of the Good, once they have entered political life, do not stay with their authorial intentions; politics is a theatre in which motivations are not decisive and have no ethical relationship to effects. For Weber, this does not mean jettisoning ethics but developing an ethical orientation appropriate to a sphere constituted by action, power and contingency, and shadowed continuously by the potential effects of violence. He identifies this orientation as “an ethic of responsibility.” Attempting an ethical orientation in political life means being responsible for the effects of one’s actions in a contingent, unpredictable sphere – not treating unintended consequences as external to one’s ethics. This is as true of individuals as it is of projects: neither can rest on purity of motives or adherence to the theoretical premises or logics. One cannot say: “Because my motivation is emancipation, and I have theoretically purified populism of all non-emancipatory elements, then anti-democratic, authoritarian, nationalist or other chauvinistic elements are no part of the populism I affirm and help create.” Theory and the logics it articulates can never clean the hands of actors or pave the course of actual events in political life.
Foucault approaches this problem a bit differently when discussing the absence of a distinctive governmental rationality in socialism, and the tendency to look to a “text” for the answer to this absence:
[I]f we are so strongly inclined to put to socialism this indiscreet question of truth that we never address to liberalism – “Are you true or are you false?” – it is precisely because socialism lacks an intrinsic governmental rationality, and because it replaces this essential, and still not overcome [absence of] an internal governmental rationality, with the relationship of conformity to a text. The relationship of conformity to a text, or to a series of texts, is charged with concealing this absence of governmental rationality. A way of reading and interpreting is advanced that must found socialism and indicate the very limits and possibilities of its potential action, whereas what it really needs is to define for itself its way of doing things and its way of governing. I think the importance of the text in socialism is commensurate with the lacuna constituted by the absence of a socialist art of government. (2010: 93–4)
Beyond the specific problematic of socialism, it seems to me, Foucault here offers a warning against seeking a theoretical substitute for the “arts of government,” the form of governing reason and specific instruments of power, that are part of any regime. Whether borrowed or sui generis, they will be employed and deployed. This problem, especially the effort to discover theoretical or textual substitutions for rationalities and techniques of governing, bears differently on political populism as a political form than it does on socialism as an economic one, but it is no less significant for this difference.
We of the meaning-making and theory-building species also generate world-making forces (religious, cultural, economic, social, political, technological) that escape our grasp and steering capacity. The combination yields a persistent temptation to attempt re-mastery of these forces with our intellects. Political theorists are especially vulnerable to trying to conquer with theory the elements of action, violence, rhetoric, staging, and contingency constitutive of the political. This conceit afflicts formal modelers, analytic philosophers, and left theorists alike. We persistently confuse theoretical entailments for political logics, political logics for political truths, and political truths for politics tout court. How might we escape this room of distorting mirrors while persisting in the intellectual work of theorizing political life?
These large questions do not answer whether Biglieri and Cadahia have offered a persuasive account of populism. They do query whether their brilliant defense of populism rests on theoretical moves that illuminate political life yet are not identical with it. I write this at a time of two ground-shifting popular movements in the United States: one brought Donald Trump to power in 2016, and continues to support his neo-fascist “leadership” along with licensing political and social expressions of every kind of supremacism: patriarchal, white, heterosexual, nativist (but not Native), nationalist, and wealth-based. The other, ignited by the George Floyd chapter in the long American history of anti-black policing, vigilantism, and incarceration, has generated sustained anti-racist protests across America and the world. As they demand racial justice, and attack existing institutions for failing to yield it, these protests express the metamorphosis of a social antagonism into a political formation, one in which the People oppose the Power, which Biglieri and Cadahia identify with populism. Broadening well beyond those immediately affected, the uprisings have brought nearly every sector in every region of America to the streets, and may have dealt the final blow to the Trump regime. They embody the transformative possibilities of popular resistance and long-term as well as spontaneous organizing, and they are igniting a new political imaginary, one in which entrenched injustices of the status quo spur rather than limit the making of a radically different future.
Notes
1 1 www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-populist-challenge-to-liberal-democracy.
2 2 “How Does Populism Turn Authoritarian? Venezuela Is a Case in Point”: www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/americas/venezuela-populism-authoritarianism.html, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/venezuela-populism-fail/525321.
3 3 See Stephan Hahn, summarizing William Galston’s view, in “The Populist Specter,” The Nation, January 28 – February 4, 2019: www.thenation.com/article/archive/mounk-galston-deneen-eichengreen-the-populist-specter.
4 4 “Militant” is an important part of Biglieri and Cadahia’s political theoretical vocabulary. The term translates awkwardly into English, especially American English, where it signifies dogmatic and aggressive and hardened political views and a tendency toward extreme, sometimes violent, actions. By contrast, in French, Spanish, and Italian, its meaning is closer to political engagement as part of a cause, or what Biglieri and Cadahia call collective belonging. In fact, they insist, an emancipatory populist militant has precisely to be non-dogmatic. It would be, they wrote in an email to me, “someone who escapes dogmatism, someone who defends some principles and belongs to a collective formation or organization but, at the same time, is never fully captured by those principles, collective formation and organization. That is to say, someone who is always open to the new, to the critique, to the event.”
5 5 Occupy, it is important to remember, began as a protest against Citizens United, the 2011 Supreme Court decision delivering the coup de grâce to electoral democracy by lifting restrictions on corporate financing of campaigns.
Introduction
The book that the reader has in their hands does not aim to be a handbook offering basic and definitive definitions of populism and politics. Nor does it claim to be an academic book in the standard sense of the term, since it does not attempt to reinforce the imaginaries of objectivity or value-neutrality associated with academic work. In contrast to these two attitudes, this book is an avowedly militant one in which we embrace our political position as a way of taking responsibility for our own subjective involvement. Moreover, we believe that the crux of honesty and rigor in intellectual work lies precisely here: in being explicit about our locus of enunciation and putting it to the test. If we engage in this provocative gesture to foster debate around a term, especially one as controversial as populism, it is because we have something to say. And what we say comes from our experiences as women, as academics, as Latin Americans, and as political militants traversed by the various antagonisms that, between populism and neoliberalism, have emerged and continue to exist in our region. However,
