Simon Tormey
Populism is not a Break from Representative Politics
Interview by Giorgos Venizelos
From Populism Newsletter #3, February 2021, pp. 7-11.
You keynoted the 4th Populism Specialist Group workshop titled the ‘Populist Moment’: Temporality, Transformations, Crises, but this was not the first time you participated in one of our events. How do you think did the themes and the issues researchers of populism study change over the years? What are the new questions that emerged?
Yes I’ve enjoyed the Populism Specialist Group’s events. It’s been a great barometer as to what is and should be of interest to scholars of populism. That means getting away from the event-ness of populism which is the preoccupation of the mainstream media towards looking at how populism works in particular settings with particular actors using particular kinds of tools. This latter question is particularly interesting to me given the centrality now of social media to our lives, the importance of the image as the text, and the manner by which leadership is manifest in a virtual and digital environment, and so on. What also comes across in the work of the group is the variety of populism(s) in a way which is perhaps not fully reflected in mainstream or media approaches, which tends as we know to focus on right wing politics, to the exclusion of left and indeed centrist forms of populism. I’ve also noticed increasing interest in the ways in which civil society actors and social movements seek to use populist tactics and strategies to further their aims. We’re still not quite used to the idea of populist social movements, but I see this is a big area of interest and something coming through in the work of some of the PhD students.
In your work, you have explored the cycles of political mobilisation that had emerged in response to the representational crisis that became evident afterthe collapse of the markets in 2008. You referred to contentious events as ‘politics from below’, ‘new democratic experiments’, ‘democratic laboratories’ and so on in that they put forward demands for change, popular sovereignty etc. What is the state of democratic politics ‘from below’ now, ten years after their emergence that shook the hitherto stable political order?
Yes I was very interested in the ways in which new technologies enabled new forms of activism to emerge. As you know I developed this interest through looking in particular at Spain after the protests of 2011 and the various attempts to challenge and alter the political landscape in the country since then. In particular, I was interested in what would happen to representative politics given what seemed to be the anti-representational thrust of these actions and the Occupy movement which emerged at the same time. To cut a long story short, what we found in Spain is that a lot of activists realised that there’s no escape from representation and indeed a certain degree of “verticality”. “Hegemony” was a bridge too far for many at the outset, but even the wariness with questions of power and the state came to be seen in a new light. Quite quickly new political parties like Podemos emerged, or citizen platforms etc. new twists on the old political form: the party.
I had expected the political party to, if not die, then certainly to perhaps find itself competing with other new kinds of actors such as Internet-connected social movements and the like. But actually a key part of the story over the past 10 years has been both for adaptation of existing parties to the new technology, as we have seen most significantly in relation to the Labour Party in the UK and perhaps the Democrats in the US, and also the mutation of horizontal, connective initiatives into political parties. Some of these initiatives were never really horizontal to begin with, such as Podemos and 5SM, but others really were born of an activist milieu. So I think one of the findings of my own research is that the binary between vertical and horizontal political initiatives has become blurred and less pertinent. More generally, citizens have become more active and better connected. You don’t see many texts these days with titles referencing the “apathy” or “indifference” of citizens, do you? That’s not to say we have escaped “crisis” however defined. It’s more that citizens, and particularly the young, have become more politicised, not less. This is both opportunity and a threat for progressive politics of course. The right is also resurgent after all.
In what phase is representative politics after having been scrutinised and profoundly delegitimised by populist actors and popular movements from below?
I think I would put this matter somewhat differently. As my comments above indicate, I think the emergence of populist movements has served to relegitimise representative processes, not least because numerous movements have competed for power. So whereas in Spain 10 years ago we might have had discussions about the legitimacy of political institutions and democracy more generally, now we find much less of a preoccupation with the system as such, and more reflection about how to build on some of the successful initiatives that have taken place and which have indeed in some cities and regions resulted in quite radical figures coming to power. I think this underlines the key points that Laclau and Mouffe make, which is that populism is not a break from representation or from representative structures. Far from it. Populism fully embraces the logic of representation in a way that other parts of left discourse, and in particular those influenced by anarchism and some variants of libertarian socialism would reject. For Laclau and Mouffe there is always representation, representative claims, and therefore representatives. This has been a difficult message for horizontal activists to accept.
There is always a moment of alienation of those who represent and those who are represented. The danger is in disavowing this alienation in the search for something more “authentic” or “democratic”. Once activists in Spain realised this, as many did after 2011, then they could reach out to that great part of the public that doesn’t have the time or wherewithal to engage directly in political activism to offer them a new set of choices and a certain experiment charity to engage them in the governance of their own environment.
