Populist antagonisms and populist interventions.

We need now to move from political representation to political strategies in our analysis of populism. Enacting redistributive policies or giving political recognition to discriminated or excluded individual citizens and social actors are important elements of the populist mode of identification but do not by themselves define populism. Populism is a political strategy (Weyland 2001) as much as a mode of identification (Panizza 2005) (or better said a strategy of political identification) and antagonism is the defining element of its strategy. Kazin’s history of American populism shows how different political narratives of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless run through America’s civil life. Who are the powerful and who are the powerless was defined and redefined by progressive and conservative versions of populism at different points in time, drawing the political battle lines that characterized and still characterize American politics. Canovan (1999, 2) also notes the political antagonism that is at the heart of populism when she defines it as “an appeal to 'the people' against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values”. The existence of an external “Other” to the people is a condition for the unification of naturally fragmented popular identities and divergent interests because, as Glenn Bowman (2005) put it, in oppressing all of them, the oppressor simultaneously renders all of them “the same.”

How is the political antagonism characteristic of populist strategies discursively constructed? Ernesto Laclau (1997) early writings on populism offer an elegant theory of the formal construction of antagonisms through the analysis of what he calls relations of differences and relations of equivalences. While no society is structured exclusively by relations of differences or relations of equivalences, relations of differences predominate in highly institutionalized political orders, such as liberal, pluralist, democracies, while relations of equivalences predominate at times of crises in which institutions loose their power to structure social relations. Laclau argues that when a series of social demands cannot be differentially absorbed by institutional channels they become unsatisfied demands that enter into a chain of solidarity or equivalence with one another, as equally unmet grievances. Populist leaders crystallize common grievances around an antagonism that simplifies the social field in the common opposition against what they identify as responsible for the status quo, such as “neoliberalism” or “the partidocracia.”

We can give some substance to this rather abstract elaboration of chains of equivalences and relations of antagonism by refering to contemporary developments in Latin America. In a formulation that closely resembles Laclau’s chain of equivalences, Ken Roberts (2008) draws parallels between the current wave of political incorporation and the first wave that took place around the middle of last century, a period that was also dominated by populist politics. Roberts (2008, 330) notes the declining capacity of state institutions to respond to social citizenship claims in the midst of the debt crisis and market-oriented structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s and early 2000s to argue that unmet social needs or heightened economic insecurities provided a basis “for the collective articulation of political grievances” against neoliberalism. The way collective grievances can be effectively articulated is analyzed by Arce and Rice (2009) study of social protest in Bolivia in the first half of the 2000s. Their study shows how protests were characterized by the formation of a new cross-class, cross ethnic, cross-regional, cross generational, and cross sectoral collective identity defined in opposition to neoliberalism. Although protests began by being specific and localized, such as the demand for water rights in Cochabamba, they quickly spread to other parts of the country and developed into a generalized opposition to the government’s economic policies and to the country’s so-called traditional parties. What made the protests so effective was the ability of the movements’ organizers to link the claims of disparate groups into a coherent critique of the country’s political and economic order with the power to mobilize thousands of people in marches, road blocks and other forms of direct action (Arce and Rice 2009, Suarez 2003, Kohl and Farthing 2006). How was it possible to achieve such a heightened level of unity and mobilization, particularly given that the new coalitions lacked institutional channels of social representation and mobilizations often occurred without a general coordinating body and with each civil society group pursuing their own agenda? Arce and Rice’s answer (p.98) is that “neoliberalism” became an organizing symbol (what Laclau would call the other of populism’s chain of equivalences) against which social movements gathered support for their mobilizing efforts.

There are a number of points that would merit further consideration from Roberts and Arce and Rice’s analyses of social protest, most obviously that social movements rather than populist leaders were the main actors in the articulation of grievances, even if arguably Arce and Rice’s account of social mobilization in Bolivia underestimates the role of key union and indigenous political leaders in coordinating the protests and does not deal with Evo Morales’ ability to crystallize social antagonisms at a higher political level. What is important for the purpose if this article, however, is to draw the implications of these analysis of social opposition to neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America for a better understanding populist politics. There are in Latin America many examples of the political strategy of dichotomization of the social space by political leaders. Hugo Chavez has systematically used political antagonisms to rally his supporters against a scatter of “enemies of the people”, from the traditional parties to the economic oligarchy and the domestic opposition and from President Uribe of Colombia the “devil Bush”. The politics of antagonism, framed in the opposition between the people on the one hand and partycracies and neoliberalism on the other, have also played a significant role in the political strategies of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. It is in populism’s strategic constitution of political antagonisms where most scholars would draw a distinction between “populist” leaders and “popular” ones. Political leaders such as Mujica, Lula da Silva (and Obama) may speak or look “like the people” and “speak for the people” but they are bridge builders rather than trench diggers. Lula da Silva is surely one of the few political leaders in the world that is equally at ease in the World Economic Forum and in the World Social Forum. Obama came to embody post-racial politics in the US. And in his inimitable language Mujica (2009c) makes a strong argument for the politics of compromise over the politic of antagonism and against the populist argument that change is above all a matter of political will: “Gobernar no es hacer lo que se quiere. Gobernar con una vision progresista es zurcir todos los dias. Es tejer incansablemente alianzas politicas y sobre todo alianzas sociales, para ensanchar todo los posible la base de sustentacion. Las contradicciones sociales van a seguir existiendo, pero si uno deja que una punta de fierro a la otra, sin piedad, terminamos todos lastimados y achicando la torta.”

