Populism at the dinner table

So if populism is potentially an unavoidable part of democratic politics, as the symptomatic and ‘pathological normalcy’ approaches suggest, what can be done about it? Is it to be encouraged? Is it dangerous, and should be quashed? Or to frame it in the language of our dinner party metaphor: if this awkward guest is coming to dinner no matter what, should we try to teach them some manners, or should we celebrate their boisterous nature? The answers to these question are relatively vague, and for good reason. Populism, as we have seen, is not a clear-cut political philosophy or movement in itself, but can rather be understood as a kind of “thin-centred ideology concerning the structure of power in society” (Abts and Rummens 2007: 408), or as a “emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general” (Worsley 1969: 245), and as such, populism can be attached to any number of political projects across the political spectrum. As Laclau (2005: 191) states, “we can have a populism of the national state, following the Jacobin model, a regional populism, an ethnopopulism, and so on”. The key point to keep in mind then, is that populism is not the automatic territory of the Right or Left, and thus cannot be dismissed outright as dangerous, or on the other hand, valorised as ‘true’ democracy. Indeed, a glance at the recent development of the Tea Party movement illustrates the way in which populism throws off the usual coordinates of our political compass in this manner: what essentially began as a protest against the government-encouraged recklessness of big business - something we would typically associate with the Left - has morphed into an anti-tax, anti­government, anti-Obama movement that has recently been accused of racism and whose most prominent spokespeople are Fox News’ Glenn Beck and former Vice President candidate Sarah Palin - figures firmly on the Right. A disorientating situation indeed.

A perhaps more basic question to consider: what is it specifically about populism that leads to us having to invite him to dinner no matter what - or in psychoanalytical terms, what is it in particular that leads to the ‘return of the repressed’ again and again? The answer to this question, I contend, is relatively simple: the people. The people continually return and it does not seem that they are going away any time soon. As Canovan (2005) has made clear in her outstanding recent survey of the term, ‘the people’ has been a relatively understudied political concept, yet in reality it remains one of the most important categories in conferring legitimacy and authority in democratic political communities. From the “we, the people of the United States” of the American Constitution to the everyday rhetoric of politicians today who claim to speak on behalf of the people, the term remains an enormously powerful tool. It is built into our very conception of democracy: the ancient Greek demokratia is a combination of demos (the people) and kratia (power, rule).

As such, ‘the people’s’ place in the mainstream democratic political imaginary remains firm - and this can lead to certain practical problems. A number of recent texts on populism have reflected on this situation, arguing that the roots of populism can be located in the tensions that characterise contemporary liberal democracy: a split between its democratic pillar, which emphasizes participation and the sovereignty of ‘the people’, and its liberal/constitutional pillar, which emphasizes pluralism, the rights of the individual, and locates the ultimate authority of the state in the law. This tension has alternatively been labelled as ‘the democratic paradox’ (Mouffe 2000), and the ‘two-strand model’ of democracy (Abts and Rummens 2007; Canovan 2004). In practice, it is argued that these two reflexive strands or pillars can keep one another in check, as the universalistic constitutionalism of the liberal pillar safeguards individual human rights as well as aims to protect citizens from the whims of the state or other citizens, while the democratic pillar locates sovereign rule within ‘the people’ and allows for the possibility of reforming constitutional matters. However, in reality, this balance is an extremely precarious one.

In this two-strand formulation, it becomes quite clear that populism falls firmly into the democratic camp rather than the liberal one. The liberal elements of the contemporary democratic system are seen as diluting the ‘true’ democratic ideal - the power of the people. As Meny and Surel (2002: 9) argue, “all populist movements speak and behave as if democracy meant the power of the people and only the power of the people”. Thus we have the simplification of the ideological space between those on the liberal side of politics (‘the elite’, minorities) and the democrats (‘the people’). Advocates of the two-strand position consequently see populism as a reaction to the scales tipping towards the liberal rather than the democratic pillar: Taggart (2000) argues that populism is ultimately a reaction against liberalism, whereas Mouffe (2005b) reads the emergence of the ‘New Populism’ in Europe as a result of the attempt to neutralize the triumph of liberalism within the liberal-democratic nexus through Third Way politics.