Does populism really constitute a threat to representative politics as liberal thinkers and commentators argue?
I take populism to be what a form of hyperrepresentation. This may or may not be a very good label, so let me explain what I mean. Populism arises when we have lost faith in our representatives to – as it were – represent. We are as Henrik Bang puts it, “uncoupled” from our representatives, and in extremis from the system of representation itself. In such a situation we then have the choice either to turn our backs on politics altogether, which is the phenomenon that political scientists are interested in when they talk about apathy or political disinterest.
Or we look around to someone who is able to articulate this discontent, and thus to represent us in our discontent with our representatives and perhaps the system of representation. Populism is thus almost by definition a politics of “outsiders”. Populism represents a critique of mainstream politics, of elites, of “Washington” or whatever. So then the question is posed, does populism on this basis represent a threat to representative politics? Not really. What it poses a threat to is obviously representation by a particular group of people, the elites. But this is of course where liberal commentary gets nervous. This is because since John Stuart Mill we have come to associate democracy with the governance of elites, and in the case of Schumpeter, with the rotation of elites in power – nothing more and nothing less.
In its anti-elite discourse, populism might thus be thought to represent an inherent risk to liberal democracy. But of course as we have learnt, while some populists are consistent in their critique of elite-based democracy, others aren’t. Left populists are often committed to a more participatory basis for democracy. Other variants of populism offer a critique of elites based on their performance as opposed to their position within the political division of labour. So the critique of “Washington” that we hear in Trump’s discourse is not a critique of elite variants of democracy, so much as a critique of what he regards as the lazy, bureaucratic self-serving behaviour of recent administrations, the fact that it is too far removed from the “ordinary people”, and so on. So in sum, I don’t think populism represents a threat to representative politics either considered as a critique of elite democracy or as a critique of the performance of elites of the kind just discussed.
Populism is the attempt to represent those who do not feel represented, those who feel that down by the system, ripped off by taxation, or whatever. It’s a kind of hyper-representation-of those who do not feel “represented”.
Last year you published a book with the title Populism: a beginners’ guide. Those of us who study populism are all aware of the wide and often uncritical ways in which the term is used by pundits. We are also very aware of the struggle over the definition of populism, which is often accompanied by heated academic debates. Scholars in the field have somehow reached a consensus on the ‘definition’ of populism: they see populism as a particular political logic, style, or discourse which juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Despite this consensus which is supposed to be bridging research gaps in the study of populism however, little else is being agreed. The normative debates on whether populism is good or bad as well as the alarmist discourses around it still remain at high levels. Why is that? Is populism a useful concept in the end?
I’m probably the only person on the planet who welcomes the fuzziness and uncertainty of the concept of populism, and who sees it productive for all sorts of discussions, not the least of which would be how do we address this apparent crisis of democracy? On the other hand, I also get that scholars and others can feel that we spend a lot of time reflexively critiquing each other, or equally having to retread our steps every time we want to have any kind of conversation. My way of putting this is to refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of a “genre”. There are different genres of discourse when it comes to discussing populism. Comparative political science has one set of interests or puzzles that it is seeking to resolve. Media commentary has another set of puzzles it’s interested in. And those who follow the Essex school approach, have some other purposes. This isn’t to say that populism is an “essentially contested concept”. I don’t see it as a value laden concept in the manner of “freedom” or “equality”. Whilst there are certainly normative differences at work between these different genres, I just think we are all trying to do slightly different things with the concept, and this means in turn that we can speak at cross purposes.
But as you indicate in your question I think there is enough of a core to the concept for us to have quite productive conversations nonetheless. As my comments above indicate, I think that at heart we are discussing a kind of outsider politics, a politics that is premised on a discontent with the performance of elites, and thus one that evinces a desire for something new or something different to take us in a different direction. It’s just that those directions can be multiple, which in turn indicates to me the lack of an ideological component to populism. I don’t think there’s a populist ideology as such, but rather a populist discourse. Everyone in the Populism Specialist Group will understand the importance of the difference here, but the nuance is often lost in mainstream discussions, where populism becomes a proxy for nasty right wing politics. Populism can take on lots of different guises with lots of different effects. The point is not to as it were turn one’s back on populism, or to dismiss it out of hand, but rather to craft a productive conversation about the contemporary crisis, and what we can do meaningfully to resolve it.
At some point in your book, you also refer to populism as the ‘politics of incivility’. Populism is presented as an extraordinary style of politics which is contrasted to the ordinary, standard, or perhaps ‘boring’ style of politics. However, if populism is becoming more and more common these days should we still consider it as an extraordinary style of politics? Or should we better speak of a new ‘normality’? Do you think that the label ‘uncivil’ contributes to further mystifying the term ‘populism’?
