Populism, political organization, and the paradox of popular agency

Abstract

The 2010s may well be remembered as the decade of "populism." On the left, this has entailed a welcome rediscovery of electoral politics-a terrain that had been comfortably monopolized by the neoliberal right and center for a generation. However, despite the palpable enthusiasm generated by some recent electoral victories, and the genuine advances made, it is by now apparent that the story of the past decade is predominantly one of disappointment for the left. Left-populism-from the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn to insurgent parties like Syriza and La France Insoumise -is now mostly an archive of defeat, with only Podemos, newly tamed by its coalition partners, continuing to claim any meaningful hold on power. Even if left populism exceeded the cynical expectations of its centrist critics, it also appears to have failed in providing a durable pathway to transformative change. Today, it is mostly rightpopulists-if one is willing to concede the semantic terrain-who continue to head governments around the globe, and to predictably disastrous effect.As often noted, the recent left-populist tide owes an important intellectual debt to the political thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Numerous parties and movements, including Syriza, Podemos, and La France Insoumise, have cited their work as a direct inspiration (Hancox, 2015). If we wish to understand the prospects and pitfalls of left populism today, it is with their theory that we must grapple. According to Laclau, the central task of radical politics is the construction of a people (Laclau, 2014, p. 139). As Jason Frank observes, this has typically been reduced to the question of popular identity-that is, "who the people are" (Frank, 2017, p. 629). Theorists have less frequently attended to the question of how this construction is to be undertaken: by what practices are the people to be enacted (Grattan, 2016)? In this article, I take up this latter question and offer a critical reassessment of left-populist theory in light of its recent practical shortcomings. As I show, to the extent that Laclau and Mouffe engage the question of popular enactment, they tend to invoke the charismatic leader-a figure uniquely positioned to actualize populism's political "logic"-as its appropriate medium. Though they have never been shy about the importance of leaders to their brand of populist politics (Jäger & Borriello, 2020, p. 743), this feature has not always been emphasized in interpretations of their work. As I show, in locating the power of popular enactment in a representative leader, the theory of left populism tends to neglect the terrain of organization (e.g., the associational bonds that tie a demos together), and this threatens to undermine the project's normative appeal and strategic viability. In response to these issues, I develop a theoretical account of political organization as a practice of people-making, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's foremost intellectual predecessor, Antonio Gramsci. Populism, of course, is a vexed term-an essentia...