Democracy's Paradox: Populism and its Contemporary Crisis 9781789201567

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Democracy’s Paradox

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day

Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist Volume 13 War, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Koen Stroeken Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Uprisings, Powers, Interventions Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen Volume 15 THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO Imaginaries of Freedom and Control Edited by Alessandro Zagato Volume 16 moral anthropology A Critique Edited by Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold Volume 17 THE GLOBAL LIFE OF AUSTERITY Comparing Beyond Europe Edited by Theodoros Rakopolous Volume 18 DEMOCRACY’S PARADOX Populism and its Contemporary Crisis Edited by Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Democracy’s Paradox Populism and its Contemporary Crisis

( Edited by

Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, editor. | Kapferer, Bruce, editor. Title: Democracy's paradox : populism and its contemporary crisis / edited by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos and Bruce Kapferer. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Critical interventions : a forum for social analysis ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018061287 (print) | LCCN 2018061741 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201567 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201550 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Populism—Western countries. | Democracy— Western countries. | Political anthropology—Western countries. | Western countries—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC JC423 (ebook) | LCC JC423.D441527 2019 (print) | DDC 320.56/62—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061287 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78920-155-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-78920-156-7 ebook

Contents Introduction Populism and its Paradox Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos 1 From ‘the People’ to ‘the Citizens’: The Possibilities and Limitations of Populist Discourse in Argentina Victoria Goddard 35 The Brazilian Crisis and the Ghosts of Populism John Gledhill 55 Lurching Between Consensus and Chaos: Shades of Populism in Australian Indigenous Affairs Melinda Hinkson and Jon Altman 74 Populism’s Claims: The Struggle Between Privilege and Equality Susana Narotzky 97 How Populism Works Michael Herzfeld 122

Introduction Populism and its Paradox

( Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Populism is a matter of major concern at this historical juncture. Often associated with rightist and virtually fascistic extremist possibility, populism augurs for many commentators an anti-democratic politics, which harks back to the recent past of nationalist, frequently racist, exclusionism (and other manifold prejudices). Much of the liberal critique of the extremism of populism is premised on an idealist conception of democratic orders. It obscures what Karl Marx recognised as the role of democratic ideology in the shoring up of class power, an aspect which many kinds of populist movements reveal (if often in a manner negating the aims that have initiated their inspiration). Liberal critiques leave unacknowledged the complicity of the dominant political system in reproducing new transmutations of populism, treating the latter as uncontaminated by hegemony. We stress in this volume that populism has been integral to democratic processes since time immemorial (perhaps in one guise or another in most political orders, not least dictatorships). It is a vital dimension of the political history of Western democracies. Jacques Ranciere (2007) has described democracy (and the populism that he sees as integral to it) as the emergence of the political in its most complete form. From this point of view, populism

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can be seen as a logical component of the political, as Ernesto Laclau (2005) has previously asserted. Our discussion here will address certain aspects of this proposition leading into a consideration of the paradoxes in the democratic-political, which populism and the discourses surrounding it expose. The focus in this volume is largely on the contemporary manifestations of populism in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and mainly in political systems of representative democracy. Populism, of course, is a phenomenon that is apparent worldwide and in situations that are far from politically democratic in the mainly western ideological sense upon which the essays here concentrate. We emphasise that what is widely regarded as populism is shaped by the form and ideological (cultural) configurations of the socio-political orders and processes within which it emerges. In other words, populism is historically and socio-culturally relative although, as we will discuss, there are underlying commonalities. Populism is difficult to define (see Goddard this volume), such difficulty probably being phenomenologically intrinsic to it. Populism, we hazard, is a political movement usually impelled within ideological contexts where democratic value, frequently egalitarian in spirit, is an ideal if not a reality. A widespread feature, often in the early stages of populism, is that it breaks with controlling or dominant socio-political orders attracting an almost cultic following usually focussed on charismatic leaders. Populism typically operates at the margins of or outside accepted organizations of the political and their ideological rationalities. Such is exacerbated by the cultic quality of much populism (in effect, a key organizational and unifying dynamic) and the fact that populism, by definition, appeals to values held by those who are ordinarily marginal to, oppressed by, or otherwise reduced or silenced in political agency. Anthropologists might note that populism, especially of the current historical moment, has some affinity with



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cargo cults, millenarian and revitalization movements (see Cohn 1970; Worsley 1957).1 It is significant that these movements occurred at times of crisis in socio-cultural orders that accompanied, for instance, the dispossessions of colonial and imperial conquest in ancient or modern realities, or in the expanding inequalities and social restructurings associated with the emergence of capitalism and establishment of bourgeois orders. Contemporary populism, which increasingly appears to be global, can be conceived as occurring at a major point of historical crisis and socio-cultural redirection. We contend that its current expressions, while historically and situationally specific, are driven within a potentially major moment of transition and transformation in global political and economic circumstances. In certain respects, populism might also be considered an agency within such processes—a sort of transformative impetus (see Laclau 2005, Comarroff 2011)—an important force in furthering dimensions of the changes, which have given rise to it. The current emergence of populist movements is entangled with transformations in capitalism that have major global effects. Class contradictions have reached what seem to be an explosively critical point excited in the western hemisphere, especially by the reconfigurations of post-industrialism. This is manifest in the redefinitions and realignments of class relations (including an expansion of what may be regarded as the outclasses, driven, among other things, by chronic unemployment affecting the working and increasingly the middle class). Much of this is effected by neoliberal policies, but perhaps more exactly described in the globalising dynamics of corporatism where the erstwhile potency of sovereign nation-states is being eroded whereby the economic has achieved dominance over the political (see Kapferer and Gold 2018; Kapferer 2018). Key factors in these processes are the technological advances attendant on digitalisation, which might be having historically transformational

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consequences that rival the dramatic changes that occurred in Europe following the printing press (the Gutenberg Revolution)—changes which reconfigured the architectures of power leading to modernity and the rise and invention of the ‘West’. These were times of ontical if not ontological import, but current times may prove of far greater global significance, and perhaps ontologically so, as a number of ideologues (specifically with regard to new technologies) are intimating (Kurzweil 2006; Harari 2017). The technological circumstances of contemporary realities are potentially creating a revolution in the nature of human consciousness and how human beings come to perceive themselves, their relations and the contexts and environment of their action. Contemporary populism finds its configuration within such a process. Its force and its very parameters may gain distinction in the new materialities created through technology. Furthermore, current populism, in its myriad dimensions, can be conceived as an index of the dislocations, reformations, and manifold uncertainties in the circumstances of social and political existence currently taking place that, moreover, mark both a continuity and a discontinuity with the populisms of the past. The remainder of this essay will be directed to outlining further some of the features of contemporary populism. We focus particularly on the paradoxes contained in the rhetoric of its practice. Discussions of populism overwhelmingly concentrate on its reactionary and potentially totalitarian extremism. This is frequently the fact of the matter and is the concern of the essays presented in this volume. Populism as we discuss it is broadly democratic in impetus, it is the voice of the demos so often suppressed or silenced, yet its potential is the subversion of the ideals and values that may give it succour. The circumstances that may give rise to this in contemporary realities comprise our chief concern here.



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Populism, Democracy and Its Subversion Populism is a concept riddled with contradictions. It lies outside or at the margins of accepted or established political ideologies and institutions. The label, populism, is not in the same ideological register as, for example, anarchism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism and so on. As a non-autonomous and co-dependent ideological system (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017), populism emerges in socialist, but also ultra-rightist variations, crosscutting and complicating political identifications, challenging and reconfiguring power, before it eventually reaffirms it. Obviously, not all contemporary populism is ultimately anti-democratic in its extremism. Some of it, of course, is expressly liberating, for example, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Populism mobilises (or represents) new assemblages of class or ethnic relations, for example, that do not always neatly fit into conventional, established visions of a traditional left/right kind (and the social relations that underpin their appeal). This makes hasty cross-cultural comparisons seem dubious and generalising, for the appeal of populism is deeply rooted in local meaningfulness and context-­specific historical consciousness. In other words, populism relies on pre-existing theories of accountability: it curves reformulations of recycled interpretative trajectories—or political theodicies (Herzfeld 1992)—reconfiguring the relationship of ideas about justice, privilege, belonging and citizenship—but also, about well-being (Narotzky and Besnier 2014), and what is ‘moral’ and ‘good’ in a given society (Fassin 2011; Kapferer and Gold 2018; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010; Robbins 2013). In its reliance on local meaning, populism addresses a wide spectrum of anthropological concerns (not least, its oft millennialism as already indicated).2

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Populism captures the public imaginary in certain ways similar to that which Benedict Anderson classically discussed in his study Imagined Communities (1983) regarding nationalism—an imaginary whose popular effect has been unmatched by competitive models of political ideology and practice. Contemporary populism indeed has other, often quite explicit, overlaps with nationalism and evokes a similar rhetorical mass appeal, communion of experience and emotional unity overriding the diversities of different cultural and political economically situated circumstances. Perhaps all this is even greater in varieties of populism that are currently being expressed in which the egalitarian individualism at the root of so much nationalism in the west and the post-colonies (see Dumont 1994; Kapferer 1988) has intensified, manifesting as a modality of “dividualism” (see Marriott 1976, Strathern 1988) and expressed to some extent in identity politics. The populism of today resonates to some extent with the kind of potent energy present in the French Revolution, in which the national and revolutionary pride of the People, Le Peuple—a reified imagined community—was harnessed to the transformational work of the Napoleonic state. Nationalism in Europe and later in imperialised colonial territories was vital to the formation of new political orders, extolling sentiments of freedom from erstwhile chains of elite and often foreign control. As such, nationalism emerged as a populist event that heralded the start of the democratic age of Western modernity: the pressure towards democracy as the legitimation of political authority, a telos in a self-propagating linear hierarchy. We note here, that Anderson (1983) in his discussion of nationalism made great play of the concept of print capitalism. The populism of the current moment is very much influenced by visual media (see also, Moffitt 2016: 88–94) and has benefited from the media’s failure to control misinformation (Freedman 2018). It is a populism intensified in its digitalisation. This enables a far greater mass outreach



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than that of print and more direct appeal to the demos (it bypasses, for example, the differentiation and hierarchy of education). Digitalisation facilitates an individualisation, a personalisation, even intrusion into the very self of individuals—the mobile phone, the institutionalisation of the selfie—while facilitating a collectivising effect, a unity of experience (despite the differentiated individuated nature of such experience). If print capitalism was vital in the nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the digitalisation of information (legible and visual), and its capacity to reach almost anywhere and everyone, is a critical driver of contemporary populism. Indeed, cyberspace as a contemporary arena for the expression of populist sentiments is a facilitator for movements of populism outside the orders of control of the recent past.

The Anti-Democratic Paradox The populism of the present historical conjuncture, broadly recognised as such, is extensively condemned for its anti-democratic tension. Its paradox derives from the fact that in many aspects it is the spirit of the demos working against the socio-political hierarchies within which it is routinely submerged and controlled. As Jacques Ranciere (2007) and others stress (see Laclau 2005; Kapferer 2017; Stavrakakis 2014) populism displays what is at the root of democracy and expresses the potency of the demos. Its force is most intense at that prime democratic moment, at the time of democratic political elections—ideally the expression of free, uncoerced, individual decision, in which all—regardless of power, status, wealth—are placed in equal relation. It is at this time that the democratic system is, it could be said, democratically reborn, but simultaneously put at high risk. Populism, as it is generally grasped, is looked at with suspicion, we suggest, because it is highly vulnerable

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to forces that are potentially opposed to the system of democracy. The distinction of populism, and perhaps its singular distinguishing feature, is that it emerges largely from the outside of the instituted democratic system (or its margins) with the exception of the fundamental act of democracy at the election moment. This is underscored by the fact that those socio-political movements described to be populist are radically antagonistic to the political system in which they are spawned. The leaders of such movements often are rules unto themselves: they defy the constraints of the political parties and even social groups to which they may have been associated. The populist leader is frequently typified as a person external to or in some way marginal to the socio-political order and its ruling groups. The charisma with which he is invested often derives from this fact. Moreover, the populist leader has many of the characteristics of a symbolic type (see Handelman 1980; Handelman and Kapferer 1980; Kapferer 1983; Klapp 1968) in that by means of performative style the populist demagogue achieves the heightened capacity of being able to tie together a heterogeneity of situated experience, opinion, that from various standpoints might otherwise appear contradictory. Symbolic types are generally internally contradictory— ritual clowns as Don Handelman demonstrates (see too Kapferer 1983); their performative play of contradiction in gesture and word, their vital dynamic for the ordering of the contexts whose diversity achieves a coherence or semblance of unity through the dynamic of contradiction. We suggest that populist demagogues have this ritual dynamic. Donald Trump epitomises it, as in a different way does Boris Johnson’s ongoing populist buffoonery in the UK context of Brexit. Undoubtedly figures like Trump, and perhaps Johnson, gain added force in a contemporary media driven world where performance style has what J.L. Austin might note as enhanced constitutive performative force.



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In rhetoric and in the style of political performance the populist leader—as a stereotypical caricature—is frequently an outsider and invested with charisma as an outsider: who in rhetoric and performance style crosses the boundaries of the system, can mould to any situation and embody its sentiments, capture and bring into some semblance of unity the diversities of experience that the democratic system as instituted does not meet or in itself appear to contradict. This was a potency that Trump was able to develop, harness and express. It is a potency that he shares with many other ostensibly populist leaders from ancient times to the present, apparent in such figures as Alcibiades and the Gracchi, through to this day. In the historical tradition of the US, the forces of populism have been long in play—perhaps fomented in the radical egalitarian individualism of its political formation as Alexis de Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America. Much of the paradox of populism—its potential for the subversion of democratic systems and its reliance upon the very system it attempts to subvert—lies in its typical development outside the system (including such aspects as instituted political parties), and in its loose organisation usually around a charismatic leader. We should underline that charisma, in Weberian terms, is given to the leader by the audience, rather than already being psychologically given to the leader. From its marginal position, populism, in its very dynamic building, coalesces sentiments that are antagonistic to the socio-political order of the democratic system as it has historically developed. Inherently oppositional to the system, it is open to being the ground for the emergence of anti-democratic forces—especially right wing extremism. The further anti-democratic paradox and potential is in the nature of its leadership. A populist leader is likely to tend to autocracy and to an aggrandisement of the self, so that he/she/they becomes the social movement, its icon. Here is the root of dictatorship emergent from the

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ground of democracy that, furthermore, is already oriented against the democratic system in relation to which it becomes defined. Thus, we see the formation of fascism, especially Nazism, in the recent past and perhaps the totalitarian possibility of some right wing populism at the present (cf. Mudde 2007; Stavrakakis et al 2017b). What is more fascinating to note, however, is the longestablished ability of populism to move from the margins of the political establishment to its very core—a further facet of the paradox inherent in populism. In fact, most populist movements achieve political legitimisation over time through association with the political systems they have previously defied. Two years after its electoral success, Brexit populism has become embedded in UK state policies and government; it is now hard to separate populist political expediencies from action taken to ameliorate the consequences of Britain’s EU exit. In the past, successful left-leaning populist movements, such as those led by Andreas Papandreou in Greece, or Eva Perón in Argentina, acquired, in time, systemic political resonances and generated their own (non-strictly-populist) political elites. As with most resistance movements, populist confrontations with conventional politics are not decontaminated from power (Gledhill 1994, 2012; Ortner 1995; Theodossopoulos 2015). In fact, the ease and speed with which victorious populist movements become integrated in dominant political structures substantiates our initial statement: that populism, despite its ephemeral marginality, is integral to dominant, Western visions of democracy.

The People of Populism The idea of ‘the people’ in populism is problematic. It is a totalising all-incorporating concept which is simultaneously open to divisive, sectionalising and exclusivist use. ‘The people’, Giorgio Agamben (1998) argues, is open



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to all-encompassing, as well as discriminating exclusivist usage. His approach introduces a contrast—or better, an oscillating movement—between a vision of inclusive political existence (the People with a capital P) and vulnerability (the people with a lower-case p, the excluded, those seen by power-holders as the poor and the needy). There are infinite possibilities for conceptualising the people. For ‘the people’—in singular form—does not really exist, as Rancière (2016) maintains: there are only figures of the people, reconfigured by privileging different criteria. Which prompts us to argue that the notion of ‘the people’, as reconstituted by populism, is a totalising (all-encompassing)—yet flexible and porous—category: a singularity within which heterogeneity is absorbed and anonymised. Despite its heavy reliance on pre-existing variants of national consciousness, the idea of ‘the people’ in populism transcends the state to adopt a potentially revisionist position from the outside. ‘The people’, in populist rhetoric, is morally endowed to question state authority (during an electoral campaign), and pliable enough to engulf state power (after electoral success) or de-potentiate it. In its manipulable flexibility, the idea of the people is remarkably hollow, an observation that has some parallel with classic anthropological theories of ethnicity; for example, Clyde Mitchell’s (1956) discussion of categorical relations on the Zambian Copperbelt, and later, Edwin Ardener’s (1989) work, on hollow categories. In these analyses, categories of ethnic identity3 are fluid, open to shift in content and relative to context.4 The idea of the People (operating in a manner similar to the categorical relations that both Mitchell and Ardener discuss) is open to the incorporation of diverse and continually changing meaning. A crucial feature of the concept ‘the People’ is that in most usage it is a flat, effectively egalitarian term. This was its sense (le Peuple) in the French Revolution and

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persists in ideological usage. It refers to the body of the mass as an all-encompassing category assumed to be or presented as being united in agreement. The idea of the People has much similarity with the imagined community of the nation in Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nationalism, evocative of similar and perhaps greater evocative power than that of the nation (it has de-territorialising and re-territorialising potential in a Deleuzian sense). Trump and the Brexiteers redoubled the potency of their populist appeal as an instrument for nationalistic re-territorialisation. What is important to note here is that ideas about the people—as much as ethnic categories—are constructed by both insiders and (more or less privileged) outsiders. For example, the ascription of the label ‘populist’ is rarely a choice of the populists themselves (see Canovan 1981; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017: 2)—and it is often used pejoratively to marginalise (Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis et al 2017a). In most cases, populism is ascribed to categories of people, without the people’s consent. As a discriminating label, the adjective ‘populist’ reveals more about the prejudice of its author, than the qualities of its intended target: populism, the label, operates in a world of hierarchies. Inequality seems to be antecedent, as much as the awareness of inequality. Without awareness of inequality, there would be no populist dynamic, no people upon which to found populist movements—or, in Laclau’s terms, no demands generating equivalent chains. Political awareness is fundamental for the constitution of the people in populism; which provides us with another reminder that the people of populism are not blind, passive and mindless automatons. Here we see scope for optimistic reflections, such as that populism does not have to be—as it has been mostly so far—a pejorative label ascribed by Others; for example, those who exclude themselves from ‘the people’ (with a lower case p, in



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Agamben’s terms). Chantal Mouffe has recently made the empowering proposition that our ideas of the people can be actively and consciously reconstituted to support progressive versions of populism—oriented towards the ‘defence of equality and social justice’—in contradistinction to right wing and xenophobic variants (Mouffe 2016a: 2, 2016b, 2018). Such forward looking and empowering visions, we would like to add, come with the realisation that every categorical inclusion—however benign—draws yet another boundary of exclusion. The critical issue for every critical analysis of populism remains: who is the ultimate author of the notion of the people? And to what degree do ‘the people’ participate in it?

Populism and Anthropology The limited participation of anthropology in wider interdisciplinary discussions about populism has been noticeable, especially given anthropology’s major concern in recent years with the marginalised and oppressed: a direction that took form in the 1960s especially in reaction to what many had seen as its colonial complicity. Patterns of resistance such as the upsurge of dominated populations against controlling authoritarian external power— colonialism and imperialism particularly, anti-witchcraft movements, cargo cults, and so on—which we consider have some affinity to contemporary populism, suggest the potential of an anthropological understanding. Anthropologists were influential in an early discussion of populism held at LSE in 1967. Ernest Gellner edited the book that came out of this meeting—Populism: its meanings and national characteristics (Ionescu and Gellner 1969)—which had a wider interdisciplinary impact. The leading anthropological voice in that volume was Peter Worsley (1969) who, interestingly, had made a major contribution to the understanding of Melanesian

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cargo cults as anti-colonial resistance. He advocated a comparative and depathologising approach contra to that which commanded opinion and which in many ways still does. Instead of trying to demarcate populism’s ideological content—which is variable—Worsley conceptualised populism as ‘a dimension of political culture’, manifested distinctly in different geopolitical and cultural contexts (1969: 245). This proposition encouraged a departure from defining populism in terms of substantive and unchanging organisational characteristics (Goddard, this volume)—a direction that was liberating for the interdisciplinary scholarship on populism (Moffitt 2016: 15). Worsley’s recognition of populism’s weak ideological content is still evident—although greatly unacknowledged—in contemporary approaches followed by political theorists, such as, for example, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2017) emphasis on the thin ideological constitution of populism, which is representative of a widely accepted definition of populism in political science (Stavrakakis and Jager 2017). The influence of Worsley’s insights have been most evident in the seminal study of Laclau (2005), whose work generally asked for a revision of classical Marxist approaches that were over-determined (in his opinion) by the specific historical experience of the industrial north of England. Laclau (1979, 2005) stressed the significance of different histories and ideologies (or cultural factors) in the formation of populist politics opening towards a more historical and culturally inflected understanding of class dynamics. Laclau, as a political theorist, was an advocate of (at least) three kinds of approach that can be described as anthropological: (1) the rejection of the ethical denigration of populism as representative of an inferior mentality; (2) the recognition of populism as a constant dimension of political life, not merely a secondary—‘clumsy’, somewhat unorthodox—type of politics; and (3) the impossibility of defining populism in terms of static, universal characteristics. This



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last point, which we trace directly to Worsley (1969), substantiated Laclau’s (2005) turn towards the ‘context’ of populist reason, as opposed to its ontic ‘content’. There were many years until we saw comparative anthropological work focusing on populism explicitly as a main theoretical theme—although admittedly anthropologists kept on returning to populism in the context of nuanced accounts of the phenomenon in specific regions. In Latin America, for example, attention was given to the generation and erosion of national-popular visions and their influence on identity politics (Hale 1997) or the relationship of indigenous groups with the state through national allegiances and populist-indigenismo (de la Peña 1992, 2005). John Gledhill (1994) has underlined the uneasy populist combination of middle class leadership and working class representation from below, expanding his comparative analysis—one of the few that recognises populism as an important concept for anthropological analysis—from Latin American to Africa. Gledhill’s perspective indicates that there is no single comprehensive model for explaining class contradictions in populism, which, in turn, accentuates the value of historically informed anthropological engagements (see Gledhill and Goddard contributions to this volume). The anthropology of India has provided us with additional (and culturally embedded) reflections on populism (see Banerjee 2014; Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Hansen 1999). Populism here, is once more considered within broader discussions, but with a frequency that competes with Latin America and Europe. During the last decade we have seen increased anthropological interest in European populism. This is partly inspired by new manifestations of the extreme right and fascism in Europe more broadly, which anthropologists have tried to tackle with their usual attention to contextual complexity (see for example, Gingrich and Banks 2006; Holmes 2000). In a volume which explicitly

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addresses populism, Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai (2011) pay systematic and comparative attention to local disenfranchisement and discontent with national elites and transnational neoliberalism. The ethnography-rich accounts in that volume shed light on hidden histories of dispossession, unemployment, and class alienation (see Vetta 2011; Halmai 2011; Petrovici 2011), resonating with a broader anthropological refocusing on subaltern resentment towards global cosmopolitics in the first decade of the new millennium (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou 2010). Another distinguished feature in the direction taken by the volume edited by Kalb and Halmai (2011) is a strong interest in class, especially the working class, which comes with two analytical advantages: (a) it adds rationalising context to the elitist denigration of working class populism and (b) sheds further interpretative light on populist opposition to privileged cosmopolitanism, liberalism and foreign migrants (see Kalb 2011; see also Kalb 2009). We congratulate this renewed anthropological attention on class5, but we are also sceptical about the identification of populism with the working class (in particular) and their tendency to underestimate the radical disjunctions of the present—for example, by constraining their analysis to terms over-determined by an earlier historical and material era. A narrow identification of populism with the working class may pave the way for the pathologisation of both populism and the working class. In contrast, recent political developments make visible populism’s implication with the middle class. We are now in a position to know, for example, that the British middle class has not been immune to Brexitpopulism (Bhambra 2017; Dorling 2016; Flemmen and Savage 2017). Adopting a wider analytical scope than most recent anthropological accounts, Jean Comaroff (2009) has recently engaged with the contradictions of populism in a brief article that was later expanded and republished



