Populism and the left: the populist temptation

Given that populism seems to be with us as long as democracy fails to live up to its democratic promise, this paper will conclude by exploring how progressive politics can approach and deal with populism. I will consider the positions of two titans of the post-Marxist Left, Ernesto Laclau (2005, 2006) and Slavoj Zizek (2006a, 2006b, 2009b), who have recently engaged in an argument on the very role of populism in the Leftist imaginary. Laclau contends that populism offers the coordinates of a renewed Leftism, while on the other side, Zizek argues that the Left must be careful to avoid what he terms ‘the populist temptation’. How we deal with the awkward guest, in both theorists’ eyes, is of vital importance to the future of democratic politics.

Laclau’s position on populism stems from his attempt to redefine the phenomenon as the very logic of the political. He approaches this in Heideggerian terms by arguing that prior attempts to define populism have necessarily failed as they have been concerned with locating populism’s ontic content, rather than capturing the ontological status of the concept. In shifting the level of analysis from the ontic to the ontological, Laclau attempts to avoid the mistakes of the empirical and historical approaches discussed earlier by moving beyond the specific concrete content of political practice, and to the more abstract level of ‘the political’ - that is, the ways in which society is instituted (Mouffe 2005a: 8-9). Laclau’s conception of populism thus focuses on “a specific mode of articulation - the prevalence of the equivalential over the differential logic - independent of the actual contents that are articulated” (2004: 111). In other words, populism is not about certain types of social bases, movements, leaders, nor about particular ideological contents. It is, rather, a political logic.

Populism is not just any political logic however: Laclau argues that it is the logic of the political. Why is this? Laclau argues that any political project is premised on the division between two competing, antagonistic groups: us/them, underdog/system and so forth. The way in which these groups are formed stem from what he posits as the minimal unit of politicosocial analysis: the demand. To put it briefly, when a demand is unsatisfied within any system, and then comes into contact with other unsatisfied demands, they form a chain of equivalence with one another, as they share the common antagonism/enemy of the system. A frontier is thus created between this chain of equivalence (the underdogs) and the system. From here, the chain of equivalence is interpellated and finds expression as ‘the people’ through a leader. ‘The people’ then demand change to, or of, the system.

‘The people’, then, in Laclau’s formulation, become the privileged agent of any renewed and effective political project, and indeed, the very subject of the political. And if ‘the people’ are the subject of the political, then populism is the logic of the political. In this sense, Laclau (2005: 47) basically argues that all politics is populism: “if populism consists in postulating a radical alternative within the communitarian space, a choice in the crossroads on which the future of a given society hinges, does not populism become synonymous with politics? The answer can only be affirmative”. As such, the aim for Left politics is to truly embrace populism, to celebrate ‘the people’ for its contingency and openness (as opposed to the essentialist tendencies of class struggle), and aim to collectively fill this necessarily empty signifier with numerous heterogeneous struggles and demands in order to forward a progressive, anti-system project to deepen the ‘democratic revolution’.

The picture is less rosy for Zizek. While he makes an untypically generous gesture towards his sometimes-sparring partner by calling Laclau’s theory of populism “one of today’s great (and, unfortunately for social theory, rare) examples of true conceptual stringency” (2006a: 555), he is struck by the inauspicious absence of a worrying characteristic of populism in Laclau’s theory: the way in which it “displaces the antagonism and constructs the enemy...the enemy is externalized and reified into a positive ontological entity (even if the entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice” (2006a: 555). The central concern for Zizek here is that populist movements always displace the ‘true’ enemy in this regard: the cause of the populist’s problems is not the system or the general structure as such, but always ‘the enemy’. The enemy of the populist thus becomes “the singular agent behind all threats to the people” (Zizek 2006a: 556). This feature is certainly empirically evident in populist movements, where the antagonistic enemy become a target of obsession for the populist: for One Nation, it was Asian immigrants; for the Tea Party, it is Obama and ‘liberals’; for almost all the European ‘New Populist’ movements it is illegal immigrants (and more often than not, specifically Muslim immigrants). Indeed, any observer of Australian politics over the past decade would note how much this populist sentiment has seeped into mainstream political practice, where focus on the enemy figure of ‘boat people’ has reached hysterical levels.

As such, Zizek is not convinced that populism offers the grounds for a progressive politics at all. In its reification of the figure of the enemy, he sees a complete refusal to deal with the complexity of contemporary political and social reality. In this way, populism is always a negative politics: it throws up its hands in exasperation, and then points the finger at the enemy figure. The key message is that somebody must be responsible for this mess. What concerns Zizek here is that the populist logic “harbors in the last instance a long-term protofascist tendency” (2006a: 557) in which the idea of a fully reconciled society revolves around the destruction of the enemy. Ultimately for Zizek, the main difference between populist politics and a truly progressive politics comes down to the distinction that the former does not offer a vision, while the latter does. Populism is obsessed with the parasitic agent, while progressive emancipatory politics is about creating new worlds. In other words, a populist movement does not offer the tools or vision to replace the capitalist system. It is a re-active politics, rather than an active one (Zizek 2009b: 61).

So whilst there are some lessons to be learnt from the rise of populism - namely its potential to ‘pull the rug’ on formal democratic politics and reject the machinations of representation - its position is still ultimately one to be avoided. Indeed, Zizek goes so far to argue that “the main task of today’s emancipatory politics, its life-and-death problem, is to find a form of political mobilization that, although (like populism) critical of institutionalized politics, avoids the populist tempation” (2006a: 567). Curiously, however, Zizek raises the spectre of the narodnichestvo mentioned earlier when he suggests that a possible temporary coalition could be forged between emancipatory politics and populist movements: “one should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our ally. In all their anger, the populists are not angry enough, not radical enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore” (2006b: 194). In other words, if ‘the people’ can be shown that their anger and hatred is being deployed in an erroneous direction, and that ultimately, as Glynos (2001: 202) has put it, “there is no plotting agency pulling the strings behind the scene”, then the possibility exists that a mix of the populist passion and willingness to refuse the rules of the game with the positive vision of an emancipatory politics could offer a chance to actually create a ‘new world’.

Zizek’s cautionary approach to populism is ultimately more convincing than Laclau’s, for the fact that it does not fudge or disregard the ultimately problematic fascistic dimension to the populist logic. This is not to say that all populisms are automatically forms of fascism, but rather that populism’s dichotomic nature can lead to a dangerous situation that begins to resemble a Schmittian universe where the eradication of the enemy becomes seemingly necessary. So although Laclau is right to argue that ‘the people’ can act as the central subject of the political in the Leftist imaginary, and that the openness of the category represents a possible escape from the fixed collective identities of traditional Leftist thought, he is wrong to assume that the heterogeneous demands that find voice through this signifier will necessary be clear-eyed in seeing the system as their shared enemy. The ‘populist temptation’ to identify the singular scapegoat remains strong.

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