Paradoxes of Polarization: Democracy’s Inherent Division and the (Anti-) Populist Challenge

Democracy and Polarization: Anthropology, History, and Political Theory

In his ground-breaking Structural Anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss has summarized the conclusions of anthropological research on the two dominant representations of the social field encountered in the two distinct groups to be found in Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes. Drawing on Paul Radin’s work—which he subsequently relates to similar anthropological findings from other communities—Levi-Strauss describes the social structure of Winnebago as follows:

We know that the Winnebago were formerly divided into two moieties, called, respectively, wangeregi, or “those who are above,” and manegi, or “those who are on earth” (hereafter, for greater convenience, we shall call the latter “those who are below”). (Levi-Strauss, 1963, p. 133)

Now, what is of interest is that when asked to draw the spatial arrangement of her or his village, members of the two different subgroups produced very different illustrations:

Both perceive the village as a circle, but for one subgroup there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles; while for the other subgroup the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. (Zizek in Butler, Laclau, & Zizek, 2000, p. 112)

Societal division and its antithetical (political) representations seem to reveal, in this example, ¹ the seeds of polarization operating throughout history. In our occidental trajectory, signifiers like “those below,” the “demos,” the “plebs,” and “the people” invariably function as markers of the internal division of every political community between the part and the whole, between the few and the many, between those governing and those governed, between those inside and those outside, and between those above and those below. This division seems to traverse the development of European, if not global, societies from Greek and Roman antiquity up until modernity. It sets the stage for a passionate and often bitter political antagonism arguably between two distinct historical blocs—what Slater (2013) formulates in terms of a salient antagonism between “oligarchic” and “populist” tendencies.

Whether polarization will acquire a benign or a malignant, a beneficial or a pernicious, or a democratic or an antidemocratic form will, in the first instance, depend on whether the often latent, implicit yet ontological, societal division marking all unequal and hierarchical societies will be allowed a political representation, opening the door to a more egalitarian and truly “pluralist” management. When, especially in conjunctures of crisis forestalling the smooth reproduction of a hierarchical system, the many—that is “those who are below” in the example offered by Levi-Strauss (1963)—demand their equal share of the pie and equal access to decision making, two scenarios become possible: an antagonistic one and an agonistic one. In the first case, dominant groups—that is, “those who are above”—will resist acknowledging societal division itself and sabotage any attempt to politically represent and register it within governmental institutions, denying any democratic concessions to those excluded. In this contentious scenario, pernicious polarization, even (civil) war, seems to be the most likely outcome. This is the war Leonard Cohen has so cogently captured in 1974—a war that starts as a short-circuit at the level of representation—symbolic and political—a war “between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.” Disallowing the registering of a (symbolic) war of antithetical representations of societal positioning, a dominant power block—a dominant political elite—may thus even trigger a real “war.” This is typically the case not only with regard to the foundation of a new democratic regime (the French Revolution provides a suitable example) but also with regard to the dynamics of further democratization (the trajectory of the Chartist movement in the 19th century and the civil rights movement in the 20th may serve as examples here). Progress very rarely occurs without “reaction,” a reaction bridging the agential with the structural:

Modern pluralistic regimes have typically come into being, it is increasingly recognized, not because of some preexisting wide consensus on “basic values,” but rather because various groups that had been at each other’s throats for a prolonged period had to recognize their mutual inability to achieve dominance. Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups. (Hirschman, 1991, p. 168)

The second scenario, ² usually overdetermined by external pressures that oblige oligarchic groups to offer democratic concessions, ³ signals a smoother emergence or consolidation of agonistic democracy (the gradual establishment of Athenian democracy through the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes offers a pertinent example here as does the welfare state type of liberal democracy following World War II against the backdrop of the Soviet threat). Societal divisions are registered, and their antithetical political representations are legitimized to the extent that they respect the shared symbolic kernel of the democratic social bond safeguarding the unity and continuity of the political community. What seems then to distinguish democracy from other regime types is that it deals with division and difference in a particular way. ⁴ Indeed, division and antagonism are recognized as inevitable: If there is no God or other transcendental source to guarantee our decisions, then democratic antagonism has to be recognized as the only legitimate instituting moment of (limited, temporary, and never ideal) hegemonic crystallizations. However, this idea is never easy to swallow. It was quite difficult to accept it in ancient Athens—something visible in the attacks of the great critics of democracy such as Plato. It is as difficult, if not more difficult, to accept today.