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(Comaroff 2011). Her position is strongly inspired by Laclau, especially in acknowledging the emancipatory potential of populism. ‘A certain populist radicalism’, she argues, ‘is necessary, if not sufficient condition of mass transformative movements’ (Comaroff 2009: 3). Yet, at the same time, Comaroff feels compelled to outline some of the limitations of populism: its inability to effect sustained social change, its homogenisation of socio-cultural difference and complexity. Contemporary populism, she adds, ‘seems to take on particularly disquieting features’ (2011: 103), a reflection that anticipated the recent increase of xenophobic populism. Generally, Comaroff stands ambivalent in regard to her double-edged recognition that populism, in its late modern form, has a positive, radically transformative dimension, but also, reinforces essentialism, stereotype, and discriminatory dualisms. Writing at the end of the first decade of this century, she indirectly predicted what we understand today as Trumpism or Brexitism and its relationship with the anger of everyday citizens towards financial elites and transnational corporatism (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Such a recognition of people’s disillusionment with politics is fully contemporary and takes us face to face with a dilemma we address in this book: what can be regarded as the reactive possibility of populism and its complicity in processes that may destroy the very democratic potential that gives populism movements their opportunity. Such observations lead us back to the main contradiction we aim to highlight in this volume: populism is pervasive and integral to contemporary, representational democratic systems, despite its superficial opposition to the dominant political establishment. The contradiction is not confined necessarily in populism as such. We stress Laclau’s position of the importance of placing populist movements in their historical and socio-cultural contexts. The upsurge of intense and widespread movements of populism which

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attack the status quo—and are at the current moment globally widespread with particular intensities, such as Trump and Brexit—reflects what Zizek and others have referred to as a general cynicism towards established political orders, that in many respects (as Marx said long ago) are largely democratic in name only. In the understanding we advance here populism refracts a global crisis. It is an effect rather than a cause, an implication in Comaroff that we would take issue with. Furthermore, what populist movements become ideologically is not within populism as such, but in the orientations that are set in the encompassing and locally relevant socio-cultural and political field. We suggest, in addition, that the reactionary dimensions of much populism as it develops (often taking more rigid form) is a consequence of its very lack of organisational and ideological systematicity, upon which depends its emergence as a space for the expression of the People. Hardt and Negri (2017) have argued that all social movements—however inchoate their beginnings— demand organisation for direction. In the socio-political fields of populism’s emergence (and certainly in contemporary times) there is a plethora of small extremist groups who are defined in their extremism as being outside the very system that they oppose. It is often such groups which position themselves in such a way to capture the movement that has burst virtually spontaneously onto the political scene. This was the case with the French Revolution, later with the Russian Revolution, and certainly with the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. It is this feature of the political field in which populism movements spring to life that is a potent factor in swinging such movements in an anti-democratic direction. The paradox of populism is largely contained in its very asystemacity and its capture by groups that have pre-existed its contemporary manifestations (e.g. Golden Dawn, in Greece). In the last year, and as a consequence of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victories, anthropology has started



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responding to the interpretative and analytical challenges set by populism. Indicative examples represent forums in two of the leading European and North American anthropology journals: one on the Brexit referendum in Social Anthropology (see Green et al. 2016) and a second on Brexit and Trumpism in American Ethnologist (see Edwards et al. 2017). These two sets of spontaneous and critical anthropological reflection point at the disillusionment of social groups, but also the complex social demography of populist vote, which, as Gusterson (2017) underlines, includes not only blue-collar workers, but also the petty bourgeoisie. In a similar critical spirit, Kapferer (2017) and Pina-Cabral (2017) have recently discussed some of the paradoxes of contemporary populism in two short articles: the former reflecting on its democratic base and subversive nature, while the latter on its historicity and ontogenetic dimension (which contributes to ideas about personhood and ‘the people’).

Analytical Directions The recent interventions we discussed above indicate a renewed anthropological interest on populism, which follows two interrelated directions. The first, attempts to provide context and historical depth, departing from the presentism of many media accounts and political commentary. Good examples represent the chapters by John Gledhill, Victoria Goddard, Melinda Hinkson and Jon Altman in this volume. Their analyses combine the strength of a diachronic perspective with the nuanced understandings of context specific referents and meaningfulness. For example, Gledhill’s contribution provides scope for appreciating how populist variants have a proclivity to recycle themselves, but also, how neoliberal regimes are minimally affected by economic crises. His account of Brazilian populism examines left and moderately-left

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populist politics, outlining a tradition that started with Getúlic Vargas in the 1930s and continues to the present with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Gledhill this volume). John Gledhill, here, provides us with valuable context to understand more recent political developments in Brazil that took place while he was writing his chapter. Goddard’s analysis of populism in Argentina echoes an anti-pathologising commitment inspired by Laclau. She recognises the transformative and emancipatory opportunities, but also the constraints, ambivalences and ‘traps’ engendered by populist politics. Noticeably, Argentina represents a ‘classic’ context for thinking about populism, as is evident in different incarnations of Peronism, from the 1940s to the present. Goddard’s diachronic perspective identifies a distinctive gender dimension, encapsulated by two emblematic leaders: Eva Perón and Christina Fernández de Kirchner, who have introduced a new model of ethic of care, community and femininity in Argentinian politics. Goddard notes that Argentinian populism—as reflected in its leadership, but also in local participation—has offered opportunities for change that have been ‘highly gendered’. Although such opportunities addressed practical gender needs, Goddard adds, they have not challenged the balance of power in private or public life. Gledhill and Goddard entertain the possibility that populism may have a certain emancipatory potential, but they also recognise the limitations, contradictions and overall persistence of neoliberalism or gender inequality. Hinkson and Altman’s account (in this volume) shares a similarly critical (and cautious) predisposition towards recurring populist patterns in Australian politics. The focus of their analysis are long-standing debates about the position of Indigenous people—their difference or sameness, as categories that may deprive rights or homogenise—in relation to the Australian constitution. Hinkson and Altman trace the effects of popular and populists’ ideas regarding Indigenous Australia in the last 50 years: from the 1967 constitutional referendum to the



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2007 Northern Territory Intervention and the contemporary campaign for constitutional recognition and reincorporation. The sequence of these politics provides scope to recognise how the idea of ‘the people’ oscillates between assimilating inclusion and discriminatory exclusion, or the superfluous neoliberal suspension of racial discrimination and the verification of embarrassing racism (a la Pauline Hanson). As we have seen so far, anthropological accounts that examine recurrent and socially emplaced manifestations of populism, over a long period of time, tend to highlight the contradictory complexity that emerges from the observation that not all versions of populism are equally reductionist or politically conservative. This realisation encourages caution against homogenising generalisations, opening a window for acknowledging—what Goddard (this volume) describes as—the ‘unintended’ and potentially (or partially) emancipatory consequences of particular popular policies, but also the subtle nuances that separate popular from populist political campaigns (see Hinkson and Altman). There is a second emerging anthropological direction which rejects populism independently of its left or right orientation. For example, Susana Narotzky (in this volume) forcefully denunciates populism variants—of all kinds—as unsatisfactory responses to more encompassing predicaments: the constraining, hierarchical effects of illiberal capitalism and the concomitant disillusionment of local actors with the promise of Enlightenment liberal democracy. Narotzky uses the notion of ‘illiberal capitalism’ to refer—not merely to totalitarian capitalist regimes—but to all capitalist manifestations: capitalism is inherently illiberal for it structures inequality, privilege, and dependency. Narotzky prefers to move beyond the illusionary dilemma of choosing either between an inclusive pluralist liberalism or an exclusionary (left or right) populism. Populism, much like liberalism, seems to reproduce hierarchies of deservingness, competitive versions of either liberal or populist Darwinism.

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Michael Herzfeld also rejects populism as a misleading and socially unjust political project. To expose its devious nature, he unravels the way populism works and employs one of his favourite concepts, ‘cultural intimacy’, the mutual self-recognition of shared familiarity, embarrassment and pride in contexts of insideness protected from outsiders (Herzfeld 1997). Cultural intimacy, Herzfeld reminds us, also includes prejudice, vulgarity, sexism and racism, which populism manipulates and turns to a political strategy—the deployment of embarrassing secrets disguised as popular attitudes or cultural traits, ‘what everyone does and knows about’. As such, populism is for Herzfeld (this volume) a ‘cynical imitation of genuinely popular politics’, a ‘trap’ that appeals on cultural intimacy to deceive the disenfranchised, who are not the beneficiaries of populist politics. Although Narotzky and Herzfeld see populism as unredeemable, their concluding considerations are not fundamentally incompatible with those of Gledhill, Goddard, Hinkson and Altman who focus on the historically informed complexity and contradictions between left and right, exclusivist or inclusionary populist narratives. The common ground between the two directions emerges from an anthropological concern for locally emplaced, less privileged citizens, whose experiences—so far—do not seem to indicate that populism can radically (and substantially) challenge existing social, economic, and gender disparities. Despite populism’s antielitist intentions, the elites—regional, national, populist or antipopulist—do not appear to suffer significantly under populist regimes, and contribute very little, as Gledhill implies, to resolving the existing inequalities.

Is Populism Really Redeemable? As we have seen so far, some of the contributors to this volume see populism as unredeemable, while others critically entertain the possibility that populism—especially



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left-leaning populist initiatives—may bring about some transformative change. The latter position, which has an explicit Laclauian echo, has been developed more recently to a political proposition by Chantal Mouffe (2016a, 2016b, 2018). She puts forward an empowering vision for a reconstituted populism, infused with an inclusionary and progressive ideology that can serve as an antidote to conservative and explicitly racist populist narratives. Mouffe’s vision is more pragmatic than utopian, and highlights the necessity for critical self-consciousness, which Jean Comaroff (2011: 101) sees as a necessary ingredient of effective and sustainable political mobilisation. Is it possible to redeem populism by repackaging its appeal within a pragmatic and conscious anti-racist, anti-neoliberal strategy? Would such an honest and transparent experiment make the reductions and totalising dimensions of populism disappear? There are some foreseeable difficulties obstructing the realisation of such an empowering possibility. The first is inherent in the power (and authorship) of constructing such a unified popular vision. Who will control, for example, the culturally intimate-cum-embarrassing ‘secrets’—see Herzfeld (this volume)—that define inclusion and exclusion? However progressive or anti-racist, a reconstituted populism will undoubtedly operate within the boundaries of a certain conception of the ‘people’ that will inevitably privilege some and exclude other communities. How such a progressive and conscious populism can battle the competitive antagonism—see Narotzky (this volume)—that burdens pluralistic democracy? The opportunities engendered by envisioning the generation of a conscious, left wing populism are limitless, yet ironically limited by populism’s paradoxical nature. We have already argued that populism stands ambivalent in its relationship with contemporary democratic systems: it engages with established politics from an exterior position, which is simultaneously integral to the propagation

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and structure of democratic governance. We are thus compelled to argue that, as a phenomenon deeply implicated with power, populism cannot exist in a universe isolated from hegemonic influences, despite its attempts (or resolution) to battle the political establishment. Hence, every conscious-cum-progressive populist stance will, unavoidably, entail a certain degree of compromise: a strategic decision to engage in a critical dialectic with local meaning that is structured—to a greater or smaller degree—by the widespread tentacles of neoliberalism. In this respect, the shortcomings of developing a conscious left wing populism—conceived as a tactic of subversion—may very well outweigh its benefits. Populism always comes at a risk.

Conclusion We have built our analysis on the preposition that populism is integral to contemporary democratic systems of state governance. Every politico-ideological position can potentially embrace a certain degree of populism, from which we cannot absolve even the most enlightened leaders (or organic intellectuals). For politicians hide within themselves a poplar in the making. Where there has been a wise Pericles, we can also find a populist Alcibiades. We would like to subvert our metaphor by underlining that populism can corrupt (or empower) Pericles himself! Here, Pericles stands for the epitome of the prudent democratic politician, a myth of Western imagination. What Western historical consciousness has chosen to forget is that Pericles’ Athenian democracy—much as any contemporary empire—was premised on the disempowerment of others: slaves, women, but also less powerful allies. Alcibiades—representing the dark, treacherous face of populism—has received the blame for the imperfections of democracy—as this has been idealised and



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appropriated in the West. The very distinction between Pericles and Alcibiades—the populist and non-populist leader, reduced in a black and white contrast—is in itself an ideological caricature. Anthropology seems to be ready to confront the topic of populism—in all its contradictions—drawing from a long repository of analytical thinking regarding informal, non-hegemonic politics. Some particular insights seem to have long established anthropological roots and reemerge: for example, the idea that the social contexts of populism can reveal more than its ideological content; or the realisation that the ethical condemnation of populism has pathologising connotations (see Laclau 2005; Worsley 1969). A focus on context and local rationality represents a long-established orientation in social anthropology, grounded on the commitment to defend the sense-making practices of local social actors. It can be traced back to classic contributions—such as Evans-Pritchard (1937) or Lévi-Strauss (1962)—but also more contemporary anthropological scholarship, for example that which analyses the situational logic of conspiracy theory (see Brown and Theodossopoulos 2000; Marcus 1999; Pelkmans and Machold 2011; Sanders and West 2003). Yet, the contemporary re-emergence of national(ist) populisms is not a conspiracy, but a social reality with deep roots in established politics, but also in particular (culturally situated) logics of accountability. We may here constructively reverse the causality of Laclau’s position: populism is not itself the logic of the political, but derives its logic from sets of pre-existing historical and political consciousness: in fact, it can be seen as a pastiche of partpolitical-logics, locally relevant, generalising, and set in opposition to particular establishments. That the authoritarian populism (from the far right) is exclusionary and narrowly dependent upon nationalism (see Gingrich and Banks 2006; Kalb and Halmai 2011) is an alarming condition that deserves urgent attention and critique, as much

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as the ambiguous role of political leaders and their heavy or light reliance on populism. But the reverse proposition, that populism can be a vehicle of transformative change, suffers, in turn, from the reductionist limitations propagated by populist homogenisations (see Comaroff 2009, 2011). We are left with Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) optimistic vision: if we cannot fight populism—which, as we argued, is integral to the perpetuation of contemporary democratic systems—can we use it for rallying support for a left oriented, non-exclusionary project? For start, a conscious, progressive populist stance would need to acknowledge and confront its own implications with the dominant politico-economic order. The utopian vision of non-authoritarian populism—employed as a subversive tactic against neoliberalism—is empowering, yet deeply immersed in the rationalisations of the very establishment it tries to defy. This is, after all, the paradox of populism: it threatens to eat its own children, again and again. The inequalities that inspire its appeal are diffused, in time, through the structuring of new inequalities. Populism is cyclical and recurring, exterior but also central to the management of (so called) democratic power. It is the paradoxical nature of populism—self-defeating, constraining, reductive, yet ephemerally oppositional— that has attracted our interest in populism in this volume, along with the realisation that the phenomenon deserves more analytic attention. This must divert, we suggest, from typologies or official party rhetoric, to embrace instead populism’s dependence on historical and national imagination. The latter has something to tell about populism’s reception: its local appeal in the periphery of power. Anthropologists, for sure, can make a contribution to this contextualising project by making visible the sensemaking logics which emerge from local social disparities (see Kalb and Halmai 2011) or turning the lens of analysis



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on the reception of populism in intimate cultural contexts (Herzfeld 1997, this volume), instead of the official populist party discourse. The continuous re-emergence of populism in the contemporary moment, demonstrates that the ‘people’ (however defined) are less concerned with the obvious contradictions of populism, but seriously troubled about the consolidation of economic and political power. We suggest that we trace the meaningfulness and appeal of populism in this direction.

Bruce Kapferer is director of the EU-supported Project “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons” (project code 340673) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bergen and Honorary Professor at University College London (UCL). He has published widely on Africa, Sri Lanka, India and Australia. Among his recent publications is 2001 and Counting. Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology. (2014), In the Event. Towards an Anthropology of Generic Moments (2015) and Against Exoticism (2016). Dimitrios Theodossopoulos is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. He has made critical interventions on a variety of topics that include resistance, populism, exoticisation, authenticity, and the politics of cultural representation and protest. He is also involved in the promotion of ‘graphic ethnography’, a new ethnographic and reflexive medium. Theodossopoulos is author of two ethnographic monographs Troubles with Turtles (2003 Berghahn), and Exoticisation Undressed (2016 University of Manchester Press); and editor of When Greeks Think about Turks (2007 Routledge), United in Discontent (2010 Berghahn), Great Expectations (2011 Berghahn), De-Pathologising Resistance (2015 Routledge) and Against Exoticism (2016 Berghahn).

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Notes 1. Both Norman Cohn (1970), for Europe, and Worsley (1957) for the colonial Pacific, examined the millennial cultic religious movements that were at the root of modern populist political movements of various ideological persuasions. Peter Worsley’s (1969) seminal article for the study of contemporary populism clearly found much of its inspiration in his famous work on cargo cults. In The Trumpet Shall Sound, Worsley (1957) saw the cargo movements as a cultic and irrational forerunner to what he conceived as the more rational development of modern democratic politics in the Pacific cases—freed of the oppressive bonds of colonialism. 2. In numerous cultures, anthropologists would argue, the word denoting ‘the people’ is the same (or synonymous) with the nation, the ethnic group, or the condition of being human: the ethnonym is also the word for ‘human’, ‘the person’ and the moral community. For example, Amerindian ethnonyms such as Panará (Ewart 2013), Urarina (Walker 2013), Emberá (Theodossopoulos 2016) do not merely denote an ethnic group, but also the human being, person, autonomous individual (resonating with the Greek anthropos), and people (resonating with the Latin populus). This complexity, which remains largely uncharted so far, provides ample space for polysemy and semantic manipulation–including empty signifiers (Laclau 2005)—that unite the ‘people’ with the notions of humanity, the nation, and sovereignty (see Canovan 2005). 3. Ethnicity here is seen as an open category. 4. See Kapferer (1995) for an application of Mitchell’s insights on the potency of categorical relations. 5. For another valuable recent contribution, see also Carrier and Kalb (2015).

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anti-populism and crisis’. Contemporary Political Theory https:// link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0142-y Stavrakakis Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Nikos Nikisianis Alexandros Kioupkiolis, and Thomas Siomos. 2017b. ‘Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: revisiting a reified association’. Critical Discourse Studies 14 (4): 420–439. Stavrakakis, Yannis, and Anton Jager. 2017. ‘Accomplishments and limitations of the “new” mainstream in contemporary populism studies’, European Journal of Social Theory 21(4): 547–565. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1368431017723337. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2014. ‘The Return of “the People”: Populism and Anti-Populism in the Shadow of the European Crisis’, Constellations 21 (4): 505–517. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-8675.12127 Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. ‘How did “populism” become a pejorative concept? And why is this important today? A genealogy of double hermeneutics’, POPULISMUS Working Papers No. 6. http://www.populismus.gr/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ stavrakakis-populismus-wp-6-upload.pdf Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, and Elisabeth Kirtsogolou. (eds) 2010. United in discontent: local responses to cosmopolitanism and globalization. Oxford: Berghahn. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2015. ‘On De-Pathologising Resistance’. In D. Theodossopoulos (ed) De-Pathologising Resistance, 1–16. London: Routledge. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2016. Exoticisation Undressed: Ethnographic nostalgia and authenticity in Emberá clothes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vetta, Theodora. 2011. ‘“Nationalism is Back”; Radikali and Privatization in Serbia’. In Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe (eds) Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai, 37–56. Oxford: Berghahn. Walker, Harry. 2013. Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Worsley, Peter. 1957. The Trumpet shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Malenesia. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Worsley, Peter. 1969. ‘The Concept of Populism’, in G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (eds), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 212–250.

From ‘the People’ to ‘the Citizens’ The Possibilities and Limitations of Populist Discourse in Argentina

( Victoria Goddard

Ernesto Laclau’s death in Seville on 13 December 2014 was followed by wide-ranging comments in the Argentine press and online communities. Some observers reflected on Laclau’s intellectual trajectory, from his work in the University of Buenos Aires and his left wing militancy in the 1960s1 to his academic career in the United Kingdom and his long-term engagement with radical political theory. A recurring theme in these commentaries is the influence of his theories on the then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Ambito 2014; Díaz 2014; La Nación 2014), with many of Fernández’s critics expressing misgivings towards Laclau’s theory of populism. José Antonio Díaz (2014) for example, describes Laclau as an ‘an agitator for permanent conflict, political polarisation and social divisiveness’, whose theories lend support to Fernández’s antagonistic political strategies and ambitions. On the other hand, the philosopher Flavio Rapisardi (2014), who describes Laclau as the ‘uncomfortable populist’, reflects on the emancipatory potential that Laclau’s theories provided for ‘[f]eminists, indigenous groups, LGBT rights’ activists, emerging from the interstices of the academy, the alternative spaces

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of militancy and political parties of the Latin American left’, at the height of neoliberal capitalist hegemony in the 1990s. These different perspectives on the man and his work resonate with broader discursive tensions in relation to the notion of populism, a topic that has been widely associated with Laclau’s contribution to political theory. For Rapisardi and others, one of Laclau’s most significant legacies is his recognition of, and commitment to, the interrelatedness of theory and practice (Rapisardi 2014). The connection between theory and political praxis is integral to his long-term project of devising tools to reconceptualise populism as an element of political discourse, starting from a concern with the challenges confronting socialist strategy in his earlier work (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) to an engagement with ‘radical democracy’ (Laclau 2015). Laclau’s theory of populism builds on earlier critical engagements with the concept, particularly with Peter Worsley’s insightful exploration and emphasis on the participatory qualities of what he calls the populist dimensions of the political (Laclau 2005). For his part, Worsley builds on the work of Edward Shils (in Worsley 1969), highlighting his emphasis on populism’s focus on the will of ‘the people’2 and its privileging of direct, unmediated relationships between the leaders and the people.3 Rejecting populism as a substantive category, Worsley argues that the populist ‘dimension’ is neither democratic nor anti-democratic, but instead should be understood as ‘an aspect of a variety of political cultures and structures.’ (Worsley 1969: 247). On the other hand, he argues that ‘Insofar as populism plumps for the rights of majorities to make sure—by “intervening”—that they are not ignored (as they commonly are) populism is profoundly compatible with democracy’ (Worsley 1969: 247). Despite this history of debate that enriches our understanding of political phenomena, ‘populism’ continues to be yielded as a blunt instrument which simultaneously characterises and critiques a range of political



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movements, leaders and governments. Ultimately, these characterisations serve to pathologise the phenomena under scrutiny, and are a distraction from the task of analysis. The pathologising of populism extends by contagion to entire political cultures, to movements, leaders and followers. The parallel existence of populism as a critical-­ analytical concept and a characterising-pathologising notion deserves reflection and discussion, a task that lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, the chapter aims to shed some light on the tensions between these understandings of populism through a discussion of ‘actually existing populisms’. ‘Populism’ will provide the basis for a loose, vernacular classification of political forms, while it will also work as a concept in the Laclaunian sense (Laclau as quoted in Howarth 2015; Retamozo 2017) to explore the dynamics of some recent expressions of ‘populist’ politics in contemporary Argentina. Reflecting on the gendered qualities of populism (Kampwirth 2010), the chapter considers the tensions and the ambivalences of populism (Rovira Kaltwasser 2012) to understand how historically, and in different ways, in different contexts, ‘populism offers significant opportunities for opening up space for change, but it also imposes constraints and sets traps’ (Kampwirth 2010: ix). Latin America has provided a number of exemplary cases of populist movements, leaders and governments; many of these have shaped the ideas and debates on the subject. This is especially the case with the ‘classical’ forms of populism of the mid-twentieth century, as discussed in John Gledhill’s chapter in relation to Varguismo in Brazil, with renewed interest in the region associated with the rise of ‘radical populism’ and the ‘pink tide’ of twenty-first century governments that have defined themselves in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy.4 While there are significant differences, reflecting different contexts and historical moments, these examples provide a useful starting point to identify some significant features.

