … Then a new
insult was found, populist”.17

15 Mudde, C., and C. Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 1.
16 Rancière, J. Hatred of Democracy. (London: Verso, 2006), 2.
17 Quoted in Zúquete, J.P. “From Left to Right and Beyond: The Defense of Populism”. In de la
Torre, C. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. (London and New York: Routledge,
2019), 425.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

10 Arditi

This was true until recently, long after the American and French revolutions.
Working men could not vote or participate in the conduct of public affairs until
the second half of the nineteenth century; women could not do so until the
twentieth century. This is because democracy, according to C.B. Macpherson,
“used to be a bad word. Everybody that was someone knew that democracy, in
its original sense of rule by the people or government in accordance with the
will of the bulk of the people, would be a bad thing – fatal to individual free-
dom and to all the graces of civilized living”.18 Eventually, the English landed
aristocracy resigned itself to share power with the less cultivated bourgeoisie,
who did not have their refined table manners but at least had money. It was dif-
ferent with their plebeian connationals, especially if they were women. They
had little sympathy for their plight to be integrated into the political system.
Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, expressed the low regard
for democracy among nineteenth-century British elites with remarkable can-
dor: “We do not live – and I trust it will never be the fate of this country to
live – under a democracy”.19
Thus, the morally good and normatively desirable concept of democracy
was first a word of derision. Now it sets the normative bar for what is politi-
cally desirable, even when most of the planet is ruled by theocratic, authori-
tarian, and illiberal autocracies. Regarding the latter, the title of a report
submitted by the University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy Institute,
Autocratization turns Viral,20 gives us a taste of the coming struggles over
democracy. Too many countries have gone in an undemocratic direction. Yet
democracy is a word held in great esteem in public discourse, and few poli-
ticians, even non-democratic ones, are willing to state that they oppose it
publicly.
The baton of disrespect has been passed on to populism, even if some con-
sider the word a badge of honor. One example from the right is Nigel Farage,
whose name was so closely associated with Brexit in 2016. He was proud to be
called a populist, and so are (or were) Barack Obama in the United States and
Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón, two of the founders of the left-wing Podemos
party in Spain. Among theorists, Laclau has hailed populism as the royal road
to understanding politics. But despite these exceptions, populism is most

18 Macpherson, C.B. The Real World of Democracy [1965], The Massey Lectures. (Toronto:
CBC Enterprises, 1990), 1–2.
19 Quoted in Quinault, R. “Democracy and the Mid-Victorians”. In Reassessing Mid-Victorian
Britain, ed. M. Hewitt, (London: Routledge, 2017), 119.
20 V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy Institute). “Autocratization Turns Viral”. V-Dem Insti-
tute, University of Gothenburg, 2021. https://www.v-dem.net/files/25/DR%202021.pdf.
Retrieved March 2021.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 11

often used as a pejorative term. It stands for demagogues willing to rally peo-
ple around any issue that seems to increase their electoral chances, for false
prophets whose followers have an almost mystical reverence for them, or for
the government of dilettantes who will surely end up ruining everything for
everyone. So, let me underline what I am suggesting here: why complicate mat-
ters when we can simply say that populism is taking the place once reserved
for democracy, a dirty word that, as Macpherson says, used to be considered
fatal “to all the graces of civilized living”?
Academics such as Andrés Velasco and John Daniszewski21 even blamed
populist governments for poor judgment in the epidemiological response to
the 2020–2022 coronavirus pandemic. They argued that their leaders rejected
the experts’ views, which exacerbated the devastating effects of the virus, there-
fore establishing a strong link between populism and incompetence. I don’t see
such a connection; if there is one, it is not of a causal kind. Philosophers make
a useful distinction between concurrence and causality. The notation of the
latter is “if A, then B,” which means that A is a direct cause of B. Concurrence is
something else. It indicates that two phenomena occur simultaneously with-
out any cause-and-effect relationship between them. When a volcano erupts,
the high priest might announce that twenty virgins must be thrown into its
crater to appease the volcano, stop the lava, and save the community. Maybe
after they do this the eruption will stop, but not because there is a causal link
between the sacrifice of twenty lives and the end of volcanic activity. At least,
that is what volcanologists tell us. It is a case of simple concurrence. Velasco
and Daniszewski affirm a more direct connection between populism and gov-
ernment performance. In doing so, they take concurrence to mean causality.
The main counterargument is that the evidence does not support this
claim. The governments of Britain, France, Italy, and Spain have been accused
of responding poorly to the crisis. Sweden’s policy of herd immunity was less
effective than that of its Nordic neighbors, who went into lockdown. None of
these countries were governed by so-called populists. Matteo Salvini, leader of
Italy’s Lega party and an outspoken Eurosceptic widely viewed by academics
and the media as a right-wing populist maverick, railed against the European
Commission for not providing Italy with enough funds to deal with the crisis.
Some considered his criticism of the European Commission a typical populist

