The term ‘Populism’ as a combat-concept and a catchword

A crisis of authority and the social imaginary

Koselleck’s work is particularly helpful when terms that have become catchwords or are used as weapons in an ideological war. If we accept that ‘neo-liberalism’ can itself be a combat-concept, then we would need to see how the new social movements have begun to attack others by preying on people’s fears and insecurity about the future in order to construct an ‘image’ that involves a constructed perspective that finds resonance with the people’s social imaginary. These are indeed ideological wars. However, one can go back to those founders of neo-liberalism (including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan) to discover how, if their policies have been the guiding principles of the new political order, the individuals who lead those states do not call themselves ‘neo-liberals’. They prefer to use the term ‘liberals’, because they want to be seen as defending ‘freedom’ above all. The freedom relates to the leaders’ agreeing not to intervene in the economy or to promote austerity on governmental spending. They suggest that they will fight against high rates of job loss and unemployment, but the reality is that they do so by paying the price of erasing social rights – and allowing global financial institutions to profit from non-regulation in the markets. Thus, these so-called ‘liberals’ have been able to avoid the ‘neo-liberal’ tag and use their state sovereignty only as the hard-core basis of racism and xenophobia. As Nancy Fraser has written, the reaction from those who have lost all expresses that they ‘are effectively saying that neo-liberalism isn’t working, that there’s something deeply wrong with the present way of organizing life and doing business, and that we need to replace it with something dramatically different’. ⁵ If many people around the world are feeling fears about their similar situations, their expressions of rejection could easily lead to being manipulated by the discourses of those neo-liberals in power or by others whose alliances can be far more to the right. Which means that we really need to focus on how the neo-liberal social imaginary works.

Without a doubt, we are in the midst of a ‘crisis’ of authority or, as Gramsci would call it, the loss of hegemony, ⁶ and pace Moffitt’s concern about the warning that the uses of the term ‘crisis’ relates also to a catchword, I think this term can be used with precision here. Fortunately we have the advantage of going back to Koselleck’s own genealogy and try to learn how the theorists who use the concept of ‘crisis’ need to provide two different alternatives and become theoretically engaged with trying to make a correlation between past and future in order to trigger actions. I am not using ‘crisis’ as causalist determining step that follows a careful judgment by the people. I understand that the uses of the concept ‘crisis’ did not clarify why actors act the way they do in their elections or choices, but combat-concepts do the work of instilling fears in how people can imagine their futures. As Fraser puts it: ‘What emerges in situations like this is not always pretty’. ⁷ But this is precisely why, this time, we need to contextualize the problem by rescuing the semantic power of the concept of crisis in order to explain the ways through which certain social movements have been able to gain political hegemony and why.

Koselleck is helpful again here, as he recovered the root of the word ‘crisis’ from the Greek verb ‘krino’, which means ‘to define, to decide, to judge, to make a decision after careful deliberations’. ⁸ According to his historical reconstruction of ‘crisis’ in ancient times, every single case involved a situation about the dangers of choosing wrong. For example, in a medical ‘crisis’, sickness can be cured if we intervene in a timely way, make the proper diagnosis and give the patient the correct treatment. At the same time, ‘crisis’ is often used as a prophecy about the destruction of democratic institutions: as in a political ‘crisis’, an economic ‘crisis’ and so on. That kind of precision has been lost today with the uses of the combat-concept of ‘populism’ and its ambiguity bears some similarities with the one found in the uses of the term ‘crisis’ as Koselleck explained how this once very precise concept became a catchword and it is used even to describe ‘personal crisis’.

How could this shifting semantics have come about? Political theorists and some actors maintain that ‘change’ is not the solution to the crisis of neo-liberalism. But they refuse to accept that before we can determine why any change took place, why people chose the way they did, we must concentrate on how the actors and their reading of the political–economic situation – specifically, the problems they foresaw and the solutions (if any) were the ones that were offered as a ‘solution’, a clearer perspective on the meaning of ‘change’.

Political actors are often unfairly criticized for blindly following ‘populist leaders’. Thus, along with the social imaginary, I intend to introduce Koselleck’s conception of ‘the spaces of actors’ experiences’ and their ‘horizons of expectations’. ⁹ The importance of events from the past, the fearfulness of the present as the unknown and a future that is characterized by uncertain change – these comprise the material for our critical examination. Making this reconstruction will help us realize that, using ‘populism’ to mean the mother of all our fears, and the cause of all the ills of our society – we are actually constructing a myth – to allay our feeling of dread and give us a feeling of security by electing those who are against any progressive or possible transformation for the better. For neo-liberals, there is no alternative.