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These historical cases emerged at times of significant shifts in social, economic and political structures, articulating a discourse of rupture, transformation and new beginnings. A less discussed feature relates to the gendered qualities of Latin American forms of populism and their entanglement with specific models of femininity and masculinity, which find expression in claims, policies, and performances (Kampwirth 2010). Furthermore, the examples illustrate the importance of sentiments in forging relations between leaders and supporters and in constituting the collective identity of the people (Laclau 2005). The discussion of these features is significant in a context in which major changes in the global political economy, as outlined by Narotzky in this volume, have generated tensions and contradictions which, in Latin America, have had implications for the politics of redistribution associated with a number of national policies during the first decade of the 2000s. These are in turn reflected in attempts to redefine the terms of political discourse (as outlined in the chapter by Hinkson and Altman), where the rejection of particular popular and/ or populist forms of leadership and policy are placed at the heart of new claims for new beginnings. This is the case of the constitutional coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil discussed in Gledhill’s chapter. According to Eric Nepomuceno, the coup was not only intended to undo the policies of the Workers’ Party under Lula and Rousseff, but had the more ambitious scope of undoing gains made in the fields of social and labour policy over the last seventy years (Nepomuceno 2018). Nepomuceno’s claim resonates uncannily with speeches made by Argentine President Mauricio Macri in September 2018, in which he proposed a new way forward pitted against the influence and ‘decadence’ of the last seventy years, a period that encompasses the governments of ‘classical’ populist Juan Domingo Perón as well as those of Kirchner and Fernández (Granovski 2018).



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Rupture, Newness and New Beginnings Néstor Kirchner formed his government in 2003, in the aftermath of the 2001 economic and financial crisis and in a context of mass mobilisations and experimentations in the social, economic and political fields (Levey et al. 2014). The dire conditions of the economy following the crisis and the impact of the 2002 default on foreign debt, historically unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, all required urgent, radical and concentrated action. The demands for change, ‘Que se vayan todos. . . . que no quede ni uno solo’ (They must all go . . . not a single one should remain)—were symptomatic of the deeply felt rejection of the status quo, while the innovations and social experiments carried out by individuals, groups, neighbourhoods to devise solutions to collapsing livelihoods and address the democratic deficit reflected both the intense needs produced by the crisis and the will to address the challenges posed by it (Ozarow et al. 2014). To address a rupture that reached its most clear visibility in 2001 but has its roots in the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, or indeed as far back as the military-civilian regime of 1976–1983, claims to legitimacy required proposals which constituted the government as radically different from those of the past. At the same time, traditions inherited from the past, particularly from the golden era of Peronism in the 1940s, provided discursive frameworks for the articulation of proposals in respect of the challenges of the present, notably, the recovery of the dignity of the people and the need to confront the people’s enemy (Barbieri 2007). Weaving the old and new to demarcate a boundary with preceding governments, Kirchner’s inaugural speech in the Plaza de Mayo positioned him as the president of the Argentine people, summoning the heterogeneous, though at that particular moment in time largely solidary, crowds in the Plaza and across the country (Biglieri 2007).

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On the presidential podium were the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.5 Their presence in this privileged space, from where the future was being enunciated, was striking. It followed decades of persecution, disregard and neglect by a series of governments since the early days of their struggle against the military regime. Recognition of the Mothers and Grandmothers was crucial in terms of enabling a shift in their place and role in the country, a shift that was also reflected in the organisations. I was surprised at the change in what had been a profoundly antagonistic relationship with the state that one group of Mothers in particular sustained since the dictatorship when, in conversation with a representative of the Association of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, I was told about an ambitious project to develop skills and build ‘dignified’ homes with government support. The Mother explained that they had verified that they ‘could work with this man’. In 2006 the Association called an end to their Resistance Marches, which had been a focal point in the calendar for a wide range of citizens, activists and organisations since 1981. The decision, I was told by the same Mother, had to do with the Mothers’ age and increasing fragility, which made it difficult for them to sustain the 24-hour vigil. Furthermore, the advances in the trials and the recognition of human rights issues meant that the March was redundant, as the enemy was no longer in Government House (Canoni 2007; Christie 2016).6 While the shift signaled at the inaugural ceremony resulted in a radically altered landscape of human rights, it gave substance to Kirchner’s claims of rupture and renewal and supported his efforts to shift the relationship between people and the state or specifically, between his government and the people. Indeed, it has been suggested that Kirchner’s interventions in the field of human rights and the politics of memory was fundamental to the construction of ‘kirchnerism’ and the articulation of



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a ‘kirchnerite people’ (Canoni 2007).7 Research carried out by an interdisciplinary team (Biglieri and Perelló 2007) provides many insights into the experiences associated with the shifts promoted under Kirchner. Echoing the Peronist concepts of ‘dignity’ and ‘the enemy’, one interviewee reflected on how Kirchner took on board the demands of the people and confronted powerful economic actors, thus breaking with the ‘apparatus of the old politics’ and enabling the emergence of a new inclusive political project (Barbieri 2007: 128). In what Barbieri describes as a recognition of the importance of passion for collective identities and struggle, she quotes another research participant’s reflections on her changing experience as new opportunities arose along with a new sense of purpose and participation: ‘today we can go out on the street knowing that we can do something’ (Barbieri 2007: 129). When Kirchner’s term came to an end, he did not bid for a second term. Instead, his wife, a provincial and then national senator and political figure in her own right, was put forward as the Peronist presidential candidate under the Front for Victory coalition. Despite her long career in politics, much was made of her marriage to the outgoing president. She was variously described as a mere mouthpiece for her husband and as a stopgap until he returned as a presidential candidate. With Kirchner’s death in 2010, attention shifted to her status as a widow, with speculation that this granted her some sympathy and support. In turn, Fernández forged her own oratory and performative style, as well as a distinctive political intervention. Her presidential campaign has been subjected to a detailed and rigorous study by Jane Christie (2016) who argues that the campaign proposed a new claim, promising to deepen and extend Kirchner’s reforms, through ‘strategically reappropriated gendered role-based images in order to promote the idea of “newness” . . . ’ (Christie 2016: 110). While the ‘golden age’ of Peronism provided the enduring example and symbolic repertoire associated with Eva

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Perón8, this bid for election to the highest position in the country and the proposition of constituting this space of power as a feminine space, was indeed understood as another radical departure from business as usual.

Gender and Passionate Politics Christie argues that Fernández, like her Chilean counterpart Bachelet, deployed gender codes which suggested that, as women leaders, they could improve on the achievements of their male predecessors and build on legacies of economic growth and poverty reduction (by Lagos in Chile, Kirchner in Argentina) through a new, feminised ethic of care and community. Both Bachelet and Fernández were successful: Fernández won the 2007 elections with a comfortable majority; in her second bid for the presidency in 2011 she gained 54.11 per cent of the vote. She is a divisive figure—hated and loved in equal measure. One of the criticisms directed at her (and sometimes at Laclau) is that her antagonistic discourse has produced deep rifts in the society at large, while accusations of corruption and mismanagement of public funds accumulate against her. Her supporters argue that she is the target of campaigns to discredit her and neutralise the achievements of the Kirchner-Fernández governments. She points to the enemies pitted against her while stressing the difficulties she has faced as a woman in politics (Christie 2016). On 13 April 2016, with the new government of ‘Cambiemos’ in place, Fernández attended the Courts of Comodoro Py in the capital, summoned on charges of currency mismanagement (the Dólar Futuro)9. In the words of reporters for the Spanish newspaper El País: ‘She turned it around completely. What seemed to be her most difficult day, as the accused declaring before the judge, turned into the triumphant return of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner



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to the frontline of Argentine politics’ (Cué and Rivas Molina 2016). She was met by a vast and heterogeneous crowd, which enthusiastically engaged in a sustained chorus of supportive songs and slogans: ‘te quiero mucho Cristina!’ (I love you lots Cristina) was heard and seen on posters and banners. She thanked the crowd for their welcome and for their love; defiant and strong, she linked the accusations against her to the country’s history of repression and complicity with the powers that be. She waited for the crowds’ enthusiasm to subside, smiling, waving, nodding. When she spoke, her statements were carefully timed, yet flowed easily, interrupting to enquire as someone in the crowd was taken ill, responding to comments shouted from the crowd, carefully and slowly drawing her hair back from her face, underlining her statements with her hands, she conveyed a sense of intimacy and connection which seemed to address every person standing in the crowd. Interspersed with personal anecdotes, her speech abounded in historical references, effortlessly conjuring up facts and statistics, demonstrating her calibre as a leader. The crowds filled the vast space in front of the courts, spread around the parked cars to the adjacent streets and the nearby railway stations, around the stalls that provided supporters with sustenance on a damp and chilly day; for most it was impossible to see her, such was the distance between much of the crowd and the podium; small groups gathered around those who managed to pick up the speech on their phones. Patient, good natured, the crowd expressed their disappointment at losing the elections and anger over the new government’s austerity/ ajuste policies through songs and refrains: ‘Oh . . . vamos a volver. . . .’ (We will be back). The speech drew the shape of the boundaries that defined the enemy: the current government, the courts, the press, all pitted against her in an attempt to erase the achievements of twelve-and-a-half years of government. And she reminded the crowd: hers

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was not the first project to be thwarted by the combined efforts of the country’s dominant interests. While maintaining a sense of immediate contact with the crowd, she conjured up a broader community, the Argentine people: ‘I don’t want Argentines to be afraid; they were never afraid during my administration’. She was addressing, she said, not only the 49 per cent who voted for her coalition but the 51 per cent who voted against it as well. She urged us to seek unity: ‘Don’t be angry [with those who voted for the current government] . . . ask them, how are things going: better than before or worse?’. The call for unity of the Argentines was based on the urgency of claiming and defending their rights—their ‘lost rights or lost happiness’.10 She invites us to seek a solidary connection with friends and neighbours, many of whom may be going through hard times and reminds us: ‘la patria es el otro’,11 the motherland is the other. She calls for intelligence: ‘a great deal of intelligence is needed . . . to be able to form a grand citizens’ front (“un gran frente ciudadano”)’; the invitation to join this front should be encompassing, extended to the trade union leaders who led strikes against her government. They too should be asked to think: ‘how were you before 10 December, how did you live the last twelve years, what did you obtain and achieve . . . ’. On 20 June 2017, before a crowd estimated at 60,000 people in the Arsenal football stadium, Fernández launched the citizen’s front she had proposed in her Comodoro Py speech. The Unidad Ciudadana was proposed in order to provide a new front that would compete in the legislative elections in October 2017. This initiative indicates a further point of rupture, this time with the traditional core of the Peronist party, envisaging a wider, more heterogeneous ‘people’, the people as citizens who, as Fernández claimed in her Comodoro Py speech, must claim their rights before Congress. While Fernández called for unity, she delineated a terrain of alliances that was



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based on antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’; the enemy was clearly demarcated and identified, and the outcome of such demarcations was, inevitably, the discursive production of exclusions within the very heart of the proposed unity.

Leaders, Followers and the Problem of Populist Politics The impressive display of support for Fernández is mirrored in the hostile response expressed in the press and social media, where the ambivalences of populism are also played out. One of the (ongoing) discussions relates to the accuracy of reports about the size of the crowd at Comodoro Py. On their site, El Revelador (2016) (the Revealer) developed a methodology to measure the crowds. The site points out the disparities in the reporting: the Federal Police calculated a total of 12,000 and the Metropolitan Police estimated the crowd at 15,000; the newspaper Clarín put the number at a mere 10,000. Her supporters estimated a crowd of 200,000 to 300,000 people. The Revealer’s own calculations produced an estimated figure of 110.506. This diligent approach was met with disdain from several online commentators, some concluding that if the figures are correct, they merely confirm how many ‘brainless’ people are willing to be led. The slippage between critique and pathologisation are not new in the world of politics and less so in the context of the ambivalence inherent in the performance and experience of populist discourse. Given the susceptibility of gender identities and spheres to reductionism and naturalisation, it is important to consider the gendered aspect of populist politics. Marta Zabaleta’s (1997) warning about the distortions produced by inadequate analytical tools is relevant. Her own analysis focuses on Perón’s first government (1943–1955), to

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provide a radical reading of populism and its gendered dimensions. She points to three misconceptions in analyses of women and politics in Latin America: the belief that Latin American women are more conservative than Latin American men; less feminist than European or North American women; and as having a greater propensity to support certain kinds of populist governments because of their ‘traditional conservatism’. Rather, she argues that women’s support for Peronism should be understood in relation to their ‘class perception of the vital problems confronting them in everyday life’ (Zabaleta 1997: 75). Many of the social, political and economic measures introduced by the Peronist government helped working class women satisfy needs that they identified as the most pressing, relating to housing, work, education, and health. Women also gained rights as citizens, such as the right to vote in 1947. Furthermore, largely through the interventions of Evita, they were interpellated as women, and called to action through a ‘specifically feminine discourse [that] was directed at them’ (Zabaleta 1997: 75). While Eva Perón’s role as mediator between the leader and the people was undeniably important, Zabaleta suggests that she also left a radical legacy and promoted a new model of femininity that was markedly different from those that prevailed in the country at the time. However, Peronism promoted a consciousness amongst women supporters that led to the satisfaction of immediate and medium-term gender interests but it did not provide the means to develop awareness ‘that they themselves were potentially capable of radically changing that situation, and taking action to effect such change’ (Zabaleta 1997: 76). While supporting women through social transformations which redefined gender relations to women’s advantage, Peronism did not question the dominant gender models or conventional divisions of labour. She concludes that ultimately, the class and masculine-gendered



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characteristics of Peronist ideology, enacted through the glorification of motherhood, and reinforced through institutions such as the family, the party and indeed the Peronist Feminine party, contributed to the reproduction of women’s social subordination. Eva Perón never attained an official government position, despite widespread popular support. In contrast, although Fernández’s profile was enhanced by her marriage, she had a long political career behind her and developed her own style of leadership from a position of power. Like Kirchner, Fernández drew on the Mothers’ support and their symbolic capital in a new, gendered strategy which underscored her own claims and projects. The proposed new progressive and feminised direction, through an ethics of care (Christie 2016), unfolded over her two governments; however, at the end of her second term the country was still afflicted by unacceptable levels of poverty while large corporations’ interests remained largely unchallenged. Christie (2016) highlights some of the contradictions in Fernández’s discourse, and the importance of policies that nevertheless reinforce existing gender relations.12 There are continuities here with early Peronism’s embrace of ‘feminine’ politics that was supportive of women in their roles as mothers, wives and workers—in themselves radical and empowering—but that failed to propose significant changes to the status quo. Fernández privileged class over gender when focusing on the undoubtedly urgent needs of women, yet she appealed to gender solidarity in a bid to overcome the class and ethnic differences that distance her from working class women. Circumscribing her identifications with women to narratives of shared suffering and a focus on the family, she refrained from recognising women’s rights over their bodies, and failed to create spaces and opportunities for radical change (Christie 2016).13

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Conclusion Worsley sums up his influential essay with the reflection that ‘ . . . populist movements, normally, have failed’. Nevertheless, he also highlights the importance of populism as a ‘constantly-recurring style of politics—the eternal attempt of people to claim politics as something of theirs . . . ’ (Worsley 1969: 248). We have seen how on the one hand populism in the context of Argentina has offered moments of change and opportunity that have been highly gendered, both in the performance of leadership and participation and in the policies carried out by Peronism in the twentieth century and Kirchnerism in the twenty-first century. These interventions have addressed many demands and needs, what Molyneux (1998) refers to as ‘practical’ gender needs, while failing to address ‘strategic’ needs that would transform gender relations and the balance of power in the home, at work and in the public sphere. While these issues illustrate the deeper contradictions of populism, it is worth recalling that, beyond leaders’ specific ideologies or intentions, achievements in relation to practical needs such as those addressed by different incarnations of Peronism can have unintended consequences in bringing about change, empowering the powerless and redrawing the terms of citizenship, representation and participation. The dialectic unfolding across these tensions, opportunities and hesitations encapsulates the possibilities and limitations of populist discourse, experience and practice.

Victoria Goddard is a Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked in the fields of economic and political anthropology, with an emphasis on gender and class. Her current research



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focuses on the political and the production of alternative publics in Argentina. Recent publications, with co-editor Susana Narotzky, include Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism: Global Models, Local Lives? (2015) and Work and Livelihoods: History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis (2017), winner of the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize in 2017.

Notes 1. In the 1960s Laclau edited two political journals (Izquierda Nacional and Lucha Obrera) linked to the Partido Socialista de Izquierda Nacional (Socialist Party of the National Left). 2. Enrique Dussel observes that in Latin America the term ‘pueblo’ or people has a more complex set of meanings than it carries in Romance languages, as a result of the widespread influence of Indigenous languages. He also observes that ‘pueblo’ establishes an internal frontier within the political community so that citizens of a state are not necessarily part of the ‘pueblo’ (Dussel 2008). See also Gledhill in this volume regarding o povo in the context of Brazilian politics. 3. As Worsley points out, Shils was referring to North American populism in particular. His analysis resonates particularly strongly with recent developments in the USA, although they also find echoes in the arguments put forward during Britain’s 2016 EU referendum. A striking feature of the leave campaign’s position since the referendum has been the defense of ‘the will of the people’ that must prevail above all other factors; another parallel with Shil’s analysis is the leave campaign’s promotion of distrust of experts, academics, business leaders and the ‘overeducated’ and ‘not-the-people’ (Worsley 1969: 244). 4. There is some consensus on the classification of Latin American populisms in identifying three historical periods and their corresponding populist forms. The classical populisms of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Getùlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina in the early and mid-twentieth century were followed by what is described as the neopopulism of the 1980s and 1990s exemplified by Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, Collor de Melo in Brazil and Menem in Argentina. At the dawn of the twenty-first century a radical populism emerged under the

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leaderships of Chávez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador and arguably Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina. A different categorisation was proposed by Zabaleta (1997) who describes Sandinismo as a radical popular nationalist government, whereas Peronism and Varguismo, as well as Freismo in Chile, are described as bourgeois popular nationalist, with Chile’s Allendismo characterised as workers’ democratic populism. At the same time, these phenomena are also subject to periodisation. For example, it has been argued that Kirchnerismo, relating to the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández from 2003 until 2015 should not be seen as a single, uniform phenomenon. Rather, as Matías Kulfas proposes, Kirchnerismo is best understood as three distinctive periods that reflect changes in the global political economy on the one hand and political and policy shifts on the other (Kulfas 2016). 5. During the military-civilian dictatorship that dominated the country from 1976 until 1983, an estimated 30,000 persons disappeared. A group of women who were unsuccessfully attempting to track down and gain information about their disappeared children started to meet in the central Plaza de Mayo, in defiance of the strict military law imposed at the time. Their numbers grew and their weekly circling of the pyramid at the centre of the Plaza de Mayo became a key act and symbol of resistance. They continue to meet to this day. In 1986 the Mothers split into the Association of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, which embarked on a wide-ranging political project and came to forge a strong relationship with Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner, and the Founders’ Line, which remained more focused on the pursuit of justice, working closely with a number of other human rights organisations. The Abuelas or Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo were formed in 1977 and work to find children who were abducted with their parents during the regime, or who were born in captivity (the mothers were murdered after giving birth and the children were given for adoption to families who were (generally) sympathetic to the regime). 6. In 2015, the Association of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo called for a renewal of the March, in the context of a new government under Mauricio Macri—the ‘enemy’ had returned to the Casa Rosada (Government House). Other groups of Mothers (Founders’ Line) and Grandmothers did not cancel the Resistance Marches during the Kirchner and Fernández



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governments; a sign of their greater distance from, and more cautious engagement with these governments. 7. Advances in the law and trials relating to human rights abuses under the military-civilian regime is one of the areas of the kirchnerite governments that gains most approval and is recognised by critics of these governments as well as their supporters (see Anguita 2014). 8. Eva or Evita Perón played a decisive role in building and expressing the relationship between her husband President Juan Domingo Perón and his supporters from 1946 until her untimely death in 1952. 9. Cambiemos is a centre-right alliance established in 2015 as an alternative to Peronism and Kirchnerismo and which won the elections in 2015, placing Mauricio Macri in Government House. 10. This may be an allusion to the victorious Cambiemos’ slogan of ‘a happiness revolution’ (‘revolución de la alegría’). 11. The notion that ‘la patria es el otro’ or ‘the motherland is the other’ was allegedly introduced by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in a speech she made on the occasion of the 31st anniversary of the Malvinas-Falkland war in April 2013. The philosopher Pablo Feinman, analysed the concept in terms of Levinas’ philosophy of alterity, arguing that alterity is essential for the construction of democracy. Nevertheless, this alterity encompasses contradictions such that not all others constitute the motherland (Feinman 2013). 12. The vast majority of unemployed and underemployed Argentines receiving subsidies from the state were single mothers (jefas de hogar); in 2006, 72 per cent of the largest state subsidy programme, the Unemployed Female and Male Heads of Households Plan, went to women (Christie 2016: 170). In her discussion of Argentina and Chile Christie suggests that while unemployment figures showed a marked improvement on the 2007 Gender Gap Index, the 2009 report recorded further evidence of gender differentials with higher percentages of the female population registered as unemployed in both countries (Christie 2016: 134). 13. One of the flagstone policies is the 2009 Asignación Universal por Hijo (universal child benefit). While the law makes no distinction in terms of the carer’s gender, Fernández repackaged it towards a gender role-based framework. In 2011 she announced an extension of the program to women who carry their pregnancy beyond their first trimester. In her speech, Fernández clarified the requirement that mothers

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References Ambito. 2014. ‘Uno de los grandes referentes ideológicos del kirchnerismo’ Ambito.com,13 April . https://www.ambito.com/unolos-grandes-referentes-ideologicos-del-kirchnerismo-n3836657 (accessed 30 November 2018). Anguita, Eduardo. 2014. La Patria Pensada. El Ultimo Tramo del Gobierno de Cristina. Buenos Aires: Aguilar. Barbieri, Graciela. 2007. ‘Las huellas: la persistencia del peronismo en el kirchnerismo’, in Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perelló (eds), En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del populismo kirchnerista. San Martín: Universidad Nacional de Gral San Martín, Escuela de Política y Gobierno Documento de Trabajo 15, 123–140. Biglieri, Paula. 2007. ‘El retorno del pueblo argentino: entre la autorización y la asamblea. Argentina en la era K’, in Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perelló (eds), En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del populismo kirchnerista. San Martín: UNSAM, Escuela de Política y Gobierno Documento de Trabajo 15, 61–84. Biglieri, Paula and Gloria Perelló (eds). 2007. En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del populismo kirchnerista. San Martín: UNSAM, Escuela de Política y Gobierno Documento de Trabajo 15.



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Canoni, Fiorella. 2007. ‘El pueblo kirchnerista performado por la memoria’, in Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perelló (eds), En el nombre del pueblo. La emergencia del populismo kirchnerista. San Martín: UNSAM: Escuela de Política y Gobierno Documento de Trabajo 15, 145–160. Cué, Carlos and Federico Rivas Molina 2016. ‘Kirchner usa su declaración judicial como regreso triunfal a la politíca’ El País, 14 April. https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/04/13/argentina/1460559810_254296.html (accessed 30 November 2018). Christie, Jane L. 2016. Negotiating Gendered Discourses. Michelle Bachelet and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. London: Lanham. Díaz, José Antonio. 2014. ‘Ernesto Laclau, el ideólogo de la Argentina dividida’ Revista Noticias, 14 April. https://noticias.perfil. com/2014/04/13/ernesto-laclau-el-ideologo-de-la-argentinadividida/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Dussel, Enrique. 2008. ‘The People: The Popular Sector and Populism’, in Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 71–77. El Revelador. 2016. ‘La verdad sobre la cantidad de personas en Comodoro Py’ El Revelador 14 April. http://elrevelador.com. ar/2016/04/14/la-verdad-sobre-la-cantidad-de-personas-encomodoro-py/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Feinman, José Pablo. 2013. ‘Alcances y límites del concepto “la patria es el otro”’ Página 12, 30 June. https://www.pagina12. com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-223384-2013-06-30.html (accessed 30 November 2018). Granovsky, Martín. 2018. ‘Macri polariza con Perón’ Página 12, 9 September. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/140952-macri-polariza-con-peron (accessed 30 November 2018). Howarth, David (ed). 2015. Ernesto Laclau. Post-Marxism, populism and critique. London: Routledge. Kampwirth, Karen (ed). 2010. Gender and Populism in Latin America. Passionate Politics. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Kulfas, Matías. 2016. Los Tres Kirchnerismos. Una Historia de la Economía Argentina 2003–2015. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto 2015. ‘Populism: what’s in a name? (2005)’, in David Howarth (ed), Ernesto Laclau. Post-Marxism, populism and critique. London: Routledge, La Nación, 2014. ‘Murió Ernesto Laclau, referente intelectual del kirchnerismo’ La Nación, 13 April. https://www.lanacion.

