Populism

Characteristics

From the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network (author not found):

"Laclau developed a theory of populism with three simple, if highly abstract, components: a chain of equivalence, an empty signifier and an antagonistic frontier.

Imagine a country in crisis. Unemployment is high, youth unemployment even higher, and the middle class is squeezed. The financial and economic institutions have lost their legitimacy, and so have the legal and political institutions.

In this country, old and new demands can no longer be channelled through the usual institutions. A big part of the population no longer feels represented. Society has been dislocated, with the different demands left floating around.

This sort of situation is ripe for populist intervention. What populist discourse does, according to Laclau, is connect different demands together in a chain of equivalence. Those demands – cheaper housing, get rid of corrupt politicians, and so on – become equivalent because they are represented by the same empty signifier.

An empty signifier could be a populist leader – say, Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos – or it could be a slogan – for instance, “enough is enough”. From the perspective of the different demands, the signifier becomes the solution to every one of them: if Podemos comes to power, they’ll stop the eviction of people from their homes, corrupt politicians will be a thing of the past etc.

The empty signifier has to be understood in tandem with the third element of Laclau’s theory of populism: antagonism. Populist discourse divides society in two: those below and those above. This is precisely what Podemos did from the beginning: those below (the people – la gente) were pitted against those above (the establishment – la casta).

Laclau refers to this division as an antagonistic frontier: you are either on the side of the people, or on the side of the people’s enemy. And if getting rid of the people’s enemy is the solution to all of the people’s problems, it follows that all the different demands of the people can only be met if we get rid of the old establishment." (https://theconversation.com/podemos-find-itself-caught-between-the-battle-lines-of-spanish-politics-69771?)

Discussion

Barry Hindess:

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, democracy, while still in some left-wing contexts retaining its earlier meaning of government by the people themselves, had also come to designate 'representative government', a complex system of government by networks of elected representatives and unelected public servants, operating through combinations of representative, vaguely consultative and hierarchical institutions.

When the World Bank, international development agencies, and western political leaders favour democracy promotion, it is usually this second understanding of democracy that they have in mind.

The longstanding western fear of the people is central to this second sense of democracy, which generally involves institutional arrangements – a free press, rule of law with a moderately independent judiciary, representative government with a system of 'responsible' political parties – expected to both promote popular participation and keep its impact under control. Grahame Thompson (oD, 22 November 2016) describes these 'four institutional manifestations of a civilized democratic life' as the principal targets of populist rhetoric. When the World Bank, international development agencies, and western political leaders favour democracy promotion, it is usually this second understanding of democracy that they have in mind.

What does all this have to do with the contemporary discussion of populism? My sense in reading as much as I can bear of this discussion, is that the term 'populism' is used to condemn any appeal to the people that seeks to circumvent the institutional arrangements noted above, whose role is to contain the impact of the people on the actual work of government.

Where Thompson identifies these institutional arrangements as the central focus of populist rhetoric, my point is almost the obverse: that political organisations or programs that attack these institutions get to be labelled populist – that this labelling is what much discussion of populism is all about. Populism is thus seen in: British, American and Australian attacks on the press and on what passes in these countries as an independent judiciary; Australian Governments' efforts to undermine the Human Rights Commission and, in New South Wales, the Independent Commission Against Corruption; Donald Trump's occasional threats during the 2016 Presidential campaign to rapidly (without due process) incarcerate or expel millions of Hispanic migrants, to send his opponent to jail and not to accept the election result; the British LEAVE campaign's pretence that a favourable referendum result could trump, no pun intended, the sovereignty of parliament; President Duterte (Harry!) of the Philippines encouraging police to hunt down and kill drug traffickers.

All that unites these different populisms is that they are labelled as such by critics. While it is not always possible to choose the terms in which public debate is conducted, we should recognise that this labelling game is, at best, uninformative and, at worst, seriously misleading.

We should not allow our dislike of many 'populist' attacks on parliamentary democracy, the party system, the press or the rule of law (Thompson's four 'institutional manifestations of a civilized democratic life') to lead us into the view that there is little objectionable about these institutions as they stand today." (https://www.opendemocracy.net/barry-hindess/against-concept-of-populism)