21 Velasco, A. “The Populists’ Pandemic”. Project Syndicate, May 1, 2020. https://www.proj

ect-syndicate.org/commentary/covid19-could-strengthen-or-weaken-populists-by-andres
-velasco-2020-05?barrier=accesspaylog. Retrieved July 2020, and Daniszewski, J. “The
Populism Factor: in Struggle Against Pandemic, Populist Leaders Fare Poorly”. Detroit
Legal News, July 24, 2020. https://legalnews.com/detroit/1490190/. Retrieved July 2020.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

12 Arditi

maneuver. Why call him a populist when there are many more precise terms to
describe what he said and what he stands for? Opportunism and demagoguery
(a Eurosceptic asking the European Union for help) are the terms that first
come to mind. Alternatively, why not side with Salvini and join his criticism
of the European Commission for being slow to respond to the financial and
logistical demands of the southern European countries that suffered the most
in the first months of the pandemic?
So, let us stop making excuses when we want to dismiss a crass politi-
cian like Salvini or complain about the lack of policy competence of, say, the
Venezuelan government under Nicolás Maduro. Simply use populism as a term
of derision, an accusation to disqualify someone or their policies. This is what
historian Enrique Krauze did years ago when he called Mexican President
Andrés Manuel López Obrador a popular but populist politician and referred
to him as a “tropical messiah”, an expression that stuck until today.22 He used
populism to diss the then-presidential candidate. The Economist did the same
thing when it called him “Mexico’s false Messiah” on the cover of its Latin
America issue.23 Incidentally, it was an issue published a week before Mexico’s
2021 midterm elections, with the explicit intention of influencing the outcome.
The headline of the main article was, “Andrés Manuel López Obrador pursues
ruinous policies by improper means,” and the opening line read “In a world
plagued by authoritarian populists, Mexico’s president has somehow escaped
the limelight.” The Economist’s message left little to the imagination: populism
is a bad thing, though not in the sense that there is something called populism
that can be adjectivized as bad, but because the magazine uses populism as a
substitute for something dreadful.
For the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, this is beyond discussion.
He claimed, without providing evidence, that López Obrador wanted to be
reelected “without a doubt”.24 This is something that the president repeatedly
denied and that the Constitution forbids. And if the president’s word is not
enough for Vargas Llosa, then let us add that López Obrador did not have the
votes in Congress to change the Constitution. Vargas Llosa also accused him

22 Krauze, E. “El mesías tropical”. Letras Libres, June 30, 2006. https://www.letraslibres.com
/espana-mexico/revista/el-mesias-tropical. Retrieved June 2021.
23 The Economist. “Voters should curb Mexico’s power-hungry president”. The Economist,
May 29, 2021. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/05/27/voters-should-curb-mexi
cos-power-hungry-president. Retrieved July 2021.
24 El Universal. “Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller reacciona a dichos de Vargas Llosa sobre AMLO y
reelección”. September 24, 2021. https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/beatriz-gutierrez
-muller-reacciona-dichos-de-vargas-llosa-sobre-reeleccion-de-amlo. Retrieved
September 2021.

