Seven Essays on Populism. Paula Biglieri

or even an intentional coalition. Nor was its opposition only the state, the bosses, the bankers, the corporations or the rich. Rather, the 99% designated a people excluded, exploited, bilked, and disenfranchized; the “power” it opposed was the plutocrats. The 99% and the 1% identified the losers and winners of neoliberalism, privatization, financialization, and government bailouts in the aftermath of the 2008–9 financial crisis. The 99% included democracy itself and the well-being of the planet; the 1% extended to the Supreme Court majority and the international Davos crowd.⁵ Everything plundered, devalued or made precarious by capitalist plutocracy was linked in the aspirational hegemonic bloc of the 99%.

      If Laclau’s bold move to identify populism with the political is troubled by the difficulty of stipulating the political, he surely succeeds in recovering populism from its derogatory associations to reveal its insurrectionary and radical democratic potential. However, more still is needed to unfasten it decisively from right-wing popular mobilizations supporting authoritarian leaders or regimes, and especially from ethno-nationalism and fascism. This unfastening is the key aim of Biglieri and Cadahia’s work. To achieve it, they carefully elaborate and dismantle the premises undergirding mainstream and left anti-populist critiques, including those of Eric Fassin, Slavoj Žižek, and Maurizio Lazzarato. They also critically analyze the claims of closer allies – Chantal Mouffe, Oliver Marchart and Yannis Stavrakakis – that populism may take right-wing forms but is equally available to left, emancipatory, another-world-is-possible democratic demands. Going a remarkable step further, Biglieri and Cadahia argue that populism is only left, only radically democratic, only anti-authoritarian, only the final and full realization of equality, liberty, universality, and community. Populism, they argue, is the emancipatory revolutionary theory and practice for our time. Conversely, what pundits call “populism” ought to be called by its true name: fascism.

Only left populism is populism, all other movements in the name of “the people” are fascist – how is such a claim possible? How, especially, can it be developed from a Laclauian formulation of populism in which “the people” is an empty signifier – always rhetorically designated, always a part representing the whole, always brought into being through articulations in every sense of the word? And how does this argument square with the worldwide eruption of what almost everyone calls authoritarian populism? How can these reactionary formations be purged from the populist treasure chest, and how is left populism purged of its persistent flirtation with non-democratic practices, especially given its connection to strong leaders and uncompromising demands?

      The arguments Biglieri and Cadahia develop for this claim depend upon but exceed Laclau’s. For Biglieri and Cadahia, the equivalential relation that Laclau establishes as constitutive of a populist formation is sustained only when equality is achieved through heterogeneity, through embrace rather than expulsion or erasure of differences. They cite Jorge Alemán: “The pueblo is an unstable equivalence constituted by differences that never unify or represent the whole” (2016: 21). The people, they insist, is brought into being not through unification or homogenized difference but only through antagonism to the elite or dominant power. If heterogeneity is constitutive of a populist formation, then only by sustaining it does populism remain populism; only by sustaining it does “the people” remain an emancipatory formulation that insists on equality and justice for all.

Right-wing popular formations, by contrast, suppress difference to make and assert the “one people.” Right-wing formations make identity and equality dependent on suppression of difference internally, and exclusion of difference externally (38). Here drawing on Bataille, Biglieri and Cadahia insist that what distinguishes populism from right-wing popular movements is the latter’s fantasy of the homogeneity that signifies both “the commensurability of elements and [political] awareness of this commensurability” (39). Commensurability of elements and the unity and oneness it achieves depend on identifying equality with sameness and inequality with difference. Because it “involves the violence of trying to dissolve the play of difference–equivalence into a broader identity … a self-transparent people,” it is an essentially repressive and violent formulation and formation (39). To return to Laclau’s terms, the commensurability of elements, and the equality and unity staged through this commensurability, is fundamentally at odds with the equivalential logic or premise of populism. The right-wing “fantasy of the one-people that contains the longing for a life without problems or antagonisms within the tranquility of a homogeneous social space” cannot tolerate the “constitutive differences of the articulatory logic of populism” (39). Then, Biglieri and Cadahia wonder, “should we continue to call it populism, especially when the classic term ‘fascism’ exists?” (39). Their answer is definitive. What the pundits call authoritarian populism is no populism at all.

      Having ripped away populism from right-wing popular formations, two projects remain. One is to unthread populism from its potential solicitude toward, and imbrication with, neoliberalism, nationalism, authoritarian leadership, state centrism, anti-institutionalism, and naturalism. The other is to connect populism decisively to socialism, feminism, radical democracy, popular sovereignty, international solidarity, ethics, and a politics of care. This is what Biglieri and Cadahia do across the last five essays of the book.

By now, the reader’s curiosity is piqued – how do they do it? – but also likely suspicious about the grandness, even grandiosity, of the project. It is one thing to redeem populism from ignorant punditry, anxious liberalism, colonial and modernization frames, or condemnations by unreconstructed Marxists. It is another to make populism so righteous, so complete, always landing on the correct square of every contemporary political challenge. Have Biglieri and Cadahia perhaps offered a new political theology, a political form both perfect in itself and inherently insulated from all that might compromise or sully it? If the political domain is open in signification, composition and direction, if it has no historical necessity and is rife with contingency, how and why would or could populist uprisings have such perfection and immunity? If the domain of politics is a realm of contingency, “without guarantees,” open to eruptions and alterations – if empty signifiers like “the people,” “freedom” or “feminism” can chime with many possible meanings – what does it mean to arrest this openness, these slides, with arguments about populism’s inherent ideational logics? Indeed, what does it mean to bring logics to this realm at all? Or to insist on populism’s insulation from dark forces through its logics? How can any political paradigm or formation be secured from imbrications with violence? Or escape the re-significations or inversions produced by genealogical fusions and transmogrifications? How do theoretical stipulations secure an object in a domain that does not submit to them? Or, to shift the register from Foucault and Gramsci to Weber, if the domain of the political is where ends and means have no necessary relation, and where certain political means easily overwhelm or subdue the ends they are adduced to serve, what protects populism against these things?

      In short, have Biglieri and Cadahia not gone too far, over-played the hand they meant to win? Have they not pressed past their compelling redemption of the potential of left populism to insist that populism alone holds the promise of an emancipatory politics in the twenty-first century? Is there, perhaps, a confession of illegitimate desire here? A desire for populism to be not only “the royal road to understanding the political,” as Laclau argued, but the royal road to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in politics … and, hence, beyond the political after all?

Still, we would do well to remember that most political concepts invite something of this kind from their partisans, both inside and outside political theory. Hence the many textual and activist efforts to redeem liberalism from its corruscation by neoliberalism, by right-wing libertarianism or by authoritarians. Or to distinguish democracy from market democracy, social democracy or even liberal democracy. Or to distinguish true communism from its repressive state form, or preserve feminism from its bourgeois or imperialist mode. From the protest chant, “this is what democracy looks like!” to scholarly identification of democracy with anti-populist norms and institutions by Levitsky and Ziblatt, to insistence on democracy’s agonistic nature by Mouffe, and its fugitive nature by Wolin, there is relentless normative stipulation of concepts in political theory and practice. That is what we do with open concepts, with sliding signification, when, as Stuart Hall reminds us,