I am less convinced. Whilst the two strand formulation is to be praised for allowing us to think through the tensions that characterize the ‘empty place’ of democracy (Lefort 1988), the causal logic underlying such conceptions - that is, populism is the result of the unbalance between liberalism and democracy - is not necessarily accurate. If the situation was as dire as some paint it to be, one would expect to see far more examples of populist movements emerging in many countries across the world, given the relatively hegemonic status of liberal democracy. However, populism (at least in its movement variant) is still a relatively fringe political phenomenon rather than a mainstream one - as we have seen, it is a symptom rather than the ‘main game’. Further, by viewing liberal democracy as a cross between two completely separate and very different things, naïve versions of the two-strand theory can set up a reification between ‘pure’ liberalism and ‘pure’ democracy - two phenomena, I would argue, that have never actually existed with any conceptual purity in the modern era, but have instead existed in a number of contaminated and blended iterations.

A slightly different, and I would suggest more productive way to look at how tensions within the operations of contemporary democracy lead to populism is that suggested by Mény and Surel (2002: 8), who have posited that contemporary democracy is characterized by “the constitutive tension between its ideology (power of the people) and its functioning (the power of elites chosen by the people)”. This is not necessarily the tension between democracy and liberalism, but rather the tension between democratic ideals and their practical application - and in our current democratic regimes, this practical application more widely means representation. This tension is indeed more empirically visible than the more philosophical/ideological tensions between liberalism and democracy - one only needs to look at the frustration fuelling a number of populist movements where it is asserted that elected politicians have ‘lost touch’ with ‘the people’. This is characteristic of the much-discussed and wider-ranging ‘crisis of representative politics’ in the liberal-democratic world. The situation can be described as thus:

The citizens feel that their votes matter less and less, that parties in power do not deliver what they promise while in opposition, that policies do not fit their needs and aspirations. It is not so much democracy which is at stake as the main mechanism of western democracies, representation. The legitimacy of the system is weakened when citizens perceive their representatives as incapable of acting according to the messages they have sent through their votes, protests, or other forms of mobilization (Mény 2003: 256-257).

This loss of faith in representative politics is further exacerbated by corruption of elites, political scandals and varying levels of transparency in politics, and is evident in the declining numbers of people who are voting, joining political parties, or becoming involved with ‘official politics’ in general.

This is not simply a ‘technical’ breakdown, whereby the occasional politician fails to represent his constituency’s views in a satisfactory manner. In today’s technocratic state of affairs, the constant policy flip-flopping of politicians on the basis of ever-present opinion polls demonstrates that even with all of our advanced electoral and demographic tools, a completely satisfactory consensus or successful representation is not possible. Zizek (2009a: 3) has recently pointed to the fact that representative democracy is never ‘neutral’ in this regard:

At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ - mirrors, registers, measures - the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ - instantiates - a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral - it privileges certain values and practices - and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.

Indeed, if the official stock-and-trade of what passes for formal democratic politics today is the chance for citizens to spend ten minutes every three or four years voting for representatives from a seriously constrained field of choice - and as Zizek’s example shows, a field of choice that often cannot even match the electorate’s desires - the ‘return of the repressed’ in the form of ‘the people’ is to be reasonably expected.

To put it simply then, populism’s occasional bursting in to the liberal-democratic scene attempts to reveal that the today’s ‘dignified’ form of politics that is named democracy falls short of the democratic promise. As Arditi (2007: 80) puts it, “populism calls the bluff on claims that gentrified politics is democratic politics is politics ‘as such’. It also shows that the ‘table manners’ of democratic politics are often little more than props to bestow an aura of public virtue on elected officials that have none.” Populism in this regard can indeed be considered the awkward guest of democracy: with a few too many glasses of wine consumed, the guest may begin to tell the fellow diners some awkward truths that they may not wish to hear.

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