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Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 13

of being a populist for demanding an apology from Spain for the massacre of
the indigenous population and the plundering of the continent’s resources
during the conquest. One must assume that the writer believes that the one
who asks for forgiveness for institutionally approved crimes is also a populist.
In that case, Vargas Llosa will have to add the German state to his list, for it
asked the Jewish people for forgiveness for its role in the Holocaust during
World War Two, and Pope Francis, who apologized for the Catholic Church’s
role in the oppression and mistreatment of Canada’s indigenous population.
Vargas Llosa repeated that Mexico’s president “has shown that he is a popu-
list”, and added, “Don’t tell me that’s not funny and absurd.” He concluded his
tirade with an allusion to the celebration of the country’s 200th anniversary of
Independence, stating that the fact that López Obrador “invites a Cuban presi-
dent to deliver a speech does not make much sense either; it’s also a populist
thing, frankly distasteful”.
This suggests that populism can be just about anything you want it to be,
even something comical, absurd, and distasteful if Vargas Llosa’s political acu-
men is to be trusted. Above all, it is a dirty word thrown around lightly, which
is what most people do, including the Peruvian writer. In brief, the spirit of this
provocation is that we do not need more populism theories or to reinforce the
attributes of existing ones. We can simplify things and accept that the word has
replaced democracy as a term to dismiss politicians you do not like, presum-
ably for being incompetent, unsophisticated, polarizing, authoritarian, mes-
sianic, or generally unworthy of higher office.
I say this with a couple of caveats. One is that some are trying to salvage
populism, especially the inclusive variety, as part of a language of greater
social justice. This is mostly for tactical purposes. Populism is used to coun-
teract right-wing accusations that the reference to social justice is an alibi for
Marxism, socialism, or progressiveness, something that makes sense given the
growing electoral appeal of right-wing political groups among the working
and lower middle classes.25 In other words, populism might be evolving into a
more neutral way of talking about (and with) the working people while avoid-
ing the connotative baggage of the concept of social class in public discourse.
Perhaps that is why Obama described himself as a populist. This is an incipient
phenomenon, and it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from it yet.
The other caveat to using populism only as an insult is closely related to the
previous one. There has been an unexpected resurgence of Cold War language,

25 Hounshell, B. “How Can Democrats Persuade Voters They’re Not a Party of Rich Elites?”.
The New York Times, July 26, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/us/politics
/democrats-working-class-voters.html. Retrieved July 2022.

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14 Arditi

and one hears the use of socialist, communist, progressive, leftist, and even
liberal (in a sense that word has in the United States) as derisive terms that
might rival populism. Conservatives use those words to undermine the politi-
cal standing of those concerned about inequality, social justice, and racial
discrimination, or call for solidarity with those who suffer. It is not unusual
to hear some accuse their adversaries of being progressive or even feminist
to disqualify them, just like others use populism to that same end. Far-right
parties and communities of like-minded people who feed on conspiratorial
information ecosystems are increasingly uncomfortable with what they see as
the lukewarm position of mainstream parties regarding “socialist” policies. By
this, they mean progressive taxation, hospitality to those escaping from perse-
cution, and in the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the mandatory use of face
masks indoors or showing a vaccination certificate at work to protect your-
self and those around you. These people are resurrecting the anti-communist
rhetoric of the Cold War.
The normalization of this rhetoric is gaining momentum as mainstream
center-right parties have also begun to accuse their rivals of being left-wingers
as if the constitution and standing laws shouldn’t recognize left-of-center
views as legitimate political expressions. For the time being populism has the
upper hand among candidates to inherit the role of democracy in Ancient
Greece and nineteenth-century liberal states, but they may eventually succeed
in having the terms “communist,” “progressive,” etc. overtake the term “popu-
lism” to express political derision. It is also possible that they may use them
as virtual equivalents, as is already happening with the word “left populism.”
Former Mexican Secretary of State Jorge Castañeda26 wrote in 2006 about
Latin America’s turn to the left and included Mexico’s López Obrador among
its representatives. He also called him an authoritarian populist. Thus, schol-
arship has contributed to blurring the lines between leftism, populism, and
authoritarianism.
If populism is a catch-all term of derision, not one of those unsolved prob-
lems that every mathematician dreams of cracking, why not let go of the urge
to find this term’s definitive or most quotable explanation? Just demote it to an
insult and then accuse someone of being a populist. One government would
be called populist if it spent money on social programs at the risk of causing
inflation. Another may be labeled populist if it liquidates government assets to
solve short-term cash flow problems at the expense of medium- and long-term
reliance on taxes and borrowing to fund infrastructure or public services.
A third may be accused of populism if it seeks the advice of trusted people
from community colleges or B-List universities rather than hiring those with