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com.ar/1680548-murio-ernesto-laclau-referente-intelectual-delkirchnerismo (accessed 30 November 2018). Levey, Cara, Daniel Ozarow and Christopher Wylde (eds). 2014. Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis. Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez, Lucía. 2018. ‘Aborto: ¿cómo votó el Senado? Análisis por género, bloque y provincia’ chequeado.com, 9 August. https:// chequeado.com/el-explicador/aborto-como-voto-el-senadoanalisis-por-genero-bloque-y-provincia/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Molyneux, Maxine 1998. ‘Analysing Women’s Movements’, in Cecilia Jackson and Ruth Pearson (eds), Feminist Visions of Development. Gender Analysis and Policy. London: Routledge, 65–88. Nepomuceno, Eric. 2018. ‘Objetivo alcanzado’ Página 12, 12 September. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/141592-objetivoalcanzado (accessed 30 November 2018). Ozarow, Daniel, Cara Levey, and Christopher Wylde. 2014. ‘Introduction. Revisiting the Argentine Crisis a Decade on: Changes and ‘continuities’, in Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow and Christopher Wylde (eds), Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis. Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–19. Rapisardi, Flavio. 2014. ‘El Populista Incómodo’ Anfibia, n.d. http://revistaanfibia.com/ensayo/el-populista-incomodo/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Retamozo, Martín. 2017. ‘La Teoría del Populismo de Ernesto Laclau: Una Introducción’, Estudios Políticos 41: 157–184. Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2012. ‘The ambivalence of populism: threat and corrective for Democracy’, Democratization 19(2): 184–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2011.572619 Worsley, Peter. 1969. ‘The Concept of Populism’, in Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (eds), Populism. Its Meanings and National Characteristics. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 212–250. Zabaleta, Marta. 1997. ‘Ideology and Populism in Latin America: A Gendered Overview’, in Will Fowler (ed), Ideologues and Ideologies in Latin America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 65–82.

The Brazilian Crisis and the Ghosts of Populism

( John Gledhill

Continuing Victoria Goddard’s focus on identifying the spaces for change that populisms open up, and the traps that they set, this chapter discusses Brazil’s ‘classical’ populist experience in relation to recent developments. Getúlio Vargas first came to power in 1930, ruled with dictatorial powers from 1937 to 1945, and subsequently recaptured the presidency in democratic elections in 1951. The 2016 ‘constitutional’ coup which ousted the elected Workers’ Party (PT) president, Dilma Rousseff, seeks to erase Vargas’ legacy, key elements of which survived the twenty years of military dictatorship that followed the ousting of his political heir, João Goulart, in 1964, and two neoliberal administrations under Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002), which produced deindustrialisation. As post-coup Brazil sank deeper into crisis, the ghost of Vargas haunted the popular imagination because it represented promises whose delivery had been repeatedly blocked by Brazil’s elites. Populist movements generally gain power in moments of crisis. Yet the ‘new’ populisms that emerged in Latin America after the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s produced mixed results. Some brought authoritarian imposition of neoliberal austerity. Others struggled with the contradictions of dependence on oil, gas and mining exports to

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fund programs for reducing inequality and ethno-racial injustice. Here I argue two things about Brazil. Firstly, that history tends to repeat itself, and secondly, that the repeated failure of ‘socially progressive’ populism to retain power, and its marginalisation of socialist alternatives, has undermined the meaningfulness of democratic institutions for ‘popular classes’ not easily brought together simply by populist rhetoric. Understanding Brazil is not, however, just a matter of understanding ‘socially progressive’ populisms. Vargas’ final exit from power in 1954 was a conscious act of self-mythification. Faced with an imminent coup, he turned the tables on his enemies by shooting himself through the heart in his bedroom in the Catete Palace in Rio de Janeiro, after writing a testament letter to the Brazilian people. The crisis of 1954 marked the first intervention in Brazilian politics of the Globo media company, backing a right wing populist alternative to Vargas’ pro-labour populism that is another of the ghosts haunting the tragic story of Brazilian democracy.

Vargas: A Durable Legacy Punctuated by Coups Vargas first came to power through a coup against the economically liberal but politically undemocratic First Republic, whose end was precipitated by a revolt of junior army officers. Exploiting a failed coup attempt by the communists in 1935, he ensured that ‘order and progress’ would prevail by proclaiming a state of emergency, centralising power in the hands of the federal government, and shutting down the legislature. Vargas modelled his dictatorial Estado Novo (New State) on the ‘integral’ corporatist state of European fascism, persecuting communists with extreme prejudice. But after realigning Brazil with the United States against the Axis powers, he focused on building a base in the organised working class, promised the restoration of democracy, and legalised the Communist



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Party, in return for its support for postponement of elections until after a constituent assembly was convened. Alliance with the communists was a step too far for the military, who ejected Vargas from the presidency. Although Vargas, a landowner himself, never sought to transform rural social property relations, a consistent thread through his career was economic nationalism. He was anathema to liberal elites because the central task of his interventionist state was to end Brazil’s status as an agro-export periphery of North Atlantic capitalism. Implementing a degree of economic and urban planning, Vargas used both state finance and private-public partnerships to develop the heavy industries and infrastructure necessary to industrialise the country, although he left manufacturing to private enterprise. The crowning achievement of the Estado Novo from the point of view of labour was the CLT (Consolidation of Labour Laws), enacted in 1943. The scope of this legislation was limited not only because unions were controlled, and its purpose was to avoid class conflict, but also because it excluded rural workers and urban workers lacking formal employment contracts. Nevertheless, it provided a framework for later advances through trade union pressure and strikes. Liberal critics of Vargas had difficulty explaining massive street demonstrations in favour of his continuing in power. Many argued that they reflected deployment of Nazi-style propaganda techniques on a culturally backward working class that lacked an autonomous political culture. The Estado Novo had a powerful Department of Press and Propaganda, and Vargas seized on the opportunities that radio provided to publicise his government’s achievements. Yet Brazilian followers of E.P. Thompson find ample evidence to challenge an image of passive ‘popular classes’ lacking any agency, consenting to Vargas’ rule simply because of manipulation from above (Ferreira 2001). By embracing populist labourism, Vargas addressed the pre-existing aspirations of blue-collar

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workers and lower-middle class white-collar workers and professionals, such as school teachers, by establishing a solid framework of rights, entitlements and trade union representation. Workers saw the backing of a ‘strong’ state as positive, since it made it more likely that employers would respect their rights. The 2016 coup sought to obliterate the CLT, painted as an anachronism that blocked Brazilian participation in the global race to the bottom premised on ‘flexibilisation’ of employment. Congress dusted off the Cardoso government’s proposal to allow unrestricted subcontracting and outsourcing, even in cases such as the employment of teachers in public schools, blocked by the PT’s first president, Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, after he assumed power in 2003. It conceded employer demands that workers should pay the costs of taking legal action against them, softened health and safety regulations, and ended Vargas’ ‘union tax’, an obligatory annual contribution by workers to support the costs of union representation. Labour ‘reform’ was pushed through congress despite opposition from some senators of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). A machine for winning power and distributing its spoils, lacking ideological consistency, the PMDB had been the PT’s main coalition partner in government. The constitution mandated Rousseff’s replacement by her PMDB vice president, Michel Temer, who promptly invited figures from Cardoso’s Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), the PT’s bitter rival and co-participant in the coup, to become ministers in his new cabinet. Vargas was a nation builder. Brazil’s elites struggled with European stigmatisation of a tropical nation founded on racial mixing between Portuguese masters and African slaves as well as Indigenous people, a stigma that could not be transcended even by promoting new immigration by ‘white’ Europeans. Vargas grasped the nettle of giving positive recognition to the cultural contributions of the descendants of slaves to Brazilian identity,



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following through the ideas of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. Samba music was projected, through radio, as ‘national’ music, even though it was the music of the slums of Rio and its unexpurgated lyrics celebrated criminality and police corruption. These elements of popular culture were sanitised and their public expressions in carnival heavily policed. The Estado Novo propagated a ‘myth of racial democracy’ that denied the everyday racism that permeated social relations. Yet Vargas’ efforts to unify the nation again offered a base on which future generations could build. Vargas created a government that was popular in the sense that working class Brazilians saw it as a government that took account of the interests of ‘the people’. The Portuguese expression o povo generally refers to the lower classes in Brazil. Yet in terms of Laclau’s discursive model for all populisms (Laclau 2005), Vargas could not construct ‘chains of equivalence’ placing o povo in simple opposition to an elite ‘enemy’, since he wished to placate large landowners as well as industrialists. He attacked elite opponents of economic nationalism but needed conciliatory tactics to win the compliance of agrarian elites who exercised local control over rural workers through patron-client relations and personalised dominion over the local police and judiciary. A risky excess of class compromise has been a recurrent feature of Brazilian populism. Once elected governments ceased to serve their interests, dominant classes whose social power was undiminished fostered coups, in which the hidden hand of US power has also routinely been present. Yet from the perspective of the cities and developing public sector of the economy Vargas’ populism was ‘inclusionary’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012), not simply in empowering organised labour but in claiming to be colour-blind. Vargas created two political parties. Replicating Perón’s strategy in Argentina in 1945, he won the 1951 election as candidate of the PTB, the Brazilian Labour Party, created to

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give unionised workers independent political expression. The centre-right, middle class and landowner-­orientated, Social Democratic Party (PSD) kept rural society under control, and industrialisation provided some rural people with better opportunities. The PSD served as the electoral machine of the ambitious moderniser and builder of Brasilia, Juscelino Kubitschek. Vargas thus articulated a multi-class hegemonic bloc orientated towards the future through control of the labour movement, promising to civilise capitalism through creation of a welfare state and state intervention in the economy. In 1953 Vargas created the state oil company Petrobras, overcoming lobbying against the measure in Congress by US oil interests. His slogan ‘The Oil is Ours’ achieved the same popular nationalist mythical significance as Lázaro Cárdenas’ expropriation of foreign oil interests in Mexico in 1938. Vargas’ legacy is therefore also central to contemporary political disputes over national resource sovereignty. The coup regime started handing over national resources of all kinds to foreign capital and forced Petrobras to disinvest, prejudicing its status as a global technology leader, important contributions, as a public interest corporation, to social projects in poor communities and the arts, and the PT’s plan to invest the revenues from new oil fields in education. In pushing forward their radical neoliberal program, the political actors fronting the coup were confronted with the ghost of Vargas for their ‘lack of a national project’, and their venality: many have personal financial ties to foreign companies and the pork barrel politics of party machines and power of regional oligarchies ensures that Congress contains more lobbyists for business interests than true ‘representatives of the people’. Vargas’ final period in office was confronted with the virulent opposition of a socially conservative populist, journalist Carlos Lacerda, standard-bearer of the right wing National Democratic Union (UDN). Right wing



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populism appealed to the social conservativism of a middle class that was still predominantly Catholic. Lacerda also exploited the enfranchisement of women voters. Ironically, although Lacerda endorsed the military’s claim that the 1964 coup was a ‘revolution’ to save Brazil from communism, after the generals thwarted his ambitions to become president on the UDN ticket by cancelling the 1965 elections, he realigned with the Vargas protégés against whom he had been conspiring throughout the previous decade. This ended his political career, but the spirit of the UDN lives on. Lacerda’s assault on Vargas resonates strongly with mainstream media promotion of the 2016 coup and involved the family company that became the Globo television and newspaper empire. Lacerda set up a rival to the most popular newspaper in Rio, the pro-Vargas tabloid Última Hora, established by Samuel Wainer, child of Jewish immigrants, with loans from the Bank of Brazil that reflected its political allegiance. Lacerda’s Tribuna da Imprensa could not compete with Última Hora, but once Globo transferred Lacerda’s strident voice to radio, his accusations of corruption and moral turpitude against Vargas shook the government’s foundations, because Lacerda was a master of ‘fake news’ journalism (McCann 2003). Lacerda also launched anti-Semitic attacks on his rival Wainer, proclaiming all the values that remain central for the Brazilian right today: dedication to Family, God, Republic (meaning government by ‘respectable’ people), and Nation (exclusionary, xenophobic and racist). Vargas’ suicide, reading of his testament letter on stateowned public radio, and printing of the text by Última Hora, brought protestors onto the streets demanding Lacerda’s arrest, but he survived the backlash to make a political comeback in 1960 as governor of Rio de Janeiro, demonstrating that he retained a social base. Vargas had, however, guaranteed that his followers would become

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presidents of Brazil until, ten years later, the military removed Goulart for threatening reforms that finally included rural society. Globo provided comprehensive backing to this coup. Labourism was refounded in 1979 by trade union leader Leonel Brizola, in partnership with anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, who had been Goulart’s chief of staff. Brizola’s Democratic Labour Party (PDT) had socialist aspirations, but still advocated a mixed economy and kept its distance from the communists. As governor of Rio de Janeiro (1983–1987, 1991–1994) Brizola abandoned the corporatist populism of Vargas to reach out to the people of Rio’s slums, the favelas, whom he correctly recognised to be active participants in political life. He also recognised that class remained racialised, drawing Afro-Brazilian activists into his team, and stopping police raids into favelas, despite protests from the right that this gave drug traffickers licence to operate with impunity inside them. Everything that has happened since this policy was reversed supports its wisdom (Gledhill 2015), although articulating residents of the favelas and the organised working class outside them into a political movement proved difficult, given the social prejudices that divided them. Brizola’s change of strategy reflected competition with the PT, a new force on the Brazilian left that had transformed the trade union movement during the PDT leaders’ absence in exile. The PT presented a bottom-up democratic alternative to labourist populism by bringing together social movements that had resisted military rule. Its working class base was the industrial trade unions of the São Paulo ABC region. By organising strikes during the dictatorship, the party drew in middle class activist professionals and socially critical sectors of the Catholic Church (Assies 1999). The PT promised more than rule ‘for’ the people: it promised popular participation in government, put into practice when it won municipal elections after the return of democracy.



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The Rise and Fall of the PT The participatory model withered as PT administrations tackled the challenges of governing. As elected officials and public functionaries, middle class professionals began to think more in terms of ‘concrete results’ than ‘popular mobilisation’ (Assies 1999). The pragmatics of exercising power led PT administrations to replicate the routine vices of Brazilian political life at a relatively early stage (Albert 2016). Lula first stood for the presidency in 1989, losing the run-off to Fernando Collor de Mello, a political outsider from a wealthy family that owned the regional Globo franchise in the north-eastern state of Alagoas, where Collor had been elected governor. A populist of the right still popular in the state capital’s violent slums, Collor had the advantage of Globo backing but disadvantage of lacking a national political machine. He resigned after two years, facing impeachment for corruption. Collor won the popular vote amongst the poorest electors, whereas Lula did better than Collor amongst the better-off, reaching 50 per cent amongst the two highest income categories (Singer 2009). After two defeats by Cardoso, Lula obliged the PT to abandon socialism for social democracy, provoking a split that produced the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). He won the presidency in 2002, but critics argued that he had made PT politics dependent on his personal charisma, a neo-populist ‘Lulism’, and was making a Faustian bargain with Brazilian capitalism (Singer 2009). Lula tranquilised the ruling classes by continuing the ‘sound economic management’ of Cardoso, making international investment banker Henrique Meirelles president of the Central Bank. As finance minister of the Temer government, Meirelles imposed a fiscal austerity package that freezes public spending for twenty years, which even the IMF judged dangerously socially regressive. Nevertheless, alongside committing to state intervention to strengthen Brazilian capitalism, the PT governments did reduce

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both poverty and income (though not wealth) inequality, becoming the acceptable face of the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ for Washington institutions, although these policies were dismissed as ‘populism’ by the Brazilian right. We should be wary, however, of explaining PT class compromise simply in terms of Lula’s ‘personalism’. As Oliveira (2006) points out, the upper strata of the leaders of the ‘autonomous’ trade union movement of the 1970s and 1980s became ‘workers’ representatives’ on boards of private pension funds that play a major role in Brazilian finance. In the period before 2002, this ‘fund management stratum’ within the PT became complicit in decisions on redundancies and plant closures that eroded the party’s base in the organised working class. Lula’s 2002 win was based on majorities from middle class voters and organised labour. He again failed to secure a majority amongst the working poor of the favelas and rural poor in the Northeast, the region which he left at the age of seven when his mother took her children to São Paulo, where Lula began his working life at the age of twelve. Singer (2009) argues that poor workers were not initially inclined to trust a labour union-based party. Precarious economic situations made them anxious about economic stability. The unions’ strikes generally had a negative impact on them, especially when they paralysed the public transport on which many depended to get to work. This changed in 2006. Increased economic growth resulting from the global commodities boom enabled the Lula government to stabilise prices, increase minimum wages, create new formal sector jobs, and introduce schemes that gave poorer citizens credit to improve consumption standards. The Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfer program was well received, but, Singer argues, not the principal reason why Lula won huge majorities amongst the poor in the Northeast in 2006. What changed was that they were now convinced that the PT could distribute resources to them whilst keeping the economy in



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good shape. The PT came to be accepted as a ‘popular’ government dedicated to improving the lives of the poor and Lula followed Vargas in becoming their ‘father’, with the additional advantage that he came from the same class and had managed not only to become president of his country but a respected world statesman. Yet Lula also became the ‘mother’ of the rich. Although he uses populist language and emphasises his personal affinity with o povo, PT governments administered in the same way as other ‘third way’ social democratic parties. Furthermore, this was class compromise Brazilianstyle. The first Lula government governed in coalition with smaller parties. To get legislation through Congress, the PT offered a ‘big monthly payment’ (mensalão) to deputies for support. The PSDB did the same to secure congressional approval for Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s re-election, but the PT’s failure to do politics differently alienated middle class voters who had backed Lula in 2002. After 2006, the PT opted to govern in coalition with the PMDB, which had the largest number of deputies in the lower house of congress and controlled seven state governorships. To compete effectively in televised elections, the party accepted funding from private sector corporations. It thus became as entangled as the PMDB and PSDB in the webs of a crony capitalism that paid kickbacks to secure contracts and overpriced the contracts received, suborning politicians with illegal campaign funding and personal benefits. Discovery of the looting of Petrobras by engineering and construction companies such as Odebrecht and OAS in collusion with Petrobras functionaries and politicians initially hit the PT hardest. Lula himself was accused by prosecutors in Curitiba responsible for the Operation Carwash investigations of being the ‘supreme commander’ of a ‘bribe-duct’ that underpinned a ‘criminal system of governance’, and, along with other leading figures in the party, of benefitting personally from kickbacks paid for

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favours rendered in the award of contracts. Although no evidence was provided to support these claims, strengthening the case of Lula’s defence team that he was a victim of politically-motivated ‘lawfare’, mainstream media reported them in a sensationalist manner as virtual matters of fact. This did the PT enormous political damage and created the climate for deputies to vote for Rousseff’s impeachment as a matter of restoring ‘morality’ to politics, directed by PMDB house leader Eduardo Cunha. His role in the coup completed, Cunha, who stashed his own bribe earnings in undeclared offshore bank accounts, was subsequently jailed for corruption. Temer was later accused of buying his silence with money supplied by the JBS meat packing company, involved in multiple corruption scandals. PT governments guaranteed the independence of the Attorney General’s office and did not attempt to block federal police corruption investigations, whereas phone conversations secretly recorded by crony capitalist associates revealed Temer government ministers conspiring to prevent investigations from revealing the sins of the PMDB and PSDB. They failed. However questionable the methods by which prosecutors obtained evidence through plea bargain deals with corrupt businessmen and money launderers, by mid-2017 such testimony had exposed the entire political class. The PSDB candidate who lost to Rousseff in the 2014 election, Aécio Neves, was suspended from the Senate after being charged by the Attorney General with corruption. Temer was also charged with acts of corruption while in office, for which he had no immunity from prosecution, although a shameless deployment of public money to buy off deputies secured congressional blocking of further investigation. Neves’s suspension was revoked by a supreme court judge, but it was Lula’s treatment that most clearly demonstrated politicisation within the judiciary and a sustained state of exception designed to destroy the PT. Judge Sérgio Moro and the Curitiba prosecutors failed to ‘follow



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the money’ from corruption to Lula convincingly. Yet with polls indicating that Lula, who had already declared his intention to stand for president again, would win the 2018 elections against all comers, enjoying support across the class, age and gender spectrum, Moro sentenced the expresident to nine and a half years in prison for receiving a triplex apartment as a kick-back from the OAS construction company, even though Lula had never lived in or owned it. Although Moro’s verdict attracted considerable independent judicial criticism, especially abroad, three appeal court judges in Porto Alegre ratified it unanimously and increased Lula’s sentence to over twelve years. Replicating Vargas’ attention to mythification, Lula capitalised politically on Moro’s ordering his imprisonment by defiantly rallying his supporters in the place his own militancy began, the headquarters of the Metalworkers’ Union, before surrendering to federal police. Yet imprisonment ended his personal chances of regaining power. The ‘Clean Slate’ law, approved by Lula himself as president, debars candidates for election who have had a criminal conviction confirmed by a first court of appeal. The Brazilian government dismissed a United Nations Human Rights Committee directive that Lula’s political rights should not be suspended until all possible appeals to higher courts had been exhausted. Yet the PT maintained Lula’s candidacy despite the inevitability of its being barred by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE). Many voters now seemed receptive to the argument that the ex-president was a political prisoner unjustly gaoled simply to keep him out of the elections. The hope was that keeping the focus on Lula for as long as possible would maximise the number of votes that would transfer to former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad as substitute PT candidate. This was a high-risk strategy. If Haddad did not inherit enough Lula votes, division of votes between candidates of the PT, PSOL, PDT and ex-petista environmentalist Marina Silva in the first round could result in a second-round

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contest between the right and ultra-right. The TSE ruled Lula ineligible to stand at the end of August, on the eve of television campaigning. Only one of its seven judges accepted the binding nature of the UN directive. Rousseff was impeached for the administrative ‘crime of responsibility’ of manipulating the public accounts, not corruption. Her judgement by a reactionary congress was a political lynching in which the validity of these charges became irrelevant. Nevertheless, the fragility of PT hegemony was partly its own doing. Encouraged by campaign donations from property developers and construction companies, the party accepted neoliberal models of urban development that expelled poor residents from city centres, backed up by public security and mass incarceration policies that perpetuated a repressive and racially-biased regime of social control. The PT introduced a non-­ contributory pension scheme for rural workers, but largely failed to support agrarian social movements, because agro-export and mining revenues were crucial to maintaining economic growth and funding social programs. Working class Brazilians became better off in lifestyle terms, but by democratising access to consumer credit and going with the individualistic flow of neoliberal market society, whose strong influence in favelas is marked by the success of evangelical churches preaching self-help prosperity theology, PT rule left poorer Brazilians more vulnerable when the economic downturn came and reduced their capacity for collective resistance. Pro-impeachment social media campaigns and street protests were funded by the São Paulo Federation of Industries (FIESP), backed up by US neoconservative money. The coup’s empowerment of the congressional agribusiness lobby offers a bleak future to rural workers, threatens the territorial rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, destroys environmental conservation regulations, and opens doors to foreign corporate land-grabbers. These measures were reinforced by



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legal persecution of activists, including anthropologists, and lethal state violence in rural areas. Even school students were repressed when they occupied their schools to protest a class-biased ‘reform’ of secondary education by decree. A pension ‘reform’ blind to patterns of social and regional inequality was postponed until after the elections, but Temer’s policies took unemployment to over fourteen million and brought poverty and hunger back to levels that enhanced popular enthusiasm for Lula’s return.

Lessons for the Future Neo-liberal solutions mean that elites contribute nothing to the costs of resolving economic crisis. Brazilian banks enjoy lavish rents derived from high interest rates, which, along with capitalists’ unpaid debts to the social security system, were the real root of fiscal crisis, given the burden of interest payments on public debt. During her first administration, Rousseff attempted a heterodox economic strategy, using state investment and tax breaks to modernise infrastructure and promote re-industrialisation, whilst driving down interest rates. This was not welcomed by bankers, but it should have encouraged investment by industrialists. The fact that it did not, and the same industrialists put money into promoting her ouster, illustrates how capital invested in production is now itself financialised (Oliveira 2006). Brazil’s economic elites are inveterate rent-seekers. They prefer to reduce the cost of labour rather than raise its productivity and liquidate national resources without thought for the future. Some aspire to be members of a global elite, investing in company acquisitions abroad. Although Brazilian capitalism is central to political corruption, the nature of that capitalism as an historically specific variant of what Narotzky (this volume) calls ‘illiberal capitalism’ is an even graver problem (Souza 2017).

