Seven Essays on Populism. Paula Biglieri

4 “Militant” is an important part of Biglieri and Cadahia’s political theoretical vocabulary. The term translates awkwardly into English, especially American English, where it signifies dogmatic and aggressive and hardened political views and a tendency toward extreme, sometimes violent, actions. By contrast, in French, Spanish, and Italian, its meaning is closer to political engagement as part of a cause, or what Biglieri and Cadahia call collective belonging. In fact, they insist, an emancipatory populist militant has precisely to be non-dogmatic. It would be, they wrote in an email to me, “someone who escapes dogmatism, someone who defends some principles and belongs to a collective formation or organization but, at the same time, is never fully captured by those principles, collective formation and organization. That is to say, someone who is always open to the new, to the critique, to the event.”

      5  5 Occupy, it is important to remember, began as a protest against Citizens United, the 2011 Supreme Court decision delivering the coup de grâce to electoral democracy by lifting restrictions on corporate financing of campaigns.

Introduction

The book that the reader has in their hands does not aim to be a handbook offering basic and definitive definitions of populism and politics. Nor does it claim to be an academic book in the standard sense of the term, since it does not attempt to reinforce the imaginaries of objectivity or value-neutrality associated with academic work. In contrast to these two attitudes, this book is an avowedly militant one in which we embrace our political position as a way of taking responsibility for our own subjective involvement. Moreover, we believe that the crux of honesty and rigor in intellectual work lies precisely here: in being explicit about our locus of enunciation and putting it to the test. If we engage in this provocative gesture to foster debate around a term, especially one as controversial as populism, it is because we have something to say. And what we say comes from our experiences as women, as academics, as Latin Americans, and as political militants traversed by the various antagonisms that, between populism and neoliberalism, have emerged and continue to exist in our region. However, and despite the specific position from which we speak, we do not intend to produce a knowledge that is merely particular, as if our double condition as women and as Latin American means that we can only speak to local and specific problems. Very much to the contrary, our commitment is to attempt to grasp what is universalizable – in the sense of a situated universalism – in the problems, challenges, and responses offered by a locus of enunciation like Latin America within the emancipatory production of knowledge in the Global South and Global North. We are convinced that epistemic decolonization also involves understanding that local problems demand global solutions through the construction of egalitarian academic spaces for debating transformative ideas.

That said, it is worth noting that, when we began to work on populism, the political context in Latin America was broadly favorable to anti-neoliberal, egalitarian, and inclusive discourses geared toward the expansion of rights. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) in Portugal had also been reinvented; experiences like those of SYRIZA, Podemos, and La France Insoumise were born; and a curious popular liberalism had been reactivated in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who were fighting for plebeian and egalitarian alternatives in Europe and North America. But since then, and as our research on populism moved forward, the political situation took a major step backward. The ebb of populist experiences in Latin America brought with it the rise of neoliberal governments that not only sought virulently to disarm the egalitarian accomplishments of populism, but also targeted the fundamental premises of the rule of law and democratic coexistence. Latin America has become a political laboratory for testing out different forms of post-democratic life for the capitalism of the future. This translates into disarming our institutional structure through the irresponsible acquisition of foreign debt to the International Monetary Fund or private investment funds, the acceleration of paradoxically democratic soft coups,¹ the judicial persecution and imprisonment of popular leaders through rigged proceedings, political experiments based on dehistoricization, new age philosophies, and social coaching, and the alarming rise in the systematic murder of social activists. Regarding soft coups, it is worth highlighting the recent coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia during the most recent presidential elections in 2019, and the institutional coup perpetrated against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The latter strategy was accompanied by the imprisonment of Lula Da Silva through a corrupt judicial proceeding, and the murder of feminist and lesbian social leader and Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle Franco – all amplified by the electoral victory that brought an overtly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic leader such as Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. But we should also mention the opacity of the judicial proceedings that led to the imprisonment of indigenous social leader Milagro Sala in the Jujuy Province of Argentina in 2016, and the systematic persecution of figures such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and Rafael Correa in Ecuador as soon as their presidential terms had ended.² However, this judicialization and criminalization of politics has also crossed the border to countries not considered populist. We could point to the reactivation of far-right and guerrilla positions in Colombia – bordering an exhausted Venezuela – through the rejection of the peace referendum; the election of far-right leader Iván Duque; the resumption of the murder of social movement leaders; the judicial persecution of popular political leaders such as Gustavo Petro, Francia Márquez, and Ángela María Robledo; and the rearmament of guerrillas, faced with a lack of protection and the murder of demobilized ex-guerrillas.³

Winds have also shifted in Europe. At the same time that SYRIZA, Podemos, and La France Insoumise showed their limitations and came up against difficulties beginning in 2018, xenophobic and racist discourses were on the rise. Thus, strong electoral performances by the likes of Marine Le Pen in France in 2017 and governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey were joined by Matteo Salvini in Italy and the emergence of the Vox party in Spain. All of these represent agendas seeking, on the one hand, to roll back the collective accomplishments of feminism, of black, indigenous, and LGBTI+ communities and, on the other, to uphold traditional values like the family, property, and the irresponsible exploitation of nature. To this, we must also add Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and his resolute determination to embrace this same agenda, to once again intervene in Latin American politics, to humiliate the European Union, and to declare a trade war on China. Although these examples do not exhaust the ways in which various reactionary or borderline reactionary positions have gained ground globally, they serve to illustrate the context in which our work and our theoretical–political concerns have unfolded. In any case, and in parallel to these advances by the right, we have also seen the victory of Alberto Fernández in Argentina; the reactivation of the progressive wing of the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador; the persistence of Humane Colombia’s pact for life, peace, and the environment; the consolidation of women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Francia Márquez in Colombia; the silent success of the Portuguese government and the pact between Podemos and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in Europe; the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; and the regional consolidation of a powerful popular feminist movement known as Not One Less.

Now, the current global scenario that we just described demands that we take up a series of questions not contemplated in classical debates on populist theory. We refer to debates on the opposition between left-wing and right-wing populisms and their relationship with neo-fascism, the emancipatory nature (or lack thereof) of populist projects, their ability to provide a true and lasting alternative to neoliberalism, the link between populism and institutions from the perspective of a popular and emancipatory state, the intersection between populism and plebeian republicanism, the potential for international populist solidarity, and, above all, the need for a fruitful dialogue between populism and popular feminist movements that are confronting patriarchal forms of power, property, and collective sacrifice. Toward this end, we found it much more suggestive to write seven theses on populism – each addressing a specific problem or position – rather than attempting to establish a unified and free-standing corpus. So the reader is not obligated to follow a specific reading order but can instead approach each of the theses independently, according to a web of concrete problems in each case. This is, therefore, an open book,