Routledge Handbook of Global Populism

Carlos de la Torre, Carlos de la Torre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351850148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This volume illustrates the diversity of populism globally. When seeking power, populists politicize issues, and point to problems that need to be addressed such as inequalities, the loss of national sovereignty to globalization, or the rule of unresponsive political elites. Yet their solutions tend to be problematic, simplistic, and in most instances, instead of leading to better forms of democracy, their outcomes are authoritarian. Populists use a playbook of concentrating power in the hands of the president, using the legal system instrumentally to punish critics, and attacking the media and civil society. Despite promising to empower the people, populists lead to processes of democratic erosion and even transform malfunctioning democracies into hybrid regimes.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism provides instructors, students, and researchers with a thorough and systematic overview of the history and development of populism and analyzes the main debates. It is divided into sections on the theories of populism, on political and social theory and populism, on how populists politicize inequalities and differences, on the media and populism, on its ambiguous relationships with democratization and authoritarianism, and on the distinct regional manifestations of populism. Leading international academics from history, political science, media studies, and sociology map innovative ideas and areas of theoretical and empirical research to understand the phenomenon of global populism.

1

Global populism

Histories, trajectories, problems, and challenges

Carlos de la Torre

As the different chapters of this book illustrate, by invoking the will of the people, populists have challenged the power of elites in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Europe. In some regions like Latin America, they have governed in different populist waves since the 1930s and 40s until the present. In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East a first generation of populists linked to anti-colonial struggles dominated their postcolonial histories, and using elections a new generation of populists assumed power in several nations of these regions. What is new, perhaps, is that populists are in power not only in fragile democracies in the global south, but with Donald Trump’s election also in the cradle of liberal democracy, the United States. Populist parties are becoming stronger in consolidated European democracies, and at the time of writing this chapter are in power in Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Poland.

Pundits and scholars responded to what they named the surge of populism with fear or hope. For some populism is the biggest threat to democracy, and even to the foundations of the project of modernity based on pluralism and reason. For others populism represents a democratizing response to the rule of technocratic global elites that have kidnapped the will of the majorities. The different chapters in this book take very seriously the populist diagnosis of the deficits of real existing democracies in the north and in the global south. When seeking power, populists politicize issues and point to problems that need to be addressed such as inequalities, the loss of national sovereignty to globalization, or the rule of unresponsive political elites. Yet populist solutions tend to be problematic, simplistic, and in most instances, instead of leading to better forms of democracy, their outcomes were authoritarian. The different chapters in this book illustrate how the populist playbook of concentrating power in the hands of the president, using the legal system instrumentally to punish critics, and attacking the media and civil society led to hybrid regimes in Zambia, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Even in more consolidated democracies like Israel, the United States, or Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, populist attacks on the institutional foundations that allow for fundamental freedoms of association and information led to processes of democratic erosion.

This volume illustrates the diversity of populism globally. Populists differ on how they conceptualize the people. This category central to populism, nationalism, and democratic theory is one of the most abused and ambiguous concepts in political theory. It refers to the population as a whole, and simultaneously to a section of the population, those considered to be excluded. It could be imagined as a diverse population or as a homogenous whole. If imagined as a diverse and plural population, no one could claim to embody its will and interests, and no politician could pretend to remain in power until liberating the people. Differently from pluralists, populists view the people as one, as an entity with one will and consciousness. They claim to be their saviors, and to be their only and truthful voice. Those who challenge their authoritarian appropriations of the will of the people are labeled as enemies. In order to liberate the people, populist leaders like the late Hugo Chávez even attempted to stay in power indefinitely.

In Australia, Europe, and the U.S. some populist leaders and parties use exclusionary ethnic, cultural, and religious constructs to exclude immigrants, refugees, and in general nonwhite populations from the people. Muslims and former nonwhite colonial subjects are constructed as threatening and inferior outsiders. Other populists in Europe and the U.S. are antiracists and refuse to stigmatize nonwhites. In Africa and Latin America several populist parties and leaders use inclusionary ethnopopulist appeals (Madrid 2012; Cheeseman and Larmer 2015). Differently from xenophobic constructs, they include various ethnicities under their notions of who are the people. Some populists use religious notions that exclude nonbelievers, while others use secular political constructs of the people to confront elites. Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump pledged law and order, while Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales promised better forms of democracy. Populists also differed on whether they are forward looking or promised the return of a nostalgic and glorious past, and on whether they use the state to redistribute wealth, or believe in the magical powers of the unregulated market.

