essential elements. On the contrary, Laclau’s insistence on populism’s revelation of the ontology of the political is relentlessly postfoundational; it corresponds to the absence of foundations and essences in political life. Far from being found in God, nature, reason or axioms of history, all political claims and formations are created, generated from militancy aspiring to hegemony. And populism’s subject, “the people,” is itself an empty signifier – articulated, rather than found or given, and irreducible to any specific population.
Populism’s status as the ontology of the political, then, correlates populism’s alleged “shiftiness” with the lack of foundations, fixed significations, and strict referents in the political. Thus, Laclau retorts to the charges that populism comprises vague, affective, and rhetorical discourse: “instead of counter-posing ‘vagueness’ to a mature political logic … we should start asking ourselves … ‘is not the “vagueness” of populist discourses the consequence of social reality itself being, in some situations, vague and undetermined?’” (Laclau, 2005a: 17). Instead of condemning populism’s “rhetorical excesses” and simplifications, he suggests, populism reveals rhetoric as fundamental to political life and at the heart of the constitution of political identities (2005a: 18–19). Instead of treating the eruption of politicized social demands as a dangerous disruption to liberal democratic norms – as a political malady – populism reveals social antagonisms as at the basis of all politics.
For Laclau, then, far from being a fallen form of politics, “populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such” (2005a: 67). We might also put this the other way around. Through the lens of populism, we can see just how profoundly anti-political much of Western political life and political theory has been. From Platonism and Marxism through liberalism and neoliberalism, most theory and practice aims at taming, reducing or disavowing the qualities of the political overtly expressed in populism – antagonism, rhetoric, constituted identity, indeterminacy and, above all, the power of the people. Most political theory and practice in the Western tradition has aimed at extinguishing these elements and instead identified “management of community [as] the concern of an administrative power whose source of legitimacy is a proper knowledge of what a ‘good’ community is” (2005a: x). Exceptions to this anti-political orientation are few and rare. There is Machiavelli, with his subtle appreciation of political drama, effect and affect, of invented formations and alliances, and his recognition that the health of republics, far from being endangered by popular “tumults,” is secured by them. There is Tocqueville, writing in the democratic (as opposed to oligarchic) republican tradition, who grasped the value for democracy – along with the messiness – of cultivating an energized people ambitious to share political power for purposes beyond pursuit of individual or class interests. And there is Gramsci, that ardent student of Machiavelli and not only Marx, who theorized the importance of actively linking popular struggles to articulate a new hegemonic bloc. Today, there are also left Schmittians, Deleuzians, and radical democrats, but they hold a tellingly small place in contemporary political theory, where liberal approaches reiterate the long tradition of attempting to expunge from politics contingency, fabrication, rhetoric, antagonism, agonism, and the popular – all that constitutes the political from a populist perspective.
Biglieri and Cadahia broadly endorse Laclau’s identification of populism with the ontology of the political. They focus especially on the aspect of this identification that features the transformation of different social antagonisms into allied political ones. As a politics that is explicitly made not born, a politics that does not express these social antagonisms directly and individually but, rather, actively (militantly) crafts them into a hegemonic formation opposing powerlessness to power, populism invents a new dividing line and the identities on both sides of it: “the underdog” versus the “power” in Laclau’s words, “the people versus the enemies of the people” in those of Biglieri and Cadahia (16). Here, they pursue Laclau’s alertness to populism’s unique alchemical capacity to transform segmented, siloed, or what he called differential demands into an equivalential relation with one another. This is the transformation that de-individuates these demands, developing instead a political frontier between the people and the power, a frontier that in turn opens new political possibilities and imaginaries. This is the alchemy that permits a critical perspective on and challenge to the discourse, organization, and arrangements, not merely the distributions, of the status quo. This is an alchemy that explodes the limits of the interest group pluralism of liberalism and the class politics of Marxism while remaining legible to and in present discourses. Therein lies populism’s deep immediate radical potential.
As they pursue this line of thinking, populism emerges not merely as a but the political form capable of challenging liberal individualization and depoliticization in the present. As it releases interests and identities from their silos, it substantively links – without dissolving – these identities to form a counter-hegemony that indicts the status quo and opposes the political power securing it. Populism reconfigures the excluded and dispossessed as articulating “different demands with one another until achieving an equivalential chain capable of challenging the status quo and establishing a frontier between those on the bottom (the articulated people) and those on top (the status quo)” (14). The “people” or the “plebs,” previously discounted, fragmented, and separated from each other, at once claim representation of the whole and politicize their exclusion (16).
In the United States, the best recent exemplar of the populist alchemy Biglieri and Cadahia are theorizing is not the white Americans constituting Trump’s base of support in 2016, but the 99% of the Occupy Movement earlier in the decade. The 99% comprised all sectors of labor, people of color, the indebted, the indigenous, the unbanked, the undocumented, the unhoused, the under-educated, the overcharged, the poor, working, and middle classes. The 99% was not a class, an identity or even an intentional coalition. Nor was its opposition only the state, the bosses, the bankers, the corporations or the rich. Rather, the 99% designated a people excluded, exploited, bilked, and disenfranchized; the “power” it opposed was the plutocrats. The 99% and the 1% identified the losers and winners of neoliberalism, privatization, financialization, and government bailouts in the aftermath of the 2008–9 financial crisis. The 99% included democracy itself and the well-being of the planet; the 1% extended to the Supreme Court majority and the international Davos crowd.5 Everything plundered, devalued or made precarious by capitalist plutocracy was linked in the aspirational hegemonic bloc of the 99%.
If Laclau’s bold move to identify populism with the political is troubled by the difficulty of stipulating the political, he surely succeeds in recovering populism from its derogatory associations to reveal its insurrectionary and radical democratic potential. However, more still is needed to unfasten it decisively from right-wing popular mobilizations supporting authoritarian leaders or regimes, and especially from ethno-nationalism and fascism. This unfastening is the key aim of Biglieri and Cadahia’s work. To achieve it, they carefully elaborate and dismantle the premises undergirding mainstream and left anti-populist critiques, including those of Eric Fassin, Slavoj Žižek, and Maurizio Lazzarato. They also critically analyze the claims of closer allies – Chantal Mouffe, Oliver Marchart and Yannis Stavrakakis – that populism may take right-wing forms but is equally available to left, emancipatory, another-world-is-possible democratic demands. Going a remarkable step further, Biglieri and Cadahia argue that populism is only left, only radically democratic, only anti-authoritarian, only the final and full realization of equality, liberty, universality, and community. Populism, they argue, is the emancipatory revolutionary theory and practice for our time. Conversely, what pundits call “populism” ought to be called by its true name: fascism.
Only left populism is populism, all other movements in the name of “the people” are fascist – how is such a claim possible? How, especially, can it be developed from a Laclauian formulation of populism in which “the people” is an empty signifier – always rhetorically designated, always a part representing the whole, always brought into being through articulations in every sense of the word? And how does this argument square with the worldwide eruption of what almost everyone calls authoritarian populism? How can these reactionary formations