The distinction between populist (the predominance of the politics of antagonism) and popular (the predominance of the politics of differences) politicians, however, needs at least some probing. If political antagonism is of the essence of populism does it mean that all political strategies that dichotomize the political space are necessarily populists? Clearly not. In the 19^th century the urban political elite in Latin America framed their political discourse around the dichotomy “civilization or barbarism” to justify their fight against the rural caudillos. Moreover, antagonism is, at least according to Carl Schmitt (1988), constitutive not just of populism but of the political, so it cannot be an exclusive distinctive feature of populism. Laclau (2005a, 47) solves the problem by arguing that effectively populism is the same as politics. For reasons that I cannot elaborate here I think that this is an unsatisfactory solution, both theoretically and empirically. It is my view that we cannot have a purely formal (ontological) definition of populism based on the constitutive role of antagonism. We need to include in our understanding of populism its normative dimension, encapsulated in the claim that by excluding those at the bottom of society the political order violates fundamental principles of equality, either in its political (representation) or socio-economic dimensions (redistribution). If that is the case, the promise to repair the injustice (the politics of incorporation) is at least as crucial for the understanding of populism as the constitution of an antagonism between the people and its oppressors. Whether the reparation of the injustice requires the destruction of the system (the foundational aspect of populism) or working within the system to give political voice and economic benefits to the excluded is largely context dependent. Historically, many populist movements in Latin America have acted pragmatically to incorporate those at the bottom of society to the system through corporatist forms of political representation, social policies and politically-mediated handouts. It is worth recalling that this was denounced by the left as evidence of populism’s conservative nature. More recently, radical left populist leaders have sought to restore the sovereignty of the people by changing constitutional orders and founding Bolivarian Republics and plurinational participative democracies. In practice, the two alternatives -working within the political order or seeking a radical new one - are at the opposite side of a continuum that can be subject to a variety of populist interventions.

In a context of crisis of representation, such as was the case in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the foundational aspects of populism become dominant while in other, more institutionalized contexts, populist antagonisms are mediated and constrained by the play of political institutions. The governments of the Kirchners in Argentina are a case in point of how context defines the reach and limits of populist antagonism. For some scholars the Kirchners represent the return of populism in Argentina. They, particularly Nestor, have centralized power in the presidency, ruled by decree, used public funds to secure the allegiance of state governors and to oil the wheels of the Peronista party patronage machine. They have rallied against neoliberalism and the market democracy of the 1990s and revived the national popular politics and policies of the Peronist left of the 1970s. Nestor Kirchner became well known for his propensity to pick up political fights with a wide variety of enemies, from the IMF to the military, and for his close alliance with President Hugo Chavez. Perhaps the most emblematic example of the politics of antagonism in the Kirchners’ administrations has been the confrontation between the farmers and President Cristina Kirchner in 2008 that followed the government’s attempt to introduce a new sliding scale for export taxes on grains and oil seeds. The confrontation bisected and polarized Argentine society. It had a strong normative dimension, as President Cristina Kirchner accused the (rich) farmers of selfishly refusing the government much needed funds to implement its ambitious social programmes. For a moment Argentina resembled the Andean countries. The confrontation spilled into the streets with farmers blocking highways and supporters and opponents of the government marching in the streets of Buenos Aires. It also evoked past struggles between Peron and the so-called oligarquia latifundista, perhaps with an undertone of Marx’s aphorism about the different ways in which history repeats itself. And yet the Government lost the fight because Congress voted down the tax. The resolution of the conflict through institutional means brings into consideration Lievitsky and Murillo’s (2008) argument that whatever the superficial similarities between Kirchner and Chavez, Argentina is not Venezuela because in spite of the Kirchners’ populist interventions and of the weakness of the country’s party system, in Argentina the institutional and societal foundations of democratic pluralism are much stronger than they are in Venezuela.