Hans Blumenberg reminds us that myth expresses ‘the fact that the world and the powers that hold sway in it are not abandoned to pure arbitrariness’. ¹⁰ That is why myths play such a big part in this political scenario – pitting the fears of the unknown against the uncertain contingencies of political life. In the social imaginary of today, the space we occupy now, we need to separate and differentiate between any of the alternatives that are offered to us, in order to make a better diagnosis of the present and of the sense of insecurity and vulnerability aroused in us by those who create and use the images of their political projects as constituting a better future or a rescue of a grandiose past.

The word ‘populism’ creates a powerful image in the minds of political actors. Which is why no one wants to call himself or herself a populist (just as no one really wants to be labelled a neo-liberal), though everyone wants to describe their opponent as such.

Koselleck tells us that images gain their power when they can unite the past and the present with the future – and generate within us a new sense of time, enabling us to create ‘resonance’ – to use Hartmut Rosa’s term ¹¹ – among political and social actors. A good example was how 30 million people voted for Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He had tried twice before to be elected promising changes, but only now the experiences of actors allowed them to learn that their previous choices were wrong. AMLO (as we call him in Mexico) was the only leader who was able to construct an image of a radical transformation from the past and he insisted on the future as a radical transformation for the better. Strong, vivid images help actors intertwine their experiences with their expectations. Consider then, how actors construct their claims about change through the uses of an image of a ‘future’s future’. AMLO's future's future offered what he called “the fourth transformation”. It brought back Mexico’s best historical moments and inserted his project as the best and most progressive vision of the renewal of the future. It remains to be seen if he will succeed or not. ¹²

Because not all change is good, we need to see how, once in power, changes are actually taking place for the better or not. This is why, as Ernesto Laclau knew, the best way to understand the logics of ‘populism’ can only come out as a historical reconstruction.

In his work on ‘populist reason’, Ernesto Laclau describes how:

A discussion of whether a just society will be brought about by a fascist or by a socialist order, [which] does not proceed as a logical deduction starting from a concept of ‘justice’ accepted by the two sides, but through a radical investment whose discursive steps are not logical-conceptual connections but attributive-performative ones. ¹³

So we better be aware of what is lacking when some ‘neo-liberal’ progressive – such as Hillary Clinton – explains that she basically wants things to stay in the same track as previous administrations and only intended to make partial changes to the status quo.

Koselleck’s helpful tools

Koselleck began his work on conceptual history because he was interested in the way concepts can help us focus on the political practices of actors and the ways that the semantic transformations of a concept entail a sense of what we would now call the political and social imaginary (although Koselleck never used Castoriadis’s concept). Koselleck proposed that actors can enable their own conceptual and political transformations by means of two anthropological/historical categories – ‘the spaces of experiences’ and their ‘horizons of expectations’. These spaces are larger than their linguistic-historical frames, since they also connect to the conscious and the unconscious repressed dimensions, as Freud conceptualized them.

According to Castoriadis, the social imaginary describes the institutional ‘magma’ from which our self-images and self-representations are formed. ¹⁵ This is how a web of significations allows us to share ‘a’ world. The semantics of Castoriadis’s initial idea have changed over time, especially because of the theories of the post-structuralists. I will not go into the Lacanian development of the concept, instead, I will use a definition that focuses on how people have an image of themselves through certain specific institutional practices, the interiorization of historical norms (and the immanent criticism that can subsequently arise), the productive uses of imagination (literature, the arts, culture and so on) and the envisioning of new pictorial images about themselves through self-creative practices.

Understanding how semantic changes – or conflicts over them – can give us a broader picture of what is going on when we attempt to define political problems or take necessary actions that must include the emotional (fears of the unknown), unconscious drives, the normative aspirations and the layers of experiences that cannot be captured with an all-purpose term such as ‘populism’. We must make sense of what goes on beyond the linguistic dimensions and, at the same time, be careful of how we use certain political concepts. Through the formulation of new concepts or the semantic struggles over the use of a concept, we realize how concepts have actually influenced actors in powerful ways. Koselleck attempted to give us a more dynamic way of understanding political concepts versus political agency with his categories of the spaces of experiences and the horizons of expectations. I am adding them to the social imaginary, as conceptual semantic changes – or struggles – can only hint at how images stored in the imaginary from the past can help actors seek change as well as how the vision of a future can be the real subject of their concern. Expectations might not come to pass, but they will become new experiences once they are collected. (I have always been intrigued by the fact that the social imaginary contains many similar past experiences but very few examples of how these experiences change the future.) Nothing is a straightforward product of our dreams and intentions. And this is precisely why Koselleck’s categories can be within the realm of a logic of equivalences that is contingent but that can be powerfully structured so as to resonate with others (Laclau).