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The coup was supported by segments of the middle classes resentful of the social advances achieved by working class people of colour, especially those empowered to compete with them in the professions by the PT’s affirmative action policies in education. A politics of hate-filled resentment took an ultra-right populist, former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro, into second place behind Lula in the polls. Racist, sexist, homophobic, and nostalgic for military authoritarianism, Bolsonaro advocates the death penalty, a gun in the hand of every ‘decent’ citizen, and a carte blanche for police to kill. Although Bolsonaro toned down his language for electoral purposes, it still epitomised the calculated use of ‘political incorrectness’ that Herzfeld discusses in this volume. Bolsonaro has less support amongst poorer voters, but his iron fist public security policies appeal to some young men in poor communities even if his hyper-masculine misogyny alienates many women, irrespective of class. In the large favela that I have studied in Salvador, Bahia, we also find lighter skinned residents complaining about the unfairness of affirmative action policies in a way that replicates complaints about multiculturalism expressed by white supporters of right wing populisms elsewhere, including, as Hinkson and Altman show in this volume, Australia. Although the spread of ultra-right populism results from the mounting contradictions of ‘illiberal capitalism’, it feeds off rejection of established political classes. Although Lula recovered his popularity, his party lagged behind even in poor communities in the Northeast that previously voted solidly for its candidates and enjoyed fewer alliances with other parties. Bolsonaro, who claims to be a political ‘outsider’, offers one alternative, but another is ‘anti-political’ refusal to participate in the rituals of electoral democracy. Voting is obligatory in Brazil, but citizens can cast a null or blank vote. In the 2016 municipal elections, null and blank votes were the real winners in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Disillusion with



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democracy on the part of a ‘people’ exhausted by corruption scandals, a political life made opaque by its judicialisation and backstage deals, and deepening physical and economic insecurity, makes it easier for a minority to put right wing populists (or plutocrats) into power. During his rally in the Metalworkers’ Union, Lula made a point of presenting the young presidential candidates of the PSOL and Communist Party of Brazil, Guilherme Boulos and Manuela D’Ávila, as the future of the left. D’Ávila subsequently sacrificed her own candidacy to become substitute vice presidential candidate for Haddad. Yet whatever the ex-president’s virtues, the continuing gravitation of left politics around his person revealed its weaknesses. This became only too clear in the October 2018 elections. In a campaign based on an unprecedented exploitation of the power of social media as a means of propagating lies and ‘fake news’, Bolsonaro and his allies pursued a successful negative politics of pinning the blame for all the country’s problems on the PT. Although the PT retained the largest single group of deputies in the lower house of congress, the ultra-right also advanced at the expense of the PSDB and PMDB, mirroring the rejection of ‘the establishment’ that has occurred in other countries, but with the significant twist, rooted in Brazil’s unresolved historical dilemmas, of doing so under the leadership of a figure who regards the period of military dictatorship as a golden age and vows to put a definitive end to both ‘populism’ and ‘communism’. Refusing any debate with his rival, Bolsonaro won the presidency in the second round with 57.7 million votes to Haddad’s 47 million. Yet 42.1 million electors refused to vote for either option, the highest rate of abstentions and null and blank votes since 1989. By allowing a politics of fear and hate to silence a politics of hope, Bolsonaro voters launched Brazil along an atavistic path towards a combination of authoritarianism and neo-liberal shock therapy reminiscent of

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Pinochet’s Chile. How sustainable that project will prove given the scale of manifest social resistance to it remains to be seen, despite the new president’s declared intention to treat ‘activists’ with a firm hand.

John Gledhill is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, co-editor of the journal Critique of Anthropology, and a fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences. He has conducted ethnographic and historical research on society and politics in Brazil and Mexico, in both rural and urban contexts, and also written on broader comparative issues. His most recent books are La cara oculta de la inseguridad en México (2017); The New War Against the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America (2015) and (editor) World Anthropologies in Practice: Situated Perspectives, Global Knowledge (2016).

References Albert, Victor. 2016. The Limits to Citizen Power: Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State. London: Pluto Press. Assies, Willem. 1999. ‘Theory, Practice and “External Actors” in the Making of New Urban Social Movements in Brazil’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 18(2): 211–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0261-3050(98)00094-1 Ferreira, Jorge. 2001. ‘O nome e a coisa: o populismo na política brasileira’, in Jorge Ferreira (ed), O populismo e sua história: debate e crítica. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 59–124. Gledhill, John. 2015. The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. McCann, Bryan. 2003. ‘Carlos Lacerda: The Rise and Fall of a Middle-Class Populist in 1950s Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review 83(4): 661–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-83-4-661



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Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2012. Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? London: Cambridge University Press. Oliveira, Francisco de. 2006. ‘Lula in the labyrinth’, New Left Review 42 (November-December): 5–22. https://newleftreview. org/II/42/francisco-de-oliveira-lula-in-the-labyrinth Singer, André. 2009. ‘Raízes sociais e ideológicas do lulismo’, Novos Estudos-CEBRAP (85): 83–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/ S0101-33002009000300004 Souza, Jessé. 2017. A elite do atraso: da escravidão à Lava Jato. São Paulo: LeYa.

Lurching Between Consensus and Chaos Shades of Populism in Australian Indigenous Affairs

( Melinda Hinkson and Jon Altman

Since it first became apparent that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were going to grow in number rather than die out, ‘the problem’ of what to do with this sector of the community has troubled successive Australian governments. One minor history of the Australian nation-state would track shifting approaches to dealing with the challenge of whether and how to acknowledge and respond to historic and contemporary forms of injustice, and of how to resolve the tension between incorporation (the allocation of the same rights to Indigenous people as all Australian citizens) and separation (allocation of rights to live differently) (Altman 2016). Through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, contestation over the political stakes involved in Indigenous governance erupts with increasing frequency into conflict over what Nancy Fraser (2008) identifies as the three ‘scales of justice’, issues of recognition, representation, and redistribution. In this chapter, we briefly examine three significant events in the history of Indigenous governance in Australia as a springboard for considering how the current chaotic state of Indigenous policy making (Anderson



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2015; Langton 2008) has come to pass. The three events are: a referendum in 1967, some fifty years ago, when Australians voted overwhelmingly to change the Australian constitution to eradicate two exclusionary references to Aboriginal people and so constitutionally assimilate them; the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention that saw the Australian government deploy very different constitutional powers and suspend racial discrimination laws so as to undertake a neo-liberalising project of improvement of targeted Aboriginal communities and individuals; and a more recent and far from complete campaign for constitutional recognition that has been under way for more than ten years now that seeks to reincorporate Indigenous peoples into the Australian constitution. We regard these three events as distinctively marked. The first was a political event we describe as popular, the second was populist—arguably, as we shall show, a distinctive type of settler colonial populism—and the third event combines elements of both the popular and populism. By examining these three events we track transformations not only in public and political attitudes to the place of Indigenous people in the nation, but in larger (il) logics of governance. In invoking populism’s analytical tractability, we are influenced by Francisco Panizza, who reads the concept in terms of ‘a political appeal that seeks to change the terms of political discourse, articulate new social relations, redefine political frontiers and constitute new identities’ (2005: 9). The processual conjuncture Panizza names is vital in revealing what is at stake in an arena of activity that could as easily be dismissed, and indeed often is, as a theatre of distraction. Taking seriously Ernesto Laclau’s related observation that populism is a form of action with ontological implications, a form of articulation that ‘produces structuring effects which primarily manifest themselves at the level of modes of representation’ (Kapferer 2017; Laclau 2005), we explore the way ‘popular

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opinion’ has been cleaved away from a generally sympathetic attitude towards Aboriginal difference and enlisted in support of a neo-liberal program to coercively recraft Aboriginal subjectivity (Altman 2014; Strakosch 2015). How did a comprehensive shift in government policy framed around the pathologisation and punishment of the welfare dependent culturally different citizen and an associated program to cultivate individualised subjectivity come to capture the moral high ground? Framed in such a way, it is clear that the transformations that we track are by no means exceptional to the context in which we explore them. They constitute socio-cultural and political forms readily and widely identifiable across contemporary liberal-democratic nation-states (Davies 2016). Similarly, while our empirical focus is restricted to a brief foray into the contested arena of Indigenous affairs, the cultural logics with which this essay is concerned could just as readily be modelled for other spheres of the Australian political arena through the same period. As Laclau’s conceptualisation makes clear, the establishment of antagonistic relations between a public and its other is the ground upon which populism is made. In this way, we might just as productively have turned our attention to the governance of ‘boat people’, or ‘Muslims’, or as one worried interviewee put it on national television, ‘Pakistanians’. Fuelling the galvanising power of what we know in Australia as ‘dog whistle politics’, is the pervasive volatility of the contemporary moment (Bauman 2017; Streek 2016). In this moment governmental practices are profoundly shaped by and enacted through the distinctive visual regime and supercharged temporality of late technocapitalism (Kapferer and Gold 2017). The churn of 24/7 news reporting, fleeting social media declarations of outrage, and the cultivation of that ever-elusive ‘public opinion’, are pervasive preoccupations with wide-ranging effects (Hinkson 2018). The distinctive social form of this technologised political culture brings destabilisation to the



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fore. It follows that an object of populist concern might be displaced by another object at any time. Yet recognition of a distinctive contemporary political culture also suggests we might find distinctive forms of populism at play in particular places; in Australia populism is funnelled through the abiding structural tensions of settler colonialism (Kapferer and Morris 2012).

1. The 1967 Referendum: A Popular Act of Inclusion Among the multiple forms of violence enacted on Indigenous Australians historically since the British arrived in 1788 is the violence of social and statistical exclusion. When the Australian nation was formed in 1901, Indigenous people were rendered statistically invisible by constitutional exclusion from the five-yearly census to ensure that States with many Aboriginal people were not unfairly advantaged in the allocation of parliamentary seats and federal resources. This act prevented the collection of nationally comparative data that might have made visible the deeply impoverished socio-economic circumstances in which most Indigenous people were living. A further intention of this act was to allow individual States to deal with ‘their’ Aboriginal populations independently, with those who failed to be granted citizen status excluded from standard social service provisions. Thus, the Commonwealth was precluded from a direct role in administering their affairs, except in the case of the Northern Territory, which was administered from Canberra.1 In 1967 these foundational constitutional acts were undone, following the most successful referendum in Australia’s settler colonial history that returned a ‘yes’ vote of 90.77 per cent. The Constitution Alterations (Aboriginals) parliamentary proposal removed section 127 of the Constitution that excluded the counting of Aboriginal people

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in the national census. It also amended section 51 (xxvi) to delete the words ‘other than the aboriginal race in any State’, hence allowing the Commonwealth to make laws for ‘the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’, generally assumed to be beneficial. Why did these proposed changes elicit such overwhelming support among Australian voters? On one reading an upswell of ‘good feeling’ combined with a sense of national guilt were the intangible forces that brought about this result. Many of the posters and leaflets promoting the ‘Yes’ campaign carried images of Aboriginal children or babies. Historian Russell McGregor writes that the campaigners were ‘attuned to the emotional impact of such images’. Out of more than a decade of public contestation over support for assimilation or pluralism, through the 1960s there was a ‘drift towards the pluralist end of the spectrum’ (McGregor 2011: 119). It is also the case that support for a ‘yes’ vote was the subject of a long, difficult, carefully orchestrated campaign, energetically pursued by the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and championed by several high profile public figures over a ten-year period (Attwood and Markus 1997). On the face of it, the constitutional act ‘in support of Aborigines’ was a legal move to properly enshrine their inclusion in the nation. Following the passing of the Referendum Aboriginal people would be fully included as citizens no different from other Australians, during a period in which official policy promoted their ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’. The White Australia policy was simultaneously in the process of being dismantled. Yet these were governmental steps that made little difference to the circumstances of Aboriginal people’s lives. Disillusionment with the effects of the Referendum, agitation over land rights and demands for freedom from police brutality helped activate a new radical Aboriginal politics inspired by the US Black Power movement (Foley et al. 2014). The militancy of this movement for self-determination



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marked a distinct break with the conciliatory approach of the Referendum campaign. It also ‘signalled a shift from demands for civil rights on the basis of equality with all other citizens, to Indigenous rights on the basis of prior occupancy of the land and historical oppression’ (Lydon 2012: 229). This constitutional act of inclusion in the nation, an act to establish equivalence, was required before Aborigines could be given special rights and enabled to pursue distinctive ways of life and modes of identification. The Referendum outcome authorised a reformist Whitlam government elected in 1972 to fundamentally remake the policy architecture of Indigenous affairs, broadly replacing assimilation with self-determination and introducing institutions of political and bureaucratic representation (the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee and the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs), recognition (federal Land Rights laws and a high degree of program delivery devolution to community-controlled organisations) and redistribution (rapid escalation of Indigenousspecific expenditures in the areas of housing, education, legal support, languages and cultural revival and maintenance programs). Jurisdictions established in earlier colonial policy periods as government settlements for the protection and civilisation of Aboriginal subjects were to be remade as Aboriginal ‘communities’, places where cultural difference would thrive with government support.

2. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response (The Intervention): A Populist Move to Radically Reshape the Terms of Indigenous Governance From 1967 and its decades long aftermath, we jump to June 2007. The conservative coalition government led by Prime Minister John Howard declared a ‘national emergency’

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in respect of child sexual abuse across Aboriginal towns of the Northern Territory in response to the report Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle ‘Little Children Are Sacred’ (Anderson and Wild 2007). ‘The Intervention’ instigated a strategic and spectacular refiguring of these places and their residents as requiring a new kind of intensive governmental attention. In its first dramatic stage, uniformed Australian servicemen and women and federal police were deployed to remote communities in convoys of army vehicles. Medical practitioners were sent to undertake ‘compulsory health checks’ on children. The hard drives of community organisation computers were seized in a comprehensive search for pornographic material. Commencing as an alarmist set of staged declarations and pronouncements around dysfunction and the need to act with ‘utmost urgency’ to stop ‘the rivers of grog’ and ‘paedophile rings’ said to be operating across Aboriginal-owned land, in a period of just two months the ‘Emergency Response’ was expanded into a raft of complex legislative measures with far reaching consequences. These included the identification of seventy-three places as ‘prescribed communities’ that would be subject to transformed land tenure arrangements; the introduction of a new regime for managing the expenditure of welfare payments; and, the disbanding of significant programs such as the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme that had enabled communities to mobilise their considerable numbers of unemployed people in locally meaningful activity (Hinkson 2007). The Northern Territory government introduced a series of large-scale changes in a similar vein, replacing community government councils with regional shires and ending its already limited support of bilingual education. Thus, a dramatic political event morphed quickly into a cross-jurisdictional shift in policy approach, one that was consolidated from the outset with bipartisan support; a ‘Canberra consensus’ (Altman 2014).



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The Intervention entailed an exceptional political act— the Northern Territory, unlike the six States, is a jurisdiction in which the federal government has constitutional ‘territory’ powers to act. The government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act (which had been passed in 1975) in order to introduce its raft of measures, withdrawing as it did any legal mechanisms available to Aboriginal people to challenge them. Prime Minister Howard was highly conscious of the need for a compelling discursive regime to convince ‘the Australian people’ of the moral justification for this dramatic shift in the principles of governance: We are dealing with children of the tenderest age who have been exposed to the most terrible abuse from the time of their birth, virtually. . . . It is interventionist, it does push aside the role of the Territory to some degree—I accept that. But what matters more: the constitutional niceties or the care and protection of young children (Schubert and Murphy 2007).

Rehearsed on paper, the Intervention might appear as an inspired and well-orchestrated political program geared towards establishing a coherent neo-liberal approach to the governance of remote living Aboriginal people. In practice it was highly chaotic, erratic in the framing of its pronouncements, and reliant upon subterfuge. The implementation of intervention measures gave rise to a remarkable spurt of official activity and a situation where, as anthropologist Tess Lea has observed of the emotional investment of bureaucrats charged with its implementation, even ‘the immanent prospect of policy failure is productive, for whatever outcomes emerge, greater bureau-professional involvement is assured’ (Lea 2012: 119). Through much of 2006 in the months prior to the declaration of ‘emergency’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship program Lateline broke a series of ‘exclusive’ stories that raised the alarming spectre of

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extensive networks of paedophile rings operating across Aboriginal communities. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs was the most passionate proclaimer of widespread sexual deviancy and criminality (ABC TV 2006). One program featured the dramatic testimony of a ‘youth worker’ whose identity was carefully hidden with a series of audio and visual techniques. He offered graphic accounts of ‘drug dealers, petrol warlords and paedophiles’ preying systematically on young children across the region in which he worked. The ‘youth worker’ was later revealed to be a senior public servant working directly for the Minister (Graham 2017). A raft of commentators, black and white, and a series of emotively titled books such as Helen Hughes’ (2007) Lands of Shame, Roger Sandall’s (2000) The Culture Cult, Peter Sutton’s (2009) The Politics of Suffering, Noel Pearson’s (2000) Our Right to Take Responsibility and Pearson’s Cape York Institute’s (2007) From Hand Out to Hand Up, established a broader narrative arc of justification through this period. While the 1967 Referendum was the outcome of a steady, unfolding, popular people’s movement, the 2007 Intervention, occurring in a profoundly different political and socio-cultural moment was rapidly unfurled and populist. Its success in political terms, aside from the proliferation of new forms of bureaucratic surveillance and myriad other public administration techniques, involved turning ‘the Australian people’ away from a generally sympathetic attitude to the idea that Aboriginal lands were regions where culturally distinctive modes of life were pursued with government support, towards a new vision in which cultural degeneration, depravity and crisis were the overriding associations. Dominant representations of culture-bearing older men and women dramatically gave way to images of the suffering child. The case for speed was compelling and constantly stated, and it was assisted by a rapidly transformed visual regime (Hinkson 2010).



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Taking a step back from the dazzling optics, how did this shift come about? Through the 1980s and 1990s further demands in support of Aboriginal rights continued to gather pace. The High Court decision in Mabo in 1992 (after a ten-year legal struggle) overturned terra nullius, the idea that at the time of European settlement Australia was conveniently without forms of legally recognisable land title. This was a highly symbolic tipping point. Earlier governmental action taken in support of the uncontentious issue of inclusion was now confronted with special claims with economic implications. The ongoing injustice of settler colonial relations was given new public visibility. On the eve of the International Year of Indigenous Peoples, then Prime Minister Paul Keating addressed the nation from the iconic Aboriginal heartland of Redfern, Sydney, in which he dramatically identified and took responsibility for systematic acts of settler colonial destruction. Significantly, his apology was offered as part of a future focused vision: By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice. . . . For that reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months. Mabo is an historic decision—we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians. The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain (Keating 1992).

In 2007, listeners to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National voted Keating’s speech their third most ‘unforgettable speech’ behind Martin Luther King’s (No.1) I Have a Dream and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (No. 2), placing it above speeches delivered by Winston

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Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, JF Kennedy and Nelson Mandela (ABC Radio National n.d.). Yet from another view Keating had overreached. He was intent on committing Australians to a contentious progressivist agenda of refiguring national identity; setting the nation on a path to economic rationalism and globalisation on the one hand, and newly oriented, culturally diverse, regional identification on the other (Kapferer and Morris 2012: 364). Bitter contestation followed, and Keating was removed from power in 1996. The newly elected conservative Coalition led by John Howard came to power promising to govern ‘for all Australians’. Howard galvanised an emergent middle class of aspirational citizens: the ‘battler’, small business and the home owning nuclear families were the critical units of political subjectivity. There was a sharpened rhetorical focus on protecting self-interest that included a turning away from welfarist considerations and the end of widespread support for Aborigines and other marginalised groups. In 1996 Pauline Hanson was endorsed as a Liberal candidate in the March 1996 federal election. She received significant media attention and thus a platform for her views—calling for zero migration, an end to multiculturalism and revival of Australia’s Anglo-Celtic cultural tradition. In Indigenous affairs Hanson called for the abolition of Native Title and the national representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an end to special Indigenous funding programs, and opposition to the reconciliation movement initiated with bipartisan support in 1991 on the grounds that it would ‘create two nations’. Hanson also called for a review of the 1967 Referendum and its’ granting of power to the Commonwealth to legislate for Aborigines. She was dis-endorsed by the Liberal party, but not before ballot papers had been printed. She was elected to the parliament with a massive voter swing in her favour, but immediately found herself sitting as an



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independent member. A rapid growth in popularity saw the formation of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in 1997. In 1998 the party received 22.7 per cent of the vote in the Queensland State election, more than either of the mainstream Liberal or National parties. In her maiden speech in the federal parliament, Hanson appealed to economically disadvantaged white Australians by expressing dissatisfaction with government policy on Indigenous affairs, saying that, Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. [ . . . ] I have done research on benefits available only to Aboriginals and challenge anyone to tell me how Aboriginals are disadvantaged when they can obtain three and five per cent housing loans denied to non-­Aboriginals. This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this. I am fed up with being told, ‘This is our land.’ Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children. I will work beside anyone and they will be my equal but I draw the line when told I must pay and continue paying for something that happened over 200 years ago. Like most Australians, I worked for my land; no-one gave it to me (Hanson 1996).

Bruce Kapferer and Barry Morris (2012: 366) have observed that the arrival of Pauline Hanson on the national scene instantiates the rise of populism in Australia. She articulates ‘a vision of state and society that is ultimately irreducible to earlier conceptions and practices’, and ‘the first major and relatively coherent articulation of the social and political discontent that motivated the majority settler population’. Hanson’s distinctive settler populism

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establishes the Indigene as villain against a settler underdog. She will later bring ‘Muslims’ into the picture, but pitting the hard working, heroic Anglo-Celtic ‘us’ against the welfare dependent exceptionally treated Aboriginal ‘them’ is the ground upon which Hanson’s historically distinctive ‘nationalist egalitarianism’ is established. The invocation of a battling working class is pivotal here and it lays the ground for a more explicit populist trope that will become central to Australia’s political discourse in the years that follow; the displacement of expert knowledge by the view of the person on the street, the ‘ordinary Australian’. While John Howard had distanced himself and his party from Hanson, she brazenly reflected the views he expressed in his 1996 election campaign. In 1997 in the thick of debates over the shaping of native title legislation Howard appeared on national television standing alongside a map of Australia: I think the Australian public will understand one very simple thing. What has happened with native title is that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, particularly after the Wik decision. And what I have done with this legislation is to bring it back to the middle. Let me just show you a view of it. This shows 78 per cent of the land mass of Australia coloured brown on this map. Now, the Labor Party and the Democrats are effectively saying that the Aboriginal people of Australia should have the potential right of veto over further development of 78 per cent of the land mass of Australia. Now, that is a very simple message. I think the Australian people will understand that message (ABC TV 1997).

What Howard did not share with his audience was the legal reality that native title did not give Aboriginal owners any right of veto over development; commercial interests always legally trumped native title interests. In the years that followed, the Howard government set about dismantling the major institutions of



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self-determination. By 2005 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was legislated out of existence, ushering in a new era of ‘mainstreaming’ of Indigenous programs. The message: that Aboriginal people will fare better if they are treated the same as other Australians, as individuals interacting directly with state agencies rather than under the umbrella of their own distinct community organisations.

3. Constitutional Recognition: Contests Over Inclusion and Representation In 1999 Howard had sabotaged attempts to commence a process of constitutional recognition. In late 2007, in the same year he launched the NT ‘Emergency Response’, he promised that if re-elected he would hold a Referendum to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution. So commenced what to date has been a prolonged and far from complete decade-long campaign, resourced by successive federal governments, with a final Referendum Council report presented to the federal government on 30 June 2017. Whereas the ‘emergency response’ was framed by a need for urgency, constitutional reform has consistently been invoked as a process that will ‘take time’, the time needed to bring on board ‘the Australian people’ as well as ‘Indigenous Australians’ to achieve a resounding ‘yes’ vote. Across the decade a raft of institutions and instruments have been brought to life for shorter or longer periods, among them, Reconciliation Australia, Recognise, a Panel of Experts in 2012, a Parliamentary Joint Committee in 2014, a Referendum Council in 2015—each ceremoniously delivering hefty tomes of deliberation for political and public consideration. Along the way there have been highly staged moments of bipartisan agreement, as well as sharp discord between the leaders of the government and

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parliamentary opposition. Prime Minister Tony Abbott promised to ‘sweat blood’ for constitutional change, but steadfastly refused to support a separate Indigenous consultation process. Soon after Abbott was removed from the prime ministership by his own party such a process was set in train. The Referendum Council’s nationwide consultations culminated in a week long National Constitutional Convention (of Indigenous delegates only) held at Uluru (Ayers Rock, the symbolic geographic ‘heart’ of Australia) in May 2017, which at its conclusion delivered the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’. Cutting through debate around fine points of legal possibility, this statement, the substance of which was then delivered as the single recommendation of the final report of the Referendum Council, called for the enshrinement in the Constitution of a ‘Voice to Parliament’, with a rousing catchcry: ‘In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we want to be heard’. This recommendation was rejected by the Turnbull government in an act that Noel Pearson (2017) referred to in the terms of ‘betrayal’ and ‘bastardry’. As we finalise this essay the Prime Minister who rejected the ‘Voice’ has been removed by his own party and this matter of constitutional reform has, at least for the time being, vanished from the precariously poised federal government’s agenda. The as yet unfinished process of constitutional recognition was established with liberal-democratic principles for the cultivation of a popular movement. The temporal dimension of the consultation process is vital; from one rhetorical stance constitutional change ‘shouldn’t be rushed’, from another it ‘shouldn’t be delayed’. On one side are frustrated Aboriginal activists weary of the way this ‘national conversation’ continually defers action. On the other are politicians whose ‘unhurried’ timeframe conveys the proposed amendments, whatever form they might eventually take, as steady, unthreatening acts of national unification and responsibility. Yet the wider social context for these deliberations has resulted



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in a process as unstable and volatile as the ‘Emergency Response’. Between 2007 and 2018 Australia has had seven prime ministers, four removed midterm by their own parties. In these turbulent circumstances Indigenous affairs is a valuable, flexible political resource, able to be inflated at will and put to good use as a distraction from the contentions of other policy concerns.

