Abstract
In order to compare cases of populism in Latin America and the United States, this chapter shows the theoretical and empirical advantages of utilizing Laclau’s discursive model of populism. First of all, insofar as the type of populism found in the United States is both rhetorically charged and principally based on discursive features, a model that treats populism as discourse and pivots around elements such as signifiers and chains of articulated demands is specifically oriented to the object of my analysis. Another advantage of Laclau’s model is its ability to allow for the conception of populism as a universal discursive formation. There are many instances of political phenomena designated as “populist” all around the world and in different time periods. After a review of the literature concerning the US, Latin American, and Western European cases, it will become evident that many theorists construct limited definitions of populism that exclude or discount cases of populism occurring in other regions. The attempt to isolate cases of populism based on region and subsequently tie these cases to historical, economic, and political conditions specific to these regions reveals theoretical problems and empirical inconsistencies and forecloses the possibility of a comparative-historical approach to populism. In order to suggest a comparison between US populism and those of Latin American cases, it is useful to employ Laclau’s ontological model of populist discourse, which provides the abstract discursive components of hegemonic identity formations applicable across cases.
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Notes
- 1.
See “For Populism, A Return to Economic Roots,” John Harwood, New York Times, March 23, 2009, and articles by Michael Kazin and Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, March 30, 2009.
- 2.
I am thinking of Jan Werner-Muller, Cass Mudde, Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Kirk Hawkins, and Takis Pappas, as some of the most recent examples, but there are too many to count and cite.
- 3.
By Laclau’s ontological model of political discourse, I refer to how the linguistic structure of populist discourse and its relationship to the Freudian conception of the unconscious closely mirror the elementary structure of the political. This point I will continue to elucidate and refer back to throughout this book.
- 4.
One should note here that Laclau’s notion of dislocations is heavily rooted in Lacanian theory. The symbolic order that is ruptured by the dislocation or crisis is referred to by Lacan as the “Other” with a big O and what the crisis reveals is the “Real,” that which resists signification or representation in the symbolic order. In this sense, the crisis disrupts the symbolic order insofar as it reveals the objet petit a—that is, the surplus in the object that cannot by codified or represented by language, the lack in the Other . Thus, we have our first ingredient and starting point of any populist discursive formation: the dislocation. But why is the dislocation so jarring? Whence comes our fragile psychological dependency on a stabilized symbolic order to the extent that it must be sutured if torn apart by the Real dislocatory event? Lacan answers this question with the concept of fantasy . The fantasy in strict Lacanian terms is that both sides of the sexual relationship can be symbolically represented, and this is our response to the desire of the Other . But the fact of the matter is that “there is no sexual relationship,” and the symbolic order is never truly stabilized or complete insofar as it is subject to what Lacan (1966/2006) refers to, drawing on Saussure, as the “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (419). Laclau and Žižek are also aware of this lack in the symbolic order, and they translate it as the impossibility of society. Locating society on a discursive level using Wittgenstein’s theory of language games comprising both language and forms of social action, society represents a failed totality in two senses. In the first sense society represents a failed totality insofar as this social/discursive order rests on a principle of unfixity derived from the infinite play of the signifier. In the second sense society is impossible because it is always characterized by an antagonism or rift between social groups.
- 5.
Laclau’s conception of society is heavily influenced by Saussure’s notion of language as a symbolic system, but Saussure’s notion of language as a social product, or langue, is also heavily influenced by Durkheim’s theory of social facts. And Laclau does attempt to bridge the gap to social action, as does Geertz, through Wittgenstein’s conception of language games.
- 6.
I am equating most historical definitions of populism beginning with Germani as “modernization theory,” following characterizations derived from Samuel Huntington’s argument that political and institutional modernization falls behind processes of social modernization . See Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Insofar as Charles Tilly’s view of “mobilization” likewise involves the incorporation of previously marginalized sectors of the population, I would argue that the reigning theory of mobilization is in a certain sense an outgrowth of modernization theory.
- 7.
Some of the movements Taggart refers to as parties that fit within his ideal type of “New Populism” include Haider and The Austrian Freedom Party, the Northern Leagues and Berlusconi’s Forza Italy, the Ticino League and Automobilist Party in Switzerland, the Danish and Norwegian Progress Parties, Sweden’s New Democracy, the Flemish Bloc of Belgium, Le Pen’s French National Front, and the Republicans in Germany. To these we can now add Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands—and beyond Europe, Preston Manning’s Reform Party in Canada and Pauline Hanson’s One National Party in Australia (Canovan 2005). This classification also retrospectively fits political figures such as George Wallace in the United States.
- 8.
For Saussure, the sign is composed of a signifier (sound image) and signified (concept), which the signifier refers to.
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Savage, R. (2018). The Negative Proof of the Discursive Model: Populism as a Conceptual and Empirical Problem. In: Populist Discourse in Venezuela and the United States. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72664-9_2
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