Seven Essays on Populism. Paula Biglieri

practices in politically invested political theory, even – and, perhaps, especially – in genres cloaking themselves in analytic objectivity yet deeply invested in liberalism, why deny this cleansing and redemption for populism? Especially if we remember the founding frame of Biglieri and Cadahia’s work – namely, that such a cleansing and redemption of populism is symptomatically refused by all who fear the power of the people, the politics of the people.

      Let us try the question differently then. Readers would be counseled to ask not whether Biglieri and Cadahia’s formulations of populism’s inherently emancipatory force squares with “actually existing populism” (a historical–empirical question), or whether their identification of populism with the Good fully squares with a theory of the political foregrounding absent foundations, contingency and empty or floating signifiers. Rather, let us ask only whether Biglieri and Cadahia, as politically engaged political theorists, have developed a persuasive political theory of populism’s inherent and possible qualities, logics, limits, and potentials.

To answer this question, two others must be posed. Can a political paradigm, form or ideal be defended or protected on the basis of theoretical logics imputed to it? And can the deficiencies or vulnerabilities of political forms, paradigms or ideals be resolved at the level of theory? The first queries both whether such logics exist at all – whether, indeed, political forms have logics once they are on the ground of the real, rather than the theoretical – and whether political life unfolds in accord with them. The second queries whether political theory, notwithstanding its power to illuminate both the deficiencies and potentials of political life, nonetheless remains distinct from the living topos that it maps. This is not a retort to radical ideals by realpolitik – the latter, too, perpetuates a myth about transhistorical political logics. Rather, the problem is one articulated by Max Weber in his challenge to adopting conventional ethics for political life – whether those bound to particular convictions such as Christian virtue or non-violence, or to a particular end state, such as socialism or neoliberalism. For Weber, the problem with both “an ethic of conviction” and “an ethic of absolute ends” is that they ignore the distinctive ethical irrationality of the political realm. By this he does not mean that the realm is inherently immoral, but that actions motivated by one set of intentions potentially unleash effects at odds with those intentions, and may even violate them. Principles and paradigms of the Good, once they have entered political life, do not stay with their authorial intentions; politics is a theatre in which motivations are not decisive and have no ethical relationship to effects. For Weber, this does not mean jettisoning ethics but developing an ethical orientation appropriate to a sphere constituted by action, power and contingency, and shadowed continuously by the potential effects of violence. He identifies this orientation as “an ethic of responsibility.” Attempting an ethical orientation in political life means being responsible for the effects of one’s actions in a contingent, unpredictable sphere – not treating unintended consequences as external to one’s ethics. This is as true of individuals as it is of projects: neither can rest on purity of motives or adherence to the theoretical premises or logics. One cannot say: “Because my motivation is emancipation, and I have theoretically purified populism of all non-emancipatory elements, then anti-democratic, authoritarian, nationalist or other chauvinistic elements are no part of the populism I affirm and help create.” Theory and the logics it articulates can never clean the hands of actors or pave the course of actual events in political life.

      Foucault approaches this problem a bit differently when discussing the absence of a distinctive governmental rationality in socialism, and the tendency to look to a “text” for the answer to this absence:

[I]f we are so strongly inclined to put to socialism this indiscreet question of truth that we never address to liberalism – “Are you true or are you false?” – it is precisely because socialism lacks an intrinsic governmental rationality, and because it replaces this essential, and still not overcome [absence of] an internal governmental rationality, with the relationship of conformity to a text. The relationship of conformity to a text, or to a series of texts, is charged with concealing this absence of governmental rationality. A way of reading and interpreting is advanced that must found socialism and indicate the very limits and possibilities of its potential action, whereas what it really needs is to define for itself its way of doing things and its way of governing. I think the importance of the text in socialism is commensurate with the lacuna constituted by the absence of a socialist art of government. (2010: 93–4)

      Beyond the specific problematic of socialism, it seems to me, Foucault here offers a warning against seeking a theoretical substitute for the “arts of government,” the form of governing reason and specific instruments of power, that are part of any regime. Whether borrowed or sui generis, they will be employed and deployed. This problem, especially the effort to discover theoretical or textual substitutions for rationalities and techniques of governing, bears differently on political populism as a political form than it does on socialism as an economic one, but it is no less significant for this difference.

      We of the meaning-making and theory-building species also generate world-making forces (religious, cultural, economic, social, political, technological) that escape our grasp and steering capacity. The combination yields a persistent temptation to attempt re-mastery of these forces with our intellects. Political theorists are especially vulnerable to trying to conquer with theory the elements of action, violence, rhetoric, staging, and contingency constitutive of the political. This conceit afflicts formal modelers, analytic philosophers, and left theorists alike. We persistently confuse theoretical entailments for political logics, political logics for political truths, and political truths for politics tout court. How might we escape this room of distorting mirrors while persisting in the intellectual work of theorizing political life?

These large questions do not answer whether Biglieri and Cadahia have offered a persuasive account of populism. They do query whether their brilliant defense of populism rests on theoretical moves that illuminate political life yet are not identical with it. I write this at a time of two ground-shifting popular movements in the United States: one brought Donald Trump to power in 2016, and continues to support his neo-fascist “leadership” along with licensing political and social expressions of every kind of supremacism: patriarchal, white, heterosexual, nativist (but not Native), nationalist, and wealth-based. The other, ignited by the George Floyd chapter in the long American history of anti-black policing, vigilantism, and incarceration, has generated sustained anti-racist protests across America and the world. As they demand racial justice, and attack existing institutions for failing to yield it, these protests express the metamorphosis of a social antagonism into a political formation, one in which the People oppose the Power, which Biglieri and Cadahia identify with populism. Broadening well beyond those immediately affected, the uprisings have brought nearly every sector in every region of America to the streets, and may have dealt the final blow to the Trump regime. They embody the transformative possibilities of popular resistance and long-term as well as spontaneous organizing, and they are igniting a new political imaginary, one in which entrenched injustices of the status quo spur rather than limit the making of a radically different future.

Notes

      1  1 www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-populist-challenge-to-liberal-democracy.

      2  2 “How Does Populism Turn Authoritarian? Venezuela Is a Case in Point”: www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/americas/venezuela-populism-authoritarianism.html, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/venezuela-populism-fail/525321.

      3  3 See Stephan Hahn, summarizing William Galston’s view, in “The Populist Specter,” The Nation, January 28 – February 4, 2019: www.thenation.com/article/archive/mounk-galston-deneen-eichengreen-the-populist-specter.

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