Does it make sense to speak of populism in well institutionalized political systems with checks and balances, a strong and active civil society and well functioning representative institutions? I think it does as long as we don’t refer to populism as a political regime or as a kind of encompassing totality but, as suggested above, as populist interventions made within a wider discursive and institutional political environment. To understand what is meant by “interventions” it is important to recall Kazin’s (1995, 3) observation that when tracing the history of populism in the US, he does not contend that his subjects were populists, in the way they were unionists or socialists, Protestants or Catholics, liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. Rather, his premise is that all these people employed populism as a “flexible mode of persuasion.” As he put it with reference to his case studies of populism, “populism, of course, was not the sole element in their rhetoric but its significance is, I think, impossible to deny” (p.6).

While agreeing with Kazin I would use “interventions” rather than “rhetoric” to signify a broader ensemble of material and symbolic practices associated with the populist mode of identification. In some cases interventions refer to the leader’s personal characteristics or political trajectory that cast him/her as an outsider to the established order even if not necessarily in antagonism to it. We can only think at how Obama’s life history has been used by the extreme right in the US to argue that he is not even an American citizen, or in a less fundamentalist version, of how he won the Democratic party primary by presenting himself as an outsider to the party’s machine. It is not trivial to understand José Mujica’s appeal that he was a Tupamaro guerrilla leader in the 1970s, a condition from which he has never repented or reneged and for which he spend long years in prison under appalling conditions. The relevance of his past is that it has not completely gone away, not in the sense that he is advocating violent revolution or that his voters endorse the goals and methods of the Tupamaros but rather that the Tupamaros were an anti-systemic movement that challenged the political and economic order, not in the name of the working class or Marxist ideology, but in the name of the people against the oligarchy. Not without reason their former critics and current allies, the communists, accused them of “populists”. As a politician Mujica does not denounce the country’s political institutions as illegitimate and is a shrewd political negotiator. He may have become a kind of wise old man of Uruguayan politics and there is relatively little in his economic programme to threaten the interests of business. He works within the system rather than against the system but his political roots and personal biography, as much as his political rhetoric and claim to represent those at the bottom of society, still make him a stranger if not to the system as such at least to the political elite, and a divisive figure that is idolized by the poor but not trusted by large sectors of the middle classes. As Jorge Lanzaro (1999, 2) put it, “Mujica has a populist profile, based on charisma, anti-establishment stances and an appeal to the poor, which was strengthened by his personal traits and his lineage as a member of the 1960s Tupamaros guerrilla movement, as well as his affinity for the ruling Kirchners in Argentina and the “Bolivarian” left.

In other cases, political leaders use populist interventions to their political advantage, often in conjunction with other forms of political rhetoric. The case of Lula da Silva illustrates this point. When confronted with allegations of corruption against his government during the 2006 electoral campaign Lula used both the populist discourse of the underdog against the political elite and the institutional discourse of differences to defend himself and his party against the accusations.

So, during a tour of the North East, where he had a strong popular support among Brazil’s poor president Lula said: “A mesma elite que levou Getulio [Vargas] a morte, que levou Juscelino [Kubitschek] ao major processo de acusa9&o e de mentiras, que tirou Joao Goulart, essa mesma elite tentou me tirar. So que a diferen9a basica no meu caso nao e que eu fosse melhor. E que tinha um componente que eles nao contavam e descobriram que exitstia, chamado povo brasileiro.” “The same elite that led Getulio [Vargas] to his death, that submitted Juscelino [Kubitschek] to the biggest process of accusations and lies, that toppled Joao Gulart, that very same elite tried to bring me down. The only difference in my case is not that I was better [than them]. [The difference is] that they found out that I had a component of which they were not aware of and that they discovered it existed [a component] called the Brazilian people.” ^[61]

However, the following day he argued that corruption was a structural element of Brazilian politics:

“Nao pensem que o erro de cada um e individual ou partidario. O que acontece sao os acumulos de deforma9oes que vem da estrutura politica do nosso pais.” ^[62]

“Don’t think that wrongs [i.e. corruption] are the fault of individuals or parties. What is going on is the result of the accumulation of deformities originated in the political structure of our country.”

It is clear from the excerpts above that Lula was presenting himself as part of the people under attack by an ever present dominant elite that had already brought down other popular leaders and, at the same time, he was presenting corruption as an attribute of the political system, of which his party, the PT, was part of. On the first argument he was being accused of corruption because he was under attack from the system. On the second he (or rather his party) engaged in corrupt acts because they were part of the system. We can also recall Lula’s much quoted statement that the financial crisis of 2008 -09 was caused by “white, blue-eyed people” and not by “blacks, poor or indigenous peoples” to figure out why Lula has become “officially” the “most popular politician on earth.”

