Introduction: the awkward guest

We have all been there at some point: sitting around the table at a dinner party where one guest has consumed a few too many glasses of wine, begun cracking politically incorrect jokes, and making unfavourable remarks about the food. Perhaps they disrupt the conversation, swear too much or knock their glass over and spill their drink on another diner. The uneasy air of awkwardness that sets across the room is palpable, yet the politeness of the hosts and the other guests mean that the drunken guest is not kicked out or scolded. Instead, the guest’s antics are downplayed, and the host might crack a joke and quietly suggest that they have a glass of water. Whilst everyone in the room may want the guest gone, the civil rules and formality of the environment triumph.

Benjamin Arditi (2007) has recently argued that populism plays this very role in modern liberal democratic politics. It acts to disrupt ‘politics-as-usual’ by either disregarding the rules of the game, or otherwise invoking them in a very flexible manner. We can certainly see this disruptive effect in the reactions to the recent Tea Party movement in the United States, or to the rise of populist parties in Europe over past years, such as Front National in France or Vlaams Belang in Belgium. Closer to home, we can think of the reaction to the success of One Nation in the late nineties. The responses to upsurges in populism in these situations have generally been ones of bewilderment, with mainstream politics not quite knowing how to deal with this apparently irrational and marginal political phenomenon, banishing it to the corners of the political realm, and labelling the followers of populist movements as backward rednecks and racists. Yet populist leaders claim that they are the true democrats in today’s political system. What is going on here? Where does populism fit?

It is the goal of this paper to explore the paradoxical role of populism in contemporary democratic politics, where it “functions both as an internal moment of liberal democracy and as a disruption of the gentrified domain of political performances” (Arditi 2007: 78). It will argue that populism is a persistent and recurrent feature of the modern political landscape. As such, it asserts that populism deserves a far more central position in political analysis in order to illuminate the complex ways in which the oft-ignored notion of ‘the people’ is articulated. After enquiring as to whether this awkward guest can be placated, and whether its presence is ultimately unavoidable, it will then examine recent theoretical inventions from Laclau and Zizek to signpost how progressive politics should approach populism. However, before locating populism’s position within contemporary politics, it will first consider the etymological knots that have characterised the concept’s development.

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