Regarding the project, even if one accepts the idea that left populism is the lifeline of the left, the version proposed by Mouffe is revealing of a somewhat old conception of democracy and the people, as it leaves little space for participative democracy and people’s say. First, in Mouffe’s vision, democracy is classically representative and mostly vertical, with the dominant figure of the leader. In the case of La France Insoumise, while it is indisputable that Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s talent of populist tribune explains in good part the initial success of the movement, there is little doubt that its rapid decline after the presidential election has been largely facilitated by his bullish personality, and we have to remember that he went as far as declaring to the surprise of even his supporters: “My person is sacred.” The contrast between the quality of the debates inside the party and the intellectual openness of its members, on the one hand, and the simplified messages and dogmatic discourse of the leader, on the other, is striking. It is more than an idiosyncrasy: it derives from the very populist idea of the supreme leader. Second, in Mouffe’s program, the imagined people do not seem to have a voice; it is rather spoken via the leader. People are supposed to be affected emotionally by discourses, images, mobilizations, but they are on the receiving end and not on the emitting side. They are represented rather than representing themselves. Although she cites the Indignados three times in passing and even quotes their “We have a vote but we have no voice,” she does not refer to any such movement when she analyzes the construction of the people. For her, the people is discursively constructed by the leader, it does not seem to construct itself. Significantly, the attitude of the French left parties and trade unions to the mobilization of the gilets jaunes – undoubtedly populist and popular, composed of the working class and low middle-class – has been at the outset prudent, if not reluctant, as protesters were depicted by the government and journalists as Poujadists, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic (Fassin and Defossez 2019). Among the numerous interesting aspects of this almost entirely spontaneous uprising which long refused leaders, two can be retained for our topic. The first lesson is that the France Insoumise has not taken advantage of the situation, dividing its voting intentions by half during the first six months of the mobilization, while both the Rassemblement National and the presidential party have slightly progressed. In sum, no benefit of the populist uprising has accrued for left populism. The second lesson is that on the roundabouts and in the street it seems that attempts at political exploitation, in particular by the far right, have failed, and that, on the contrary, right and left populists often decided to leave aside their ideological differences and to fraternize against their common enemies, which was interestingly deemed to be the state rather than capital. On the ground, the right-left division seemed to ease somewhat. Beyond this particular example, it is essential to acknowledge actual movements and to try to comprehend them – even when they do not fall into the theorists’ categories.
In the critical moment many polities are going through globally, confronted as they are with the rise of right-wing populisms, from the United States to Russia, from Israel to Hungary, from India to Brazil, the idea that left populism could counter this disquieting wave may have a seductive power. This is probably what explains the reception of Chantal Mouffe’s book within some leftist circles. But whereas left populism has had electoral successes in a few Latin American countries, it has encountered profound difficulties in transforming these remarkable victories into sustainable democratic practices, often even facing the opposition of the very organizations and unions which had brought them to power. This is no coincidence. The vertical structure of left populism, its substitution of an imaginary community for the actual people, and its call for nationalism to produce an affective identification underlain by xenophobic subtexts, have generated a form of populism in which the left has lost its soul without gaining a constituency. Of course, one could legitimately argue that the expression “left populism” covers a wide range of political forms, from Sara Wagenknecht’s program for Die Linke, with its dangerous flirtation with nationalism, to Bernie Sanders’s reorientation of the Democratic Party, which would be assimilated to a form of social-democracy in the rest of the world. But it is clear that Mouffe’s view is inspired by the Latin American version of it, which mirrors right-wing populism with its critique of the elite, the rhetorical construction of a people and the overwhelming presence of a líder máximo deaf to the voice of his constituency. Rather than this populism, what the left needs is to refocus on its core principles of social justice and have the courage to defend them.
References
Fassin, Didier & Anne-Claire Defossez. 2019. “An Improbable Movement? Macron’s France and the Rise of the Gilets Jaunes.” New Left Review 115: 77-94.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London/New York: Verso.
Moffitt, Benjamin. 2017. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For A Left Populism. London/New York: Verso.
Mudde, Cas & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
This article was originally published on Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy and is republished with permission.
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Didier Fassin | Radio Free (2020-12-18T07:36:59+00:00) The blind spots of left populism. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/18/the-blind-spots-of-left-populism/
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