Simply put, already from Greek antiquity, antagonism and polarization have been seen as the unavoidable predicament of a democratic polity—indeed as a challenge to be actively assumed and not as a symptom of a political pathology to be eliminated. The polis undoubtedly knows that division and antagonism are central and have to be safeguarded and sustained. How else can one interpret Solon’s famous law, discussed in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens:

Solon realized that the city was often split by factional disputes but some citizens were content because of idleness to accept whatever the outcome might be; he therefore produced a specific law against them, laying down that anyone who did not choose one side or the other in such a dispute should lose his citizen’s rights. (as cited in Wolin, 1994, p. 40)

Hence, any citizen who will not take sides is stripped of his political rights. It would be very difficult to find a more clear indication of the central idea at the core of democracy:

Democratic stability can be achieved through dynamic tensions. Indeed, in Athens, the never-resolved tensions between aristocratic values and demotic ideology, and between apparently contradictory but deeply held political values . . . lay at the heart of the democratic system. (Ober, 1996, p. 31)

On the other hand, the unity of the polis also had to be protected against extreme forms of political struggle. This principle explains, according to Castoriadis (1991), the practice of ostracism: “In Athens political division and antagonism should not be allowed to tear the community apart; one of the two opposing leaders must go into temporary exile” (p. 112). The polis could only come to terms with the risks involved in the antagonism it had itself sanctioned through a paradoxical inclusive exclusion of stasis and civil war. Even if the productive inscription of antagonism is possible—that is, if it can be cultivated as well as endured—this does not mean it is easy. On the contrary, it takes place within a very delicate equilibrium, exorcizing the “regression” of a celebrated democratic agonism back to raw antagonism (Loraux, 2006). Indeed, this problem seems to be structural and is still with us:

Curiously, the very stability and proper functioning of a well-ordered democratic society depend on its citizens arraying themselves in a few major (ideally two) clearly defined groups holding different opinions on basic policy issues. It can easily happen then that these groups become walled off from each other—in this sense democracy continuously generates its own walls. (Hirschman, 1991, p. x)

The Agonistic Challenge

Contemporary radical democratic theorists themselves are not unaware of this problem, which is very much related to polarization dynamics. As Chantal Mouffe has conceded,

People really need to be enthusiastic about political struggle, while at the same time being aware that there is no final goal—democracy is a process towards which we are continually working. So we are clearly facing a difficulty in terms of the way passion can be mobilised, in terms of an acceptance of the contingent nature of our struggle. (Mouffe in Laclau & Mouffe, 2002, p. 129)

Democratic government involves an attempt to register the unavoidable play between two antithetical imperatives: (1) the need for grounded social institutions and functional arrangements, on the one hand and (2) the awareness of their contingent dislocations and political re-articulations, on the other. The latter presuppose choices between alternatives and thus involve dynamics of difference, antagonism, and hegemony. Such division is inherent to democracy, to the extent that it involves an unavoidable tension between inclusivity and constraints, what Slater (2013) discusses in terms of vertical and horizontal accountability. By recognizing the irreducibility of political antagonism, modern democracy enables the emergence of blends of liberalism and democracy, of liberty and equality, capable of perpetually questioning the limits of community and transforming existing hegemonic orders without endangering the relative stability of communal life. This is the agonistic democratic paradox that liberal democracy incarnated in the postwar period:

The agonistic confrontation is different from the antagonistic one, not because it allows for a possible consensus, but because the opponent is not considered an enemy to be destroyed but an adversary whose existence is perceived as legitimate. Her ideas will be fought with vigor but her right to defend them will never be questioned. The category of enemy does not disappear, however, for it remains pertinent with regard to those who, because they reject the very basis of pluralist democracy, cannot form part of the agonistic struggle. (Mouffe, 2014, p. 150-151)

Within such a framework, polarization can then acquire legitimate and illegitimate, benign and pernicious forms. To the extent that they respect agonistic pluralism and stop short of resignifying political adversaries as enemies to be eradicated through authoritarian rule, even conflictual types of partisan intensity (often debated under the rubric of “populism”) should not be a priori denounced as endangering democracy—in fact, they may be the ones defending it against an (oligarchic) adversary that has already stopped respecting them and vice versa:

I define democratic careening as political instability sparked by intense conflict between partisan actors deploying competing visions of democratic accountability. It occurs when actors who argue that democracy requires substantial inclusivity of the entire populace (vertical accountability) clash with rivals who defend democracy for its constraints against excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, particularly in the political executive (horizontal accountability). Since both sides plausibly claim to be on the side of the democratic angels, . . . the resultant regime dynamics are not well captured by the authoritarian/democratic distinction. These dynamics are therefore often better portrayed as careening between populist and oligarchic modes of politics. (Slater, 2013, p. 731)