Conclusion: From the Ruins of Technocratic Creative Destruction We have argued that the 1967 Referendum was a popular event that unfolded according to a distinct logic when compared with more recent populist moves to cultivate public attitudes towards Indigenous people. In the decades that followed there would be a broader shift in the practice of politics by liberal-democratic governments of which the increasing frequency of referenda marks but one dimension (Qvortrup 2014). In Australia, deliberative decision-making techniques including referenda, plebiscites and postal votes have been increasingly invoked in political debate as contentious decisions of policy are increasingly deferred to spaces outside parliament. Margaret Canovan has observed the redemptive nature of these political tactics, as governments struggle to respond to a pervasively volatile public mood; ‘a deep revulsion against institutions that come between the people and their actions, and a craving for direct, unmediated expression of the people’s will’ (Canovan 1999: 13). Referendadriven constitutional reform relocates ‘the problem’ of Aboriginal policy from the increasingly disparaged spaces of parliamentary process and leftist elite commentary to a redemptive democratic performance of the ‘living voice of the people’ and their spontaneous action (Canovan 1999: 13).2 In strategically narrowing the scope of complex affairs to be addressed to a simple answer of ‘yes’ or

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‘no’, the referendum is also an instrument that political leaders can offer or withhold while presenting themselves as empathic and perceptive readers of a public mood they themselves ostensibly have no role in shaping. In Australia in the present, Indigenous affairs often resembles a sphere of ricocheting effects, one in which all participants, no matter how differently located, are lured to play on a shrinking ground according to constantly changing rules. In this shrinking space of politics, Aboriginal activists find it increasingly difficult to imagine forms of governance, or future-focused projects, grounded in their relative independence. As governmental processes permeate the intimate spaces of kin-based community life with ever-increasing intensity, it also appears there is no option but to play by the terms that have been established, no matter how often those terms might change or betray. If Pauline Hanson’s One Nation established the terms of Australia’s distinctive settler colonial populism in the mid-1990s, the effective intent of her attacks on Indigenous people has now been absorbed into the punitive workings of policy. The disbanding of the national representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2004 left a gaping hole in political representation. In its place a number of self-proclaimed Indigenous leaders have emerged to seize the mantel. The incursions of these activists at times resembles a Goffmanesque theatre, as alternate scripts of ‘responsibility’, ‘rights’, and ‘representation’ are variously selected and deployed to the shifting circumstances of the day. The backstory to the surprise final recommendation emerging from Uluru sees prominent Cape York leader Noel Pearson flying into the meeting to present delegates with two options—constitutional change could tackle the problem of racism, or it could tackle the problem of representation. Having published his views (Pearson 2014; Morris and Pearson 2017) Pearson presented his preference for the second option and galvanised the support of those assembled. Others walked out in protest, pointing out



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the hypocrisy of holding this meeting on the ground where the previous Howard government had deployed the military as it staged its dramatic intervention in 2007, and calling for recognition of prior sovereignty and more radical action in respect of Indigenous dispossession. In the meantime, the once declared ‘father of reconciliation’, Pat Dodson, reneged his long-standing relative independence and critical distance to assume a seat in the parliamentary Senate as a member of the Labor party opposition. He and other Aboriginal parliamentarians initially described the ‘Voice to Parliament’ proposal as a ‘bolt in the dark’ (ABC TV 2017). So, we conclude by reaffirming the utility of Panizza’s definition of populism to this field of wicked problems, a field in which much energy has been expended over the past decade ‘to change the terms of political discourse, articulate new social relations, redefine political frontiers and constitute new identities’ (Panizza 2005: 9). Where political theory falls short, however, is in failing to track the fault line along which seemingly clearly demarcated ‘people’ and ‘others’ defy categorical separation and dissolve into a splintered spectrum of ontological commitments. Here lies the next frontier of conflict in Australia, as the once celebrated figure of the remote-living culturebearing Aborigine is increasingly displaced by the cosmopolitan Indigene of layered identity (Pearson 2014; Grant 2016). This is a shift which shadows a striking demographic transformation. At the time of the 1967 Referendum remote-living Aboriginal people constituted more than fifty per cent of the Aboriginal population, today they number just twenty per cent, a demographic shift mainly due to intermarriage and shifting ethnic identification, not to physical migration nor extraordinary fertility. The terms of recognition politics in Australia are shifting accordingly. As these recent contests make clear, the political practices likely to gain traction in these volatile times are those that can be recognised in the abstract, technical terms that now dominate the public sphere.

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Melinda Hinkson is associate professor of Anthropology and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. Her work is informed by ethnographic research with Warlpiri people of Central Australia. She has published on diverse forms of Warlpiri visual culture and mediated practice, on the lifework of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, on the shifting governance regimes in Australia’s Northern Territory, and on contemporary cultural attitudes to images. Her current work analyses interrelationships between settler colonial displacement, cultures of seeing and creative place-making practices. Jon Altman has a disciplinary background in economics and anthropology and is an emeritus professor of the Australian National University where he was foundation director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research 1990–2010. He was a research professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University 2016–2019 when this chapter was co-authored. Professor Altman is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and an honorary fellow of Te Apārangi The Royal Society of New Zealand. He is a conviction social scientist whose current research focuses on economic justice for Indigenous Australians.

Notes 1. There is some debate about the practical and symbolic intentions of these exclusions (see Taylor 2016; Attwood and Markus 1997). 2. A detailed treatment of this evolving political landscape would also consider the increasing frequency of royal commissions in Australia with their focus on testimonial evidence and public performance of transparency.



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References ABC TV. 1997. ‘Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP Television Interview with Kerry O’Brien, the 7.30 Report, ABC TV’ PM Transcripts, 4 September. http://pmtranscripts. pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00010469.pdf (accessed 30 November 2018). ABC TV. 2006. ‘Paedophile rings operating in remote communities: Brough’ Lateline, 16 May. Transcript available at: http://www. abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1640148.htm (accessed 4 August 2017). ABC TV. 2017. ‘Pat Dodson discusses changing the Constitution to enshrine an Indigenous advisory body’ ABC TV, 17 July. https:// www.abc.net.au/7.30/pat-dodson-discusses-changing-the-constitution-to/8717716 (accessed 30 November 2018). ABC Radio National. n.d. ‘Unforgettable Speeches’ ABC National Radio, n.d. https://www.abc.net.au/rn/features/speeches/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Altman, Jon. 2014. ‘Indigenous policy: Canberra consensus on a neoliberal project of Improvement’, in C. Miller and L. Orchard (eds), Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Bristol: Policy Press, 115–132. Altman, Jon. 2016. ‘Reconciliation and the quest for economic sameness’, in S. Maddison, T. Clark and R. de Costa (eds), The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage. Singapore: Springer, 213–230. Anderson, Ian. 2015. ‘The crisis of Australia’s indigenous policy’, Meanjin 74 (3): 54–59. Anderson, Pat and Rex Wild. 2007. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle ‘Little Children Are Sacred’, Report of the Northern Territory Board of Enquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, Northern Territory Government, Darwin. Available at http://www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/pdf/ bipacsa_final_report.pdf Attwood, Brian and Andrew Markus. 1997. The 1967 Referendum, or, When Aborigines Didn’t Get the Vote. Canberra: Australian Institution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. London: Polity Press. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. ‘Trust the People! Populism and the two faces of democracy’, Political Studies 47(1): 2–16. https://doi. org/10.1111%2F1467-9248.00184 Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. 2007. From Hand Out to Hand Up: Cape York Welfare Reform. Cairns: Cape York Institute.

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Davies, William. 2016. ‘The new neoliberalism’, New Left Review 101: 121–34. https://newleftreview.org/II/101/ william-davies-the-new-neoliberalism Foley, Gary, Andrew Schaap and Edwina Howell (eds). 2014. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State. London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. 2008. Scales of Justice: Reimaging Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press. Grant, Stan. 2017. ‘The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming’, Quarterly Essay 64. Melbourne: Black Inc. Books. Graham, Chris. 2017. ‘Bad Aunty: 10 Years on, How ABC Lateline Sparked the Racist NT Intervention (With Introduction by John Pilger)’ newmatilda.com, 23 June. https://newmatilda. com/2017/06/23/bad-aunty-seven-years-how-abc-latelinesparked-racist-nt-intervention/ (accessed 30 November 2018). Commonwealth of Australia. Appropriation Bill no.1, 1996–97. Second Reading speech by Senator Pauline Hanson. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, p. 3859. Available at: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display. w3p;query=Id:%22chamber/hansardr/1996-10-10/0028%22 Hinkson, Melinda. 2007. ‘In the name of the child’, in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds), Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia. Carlton: Arena Publications, pp. 1–12. Hinkson, Melinda. 2010. ‘Media images and the politics of hope’, in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds), Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, pp. 229–47. Hinkson, Melinda 2018. ‘Beyond the hot take’, Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, September 26, 2018. https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/1533-beyond-the-hot-take Hughes, Helen. 2007. Lands of Shame: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Homelands in Transition. Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies. Kapferer, Bruce 2017. ‘Ideas on populism’, Arena Magazine 146: 31–4. https://arena.org.au/ideas-on-populism-by-bruce-kapferer/ Kapferer, Bruce and Marina Gold. 2017. ‘The cuckoo in the nest: Thoughts on neoliberalism, revaluations of capital and the emergence of the corporate state, part 1’, Arena Magazine 151: 31–34. Kapferer, Bruce and Barry Morris. 2012. ‘Appendix 5: The Australian Society of the State: Egalitarian Ideologies and New Directions



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in Exclusionary Practice’, in B. Kapferer (ed), Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. New York: Berghahn, pp. 363–93. Keating, Paul. 1992. ‘Redfern Speech (Year for the World’s Indigenous People)—Delivered in Redfern Park by Prime Minister Paul Keating, 10 December 1992. Antar.org. https://antar.org.au/ sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf (accessed 4 August 2017). Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. ‘Populism, what’s in a name?’, in F. Panizza (ed), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso, pp. 32–49. Langton, Marcia. 2008. ‘Trapped in the Aboriginal Reality Show’, Griffith Review 19: 143–159. https://griffithreview.com/articles/ trapped-in-the-aboriginal-reality-show/ Lea, Tess. 2012. ‘When looking for anarchy look to the state: Fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian Indigenous Estate’, Critique of Anthropology 32(2): 109–24. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F0308275X12438251 Lydon, Jane. 2012. The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights. Sydney: NewSouth Books. McGregor, Russell. 2011. Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Morris, S. and N. Pearson. 2017. ‘Indigenous constitutional recognition: Paths to failure and possible paths to success’, Australian Law Journal 91: 350–59. Panizza, Francisco. 2005. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso. Pearson, Noel. 2000. Our Right to Take Responsibility. Cairns: Noel Pearson and Associates. Pearson, Noel. 2014. ‘A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth’, Quarterly Essay 55, Melbourne: Black Inc. Books. Pearson, Noel. 2017. ‘Betrayal: The Turnbull government has burned the bridge of Bipartisanship’ The Monthly, December. https:// www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/december/1512046800/noelpearson/betrayal (accessed 30 November 2018). Qvortrup, Matt. 2014. Referendums Around the World: The Continued Growth of Direct Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandall, Roger. 2000. The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. Boulder: Westview Press. Schubert, Misha and Katherine Murphy. 2007. ‘A national emergency: Howard acts’, The Age, 22 June. https://www.theage.com.au/ national/a-national-emergency-howard-acts-20070622-ge56rh.html (accessed 30 November 2018).

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Strakosch, Elizabeth. 2015. Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the ‘Post-Welfare’ State. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Streek, Wolfgang. 2016. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso. Sutton, Peter. 2009. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Taylor, Greg. 2016. ‘A History of Section 127 of the Commonwealth Constitution’, Monash University Law Review 42 (1): 206–37.

Populism’s Claims The Struggle Between Privilege and Equality

( Susana Narotzky

Who are the ‘people’ supporting ‘populist’ leaders and what are their claims? The argument I seek to develop here is that ‘populist’ mobilisations (of all kinds) are a reassessment of the continued reality of illiberal capitalism and the withering away of the ideological force of the illusion of Enlightenment liberalism and democracy. Hence, rather than focusing on ‘illiberal democracy’ I will focus on the inherently ‘illiberal’ aspect of capitalism and on the irresolvable contradiction of the ideological articulation of democracy and capitalism (Crouch 2015; Merkel 2014; Streeck 2015) that has repeatedly produced a ‘populist’ kind of conflict. Indeed, we find similar antiliberal and anti-capitalist popular mobilisations scattered throughout European history in the nineteenth century, taking the form either of ‘resistance’ revolts seeking to preserve rights and duties embedded in obligations attached to privileges of status (Thompson 1971, 1993), or ‘transformative’ revolutions seeking to establish an egalitarian society. Although the intellectual lineages supporting these divergent expressions of discontent have tried to maintain a certain ideological coherence and continuity, there have often been overlaps in discourse and claims to precursors as well as crossovers of leading figures (Blais 2007;

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Canfora 2006; Compagnon 2005; Sternhell 1983) that have been treated as anomalies. If we look at the actual people, rather than at the discourses of their alleged leaders, we often also find overlaps and crossovers, or similar sociological positions, resentment and demands. When, as social scientists, we speak of ‘exclusionary’ (i.e. ‘bad’) populism as different from ‘inclusionary’ (i.e. ‘good’) populism we are, in my opinion, following the historical intellectual discourse of divergence, positioning ourselves within it or, more often, outside it. However, this moralisation of the practices and discourses that we seek to understand might obscure the actual issues which push reasonable people to mobilise against a particular social system, either seeking restitution of past forms of obligation, or proposing new forms of social responsibility. In his study on populism, Laclau (2005) has addressed the construction of an identity of ‘the people’ from a discursive perspective in order to explain its emergence as political subject. His structuralist, Lacanian and ontological analysis of populism conceives the concept as an empty signifier, as a concept devoid of ideological content and material substance, that enables a positional dichotomisation of the social field through the logic of equivalences of particular units of ‘social demand’ (a lack of fulfilment of ‘democratic demands’). In contrast, my perspective is concerned with content, rather than form. It is interested in practice rather than signification, and in the substantive motivations—both material and discursive—that push various agents (individual, collective, corporate, institutional) to action when confronted in a struggle for resources that they value differently. In so doing, I wish to explain the field of forces of a kind of popular mobilisation that is not amenable to suitable forms of political expression within liberal democratic pluralism. Three vectors of tension will guide my analysis of the paradoxical entanglement of liberalism and capitalism: wealth / power; freedom / dependence; and equality /



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privilege which will be the main focus of attention. Empirically, this reflection is grounded in the emergence of so-called populist mobilisations and parties in Europe, especially in the wake of the austerity measures that have been imposed by governments of allegedly different political persuasions, but it will probably resonate with similar processes in other regions of the world.

Liberalism: Wealth, Power, and Freedom The meaning of populism as a concept relates to liberalism in a straight forward manner, in particular with a brand of liberal politics described as pluralist and parliamentary (i.e. groups with different views and interests resolve conflict through debate) and directly opposed to revolutionary transformation. The day after the 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) coup d’état of General Bonaparte, Barère de Vieuzac, whose political life would span from being a Deputy of the Third Estate in the Estates General of 1789, a member of the Comité de Salut Public with Robespierre, a member of the Council of Five Hundred under the Directory, to finally being a royalist member of Parliament in 1815, wrote to Bonaparte the following: ‘Revolutionary ideas are worn out, reactionary ideas are odious, the only space left at present is for liberal ideas’1 (in Canfora 2006: 103). What this meant has to be understood in the context of the war that absolutist regimes in Europe waged against revolutionary France. While the Revolution had been a fight for freedom from any kind of privilege and dependence (especially during the Convention), a constitutional monarchy with a representative parliament could provide a ‘third way’ in the manner of the English and American revolutions. Representation, however, was the key to exercising power through legislation, and neither the vote nor the capacity to become a candidate was open to all. As

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Bauman points out: ‘Freedom was born as a privilege and has remained so ever since. Freedom divides and separates. It sets the best apart from the rest’ (Bauman 1988: 9). Parliamentary regimes, while positing equality before the law, defined the privilege of representation (i.e. the power of making law) in relation to freedom as opposed to dependence and as measured, among other criteria, by wealth. Indeed, those who held positions that made them dependent on others (e.g. women, domestics, and those who did not possess sufficient wealth) were not free to vote or be candidates, and hence to yield power in Parliament. As C.B. Macpherson describes in his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, ‘the extent and genuineness of the franchise became the central question’ of a system of representative parliamentary government that would suit a capitalist society that linked protection of its citizens from insecurity to maximisation of wealth (Macpherson 1977:34). Enfranchisement of the masses through universal suffrage was seen as a danger to private property, the central tenet of the system. Therefore, many kinds of exclusions where deemed necessary to the democratic franchise (based on gender, age, education, wealth, taxation, etc.). As the nineteenth century progressed and the working class became articulate, organised, and combative, drawing them into active participation in government through the vote became a necessary transformation in order for the system to survive (Macpherson 1977:51). Still, the danger that the more ‘numerous class’ would take power and legislate in its own favour, compelled Stuart Mill to propose that the ‘smaller class’ should have several votes, so as to balance their interests (Macpherson 1977:57). Thus the issue of enfranchisement, tied to that of representation, was understood as being at odds with the requirements of capitalism by the founding theorists of Liberal Democracy. Rousseau ((1762) 1966) moreover had pointed to the problem of representation as being a transfer of



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sovereignty and an acceptance of servitude concealed in the free act of election. Hence the will of the people (general will) was not present in the Parliament, only the will of those elected, a privileged minority. Rancière (2017:16– 17) points to a similar issue: experts, technocrats, experienced politicians are up for election ‘Representation has become a trade exercised by a class of professional politicians who, basically, self-reproduce and validate this self-reproduction through the specific form of people it produces, namely the electoral body’.2 The legitimate representatives of our liberal parliamentary democracies produce a hierarchical logic of power. It is therefore outside the representative system that ‘an egalitarian people in movement’3 can emerge and the will of the people can yield power. For Rancière liberal democracy configures ‘the people’ in a restricted and formalised manner tied to the illusive identity of representation, but so does the ‘populism of the left’ which creates an image of a ‘substantive and suffering people despised by the elites that finds its expression in a force that represents it authentically and a leader that incarnates it’ (2017:67). This kind of antagonism remains trapped in ‘two forms of inegalitarian logic’ and Rancière concludes: ‘However the problem is not about the opposition of groups, but of worlds: a world of equality and a world of inequality’4 (2017:67). I wish to take this insight seriously and place (in)equality as the issue of contention as it compounds both the force and the potential weakness of popular forms of mobilisation in present-day Europe. In contemporary liberal democracies wealth and power are supposed to be separated, articulated only through regulation whose main purpose is to create a stable juridical context that will enable agents in the market to operate freely. Likewise, market ‘forces’ are supposed to operate independently of power structures as long as these do not interfere. Collusion between the realms of ‘power’

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and ‘wealth’ is considered a problem. When wealth holders lobby or bribe power holders it distorts the market’s competitive basis. When power holders submit to wealth holders’ interests, they produce privilege often inscribing it in law. As we know historically and experience continuously (and the example of Trump as President and billionaire entrepreneur is paradigmatic) this is not so: liberalism is about the blending of wealth and power under the auspices of ‘freedom’, but a ‘freedom’ which is a privilege tied to wealth (instead of status), a privilege which itself would seem to accrue from a principle of liberation: money (Reddy 1987). It is well known that the French Revolution abolished privileges that were directly relevant to wealth-making: the privilege of the corporations and guilds (freeing work and entrepreneurship); the privilege of kinship ties (freeing dependents from paternal domination); the privilege of seigniorial jurisdiction (freeing subjects from the lord’s dominion and the fiscal dues attached to it); the privilege of entailment (freeing land from its attachment to lineages, the Church or the commons). These were all processes of disembedding the economy, in particular as it affected the circulation of factors of production, from various kinds of obligations that sustained livelihoods unequally within a framework of hierarchical relationships (Polanyi 1971; Thompson 1971, 1993). Politically this was related to a ‘productivist’ idea of wealth that would put to work ‘idle’ lands and hands to the benefit of the nation’s power. However, as already Rousseau ((1754) 1965) and later Marx pointed out ((1844) 1959), those freedoms rested on a privilege that became the basis for the new liberal institutionalisation: that of private property attached to the sole individual who had absolute rights of alienating it. This included property of the self (as individual enfranchisement) which was ideologically considered the grounding of the entire social system. Indeed, private property appeared as a derivate of individual effort (Locke 1980



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(1690)) and, hence, equally open to all in theory, while simultaneously material wealth created the individual as ‘free’ from dependent ties and politically ‘equal’. How did the liberal illusion work? William Reddy (1987) has presented an interesting argument that builds on Marx’s point that the ‘free’ worker is both the sole owner of his labour power, and is ‘freed’ from any other way to make a living than that of selling its use through contract. What Reddy presents as crucial, however, is the pervasive fact of ‘exchange asymmetries’ that the liberal illusion of market equality obscures, an illusion grounded on the concept of money as universal equivalent in market exchange. The idea of exchange asymmetries is different from that of ‘unequal exchange’ in that it is based on the actual use value (referred to culturally embedded livelihood needs) of what is exchanged for the different parties, not on the unequal exchange value of a transaction (Reddy 1987: 66–67). As a universal medium of exchange, money appeared to dissolve privilege asymmetry in social relations of production: ‘exchange asymmetries could be wished out of existence’ (Reddy 1987: 78); ‘relationships were actually between two equal parties freely exchanging money equivalents’ (Reddy 1987: 80). But obviously the stakes that each party had in the transaction were different and were tied to its capacity to endure outside of the proposed relationship, a situation which had to do with the wealth, power and support networks available to the parties. In fact, it had to do, centrally, with the possession of property, privilege and embeddedness. The liberal illusion of freedom of factors of production and of money as a universal equivalent imposed an alleged calculative reason to exchange and obscured existing embeddedness and privilege in transactions. It was also the central tenet describing capitalism as a liberal system based on competitive exchange. A calculative reason that would extend to a form of calculative politics, a technocratic, unpartisan, neutral rule, guided by abstract principles and disembedded obligations.

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The liberal illusion did not go unchallenged and the revolts and revolutions that shook nineteenth century Europe are an expression of how the un-privileged opposed a regime that did not favour them. These popular protests sometimes appeared as definitely anti-liberal, seeking to reembed social obligations in their hierarchical and exploitive albeit responsible webs of privilege (e.g. the popular support for the traditionalist revolts in Spain and elsewhere, Millán 2000).5 At other times, popular protest appeared as anti-capitalist pushing the drive to equality to its limits by proposing the abolition of the ultimate privilege: private property (e.g. 1848, 1871, and 1917 revolutions). This egalitarian popular mobilisation, however, also sought to reconfigure embedded obligations through forms of social responsibility and cooperation. In sum, claims to subsistence and to recognition drove popular protest in two fundamentally different routes, one seeking resources through rekindling privileged links with wealth and power holders, the other seeking resources through the ultimate realisation of social freedom, equality, and collective responsibility. Both routes were repeatedly co-opted or repressed at best by the forces of ‘liberal’ illiberal capitalism and representative democracy, and at worst by dictatorial regimes mostly supporting various forms of illiberal capitalism as well. The strength of the liberal illusion has endured as long as the system provided the conditions of possibility for the extension of power / wealth privileges to the population, and legislation upheld the separation of wealth and power, while constraining the privilege of wealth, mostly through redistributive policies, anti-monopoly law, and equality before the law. Obviously, the era of democratic pluralism in Europe and the West, was predicated on world system dependencies of an uneven capitalist ‘development’ which was often incompatible with democratic expansion (Amin 1993: 61). When ‘democracy’ has been pegged to capitalist expansion (e.g. in Latin America, in post-socialist Central Eastern



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Europe) it has legitimised foreign intervention while generally been restricted to formal electoral participation in what has been defined as ‘low intensity democracy’ (Gills et al. 1993). More recently, forms of NGO development of ‘social capital’ projects supported by international agencies such as the World Bank have introduced an aspect of local participation often reconfiguring new kinds of embedded dependencies that challenge liberal democracy ideals through the extension of neo-indigenist power systems, albeit often reproducing neo-liberal rationalities (Bretón Solo de Zaldivar 2006; Gledhill 2005). However, what has become increasingly obvious in the present globalised economy, is that nation-states and their elected representatives, the political spaces of liberal democratic legitimacy, have lost all economic sovereignty and hence the ability to respond to the ‘will of the people’ who vote them into power.