26 Castañeda, J. “Latin America’s Left Turn”. Foreign Affairs 85 (3) (2006), 28–43.

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Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 15

credentials from Ivy League ones to find the best way to address a country’s
political and economic challenges. Labeling others as populists is what people
usually do in political debates and café conversations. We can continue to use
populism in this way rather than worrying about whether we adopt minimal,
maximalist, discursive, rhetorical, ideational, strategic, or other definitions of
the term.
Those who feel passionately about populism will ignore these arguments.
Some will do so because turning the word into an insult undermines a research
niche. There is funding for populism studies, venues for lectures on the subject,
conference panels, Zoominars, books, journal articles, and various curricula
that address populism in whole or in part. The subfield is so entrenched that
this specialized journal, Populism, was created to publish research on the sub-
ject. The constant use of the word in academia and in everyday language makes
it resilient. That alone exerts pressure to curb the urge to abandon populism, to
use it as an insult, or to question its analytical status. And yet, I mentioned that
I was suggesting just that.

3 Peronism and Its Contemporaries Were Populists. What Came Later

Was Not

I have said that we could dispense with populism or use it as a reproach or

invective, although I am aware that this is difficult to accept because of peo-
ple’s attachment to the word. So, I propose a third option, Plan C, prompted by
a remarkable observation in Peter Worsley’s article in the book Ionescu and
Gellner edited. The sentence reads: “since the word has been used, the exis-
tence of verbal smoke might well indicate a fire somewhere”.27 Most schol-
ars understood this to mean that the populist fire was indeed out there, but
we could not say exactly where or what it meant. We took this as a challenge.
Finding this fire became the holy grail of populism studies or a scholarly
Excalibur. Like so many Arthurs, we aspired to see which of us would suc-
ceed in pulling the conceptual sword of populism from the stone in which it
was embedded.
I took inspiration from Worsley and wrote about populism hoping to find
this fire, but I overlooked the syntax of his quote. Worsley used the conditional
“could”. He said that the verbal smoke could indicate a populist fire, not that
the fire was there waiting for someone to find it. Perhaps the wording was cau-
tious because he was not sure what was going on out there or because of the

27 Worsley, P. “The Concept of Populism”. In Ionescu, G., and Gellner, E. (eds.). Populism. Its
Meanings and National Characteristics. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 219.

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16 Arditi

very English way of making a bold claim while weakening it with a conditional
qualifier, a familiar tactic among writers to protect our backs in case readers
think the idea is outlandish. Maybe Worsley was not quite sure what the fire
was either; in his article, he justifies the claims of classical populism in favor
of the dispossessed while avoiding committing to a strong explanation of the
phenomenon. All he does (and he does it very well) is introduce various mean-
ings of populism and link the term to democracy and the advancement of the
underdogs. Whatever the case, my impression is that, like me, others who went
after this fire did not get too far either. I say this despite the extraordinary qual-
ity of published research on this subject. So let us underscore Worsley’s cau-
tious “could”. If the verbal smoke is any indication that there might be a fire,
and after half a century and more, we have not quite managed to find it (others
will disagree, of course, and claim that we have pretty good theories to explain
it), then why don’t we do the right thing and stop trying? That was my initial
intuition. Drop the term or use it as an accusation.
The third and final provocation comes closer to assuming that populism is
an existing concept describing a specific experience. However, it is unlikely
to help me win an award for congeniality among populism scholars. It con-
sists of using the word to describe something that happened in the past. If
there is something out there that reveals the traces of populism, it probably
comes from a fire that burned in another time: Worsley’s populist fire is some-
thing that flared up mainly in Latin America around the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, between the 1930s and the 1950s. That was populism; what came later
was something else. So, if there is such a thing as populism, the word would
name an experience that is no longer current: there was once something called
populism, but not anymore.
What came before was something else too. There is a prehistory of the
term, one inhabited by the Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals of populism.
In the literature, the political experience of populism is traced back to the
agrarian Narodnik movement in Russia in the mid to late nineteenth century.
The United States had a progressive people’s party, also known as the Populist
Party, founded in 1892 to represent the interests of farmers. Other forerunners
included William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long, who were at the forefront of
mobilizations in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.
But after the literature pays tribute to these precursors, it moves on to the real
deal by examining the classical wave of processes led by the likes of Vargas and
Cárdenas in the 1930s and 1940s, and especially Perón in the 1940s and 1950s.
I do the same here and go straight to that classical experience. The model for
populism is the politics of Juan Domingo Perón and his Partido Justicialista in
Argentina between 1946 and 1955.