Despite advocating for different economic policies, appealing to different class and ethnic constituencies, and promoting different models of democracy, as the chapters in this book show, populists share a political logic and use similar political strategies to get to power and to govern. Populists aim to rupture exclusionary systems to give power back to the people. They understand politics as an antagonistic struggle between the people and their enemies. They feel a sense of urgency: because the establishment is so corrupt, it needs to be overhauled immediately. Populist leaders claim to be the only voice of the people, and even their embodiment. Many use a revolutionary rhetoric; all face enemies and not democratic adversaries. After gaining power populists attempt to create new political and social institutions; they share majoritarian views of democracy, disregard pluralism, and try with different levels of success to regulate and control the public sphere and civil society. As Jan Werner Müller (2016, 48) put it, populists in power attempt to “create the homogeneous people in whose name they have been speaking all along”.

Until recently and with the exception of the People’s Party founded in 1892 by American farmers and workers, only external observers used the term populism. Most parties and leaders that were labeled as populist did not accept this characterization. Things are different nowadays. Leftwing parties like Podemos (Yes we can) established in Spain in 2014 by professors of political science, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, proudly accept the label populist. Similarly, as Pedro Zúquete shows in Chapter 27, rightwing populists like Marine LePen or Matteo Salvini, head of the Italian political party Lega Nord (Northern League), describe themselves as populists. However, in global media discourses, with the exception of the United States where the term populism still has positive connotations as pro-labor and democratizing, it still evokes images of demagogy, irrationality, danger, and fear.

Differently from Eurocentric studies that relegate the multiple populist experiences of the global south to footnotes, this book aims to look at populism globally. The first populist regimes emerged in Latin America, combining open elections and views of the unitary people and of the leader as its savior (Finchelstein 2017). In order to understand the effects of populism on democracy, for instance, scholars working on Europe and the U.S. would profit from studies of the long Latin American experiences of populists in power (Finchelstein 2017; de la Torre 2017a, 2017b; Peruzzotti 2017).

This chapter is divided into four sections. The first discusses different approaches to populism. It explains how these theories conceptualize populism, and analyzes the normative claims that each of these perspectives uses to evaluate the effects of populism on democratization. The second part of this chapter analyzes how different constructions of the people could lead to different forms of inclusion and exclusions. The third explores different links between the populist leader and followers. It distinguishes between charisma, populist organizations, and the media. The fourth focuses on populism in power. It analyzes how and why, despite promising to return power to the people, populists in power either disfigured consolidated democracies, or led fragile democracies in crises toward authoritarianism.

1 Studying populism: from mass society to discursive and political theories

Writing after the traumas of fascism, the first round of historians and social scientists of populism were suspicious of its democratic credentials. Notions of crises, of the irrational responses of the masses to stress, and manipulation in conditions of anomie were at the center of social scientific and historical scholarship. Analyzing McCarthyism, Talcott Parsons (1955, 127) wrote: “it is a generalization well established in social sciences that neither individuals nor societies can undergo major structural changes without the likelihood of producing a considerable element of ‘irrational’ behavior”. The expected responses to the stress produced by major structural transformations were anxiety, aggression focused on what was felt to be the source of strain, and a desire to reestablish a fantasy where everything will be all right, preferably as it was before the disturbing situation.

Contrary to the prevailing view of the U.S. populist movement and party of the 1890s as progressive and democratizing, historian Richard Hofstadter showed its ambiguities. He argued that populists “aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with strong moral convictions and with the choice of hatred as a kind of creed” (Hofstadter 1955, 20). Populists imagined the populace as innocent, productive, and victimized by predatory elites. Their views of politics, he claimed, “assumed a delusive simplicity” (Hofstadter 1955, 65). It was a Manichean and conspiratorial outlook that attributed “demonic qualities to their foes” (Hofstadter 1969, 18). Populism was the result of an agrarian crisis, and a transitional stage in the history of agrarian capitalism. Populists aimed to restore a golden age, and its base of support were

those who have attained only a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel themselves completely deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power.