The Project of Europe: Democracy, Capitalism, and its Transformations After World War II (WW II) the aim of a peaceful future between the nations of Europe became synonymous with economic integration, centred on the creation of an open market for Coal and Steel. The Schuman declaration (9 May 1950), considered as the founding bloc of the European Economic Community (1957), proposed: The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe ( . . . ). The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible (Shuman 1950).

An additional aim was ‘the equalisation and improvement of the living conditions of workers in these industries’

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(Schuman 1950, emphasis added). Therefore, while the creation of an open market in coal and steel, regulated by a High Authority, aimed at limiting national intervention in these markets for the common good of attaining durable peace, this free-market aspect was often overpowered by the national preoccupation with full employment and wealth redistribution needed to control class unrest in the context of the cold war. As Maier has put it for post WW II Europe: ‘In the last analysis, the politics of productivity that emerged as the American organising idea for the postwar economic world depended upon superseding class conflict with economic growth’ (1977: 629; see also 1981). The result was a political economic system based on the Keynesian Welfare State or ‘embedded capitalism’ (Harvey 2005; Jessop et al. 1984). Thus, in Southern European countries emerging from dictatorships in the 1970s (Portugal, Spain, Greece), the imaginary Europe (then still the EEC) that working people sought to join was one where democracy—understood as equal rights—and increased welfare—understood as the expansion of economic equality—were the basis of integration and convergence. What workers had experienced as immigrants to northern European countries in terms of social services and consumption possibilities, but also in terms of free unionisation and freedom of political expression would be imported to the young democracies in the south. But democracy and Europe were tied to economic policy, and the conditionalities of access to the EEC resulted in deindustrialisation and a reconfiguration of agricultural production which transformed the livelihood opportunities of many in southern Europe. These transformations, however, came hand in hand with desired liberal democracy and with European funds that would create the means for the economies to become ‘productive’ and ‘competitive’, that is, ‘modern’. This would result in ‘growth’ and generalised wellbeing through redistribution, which would propel southern nations to an equal position



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with northern European ones. Hence, people were happy to make the sacrifices these transformations entailed (Narotzky 2016a). Representation through elections and equality in front of the law were highly prized by workers, and some got elected. But privilege had not disappeared. In Spain, large infrastructure works undertaken with European funds after the transition were generally adjudicated to large companies who had been privileged under (and supporters of) Franco and had strong (often kinship) connections with those in power. In conservative parties, the lineages of electable representatives go far into the Francoist or even deeper traditionalist anti-liberal past (e.g. Carlism). Most parliamentary deputies after the Transition (even those in the social democratic parties of the left) became staunch supporters of capitalism, of (de)regulation, and have practiced ‘revolving doors’. Spain has indeed become an export-led economy, extremely competitive in international markets (in food production, tourist service, and infrastructure construction) albeit generally through garnering an ‘edge’ through personal contact with those in power. This is not an exception of a particular, historically tainted country with an undemocratic past. Indeed, one of the first acts of the Trump presidency was to repeal the Securities and Exchange Commission rule that aimed to reduce bribery and corruption of companies dealing with foreign countries (especially extractive industries). The dream of equality in Europe was short lived. The Social Market Economy was initially an ordoliberal project tempered by social security provision aimed at establishing a free competitive market that would prevent extractive monopolies and the domination of a plutocratic elite. During the 1980s the project was progressively transformed into a new kind of global neo-liberal cum monopolistic system where fierce competition occurs in parallel to strong oligopolies (Crouch 2015). Indeed, global competition shifts jobs to countries with less regulation (labour,

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environmental), creates high unemployment in the areas of stronger regulation, and slashes wages and labour rights. It sets smaller firms to compete with each other in a despotic neo-liberal space while large transnational corporations shop around for spaces of privilege to benefit from corporate tax cuts, tax avoidance and evasion, and crony capitalism. Increasingly, profit is provided by rent in FIRE, extractive, knowledge, and platform capitalism forms (Henni 2012; Hudson 2012; Standing 2016). Surplus value from production, however, is often also of a ‘new’ kind as labour is exchanged below its value in the market, obtained through unfree labour forms more akin to labour service that rely on strongly embedded personalised connections which often bypass or resignify contract. This evidences a systemic duality where big corporate firms strengthen monopolies while labour and small firms are subject to savage competitive environments. If today the domain of the political is being reconfigured both symbolically and physically it is in relation to a new kind of political economy which comprises multiple scales of illiberal practice thwarting equality and promoting new forms of privilege. Although monopoly capitalism has always been acknowledged as a reality, it has generally been considered an anomaly to ‘pure’ capitalism, which flourished in competitive markets. Because of this assumption, the multiple forms of capitalism thriving on unfree factors (e.g. bonded or slave labour, imperial privilege of commerce, patents, etc.) were considered transitional to ‘pure’, ‘free’, liberal capitalism (e.g. protectionism as a backward policy based on preserving the privilege of particular groups of producers), often explained as part of the evolutionary aspect of capitalism, a reward to innovation (e.g. patents) and ‘productivity’ that pushed the market’s competitive objective ultimately resulting in better distribution. Freedom and capitalism went hand in hand, and this has been the slogan of the ‘free world’: you get capitalism and you



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get freedom, meaning liberal parliamentary democracy as political freedom, and vice versa. But we know this is not the case, and perhaps the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile is a recent example, but historically we have innumerable examples, not least in Southern European countries in the 1960s where dictatorships soon became an expression of illiberal capitalism a reality that the promise of Europe and democracy was expected to transform.

Popular Mobilisation in Spain: Indignation During the Indignados 15 of May movement in 2011, in Spain, the people’s assemblies in Acampada Sol-Madrid and Barcelona-Plaza de Catalunya gathered demands and suggestions from participants. In Barcelona, the demands agreed by the general assembly were ranked by order of importance as follows: No privileges for politicians; No privileges for bankers; No privileges for big fortunes (the Rich); Dignity in salaries and quality of life; Right to housing; Quality public services (especially Health & Education); Liberties and participatory democracy; and the Environment. In Madrid, the Acampada Sol accepted suggestions from participants for several months. It received some 14,700 (fourteen-thousand seven-hundred) contributions that were subsequently organised and analysed. The most recurrent claims, with over 600 mentions, were ‘suppression of political privilege’, ‘reform of the election system’, and ‘control of corruption’. This was followed by demands for public education, better labour conditions, and financial regulation. The main focuses of those participating in the popular assemblies were: undue privilege, economic welfare and social rights. They underscored the political within the economic. They discredited the view of a purely technocratic tackling of the ‘economic crisis’. They questioned the (neo-liberal) discourse that the state’s intervention in

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the economy should be minimised if an optimal allocation of resources was to be achieved. But they also challenged the perception that, in the post-1980s political economic conjuncture of Europe, the state had effectively rolled back, that it was ‘intervening’ less (Peck and Tickell 2002). On the contrary, the state was perceived as pervasive in its ‘business friendly’ regulations while clamping down on socially redistributive and labour protective practices. It operated on behalf of a small constituency of individual and corporate wealth holders. Nowhere was this collusion more obvious than in the bailing out of banks, the endless corruption scandals and in the double standard regarding taxation and tax avoidance sanctions. Each of the three issues highlighted in the assemblies (undue privilege, economic welfare and social rights) presents a different angle of the articulation of political power and economic power and how it affects ordinary people. It points to the tension between the liberal ideology of freedom from statutory dependencies and individual equality (the alleged aim of liberal democratic polities) and a pervasive illiberal practice that defines communities of privilege and produces barriers to entry against competitors. ‘Indignation’ also underscored the issue of reclaiming dignity and equal worth against an experienced reality of hierarchy and daily disregard. There was a structure of feeling that was making its voice heard, a form of immediate struggle against the consequences of the financial crisis and austerity as it affected ordinary livelihoods (Narotzky 2016b; Williams 1989). In the European Union, the political discourse of mainstream parties (social democrats and liberal conservatives alike) had stressed the liberalisation of the market, free trade and labour deregulation as a path to growth and wellbeing. As we know, the liberal argument of market freedom comes in the same package as individual equality: in theory, stripped out of privilege and outside intervention, the market would be an equaliser, facilitating



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access to needed resources at the lowest cost, and thus expanding welfare in the long run. However, as ordinary citizens experienced the privilege of wealth and power holders together with increasing dispossession of their means of livelihood, the role of existing liberal parliamentary democracy and elected representatives was put into question. ‘They do not represent us!’ was a famous slogan of the Indignados 15-M movement. Hence the lack of representative legitimacy in actual existing contemporary democracy came to the fore and underlined the original contradiction between the alleged franchise of liberalism and the founding privilege in capitalism. The Indignados 15-M popular mobilisation did assert the importance of the ‘social question’ and it was centrally concerned with issues of exploitation, domination, discrimination, and the environment as Chantal Mouffe (2018) has recently defined ‘Left populism’. It was also traversed by affect as one of its moving forces but it did not as yet self-identify as ‘populist’. Indeed, the leaders of Podemos, the party that has claimed for itself the affect of the original mobilisation, had a highly crafted theory of politics based on Laclau and Mouffe’s writings, in particular on the idea of building ‘a people’ around the chain of equivalences that would unite diverse demands (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The idea and language of class transversality—of going beyond sociological realities—and the refusal of positioning the party in the left, was an intellectual discourse of the leadership, at least initially. The horizontal opposition between right and left ideologies was declared obsolete and Podemos vindicated a form of populism that opposed ‘the people’ to ‘the caste’ or oligarchy. However, rather than falling into nationalist and xenophobic arguments it sought to expand entitlements and confront neo-liberalism with what were the traditional instruments of the left: regulation, progressive taxation, redistribution, and a social state (Navarro et al. 2011). A discredit of traditional parliamentary democracy fostered by corruption and by its failure to care for

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citizens, colluding instead to impose ‘austerity’, supported the reframing of conflict into a vertical confrontation of the people against the establishment, although this appeared as a tactic to get hold of power through the traditional electoral system. Recently, a split within the leadership of Podemos, between Iñigo Errejón—whose attachment to Laclau and Mouffe’s theories is resilient—and Pablo Iglesias who has shifted to a more traditional left position, has resulted in a withering away of the ‘populist’ tag of the party, although it is still used as a derogatory disqualifying description by political opponents.

Breakdown and Reembedding of Trust: The Claim for Entitlements The failure of Western governments (of different persuasions) to care for citizens who are coping with job loss and fiscal austerity policies appears as a breach of trust. It makes the state, its institutions and its representatives responsible for the breakdown of working people’s expectations of improved wellbeing. At the same time, collusion of financial capitalism and large monopolistic firms with political agents has become blatant, a situation which has resulted in presenting the political establishment as the handmaiden of capitalism or, more specifically, ‘banks’, ‘the rich’, ‘the billionaires’, and so on. The discredit of liberal parliamentary democracy fostered by collusion, corruption, and revolving doors rewards for complacent retired politicians, has eroded faith in electoral representation. The saying is that ‘politicians are all the same, whatever their party’, ‘they never fulfil their campaign promises’ and, as the Indignados in Spain (May 2011) chanted ‘they do not represent us’. These seem to be the more evident expressions of a growing mistrust of a political system that gives power to those that, fundamentally, do not care about whom they purport to represent. Popular outrage at how democratic



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governments have destroyed common people’s livelihoods by imposing austerity, and mistrust in ‘the system’ is expressed through different popular mobilisations and political agendas, albeit with convergences between them, such as the struggle to reembed economic relations and to enhance proximate responsibility. As trust in democratic existing institutions fails, trust channels shift to personal relations, precisely those that liberalism allegedly abolished but in fact retained in the form of illiberal capitalism and privilege for the propertied. We are witnessing the collapse of Enlightenment values that produced the political environment of liberalism and modern parliamentary democracies. This often results in an anti-liberal rather than an anti-capitalist revolt, although the case of Podemos in Spain seems to be clearly positioned as an egalitarian and redistributive attack to neo-liberalism (see also Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014, on Syriza). As I pointed out at the outset of this article, these were the two main routes of confrontation with the disembedding and dispossession forces of nascent capitalism. In the face of illiberal capitalism (not a novelty but now increasingly obvious to many in the West who had been relatively protected within the world system), that is, in the face of the recurrence and inscription of privilege of wealth and power holders, popular claims try to reembed responsibility through claims to parcels of privilege within the existing hierarchical structure, rather than seeking to eliminate the grounds for hierarchy: the privilege of private property and of unequal power. This is accomplished through claiming particular privileges of deservingness that underline differences instead of equality. In this expression of outrage at the existing shortcomings of liberal democracy in constraining the workings of illiberal capitalism, affects are also mobilised in the name of ‘a people’ which feels it has been abandoned by those whose responsibility it is to protect. Protection here is about fencing against the encroachment of others whose difference excludes them from the ‘people’.

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Difference is increasingly conflated with identity (national, ethnic, religious, etc.), essentialised, and understood in terms of socially predefined privilege groups instead of as a result of historical and material struggles for making a living or capturing surplus and power (Kalb 2009). In this exclusionary form of populism, the value of difference shifts from being understood as an obstacle to needed resources (expressed in struggles for equal rights of access) to being perceived as a possible avenue to needed resources. These shifts in people’s argument for making claims respond to the present-day conjuncture but not in a manner totally unprecedented. There are material and ideological reasons for it: (1) the delocalisation of industrial production, the fragmentation and volatility of livelihood practices, the distancing of commodity chains, the rise of financial and rentier capitalism; (2) the postmodern rejection of ‘grand narratives’, the rise of cultural relativism, the erosion of equality as a political concept and the multiplication of exceptions as the grounds for redistributive justice; and (3) the contradiction, in practice, of the liberal entitlement to equality and the effective reproduction of inequality and privilege. Politically, this last contradiction was made palatable and acceptable during the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) period because of formal equality before the law, and because of the avowed objective of providing equal opportunity to competing individuals, mostly through ensuring access to education, while eliding the objective of equality of outcome. Neo-liberal policies and practice have enhanced the contradiction instead of concealing it.

Conclusion: Illiberal Capitalism, Liberal Democracies, and Populism Is competitive pluralism (e.g. what the elections represent) the symbolic anchor of liberal democracy? Is tolerance to difference inherent to liberal democracy?



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Pluralism expresses political competition in an open arena akin to market competition. It accepts or tolerates different projects but this is premised on an (economic / political) Darwinist idea that the best (project) wins. Hence the anchor of liberal democracy is not tolerance but the competitive process that leads to the natural disappearance of less successful opponents in the short or long term (e.g. the celebratory and self-righteous discourses of liberal democracies after the 1989 fall of ‘socialist’ polities!). This political pluralist Darwinism states the righteousness of the elimination process of other projects (in the name of progress, civilisation, development, etc.) (e.g. TINA), a process that mirrors the liberal competitive market model. How can we explain the relevance of ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ arguments in many present-day populisms? Liberal politics is allegedly a project based on making cultural difference irrelevant (often by force) and having citizenship replace other forms of attachment (guilds, entailments, kinship, etc.) making them irrelevant to the governing powers (although this is never completely the case). This un-differentiation of subjects is based on a technical device: contract and therefore on ‘the rule of law’. Subjects are no longer ascribed to the ruler through national, religious or historical traditions (e.g. the AustroHungarian empire and its nationalities), but by a rational and allegedly voluntary act of association (e.g. this voluntary citizenship system was active for a few short years after the French Revolution, during the Convention). Liberalism is based on individual rights not collective rights and this has been a problematic issue for liberal multiculturalists (how to uphold both simultaneously) (Kymlicka 1996). Pluralist liberal democracy is being presented as the opposite of populism on two grounds: (1) its pluralist openness to other political projects (e.g. the open society) and (2) its superior character based on the equality of the individual citizens before the law. Populism, instead,

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allegedly forecloses pluralism, creates bounded societies and reclaims the superiority of the embedded aspect of belonging (not any longer an abstract ‘imagined community’ but a very real corporatist entity). I would argue that the shift from the political Darwinism of pluralist liberal democracies to the illiberal populist Darwinism of exclusionary nationalisms and hierarchies of deservingness mirrors the larger transformations in present-day capitalism, and in particular the heightened tension between competitive and monopoly forms of surplus extraction. Capitalism has always combined an ideology and a practice of competition with the continuous objective of reaping monopoly rents and limiting competition through diverse forms of political leverage. Moreover, these two processes have generally characterised the environment for different kinds of actors in relation to their power to set the rules of the game, in particular their leverage with rule makers and enforcers. The greater the power they can yield the more privilege they can obtain and the less competition will affect them. This is true for firms but also for labour as powerful unions and professional guilds evidence through the creation of internal or protected labour markets. It seems to me that this is relevant for the populist debate. Neo-liberal ideology recurrently voices the idea of individual and corporations’ freedom from state interference as the objective of a ‘pure’ capitalism. On the contrary, we are witnessing today a move toward an illiberal form of capitalism that only briefly seemed to recede during the KWS period. In it, the state is a major player in the regulation of privilege for economic actors. The state produces privileges for big corporations and ‘the rich’ instead of increasing equal opportunity by redistributing assets through public services. This negates in practice both the liberal ideology of citizenship equality and the postulate of freedom from state intervention. Indeed, it encourages



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the creation of status groups and brokerage networks that promote inequality and dependency. Two consequences should be highlighted: (1) Competitive market frameworks are selectively enforced on powerless actors while monopoly privilege is increasingly instituted for the powerful; and (2) Actors are shifting from labour/capital (class) struggles to struggles for privilege that simultaneously decry and design boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of access. Less powerful actors experience and understand this new reality of an increasingly illiberal capitalism as a betrayal of the liberal democracy promise of equal opportunity that prevented privilege and enhanced consumption possibilities through market capitalism. As these promises are not being kept, people address contradictory claims to the state. On the one hand, the elimination of privileges of the powerful economic actors (e.g. banks, the ‘rich’, corrupt politicians). On the other hand, the protection of personal identity rents (the creation of deserving hierarchies, i.e. privilege) through the exclusion of immigrants’ entitlements and the closing of borders. The difference between ‘exclusionary’ and ‘inclusionary’ populisms rests on the way leaders and organic intellectuals of popular mobilisations tilt the balance of claims against really existing liberal democracy and illiberal capitalism. The main difference rests in whether they seek redress through pushing equality towards its actual realisation as so called ‘Left populisms’ of the Podemos kind seem to be doing, or through obtaining grants to some form of privilege as so called ‘Right populisms’ in other parts of Europe are doing. These two routes taken to confront the exploitation, domination and dispossession processes of capitalism in its ever-changing forms are very different, as a long history demonstrates. Both, however, seek redress against technocracy through the reembedding of political responsibilities within a logic of mutuality and social care.

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Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain. She has been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant to study the effects of austerity on Southern European livelihoods (Grassroots Economics [GRECO]). Her work is inspired by theories of critical political economy, moral economies, and feminist economics. Recent writing addresses the themes of making a living in futures without employment, political mobilization, and class. “Rethinking the Concept of Labour,” JRAI, 2018, is her last publication.

Notes 1. ’Les idées révolutionnaires sont usées, les idées réactionnaires sont odieuses, il n’y a désormais plus de place que pour les idées libérales’ 2. ’La représentation est devenue un métier exercé par une classe de politiciens professionnels qui, pour l’essentiel, s’autoreproduit et fait valider cette autoreproduction par la forme spécifique de peuple qu’il produit, à savoir le corps électoral’ 3. ’un peuple égalitaire en mouvement’ 4. ’Or le problème n’est pas d’opposition des groupes mais des mondes: un monde de l’égalité et un monde de l’inégalité’ 5. Lenin (1895) defines (and critiques) the aims of the ‘populists’ in Russia for idealising the ‘Peasant community’ and its precapitalist order in opposition to the development of capitalism and competitive individualism, and for rejecting Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom. Lenin’s main critique was that populists disregarded the effects of capitalism in Russia, its contradictions, and its connections with contemporary peasant communes, as well as the potentially positive aspects of progressive bourgeois ideologies of freedom and equality.

References Amin, Samir. 1993. ‘The Issue of Democracy in the Contemporary Third World’, in B. Gills, J. Rocamora, and R. Wilson (eds), Low



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Intensity Democracy. Political Power in the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 59–78. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988. Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blais, Marie-Claude. 2007. La solidarité. Histoire d’une idée. Paris: Gallimard. Bretón Solo de Zaldivar, Victor. 2006. Capital social y etnodesarrollo en los Andes. Quito: Centro Andino de Acción Popular. Canfora, Luciano. 2006. La démocracie. Histoire d’une idéologie. Paris: Seuil. Compagnon, Antoine. 2005. Les antimodernes. De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes. Paris: Gallimard. Crouch, Colin. 2015. ‘Comment on Wolfgang Merkel, “Is capitalism compatible with democracy?”’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 9(1-2):61–71. https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/ item_2168497/component/file_2309551/content Gills, Barry, J. Rocamora and R. Wilson (eds). 1993. Low Intensity Democracy. Political Power in the New World Order. London: Pluto Press. Gledhill, John. 2005. ‘Citizenship and the Social Geography of Deep Neo-Liberalization’, Anthropologica 47(1): 81–100. DOI: 10.2307/25606219 Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henni, Ahmed. 2012. Le capitalisme de rente. De la société du travail industriel à la société des rentiers. Paris : L’Harmattan. Hudson, Michael. 2012. ‘Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory’. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper No. 729. http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_729.pdf Jessop, Bob, Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley and Tom Ling. 1984. ‘Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism’, New Left Review No. 147: 32–60. Kalb, Don. 2009. ‘Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond)’, American Ethnologist 36(2): 207–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01131.x Kymlicka, Will. 1996. Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press, OUP. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lenin, Vladimir Illyich. 1895. ‘The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve’s Book’ Marxist Internet

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Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/ narodniks/index.htm (accessed 29 September 2018). Locke, John. (1690) 1980. ‘Second Treatise of Government’ The Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm (accessed 25 July 2017). Macpherson, C.B. 1977. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maier, Charles S. 1977. ‘The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II’, International Organization 31(4): 607–633. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0020818300018634 Maier, Charles S. 1981. ‘The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe’, The American Historical Review 86(2): 327–52. https://doi. org/10.2307/1857441 Marx, Karl. (1844) 1959. Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm (accessed 25 July 2017). Merkel, Wolfgang. 2014. ‘Is capitalism compatible with democracy?’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 8(2):109– 128. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12286-014-0199-4 Millán, Jesús (ed). 2000. Carlismo y revolución en la España contemporánea. Ayer n.38, Madrid: Marcial Pons. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Narotzky, Susana. 2016a. ‘Spain is the Problem, Europe the Solution: Economic Models, Labor Organization and the Hope for a Better Future’, in J. Gledhill (ed), World Anthropologies in Practice. London: Bloomsbury, 19–39. Narotzky, Susana. 2016b. ‘Between inequality and injustice: dignity as a motive for mobilization during the crisis’, History and Anthropology, 27 (1): 74–92. Navarro, Viçens, Juan Torres López and Alberto Garzón. 2011. Hay alternativas. Propuestas para crear empleo y bienestar social en España. Madrid: Sequitur-ATTAC. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell. 2002. ‘Neoliberalizing Space’, Antipode 34(3): 380–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00247 Polanyi, Karl. (1944) 1971. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2017. En quel temps vivons-nous? Conversation avec Eric Hazan. Paris: La Fabrique éditions. Reddy, William M. 1987. Money and liberty in modern Europe. A critique of historical understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1754) 1965. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Paris: Idées Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1762) 1966. Du contrat social. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Schuman, Robert. 1950. Schuman Declaration. Declaration of 9 May 1950. http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm (accessed 13 October 2011). Standing, Guy. 2016. The Corruption of Capitalism. Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. London: Biteback Publishing. Stavrakakis, Yannis and Giorgos Katsambekis. 2014. ‘Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA’, Journal of Political Ideologies 19(2): 119–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356 9317.2014.909266 Sternhell, Zeev. 1983. Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France. Paris: Seuil. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2015. ‘Comment on Wolfgang Merkel, “Is capitalism compatible with democracy?”’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 9(1-2):49–60. https://pure.mpg.de/ rest/items/item_2088385/component/file_2309547/content Thompson, Edward P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50: 76–136. Thompson, Edward P. 1993. The Moral Economy Reviewed. In Customs in Common. New York: The New Press. Williams, Raymond. 1989. Resources of Hope. London: Verso.