The vague and sometimes misleading pronouncements appropriated by political actors in their battles over the meaning of concepts are more common than we might at first realize. This is why theorists are convinced that they can easily define the term ‘populism’ – and, to date, none has succeeded. To understand what brought us to this crisis of political authority, we must accept that it is necessary to do more than review our trove of past experiences; we must also engage with others about a critical examination of our ideas for constructing the future. It is this aspect of ‘drawing the future’s future’ that has been left out of most of the current theories on populism. Only by reversing this apparent trend, can we hope to figure out whose views can generate the most transformative, compelling project – which must be ethically transparent and openly inclusive. (To be sure, political actors (or leaders) can and do support agendas and engage in conceptual battles for political purposes to advance their careers.)

A second lesson: The state is not the enemy, it is the goal

When Koselleck began developing his method of conceptual history, he was mostly interested in giving an account of how the 18th-century concept of crisis had become intertwined with a web of new practices related to critique, which enabled Enlightenment philosophers to re-enter the political arena by voicing their political objections against the Absolutist State. According to Koselleck, these thinkers had ended up using critique as a moral weapon to undermine the State’s authority. He saw them as opening up a gap between the layers of sedimented spaces from the past with newer expectations (to bring down the monarchy). Despite Koselleck’s concerns about the lack of any previous experience of change for the better, positive expectations were reflected in powerful images of a revolution that enshrined egalitarian values.

Actors and theorists had learned how to use the term ‘crisis’, along with the idea of ‘revolution’, and through both they developed a powerful political agenda that has remained in the horizon of the experiences of political actors for more than 200 years. The gap created between ‘experiences’ and ‘expectations’ allowed for an expansion of hopefulness. As Koselleck explains: It is ‘the tension between experience and expectation, which, in ever-changing patterns, brings about new resolutions and, through this, generates historical time’. ¹⁶

The anticipation of radical revolutionary transformation that made up the new social imaginary only disappeared after the collapse of Communism in the late 20th century. At that time the neo-liberals claimed that their political project was the only one worth preserving. Their policies, set without any counter-hegemonic dissent, thus became the new form of governance. The neo-liberal social imaginary closed the spaces of the ‘future’s future’.

The idea of the possibility of political change came back several decades later, along with the increasing tendency of the political actors to question political authority. They saw themselves becoming the individuals who can win elections and run the government and whose success depended on the effectiveness of their political projects, as well as the appeal of their images about the future.

The expectations about a post-Communist change-for-the-better have not been borne out by the events of the past 30 years. As we have seen, living in an environment rife with fears and insecurity is not the best one in which justice and hope can flourish and a new order can replace the chaos of the past. We are again living in a time of the unending interrogation about political authority. But our perspective is completely different from the one Koselleck thought existed in 18th-century France. Social actors expressed doubts about a technocratic economic view of government and, as we have already noted, wanted to become themselves the representatives of a political State. If Koselleck understood how the sense of time was a fundamental factor of change, the present actors are still struggling to redefine their past in order to project a possible vision for going forward. Instead of fighting to destroy the State, the new social movements have entered the struggles to be elected by democratic means. But the question of how actors see what has happened to them in their economies and with their losing what has been gained in terms of social rights has opened up a radical new scenario where everything is possible.

Striving for a suitable political vocabulary

We must take a hard look at how the right wing and ultraconservatives have been winning battles because they have learned to use their images linking fear with order, immigration with exclusion and prosperity with the past. Some political groups are dreaming of bringing back the past’s past, not the future’s future. But if we want to accept the lessons of history about how the logic of equivalences has a tendency to produce unintended consequences, we must figure out how to promote ideas about the future as an open and engaging experience-to-be, bearing in mind how essential experiences are to individuals’ expectations and how both the past and the future must be taken into account when heads of social groups and political parties design their projects. Social and political actors must force themselves to insert some reality into their political pronouncements and texts in order to dispel negative myths and challenge the combat-concept model of political engagement. Historians are also needed in this effort, since they are the ones who can reconstruct the success or failure of certain movements to achieve positive change. We must acknowledge that actors on both the right and the left have been challenging the authority of the present political establishment – and not only because they feel the leaders do not represent them. They have experiences of failure and suffering, but they still cannot articulate their hopes when those who are able to ease their pain and fear mesmerize them with false promises of a better future and inclusiveness. The neo-liberal policies and States have claimed to erase the possibility of a new left. This is why the new weapon or combat-concept of ‘populism’ is used powerfully by those who want to instil fears about what can be expected. Fascists groups have managed to learn the lessons on how to attract the discontent and how to provoke fear using images that are created as nightmares. Leaders of the new ultra-right and the arising fascist political parties freely criticize ill-conceived and poorly executed programmes from the neo-liberals in an effort to show that they know the kind of changes that are needed. The left has struggled to bring about their images of a different future and has had less success than their opponents. But I maintain that the progressive social movements must learn their lessons from the history of how fascism won the battles against socialism in the last century and how the left was undermined on those historical battles. In going backwards to denounce the failed policies of the present government, these groups should also go forward – expounding on the positive changes that will take place over the coming years and in fighting back against claims by political actors who purposely do not call themselves ‘populists’ but use inflammatory language and grandiose, deceitful images in order to defeat neo-liberalism. But can progressive neo-liberalism serve as a counter-image of a future’s future? That is the trillion-dollar question that remains to be answered.