(Hofstadter 1955, 71)

Even though he asserted that the populist movement and party “was not an unambiguous forerunner of modern authoritarian movements” (Hofstadter 1955, 71), the paranoid style in American politics reappeared with McCarthyism, and other forms of cranky “pseudo-conservatism” (Hofstadter 1965). This opinion was shared by prominent American social scientists like Talcott Parsons (1955, 136), who argued that the “elements of continuity between Western agrarian populism and McCarthyism are not by any means purely fortuitous”.

Gino Germani, an Italian-born sociologist who sought refuge from Mussolini’s jails in Argentina only to later lose his academic job under Perón’s government, set the research agenda for the study of Latin American populism, and for the comparison between fascism and populism. Like Hofstadter, he viewed populism as a transitional stage provoked by the modernization of society. Relying on modernization and mass society theories, he argued that abrupt processes of modernization such as urbanization and industrialization produced masses in a state of anomie that became available for top-down mobilization. The social base of Peronism was the new working class, made up of recent migrants that were not socialized into working-class culture, and therefore they could be mobilized from the top by a charismatic leader.

The political incorporation of the popular masses started under totalitarianism. It gave workers an experience of political and social participation in their personal lives, annulling at the same time political organizations and the basic rights that are the pillars for any genuine democracy.

(Germani 1971, 337)

Hofstadter and Germani rightly showed the importance of analyzing populism as simultaneously inclusionary and autocratic. Populists challenged exclusions, and politicized humiliations, resentments, and fears. Yet they reduced the complexity of democratic politics to a struggle between two antagonistic camps. The populist leader was portrayed as the embodiment of the will of the homogeneous people, and even as its savior and redeemer, transforming politics into religious-like struggles. Yet for all their merits these pioneer studies reduced class and interest-based politics to the alleged irrationality of the masses, especially of poor rural dwellers and of recent migrants. Scholars showed that mass society theory wrongly viewed populist followers as irrational and populism as a transitional stage in the modernization of society. “Since the late 50s historians and other scholars have persuasively demolished both the portrait of the initial Populists as irrational bigots and the idea that those who supported Populism were linked demographically to McCarthy’s followers” (Kazin 1995, 192). Historian Charles Postel (2016, 119) showed that U.S. populists were not backward looking, but were modern and defended their interests in a movement that “resembled a type of reformist and evolutionary social democracy”. Argentinean workers’ support for Perón was rational because as Secretary of Labor he addressed workers’ demands for social security, labors legislation, and higher wages (Miguel and Portantiero 1971).

Three approaches replaced mass society and historicist theories of populism that linked it to the early phases of modernization: discursive, political, and ideational theories.

Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory

As Enrique Peruzzotti analyzes in detail in Chapter 2, instead of focusing on the content of populist ideologies or on its class base, Ernesto Laclau developed a formal theory of populism and its logic of articulation. Populism is a political practice that creates popular political identities. In Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, he defined populism as a discourse that articulates popular democratic interpellations as antagonistic to the dominant ideology. Populist discourse polarizes the social field into two antagonistic and irreconcilable poles: the people vs. the power block. The types of populist ruptures, according to Laclau (1977), are not theoretically predetermined, and could lead to fascism, socialism, or to Perón’s Bonapartism.

In his book On Populist Reason Laclau contrasted everyday, mundane, and administrative politics with those exceptional moments of a populist rupture understood as the political. He argued that the division of society into two antagonistic camps was required to put an end to exclusionary institutional systems and to forge an alternative order (Laclau 2005a, 122). He contrasted the logic of difference and the logic of equivalence. The first presupposes that “any legitimate demand can be satisfied in a non-antagonistic, administrative way” (Laclau 2005a, 36). There are demands that could not be resolved individually and aggregate themselves, forming an equivalential chain. Under the logic of equivalence “all the demands in spite of their differential character, tend to aggregate themselves”, becoming “fighting demands” that cannot be resolved by the institutional system (Laclau 2005a, 37). The social space splits into two camps: power and the underdog. The logic of populist articulation is anti-institutional; it is based on the construction of an enemy, and in an equivalential logic that could lead to the rupture of the system.

“Laclau’s project is a defense of populism” (Beasley-Murray 2010, 41). He failed because he relied on Carl Schmitt’s view of politics as the struggle betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Global populism Histories, trajectories, problems, and challenges
• Part I: Contemporary theories of populism
• Part II: Populism and political and social theory
• Part III: The populist politicization of inequalities and differences
• Part IV: Populism and the media
• Part V. Between democratization and authoritarianism
• Part VI. Regional trajectories
• Index