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Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 17

Gino Germani28 pioneered the study of populism with a series of essays

on the transition from traditional to modern industrial society. In his view,
Latin American countries changed the path taken by Europe. Instead of a
generalized transition to modernity, they experienced what Germani calls
an asynchronous or patchy process of change that created tensions between
the emerging modern sector and the remaining traditional sector. The newly
emerging urban proletariat – migrants fleeing poverty and moving from the
countryside to the cities in search of work – made up the labor force in the con-
struction and industrial sectors but were excluded from political participation
and the economic benefits of emerging capitalist modernity. They also lacked
a collective identity. Germani argues that their socialization was split between
two worlds, the one they came from and the world they lived in. Elites who
held power benefited from industrialization but didn’t see the need for social
inclusion or for providing participatory mechanisms for those laborers.
For Germani, this opened the possibility for an enterprising person to har-
ness the energy of the underclass and make a claim to leadership. Usually, this
was an authoritarian person who promised to satisfy the needs of the people
only to manipulate them for her ends. Perón and Peronism mobilized masses
with a diverse class composition to bring about change from above, although
I already mentioned Roxborough’s criticism of this view about disorganized
masses. Peronism combined a series of features: authoritarian social inclusion;
top-down participatory mechanisms; building infrastructure for the urban
poor (hospitals, schools, housing); addressing the underclass, as Evita, Perón’s
wife did, as her cabecitas negras [black heads], in reference to their darker hair
and skin, or her descamisados [shirtless], to highlight their humble origins in
opposition to well-dressed oligarchs; defining the enemy as an anti-popular
oligarchy; and elevating the charismatic caudillo to the position of an undis-
puted political broker between the different factions of the movement.
Peron also embarked on institution building. His first two administrations
(he was president three times, twice between 1946 and 1955 and once between
1973 and his death in 1974) introduced labor laws, constitutional reforms to
enshrine social rights, social security for workers, investment in infrastructure,
and the use of public debt to stimulate aggregate demand and thus the double
expectation of economic growth and an ensuing increase in tax revenues to
finance the growing debt. De la Torre points out that during Perón’s first gov-
ernment (1946–1951), wages as a share of GDP increased from 37 to 47 percent,
real wages increased by 40 percent between 1946 and 1949, voting rights were
expanded, voter turnout increased from 18 to 50 percent, and women were

28 Germani, G. Política y sociedad en una época de transición. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1962).