If the shadows of a life lived as an outsider or the occasional jabbing at the system from within were all that it is to populist interventions, the appeal of populism in highly institutionalized political systems would be real but limited, a kind of populism light. There is, however, another characteristic of populism that makes it potentially such a powerful political force in any democratic environment. Canovan (1999, 10-11) argues that modern democracy presents two faces, one redemptive, the other pragmatic.“ She further argues that although the two are opposed, they are also interdependent; and that between them lies a gap in which populism is liable to appear. She establishes the distinction between redemptive and pragmatic policies by looking at different elements, such as the claim that, pragmatically, democracy is a form of government and a way of coping peacefully with the conflicts of modern societies by means of a collection of rules and practices, while for democracy’s redemptive face the people are the only source of legitimate authority, and salvation is promised to them as and when they take charge of their own lives. She concludes that at least some degree of redemptive democracy’s promise of salvation is actually necessary to lubricate the machinery of pragmatic democracy, and that if it is not present within the political system it may well reassert itself in the form of a populist challenge. There is a parallel formulation of the relation between populism’s redemptive promise and everyday democratic politics in Kazin’s (1995, 289) claim that populism is “rooted in the gap between American ideals and those institutions and authorities whose performance betrays them” and in his remark that populism is “a kind of “rhetorical optimism”. As he put it: “It is only when leftist and liberals themselves talked in populist ways -hopeful, expansive, even romantic- that they were able to lend their politics a majoritarian cast and help markedly to improve the common welfare”. (1995, 6-7)

For certain versions of populism the redemptive dimension of democracy cannot be realized within the system because there could be no shared common ground between “the people” and their “oppressors”. Thus, the gap between the two dimensions of democracy is unbreachable under current institutional rules and the system must be re founded on different bases. Redemptive rhetoric digs deep into the past to evoke Indian forms of collective organization and democratic deliberation or selective Bolivarian ideals in order to contrast them with the inequities of the present and inspire the people to march towards a better future. However, the rhetorical optimism of populism can also be put to work in an attempt to close the gap between the redemptive and pragmatic dimensions of democracy without ever achieving total closure or, alternatively, tearing apart the political order. Lula da Silva is increasingly being perceived, particularly within Brazil, as an ultra pragmatic politician that makes pacts with his former right wing critics and has largely embraced the so-called neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Many analysts trace the public origins of Lula’s pragmatic turn to his famous “Letter to the Brazilian people” published at the beginning of the 2002 electoral campaign in which he promised that, if elected, his government would comply with the fiscal and monetary conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But is worth recalling that at the heart of Lula’s 2002 campaign was not the pragmatic promise to repay the IMF but the redemptive promise of ending hunger in a country in which millions of persons still suffered from it. And while his style of government has become increasingly more pragmatic and less redemptive and the “Fome Zero” promise has pragmatically morphed into the highly effective “Bolsa Familia,” the redemptive dimension of President Lula’s rhetoric can still be found, perhaps too conveniently, in his interventions in the international arena in which he campaigns for a rebalancing of the world order in favour of those “at the bottom of it”. As he put in an address to the 2009 World Social Forum:

“ O que essa gente [the political and economic elites] nao percebeu e que hoje o povo mais humilde da America Latina, os indios da Bolivia, os indios do Equador, os indios brasileiros, os seringueiros, os trabalhadores da Venezuela, do Paraguai, as pessoas aprenderam a nao ter mais intermediario para escolher os seus dirigentes. As pessoas votam diretamente e escolhem en que elas confiam.” ⁱⁱⁱ

There are times in which an electoral slogan captures the redemptive message of populism. In the 1989 electoral campaign Carlos Menem told the Argentinean people “Siganme no los voy a desfraudar” (“Follow me, I will not let you down”). Menem’s command can be interpreted in many different ways. It can be seen as evidence of the personalist and top down nature of populism and of the programmatic emptiness if not the duplicity of his campaign promises. But at time in which the Argentinean people were suffering from terrible economic hardships, his slogan conveyed the promise of lifting people up from their suffering and of better times to come. In many aspects Obama is the antithesis of Menem and so was his campaign slogan. “Yes we can” conveys a very different message than “follow me”, a convocation to a collective endeavor rather than a command to follow the leader. Although Obama has probably the most unlikely personal background of any past US presidential candidate, he never sought to make political capital out of not being part of the political elite, as did Sara Palin. For some of his critics one of his faults is that he seeks too much consensus at the cost of compromising his ideals, too many articulation of differences and too little political antagonisms, although the point appears moot for the populist right that thrives on antagonisms to the verge of paranoia and believe that Obama is not American. And yet, “yes we can” brilliantly encapsulates the rhetorical optimism that Kazin argues made populism such a powerful mode of persuasion and I would like add, gave hope and voice to millions of disenfranchised of African American citizens that did not feel represented by other politicians.

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