Here, “careening” seems to constitute the degree zero of agonism, a critical though not terminal condition: “When this tension is actively manifested in partisan conflict, it has destabilizing consequences, but not deadly consequences, for democracy” (Slater, 2013, p. 730). Of course there is no guarantee that careening will manage to restore a democratic operation. It may very well end up in a democratic collapse, in the deepening of societal divisions and a war between the political camps representing the different sides involved, a war premised on the demonization of the enemy and its dehumanization along the lines of a redemptive, exclusionary, eschatological scenario.

Populism Versus Antipopulism

Conventional wisdom locates the danger of so-called consolidated democracies in “populist” forces challenging the established order. I argue, however, that established oligarchic forces not only commonly short-circuit in advance the foundation of democratic institutions (as we have already seen), but they may also be equally to blame for the degeneration of an agonistic framework into an increasingly antagonistic one. By failing to honor the promises and the founding principles of democracy, political elites actively participate in the destruction of those principles. They engage in the demonization and even in the dehumanization of those challenging the growing inequality and the elite monopoly of decision making, camouflaged as meritocratic, technocratic governance. They very often ignore the ideological position, democratic credentials, discursive genealogies, and political agendas of these challengers.

The challengers can also obviously take antidemocratic forms, and authoritarian movements can capitalize on these broken promises. The recent literature on the extreme right has cogently highlighted, for example, the deeply problematic ways through which some populist movements articulate their claims to represent “the people,” clearly opposing an open and inclusive conception of democracy: relying on charismatic strongmen, fueled by blind resentment, virtually bypassing the institutional framework of representative democracy, and/or often containing an illiberal, antirights and exclusionary nationalist potential (see, e.g., Wodak, 2015).

However, such a picture cannot exhaust the immense variety of populist articulations. Indeed, by representing excluded groups, by putting forward an egalitarian agenda, other types of populism can also be seen as an integral part of agonistic democratic politics, as a source for the renewal of democratic institutions suffering from the postdemocratic mutation of liberal democracy. Thus, populism should be primarily understood in formal and not normative terms: as a specific type of discourse or ideology that claims to express popular interests and demands (the “will of the people”) against an “establishment” or elite, which is seen as undermining them and forestalling their satisfaction. Accordingly, populist discursive representations typically articulate a polarized framing of the sociopolitical field in a bid to inspire and mobilize excluded social groups. The latter are called to establish links of unity, which will enable them to effectively challenge the established power structure and influence decision making in a bid to restore democratic accountability and inclusivity. Thus, the main criteria forming a minimal definition of populism would comprise (a) people-centrism—a political priority attributed to “the people”—and (b) anti-elitism—a dichotomic representation of the sociopolitical field between Us (the marginalized, the underdog, the many, “the people”) and Them (the establishment, the 1%, the elite, the few; see Stavrakakis, 2017a, 2017b).

Instead of embracing the inclusionary type and marginalizing the exclusionary type of populism, mainstream political, media, and academic discourses often adopt an a priori antipopulist attitude. Such a rejection may involve a legitimate suspicion toward the specific ways through which popular demands are formulated and the political actors (parties, leaders, etc.) that promote them. But it may also signal an elitist foreclosure of popular sovereignty as the foundation of a democratic polity. Thus, both populist and antipopulist discourses can acquire “progressive” or “reactionary,” democratic or antidemocratic forms. While populism may or may not be a trigger of pernicious polarization and a threat to democracy, depending on its inclusionary or exclusionary character, unequivocally denouncing populism as “a” or even “the” threat to democracy definitely constitutes a threat to a truly pluralist and agonistic democracy. Such an a priori rejection not only neglects the immense variety of progressive populist projects; by demonizing them and sabotaging their egalitarian political impact, institutional antipopulism indirectly also allows authoritarian populist variants to present themselves as the only force able to ostensibly challenge an increasingly unequal, unjust, and disconnected status quo.