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18 Arditi

given the right to vote and exercised it for the first time in the 1951 elections.29
All of this made Perón and Evita rock stars in the eyes of their supporters, but
it also earned the couple the disdain of industrial, cattle-raising, agricultural,
military, intellectual, and religious elites, as well as the upper middle classes.
Much of the literature that followed Germani either adapted and refined
his conceptual apparatus, or criticized his theses, which almost everyone else
did, beginning with the authors of the volume edited by Ionescu and Gellner.
However, there was little change in available theories or the diversity of the
literature. Now things look quite different. The use of the word populism has
gone viral, and populism studies have grown to the point that it resembles
a specialized subfield of political science alongside democracy or area stud-
ies. But I have said repeatedly that the ubiquity of the term and the growth of
research haven’t necessarily improved our understanding of the phenomenon.
The lay audience is torn between two imaginary voices, one that whispers in
an ear to beware of populism as an irresponsible form of politics, and another
that tells the other ear that everything will be all right because populism her-
alds the rule of the common people. Scholars outside the subfield of populism
studies also struggle to grasp and explain the phenomenon. We’ve seen that
even specialists have their doubts. Populism has come to resemble an empty
signifier of politics: a projection screen onto which those who invoke the word
project the most diverse and contradictory narratives about what it means,
how it works, and why we should care about it. De la Torre’s anthology,30 par-
ticularly the first seven chapters on conceptual approaches, is a reminder of
the highly contested interpretations of populism.
Hence my provocation to reduce complexity by adopting the historical
hypothesis: if Worsley’s fire lies anywhere, it is in classical or first-wave popu-
lism. Germani’s model was Perón and the mass movement that was named
after him. He knew the decade of Peronism firsthand when he wrote about
what he saw as Latin America’s unusual path to modernity. His book became
the foundational narrative for populism studies, whether following his theses
or criticizing them. But although Perón and other representatives of the first
wave have a strong family resemblance, this is not because of Germani’s claim
that they were all endogenous reactions to the transition to modernity in the
periphery of advanced capitalism. The resemblance was because Peronism
functioned as the analogical model for this political experience, even though
Cárdenas came to power before him and Vargas’s second term, which scholars

29 de la Torre, C. “Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Latin America”. Journal
of Political Ideologies, 21 (2) (2016), 124.
30 de la Torre, C. (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. (London: Routledge, 2019).

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Three Provocations concerning the Uses of Populism 19

more clearly associated with populism, was concurrent with Peron’s govern-
ment. Except for Vargas, they came from the military, denounced (sometimes
demagogically) the class- and race-based prejudices of the elites, strengthened
the participation of workers and peasants while subjecting them to verti-
cal mechanisms of control, accelerated modernization, created new welfare
institutions, pursued similar fiscal policies, sought to reduce inequality, and
ensured a strong, cult-like following among their bases.
We could then solve a terminological problem if we narrow populism to
common features within a geographical area and a particular historical period.
I say this because researchers, regardless of their theoretical perspectives,
agree on at least one point: they all say that Perón and Co. were populists. This
is quite something in a field so full of conceptual disputes. Populism is limited
to a (predominantly) Latin American political experience around the middle
of the twentieth century. This places limits on the turbocharged expansion of
the semantic field of the term. What we used to call classical populism is no
longer classical. It is populism, period.
This historical delimitation of populism has a non-trivial advantage. It frees
us to speak of competitive authoritarianism, the radical right, strong leaders,
the rise of shamelessness in liberal democracies, or of the illiberal states that
are variants of authoritarianism in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, but with-
out the compulsion to also look for the footprints of populism in all these
phenomena. The same is true of binary conflict, confrontational discourse,
anti-elitism, the cult of personality, etc., which are features of a wide range
of political practices, including liberal democracies, and we need not associ-
ate them fundamentally with populism. Those who use the word are the ones
who must justify it, explaining why they describe Viktor Orbán or Marine Le
Pen as populists instead of simply calling them what they are, authoritarian
politicians of the radical right. The answer that I propose in this third and last
provocation to the conditional formula, “Is there such a thing as populism?”,
is that there is no such thing at present and that populism is best understood
as an object of historical interest. Later experiences may have a loose kinship
with the modernization and mobilization of Latin American urban workers in
the 1940s and 1950s, but they do not qualify as populism merely because they
use polarizing language, think of politics in terms of an epic battle between the
good people and out of touch elites, or have strong leaders who claim to speak
in the name of the people. If the populist fire ever flickered, it was at that time
and in those places.

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 20 Arditi

So, that’s it. I didn’t write these three provocations to annoy colleagues. I am
concerned that the term has become too vague and depends on words and
gestures (and the resonance of those words and gestures in our political imagi-
nation) that condition us to say “Populism!” without giving it a second thought.
Many will not be impressed by these provocations. That is perfectly under-
standable. They will continue to speak of populism as they see fit, just as so
many of us will speak of society after (and despite) reading and even sympa-
thizing with what Touraine and Laclau had to say about it. Developing a meth-
odology for studying populism research would be helpful, but that is a topic for
another article. In the meantime, perhaps the provocations will help to shake
the comfort zone in which we do populism studies.

POPULISM 7 (2024) 1–20

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