Abstract
Halfway between the diagnosis of geopolitical juncture and political strategy, Chantal Mouffe presents her new book called For a Left Populism. This work gives some notes about the potentialities and risks of the ‘populist moment’, which is a sign of these times in the West. With this concept Mouffe aims at describing the current political era in which the dominant hegemony is incapable of giving satisfactory answers to a multiplicity of demands. Institutions cannot defend the established order, which begins to decompose and, therefore, opens the possibility of building ‘the people’, understanding this social actor as an articulation of victims of neoliberalism; that is, a historically gifted new subject endowed with skills to receive those unmet demands.
It is possible to synthesize the concerns that Mouffe is addressing throughout this work in three questions: What is the world like today? What to do about that? How to do it? Therefore, this is a book that has a double objective: first of all, it has a political-prescriptive eagerness and, to a lesser extent, a theoretical objective that aims to adjust some of its previous ideas to the current scene of the West. The Belgian intellectual partially pays attention to the theory but sharply to the juncture.
If in previous works, such as On the Political (2007) and Agonistics (2013), the field was described as ‘post-politics’, what has happened since 2008 is the collapse of post-politics giving way to the populist moment. Within populism there are two poles that have the rejection of post-democracy in common, but differ among themselves in the fundamental issues: right-wing populism does not reject neoliberal mandates, while left-wing populism struggles for the recovery of democratic values, which is considered incompatible with neoliberalism. Today, the battle is inside populism, with the danger of giving rise to authoritarian expressions such as the incarnation of Trump, Le Pen and UKIP.
It is no longer a matter of revitalizing the frontier between the left and the right, since new forms of subordination have arisen that gave rise to demands that no longer correspond to social sectors defined by their location in the social structure. The substantial objective is then to draw a new political frontier in a populist and transversal way. The possibilities are immense given that the scope of the conflict has widened, because the line of victims left by neoliberalism is so vast that it is possible to build a more extensive and diverse people, united behind the search for the recovery of democratic principles.
Provocative, Mouffe recalls the experience of Thatcherism. The former British premier was successful in disabling, through a populist logic, the key elements of the consensus between Tories and Labour and thus establishing a new hegemonic order, taking advantage of the cracking of the post-war social-democratic model. This comes to tell us that the way to approach this project is to build a chain of equivalences that decants into a new political frontier, according to the historical context.
There, ‘democracy’ must be the hegemonic signifier from which the different struggles will be articulated. The author points out the forces represented by Corbyn and Melenchon in the UK and France as examples to follow in which left-wing populism managed to wrest votes from the right-wing populism embodied by UKIP and the Front National of Marine Le Pen. Bearing this objective in mind they should look for forces like Podemos, Die Linke and Bloco de Esquerda.
A left populism has great potential as panoply to unravel budding social processes and is a crucial contribution to the analysis of emerging movements such as the Yellow Vests in France. This movement is developing a populist strategy by formulating a chain of demands that has as historical subject a vast and diverse group with diffuse ideological borders, but that defines itself as an ‘anti-elite’ and ‘anti-establishment’ movement. The irruption of the French insurgents is a symptom of Mouffe’s success in describing the current conjuncture.
To summarize, it is correct to conclude that Mouffe has reached the purpose of answering the questions she mentioned at the beginning of her book: What is the world like today? A trembling crossed by the crisis and the collapse of a hegemonic order and the irruption of a populist moment; what to do? Start a left populist strategy to recover the democratic values. How to do this? Drawing a frontier which places people all side by side – led by a person or a big common demand – against the establishment of elites. As the author warns the readership, this populist moment cannot be conceived only as a threat from the right, but it is also a great opportunity for the radicalization of democratic values.