Dehumanizing Rhetoric

Unable to register the complexity of the populist challenge, very often pleas for “moderate politics” dangerously flirt with normalizing such a postdemocratic and depoliticized status quo (discussed below), where politics has abandoned the possibility for real democratic change in favor of a technical administration of public affairs. However, the defense of postdemocratic normality requires the production and persecution of the abnormal. Today, for example, in crisis-ridden Southern Europe, it is the institutional defenders of “moderate politics,” those located at a naturalized consensual “center,” that predominantly construct a Manichean view of society, dismissing virtually any disagreement as irrational and populist and thus becoming more and more extremist and exclusionary. Given the turn of events in the South in a brutal nihilistic direction, is it not time to start dissecting the extremism of this “moderate center”? One of the key terms in grasping this tendency is what we have called antipopulism (Stavrakakis, Katsambekis, Kioupkiolis, Nikisianis, & Siomos, 2017), a discursive strategy that needs to be studied in its own right, since it often generates its own caricature of the populist “enemy” in dehumanizing terms (Katsambekis & Stavrakakis, 2013), associating it with abnormality, monstrosity, irrationality, and even paranoia. And this dehumanization is directly related to pernicious polarization (McCoy & Rahman, 2016, p. 10).

The example of the Greek debt crisis and the crisis of democratic representation it triggered from 2010 onward is indicative. An intensely partisan populist orientation—mainly expressed by protest movements and then hegemonized by SYRIZA—was met by a dehumanizing discursive repertoire that had been in the making even before protest had made its presence felt. In fact, already from the first imposition of austerity measures, a series of disciplinary discourses drawing on medical and pedagogical repertoires (Greece and the Greeks as a corrupt, ailing body or as a truant, delinquent child) have been supported and illustrated by zoomorphic metaphors like that of the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain; comprising the delinquent countries with debt problems and questioning their humanity and dignity; Stavrakakis, 2013, 2014). As soon as protest started to radically confront the policies implemented, these normalizing discourses were also radicalized. It is at this point that “populism” was established as the suitable discursive vehicle for the localization of abnormality in the Greek context. Indeed, what is crucially important, from our point of view, is that this denouncement of the abnormality of populism required a radical investment with an extrapolitical, anthropological value. Such processes of vilification, where “political discourse is often reduced to language vilifying the opponent and reducing them to the ‘inferior’ other by stripping them of any morally redeemable quality in the contest of electoral politics” (McCoy & Rahman, 2016, p. 11) may indeed increase the chances of a pernicious outcome.

In particular, very often populism was opposed to “rationality” and “common sense,” characteristics that are commonly recognized as universal features of the human species (presumably including “populists”). At the extreme of such depoliticized arguments we meet the downgrading of “populists” to subhumans: “cave men,” “Neanderthals,” and “troglodytes” (for a detailed analysis and particular examples, see Stavrakakis, 2014). Last but not least, metaphors of monstrosity were enlisted to strike the final blow—as in the case of ex-minister of education, Anna Diamantopoulou: “Populism has always been more than a threat—it has been an executioner of democracy, societal development, and of peace . . . the monster of populism must be crushed for good” (Diamantopoulou, 2016). In this Manichean discursive frame then, “populism” is indeed presented as pure negativity, a pure negativity that is to be contrasted with the pure positivity with which the postdemocratic normality is credited.

Indeed, extreme antipopulist rhetoric is not restricted within partisan political antagonism. It also marks the field of the media (Nikisianis, Siomos, Stavrakakis, & Dimitroulia, 2016). Once more, what emerges here is, on the one hand, the polarization implicit in pro-populist discourse and, on the other, the demonization of “populism” (and the political forces denounced as populist, mainly SYRIZA), marking the antipopulist press. Indeed, common adjectives accompanying references to populism in this camp comprise the following: extreme, vulgar, dangerous, cheap, fanatical, clientelist, catastrophic, unbearable, lumpen, irresponsible, savage, total, unscrupulous, and so on. In a similar vein, a lot of metaphors utilized in forming sentences about populism emanate from medical discourse and associate it with some sort of illness, either of the body (contamination, plague, gangrene, cancer, etc.) or of the soul (madness, schizophrenia, irrationality, etc.). Another salient category of metaphors employed originate from the natural sciences, especially meteorology (tsunami, storm, etc.) and zoology, either real (parasite, wolf, etc.) or imaginary (beast, monster, etc.) (Nikisianis et al., 2016). Even emblematic journalists of respectable media, like Alexis Papachelas, reproduce this narrative. Already from 2010, he refers to the “beast of populism,” to which in 2014 he attributed all that has gone wrong in postauthoritarian Greece: “All that angers us has an explanation and is not a momentary product, for it took several decades for the hungry beast of populism to rear its ugly head” (Papachelas, 2014). This repertoire of monstrosity continued to feed this antipopulist rhetoric well into 2015 and is still in circulation today both in the political sphere and in the media, old and new.