The idea that we can demarcate populism in terms of incivility, or more generally in terms of a pattern of behaviours is much more Benjamin Moffitt’s position than my own, notwithstanding our joint piece explaining the centrality of all this to populism! I take a more formal approach, as I think my answers above indicate. This is to say that I think that at heart, populism concerns a discourse or a form of politics in which the idea of the people is being mobilised against the elite. Benjamin’s view is that this is normally accompanied by a particular repertoire of performances, what he terms “bad manners”. I think that whilst this may often be the case, it is not intrinsic to populism as such. And of course having spent quite a lot of time over the past decade in Spain observing the emergence of populist movements and initiatives at close hand, I would contend that it is not at all intrinsic to populist politics to be lacking civility or accompanied by bad manners. Far from it. One of the most impressive features of these populist initiatives in Spain is the calmness, maturity and civility of many of its key protagonists such as Manuela Carmena, Ada Colau, and Inigo Errejon. No one could accuse any of these figures of being anything other than serious, thoughtful representatives of their various interests. We could perhaps allow a slight exception for Pablo Iglesias, who as we know can be given to a rather excitable, emotive style of discourse, but really we are scrabbling around for scraps of evidence here. And we could go on to discuss the likes of Alexis Tsipras, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, etc. Of course it’s always open to us to say that “Well these are not populists”, but then what is the utility of the term? Those who have read my book will know that I do think they are populists, and I think they are populists because they mount a serious critique of the performance of elites, and in a number of cases of elite democracy as such. They do this in the name of the people, which of course is the classic banner for populist initiatives. So I know I may be associated with the view that populism is to be judged on the basis of performance, bad manners, etc., but all I can do is point, as you have done to my book, to offer a corrective!
How does contemporary democracy look like ‘after’ populism?
I think at one level populism has succeeded in its task, which is to disrupt the comfort of elites around the world, and to put in motion a renewal of interest in politics, how it works, and for whom. For those of us with long memories, this all seemed quite unlikely until the financial crisis disrupted the terrain in 2008. Prior to that point we had been regaled with stories about “the end of history”, the triumph of the “third way”, the necessity for market solutions to every kind of common problem, and so on. In other words we were in the midst of a neoliberal triumphalism that seemed to have no end. That triumphalism was rudely crushed in the banking crisis and in the unleashing of austerity politics thereafter. This is of course the background to the emergence of both right-wing and left-wing populism over the past decade. These initiatives would not have been possible were it not for the crisis of neoliberalism and by extension the crisis of the hegemonic idea that has governed most democratic societies for the past four decades. Now I think we are in the midst of a new “return of the political”, as my friend Chantal Mouffe might putit. We are in an environment where many of the old coordinates either no longer seem fit for purpose or have had to be rebadged and repackaged for a new audience. And in addition, we have a whole series of new issues that prompt discontent or doubt about the ability of elites to manage what lies ahead. These include most obviously the climate crisis, the crisis of the liberal cosmopolitan vision of globalisation, the collapse of the middle-class with growing precarity and employment insecurity, the emergence of “surveillance capitalism”, and of course most immediately the rise of a kind of resilience-wellness agenda that prompts a new age of medicalised statism. Notwithstanding the admittedly unpromising nature of the terrain I do think there are opportunities for progressive forms of populism to make advances, although it will do so faced by a newly confident and quite assertive anti-immigrant neo-nativist right. It will for example be interesting to observe what happens in France in 2022. It’s quite conceivable there that we will see a contest between the old National Front and either Macron, or quite possibly Mélenchon.
To put this into a more global perspective I still think that “centrist politics” is under strain and that therefore a more radical politics, often populist in nature, will be regarded as a natural choice for the electorate. What I also observe is that there is now much less resistance on the left and broadly speaking to adopting populist strategies, tactics, tropes. I do think that the old battle between “horizontalism” and a more populist style, party-based radicalism is less marked now than it was perhaps 20 years ago. I think many activists get that these neatly packaged positions are not self-sustaining, and that ultimately one can do very little without competing and winning power; but equally one can’t even conceive of winning power and doing something productive with it without the help and support of everyone on the left, including every variety of libertarian horizontalist. That was definitely an important lesson for many activists in Spain over the period of time that I was researching the evolution of progressive responses after 15 M. So, in short, populism’s hour is definitely here, and there will be many more populist initiatives and projects for members of the group to study!