How Populism Works

( Michael Herzfeld

Populism is a performative mode of political action in which potentially offensive speech, mannerisms, and attitudes are rendered legitimate as alternatives to establishment values and practices. It has shown itself to be a powerful shaper of political process; while it is at one level a discourse, a way of talking, it also has the material potential of all language and symbolism—it is a way of acting on the world, as recent events have shown beyond any shadow of doubt. It is thus less useful to ask, ‘What is populism?’—a question that presupposes a static response—than to inquire, ‘How does populism work?’ (or perhaps we might more specifically ask, with apologies to J.L. Austin (1975), ‘How on earth do populists manage to do so much with such nasty and inappropriate words?’). This is centrally important because there can no longer be any questioning of populism’s effectiveness. Populism has been the rallying point for many groups of people around the world. As such, it has inspired both solidarity and violence. These orientations, in combination, appear to destroy the old order and to establish new hierarchies of power in its place. While the dream of an egalitarian world remains a legitimate aspiration, its potential to create new racial, religious, cultural, and gender-based hierarchies, or, worse, to entrench old ones, rightly prompts deep apprehension. Egalitarian sentiments are not incompatible



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with deeply divisive and violent realities; in some cases, they may mask them (see Kapferer 1988)—and they are anticipated in the seemingly harmless disclaimer of those who claim not to be racist or sexist but who nevertheless are prepared to make so many exceptions that those claims are ultimately exposed as a sham. Populist performances draw on a repertoire of culturally intimate secrets—the features of everyday life that official discourse shields from the eyes and ears of outsiders, but that in reality ‘everyone knows’.1 Like all secrets, cultural secrets—which in this case include some of the most destructive forms of prejudice—must be performed if they are to have any social relevance; there is no point in having a secret if no one knows about it. These collective cultural secrets become important when they escape the private domain of everyday life because their public display has become an effective way of embarrassing the current holders of power; at such times, embarrassment suddenly becomes a political strategy. Current events suggest that this strategy works, and that it works well. Display, however, can also be a form of concealment, and the violence and unfairness that the new populism threatens to unleash on the world are hidden not very far below the smiling surface of an egalitarian rhetoric. Both, together, constitute what we now call populism. The rhetoric includes a wide range of cultural features that people recognise as culturally familiar, but that have been generally viewed as sources of embarrassment. Such features include vulgarity and rudeness, gaffes about other cultural groups’ practices (as in British foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s comparison of the Maori greeting with a head-butt), political corruption, and clumsy and ungrammatical language. Most disturbing of all, they include blunt sexism and racism. All these features are objects of Western bourgeois disdain, yet all are also, on occasion, aspects of Western bourgeois culture. They are the dimensions of a cultural pattern rendered necessarily

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intimate—or secret—by the prevalence, today on a global level, of a code of conduct that treats them as forms of symbolic pollution. They are the very glue of sociability. Corruption, for example, creates a very dense nexus of affective engagements among people who might otherwise never have much to do with each other—and these engagements implicitly suggest resistance to the hierarchy of values that a Victorian sensibility has globalised during the final age of European imperialism.2 Despite current geopolitical shifts, these values seem remarkably durable as well as ubiquitous. China, for example, despite its vaunted cultural independence and antiquity, not to speak of its official rejection of bourgeois ideology and especially of the Christian models that infused the Victorian sensibility, is as touchy about such matters as Greece—a country where violations of this globalised value system are a source of enduring concern. Indeed, China is one of several nation-states where such violations of respectability—for that is the core value in question—have been astutely observed by ethnographers (notably Steinmüller 2013). It is in this context that we now see emerging, with increasing clarity and conviction, a style of political leadership that invokes precisely those cultural phenomena that have hitherto been viewed as embarrassing secrets. This style is broadly understood as populism—a term that suggests popular (that is, working class) appeal, but that should be understood, like the parallel term ‘realism’, to suggest the imitation of what its exponents conceive to be popular attitudes.3 It is vital to the wellbeing of the working people of the world that this imitative aspect of populism be exposed for the deception that it is. The model is older that some media accounts appear to suggest; Mussolini and Hitler, for example, both understood its appeal and played it to the hilt. But its appearance across a broader spectrum of countries—including China, Hungary, Poland, Thailand, Turkey, and the United



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States—suggests a new global dynamic, a reaction to bourgeois respectability as visceral at the international level as it has been for much longer on the hustings and in local conflicts. The display of cultural intimacy has been scaled up; the dirty secrets that used to be confined to local operators have become common knowledge. As much of the media coverage of Trump and others demonstrates, many observers are now openly discussing what used to be admitted with great discomfort if at all. Indeed, parts of the establishment are still fighting a rearguard action to deny such knowledge and the complicity that it entails. This globalised populism dons the clothing of political correctness to a certain degree, much as, in everyday life, cautious rightists temporise by saying, ‘I’m not a racist, but . . . ’—a device, that, as I have remarked in another context, had already began to spread across national boundaries, producing directly translatable equivalents in several languages.4 This performance of political correctness, now translated into public political actions, serves as a tactic to disguise the ongoing pervasion of the establishment by attitudes that it is forced to embrace while holding its collective nose. The response of the Republican Party in the US illustrates the political establishment’s dilemma particularly well, since, without Trump and his raucous supporters, the party would probably have lost the 2016 election; the adhesion of the vulgar carries a specific price, one that the establishment could not afford to refuse. We should perhaps replace the phrase ‘the return of the repressed’ with ‘the revenge of the rejected’.5 Trump’s own ambivalent responses to charges of racism and sexism clearly illustrate the tactic whereby the populists co-opt both the appeal to cultural intimacy and the establishment structures they provisionally need to gain the power that will ultimately allow them to dismember those structures and enfranchise attitudes hitherto rejected as unacceptable.

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Populists may continue to shield themselves by paying lip service to the generic disapproval of vulgarity, racism, and the rest, but their espousal of specific acts which embody these disapproved attitudes allows them to attract the support of those members of society who feel rejected and ignored by establishment leaders. Populist leaders are saying, in effect, that they understand the disenfranchised because, in their everyday practices, they share in the same set of disenfranchised attitudes. Like the working class man who slaps his mate on the back and tells him, ‘C’mon, you motherfucker!’ (or the Greek who affectionately calls his mate a malakas, or masturbator), these leaders are invoking culturally intimate styles of speech and action as a political resource and a rallying call to collective disaffection. And mateship, as Kapferer (1988) demonstrates in his dissection of Australian masculinity, is a potent source of racism and sexism; assertions of egalitarianism cannot completely disguise the alternative inequalities that populism imports. Populist leaders draw on culturally intimate idioms in their specific acts and words, hoping thereby to suggest that those who generically espouse these attitudes will feel that they have at long last been understood. But they do not admit that their policies, far from destroying the old inequalities, will simply reinforce them by allying them with new discriminations based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality. There is thus considerable cynicism in the populist manipulation of cultural intimacy. Whether or not populist leaders are truly racist or sexist themselves—some of the more provocative leers and sneers by leaders from Boris Johnson to Silvio Berlusconi leave the answer in little doubt—their track records do not suggest that they would, if elected, exert themselves to create a better world for the disgruntled working class. Wealthy populist leaders are demonstrably uninterested in preventing the mistreatment of industrial workers; they intend to generate more work, it is true, but apparently with the goal of increasing



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the profits of the already wealthy—many of whom would not take kindly to attempts to enhance the protection of workers’ rights. But populism is effective precisely when the establishment has clearly failed to provide effective answers, or when global economic forces—often represented by these same politicians—appear to threaten the very survival of working class people whose livelihoods have already become precarious. Anthropologists are in a strong position to document such emergent anti-establishment solidarities, but, to do so, they must abandon their collective reluctance to take seriously the deep concerns which underlie so much of the racism and sexism that characterise populist rhetoric. All forms of prejudice are at odds with anthropological scholarship. But studying them does not mean embracing them; it does, however, mean showing some understanding of their sources and motivations. When Faye Ginsburg (1989), a strong supporter of abortion rights, investigated both pro-choice and ‘pro-life’ factions, she found that, although she continued to disagree with the latter group’s position, she was able to understand and even to some extent empathise with its sense of moral commitment. If we do not try to understand the appeal of populist political positions for people who consider themselves to have been abandoned by the establishment, and especially by those liberal and left wing elements to which they looked for solidarity and support, we will not succeed in preventing the spread of an ideology that ultimately does more harm to these disenfranchised elements of the population than to anyone else. Anthropologists must also be careful not to sound as though they thought the working classes were simply gulled into accepting an ideology that would eventually undermine their own interests. They, too, exercise agency, and their assumption of populist rhetoric may mask a determination on the part of significant elements in the working class population not to yield to the temptations of

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exclusionary prejudice. In Italy and Greece, for example, against the many outbursts of racist violence, we can set the equally striking frequency of acts of working class solidarity with, and support for, migrants who have been cast up on the shores of both countries. If some working class people have adopted racist attitudes—or, rather, have openly espoused those attitudes now that a populist leadership has rendered them acceptable—this does not mean that they are incapable of changing their minds, or that they do not understand the strategic and tactical advantages of such attitudes as well as the ultimate trap that they pose once such values are forced back into the covert spaces of cultural intimacy as officially unacceptable. Anthropology, moreover, is well equipped to probe the origins of the inequalities that lie at the heart of current tensions. In particular, anthropologists have studied the forms of patronage that for many centuries, in Europe and the Middle East especially, have sustained deep economic and political inequalities through the adroit management of an idiom of mutual respect and interdependence. The masking of inequality through the performance of reciprocity is an old tradition (e.g. Campbell 1964: 217–224; Holmes 1989: 98). Political patrons provided a range of services, from assuring their clients’ children reasonably respectable jobs to protecting them from the consequences of their crimes, while aristocrats assured their dependents of a livelihood grounded in genteel subservience; in exchange, clients voted for their patrons and peasants performed labour on the seigneurial lands. The language of reciprocity conveys a message of mutual respect, but it conceals an entrenched inequality. While the medieval offerings of honorific gifts may have generated feelings of real gratitude, feelings that political patrons still expect to hear expressed on appropriate occasions, the widespread critique of ‘corruption’ in the modern media has made such pretences hard to sustain internally.



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The case of Greece, often singled out for journalistic criticism because of its alleged proclivity to corruption, is particularly revealing in this respect. Greek peasants and workers see the operation of power as a cynical exercise. Whether their scepticism concerns a government minister who in parliament rails against animal-raiding among shepherds and the cultivation of marijuana in remote villages while also suborning witnesses in trials regarding both these legal offenses, or a German government that blithely accuses the entire Greek nation of corruption while ignoring the fact that some of the major sources of bribery have been German companies (see Herzfeld 2016b), ordinary people have no reason to believe in the innocence of those who launch these attacks. To the contrary, they view corruption as an inevitable accompaniment of power. In Italy, the alleged role of the mafia in the career of seven-times-premier Giulio Andreotti appeared to confirme generic suspicions that politicians were always fleecing the state, and these suspicions found expression in a deep cynicism that also justified a cavalier attitude to the law—not only on the part of ordinary citizens, but also on the part of those charged with the state’s day-to-day operation. Centralised states are not immune to such questioning; Chinese parallels, for example, are plentiful (Steinmüller and Brandtstädter 2016). Similar instances can be cited from most other nation-states, and suggest that cynicism about the political establishment is often the enabling condition for the rise of populist sentiment among those who, as clients, were thought to be the major working class beneficiaries of the unequal reciprocities generically labelled as ‘corruption’. The critique of racism similarly finds itself exuding the stench of hypocrisy. Those who speak out against racism are often thought to harbour racist sentiments themselves, especially when their generic pronouncements are bracketed with specific attacks of a racist character— when they claim to condemn racism even as they openly

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condone their followers’ attacks on a beleaguered minority. Moreover, the class origins of this critique—educated, bourgeois people are those who feel most constrained to express distaste for racist and sexist attitudes—make it a particularly attractive target for the suspicion of working class men afraid that exotic foreigners and unmarried women may be about to ‘steal’ their jobs because such arrangements suit the economic interests of the political establishment. Bourgeois citizens may be as racist as any worker, but their education requires them to disavow such generic feelings and to justify discriminatory acts and attitudes against ‘these people’ on the grounds that the latter have unfortunately given them no choice in each particular instance; they, not the offending minorities, are the victims, they say, because they have been forced to act in ways that others will interpret as racist. The hypocrisy of their disavowal becomes increasingly apparent with time, and fuels the anger of working class people who fear for their employment but do not have the luxury of being able to express racist attitudes without, at the very least, confirming their lower status in the class hierarchy. That anger feeds the political ambitions of extreme rightist groups and works against the collective selfrepresentation of any nation as a ‘tolerant society’. The rightists do not necessarily win elections, but the very possibility that they might do so at some point triggers considerable nervousness among liberals, especially those who are committed to the massive project enshrined in the European Union. The Dutch right wing populist Geert Wilders had lost some ground by the 2017 national elections, but not to the point of assuaging such fears (see de Koning and Modest 2017); Marine Le Pen mounted a credible, though ultimately unsuccessful, campaign for the presidency of the French Republic, suggesting that equality and fraternity were only for those with genuinely French ancestry.



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Greeks routinely deny that they are racists, and unlike the British, French, and Dutch, they have not been colonists in the modern age, but Golden Dawn—a far right political organisation with openly racist policies including the denial of aid to those who cannot prove Greek ‘blood’—now has seventeen seats in the national parliament, only one fewer than in the previous parliament. Moreover, the movement has achieved this visibility either despite or because of some dramatic acts of violence against migrants and, in one spectacularly public event on television, a female communist politician. Even the apparent absurdity of the accusation by some Golden Dawn supporters that the Greek Orthodox religion was ‘Jewish’ and therefore should be replaced by a return to the worship of the Twelve Olympians has so far not seriously dented the party’s appeal, suggesting that Lynda Dematteo’s (2007) insight that former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s success was due to his ability to play the fool might usefully be expanded to a more general analysis of populist politics. To be sure, some of those who voted for Golden Dawn were expressing their frustration with the previously dominant political parties, and some now regret having done so, but friction between refugees and locals at a time of economic depression does not favour the disappearance of racist attitudes, covert or otherwise, and acts that might at another time be ignored as mere buffoonery now become statements of anti-establishment satire. In Italy the absurdity seems to have continued with the participation of a party formerly committed to autonomy for northern Italy (’Padania’) in a populist national government, its change of name (from Northern League to League tout court) a paltry and not very effective fig leaf for its opportunism. The racist attitudes more or less discreetly adopted by such populist politicians, while often suppressed in the name of political correctness, are a significant component of cultural intimacy in many countries. There is no

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denying this unpleasant reality. In the United Kingdom, the excuse that a racist slur was ‘just a joke’ was acceptable for far too long for precisely that reason: it was a kind of humour which ‘everyone does’ and ‘everyone knows about’, and, as such, was treated with the indulgence that acknowledges a shared cultural trait. The frequent resurgence of comments involving the ‘N-word’ in the United States suggests that a similar situation obtains there. So treating the present surge of populist sentiment as merely the result of the precariousness of employment misses two crucial points: first, that racism has festered under the cover of a bourgeois distaste for such disruptive ideas but has in part been fomented by the refusal of the bourgeoisie to practice what it preaches and treat as equals people of different class identity or racial appearance; and second, that working class people are fully aware that middle class people are thus just as likely to display racist attitudes in practice despite that affectation of distaste. There is a high degree of collusion in the maintenance of racism in societies that affect to disavow it, and those whose jobs are on the line are very well aware of this inconsistency. Politicians may decry racism and other forms of prejudice, but leave it to their aides to deal with specific incidents and expect that in fact these aides will do nothing. In India, for example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly offered generic denunciations of anti-Muslim discrimination, but has generally failed to prosecute those who have expressed support for it or have carried out specific attacks. Such leaders are acting in exactly the same way as those who generically deny being racists but point to ‘exceptional’ cases as justifying specific acts of discrimination. The model for ‘outing’ cultural intimacy is thus already in place; when massive discrimination is unleashed, as in Milošević’s Yugoslavia or Hitler’s Germany, support comes precisely from the social elements that now find legitimation for hitherto proscribed but



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widely held sentiments of hatred. Other moral justifications come into play—the defence of free speech, the protection of women, and so forth—but the wreckage of institutional protections at the level of the state, which has been engineered by leaders attentive to the rich possibilities afforded them by a frustrated sense of cultural intimacy, is by then too far advanced to protect the victims of these developments. Few will dare to protest—not only because the forces thus unleashed are so powerful, but also because, for the moment, ‘what everyone knows’— and has been denied by the institutions now in ruins—has become the new ‘common sense’. In this context, it will not be sufficient to deride popular racism as the product of ignorance. If working class people lack education (or, rather, cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984)), whose fault is that? Academia is widely perceived as part of the problem; its prerogatives, even in an era of the expansion of university education, are widely seen as the privilege of a few. While anthropologists have been more willing than most to acknowledge the capacity of ordinary people to theorise their lives,6 even they have not done so as wholeheartedly as they should have. As a result, the increasing resentment of the ivory tower overlooks the fact that some academics—and anthropologists in particular—have pursued forms of social and political engagement that do not compromise on questions of prejudice but nonetheless seek to understand its appeal and to look for more productive and equitable answers to the disaffection of such large segments of society (see e.g. Low and Merry 2010; Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011). Yet more is clearly needed. There is no point in turning up our collective nose at the vulgarity, bad grammar, and hate-ridden sentiments expressed by populist leaders. Rather, we should clearly and coolly point out that this exploitation of widespread but officially disparaged ways of talking and behaving is

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entirely cynical and does not hold the slightest promise of redemption for laid-off or deskilled workers; that, to the contrary, it contains an implicit threat that the contempt now expressed for an established elite and for minorities—in other words, for those who lie outside the bourgeois mainstream—can just as easily be turned against the voters whose support enabled it in the first place. Here, by way of conclusion, I turn to a favourite anthropological device, Mary Douglas’s (1966) time-tested concept of pollution as ‘matter out of place’. Douglas was fully aware that the old British aristocracy and the working classes were both structurally outside the national mainstream defined by a bourgeois leadership,7 and her insight helps us to see how, by exploiting the outward signs of cultural intimacy, that leadership can both attack the elite and, while co-opting the working classes for its purposes, similarly undermine the ability of the latter to benefit from the new order. Margaret Thatcher, whom the politically conservative Douglas detested, began the parallel assault on working class, aristocratic, and academic interests, an assault of which today’s British populists, such as Boris Johnson and the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, are the unmistakable beneficiaries.8 These populists have found in her legacy a useful set of rhetorical tools. Making fun of the elite may briefly win a few votes, and it may also expose the elite’s mistakes and bad faith. More important, however, is its diversionary potential: it papers over the populist leaders’ intentions in respect of the less fortunate segments of society. Populism, as I have already indicated, is not a movement of or, necessarily, for the people; it is often a cynical imitation of genuinely popular politics. But the populism that has spread its miasma across the world today is more than merely an ill-intentioned exploitation of popular resentment. It is a trap—one that smart social actors have already identified as such, as witness the fact that many workers do not vote for populist leaders, but also a trap



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that can be baited for a long time; its architects are patient as they await their prey. The trap is part of a long-term strategy, and the performance of cultural intimacy is a vital aspect of what constitutes its appeal—of what makes it work. For it manifestly does work. It does so, moreover, for the benefit of those few who have figured out how to play its indecent game; and anthropologists are in a strong position to document this process in a variety of different cultural settings. Let us make no mistake: populism’s real beneficiaries would indeed be few in number. The precarious would remain precarious, and the intelligentsia would, by and large, languish—perhaps with equally precarious employment—in universities gutted of their commitment to critique and free speech and reworked as the passive instruments of anti-intellectual and anti-social policy demands that thought be replaced by data production. We can perhaps prevent this from happening, but we should never underestimate the enormity of the task that such resistance entails. If anthropologists fail to take up the challenge, they will be among the first victims of the new order. They will be derided (as they have often already been) for everything from their focus on seemingly unimportant detail to the complex sound of their professional name. They must respond immediately and without hesitation, and expose the bad faith that, in mocking an academic discipline devoted to the study of ordinary people’s social experience, surrenders the very name ‘people’—as in ‘populism’—to the cynical exploitation of everyday lives and aspirations. By using the discipline’s comparative perspective to show how such tactics work across a wide variety of cultural contexts and idioms, they may yet bring the world to a realisation of how cultural isolationism does not benefit the global working class but only the special interests of self-interested populist leaders.

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Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, served as the first Director of the Asia Center’s Thai Studies Program. He is affiliated with Shanghai International Studies University, the Universities of Leiden, Melbourne, and Rome (La Sapienza), and Thammasat University. Author of eleven books—­ including Cultural Intimacy (1997; 3rd edition, 2016), The Body Impolitic (2004), Evicted from Eternity (2009), and Siege of the Spirits (2016)—and an advocate for “engaged anthropology,” he has conducted research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand on crypto-colonialism, the impact of historic conservation and gentrification, social poetics, gender dynamics, nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.

Notes 1. For an initial presentation of this idea, see Herzfeld 2018; on cultural intimacy, see especially Herzfeld 2016a. 2. This is the phenomenon I have called the ‘global hierarchy of value’ (Herzfeld 2004). 3. The suffix ‘-ism’ always implies imitation, although this is often forgotten. 4. See Herzfeld 2007, on the Italian expression non sono razzista, però. . . . 5. For the former phrase, see Kalb and Halmai 2011. 6. The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) is another intellectual who has accepted this possibility. 7. Unfortunately, she seems not to have explored this insight into British class structure in the specific terms of cultural capital and its negotiation; but see the discussion of her approach to punning reported in Herzfeld 2016c. 8. See especially Hall’s (1979) prescient analysis of ‘Thatcherism’ and its transformation into a hegemonic force as common sense.



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References Austin, J.L. (1962) 1975. How to Do Things With Words, J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (eds). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Campbell, J.K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. de Koning, Anouk and Wayne Modest. 2017. ‘Anxious Politics in Postcolonial Europe’, American Anthropologist 119(3): 524–526. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12916 Dematteo, Lynda. 2007. L’idiotie en politique. Subversion et néopopulisme en Italie. Paris: Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ginsburg, Faye. 1989. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, Stuart. 1979. ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today January14–20. http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/ pdf/79_01_hall.pdf Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 2007. ‘Small-Mindedness Writ Large: On the Migration and Manners of Prejudice’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33(2):255–74. https://doi. org/10.1080/13691830601154237 Herzfeld, Michael. 2016a. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge. Herzfeld, Michael. 2016b. ‘The Hypocrisy of European Moralism: Greece and the Politics of Cultural Aggression’, Anthropology Today 32(1): 10–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12224 Herzfeld, Michael. 2016c. ‘Purity and Punning: Political Fundamentalism and Semantic Pollution’, in R. Duschinsky, Robbie, Simone Schnall and D. Daniel H. Weiss (eds), Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives. London: Routledge, 34–51.

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Herzfeld, Michael. 2018. ‘Cultural Intimacy and the Politics of Civility’, in BjørnThomassen and Harald B. Wydra (eds), Handbook of Political Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 101–114. Holmes, Douglas R. 1989. Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kalb, Don and Gábor Halmai. 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Oxford: Berghahn. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Low, Setha M. and Sally E. Merry. 2010. ‘Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2’, Current Anthropology 51(S2): S203–226. DOI: 10.1086/653837 Steinmüller, Hans. 2013. Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China. Oxford: Berghahn. Steinmüller, Hans and Susanne Brandtstädter (eds). 2016. Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State. London: Routledge. Vradis, Antonis and Dimitris Dalakoglou. 2011. Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come. London: AK Press.