In my view it is not populism, but racism, authoritarianism and exclusion that we must fight against. The struggles of today present us with a conflictual panorama in which powerful actors have been manipulating their followers, encouraging them to embrace fascistic and other anti-democratic political parties because they have made their claims against neo-liberalism in a more powerful and resonant way.

In an attempt to connect the concept of crisis with the concept of ‘populism’ to the situation we now find ourselves in, we must offer voters clear, honest, easily understandable choices about our project of the State that has a clear image of social justice (goals). We are in a defining moment, where the past is not entirely gone but the future is not yet clear. This knowledge should help create an image that wins the hearts and minds by offering a compelling view where justice is the most resonant colourful view.

Not all futures are dreamed of in the same way. If some actors want to recover ‘past glorious identities’ and seek to recover their diminished ‘national sovereignty’, we must encourage them to rethink critically and reimagine the environment in which emancipation can be found, along with satisfactory social entitlements, meaningful economic redistribution and a strong system of justice. Other actors want to fight back against the ways financial institutions have managed to initiate policies of economic ‘reform’ that favour the wealthy and the elites. In the middle of this political landscape are those who call for ‘reason’ and insist that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (shortened as the acronym TINA) except to try to manage the economic deficits and continue with the austerity policies dictated by financial institutions. This no-choice is presented as the safeguard of a very thin project about formal democracy. (This slogan was often used by the Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to signify her claim that the market economy was the only system that worked and that the time for debate was officially over.) Those who occupy the centre want to make very few political changes, so as not to have to change anything at all (this was the scenario of the great Italian epic novel Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] written by Guiseppe Luchino di Lampedusa in 1958 and, later, made into a film by Luchino Visconti).

Before discussing what is missing from this discussion, we must consider what has triggered the current period of crisis – not in causal terms but in an elucidating way. As I have said, it is not ‘populism’ that has destroyed democratic societies, but neo-liberalism, which has manipulated the populace, thinned the layers and reduced the contents of what constitutional democracies used to be all about. Wendy Brown has called this ‘Undoing the Demos’. ¹⁷

The new struggles

In recent times, the theoretical debate seems to be changing over how the negative semantics of the term ‘populist’ are being confronted by a few theorists who want to use it in a positive way. The first problem with this idea is that, according to Koselleck, the combat-concept could now be transformed into a ‘catchword’. As such, it could mean anything – either good or bad. It has no precision, but at least, we are reminded that semantic wars have always been ideological. In terms of the social imaginary, the ‘myth’ to be destroyed is that ‘there is no alternative to liberalism’. This should be now the focus of the progressive critical views.

The second problem is the absurdity with which the conservatives hide their true motives as if they themselves were protecting ‘democracy’ and order rather than trying to rehabilitate their public image. Here I want to introduce Hans Blumenberg’s main idea about myth-making, stated as: ‘Fear is less about what we do not yet know than about what we are not yet acquainted with’. ¹⁸ So it is a good strategy to find ‘names for what is undefined’. ¹⁹ What many political actors on the right fear is the dissemination of radical progressive views that could undermine the idea of a country’s ‘great pasts’ or its glorious history. Politicians and theorists have used that fear to prevent any possibility of real change or gaining support from like-minded political leaders. Actors who want to fight back against a particular politician, party or actual policy often do it using ‘populist’ as reproach – in much the same way as they might invoke the image of ‘Venezuela’, or ‘Muslim terrorist’ or lawless ‘immigrants’ who want to take away the job, the possessions or ‘the place’ of White working people.

Casting ‘populism’ as an illness, an evil or as a plague on democratic institutions is the perfect way to discredit it, to instil fear. Nancy Fraser has been one of the few theorists who seems really interested in knowing why people can be so easily manipulated or why certain ‘images’ about the future and the future’s past have proved to be so successful for those actors who then move from the left into the right in an unexpected choice. In my view, Fraser has deep understanding of all that is at stake. She also recognizes that political progressives are still in the unknown territory of the undefined, that is, they are in a precarious state of the ‘not yet’. They have a space – the ‘not yet’ – that has not been entirely able to mount a powerful counter-hegemonic challenge to neo-liberalism. She understands how ‘progressive populism’ rightly questions the ‘neo-liberal’ political projects. It also envisions the future as an open, positive dimension still to come – and not as a return to the past.

Chantal Mouffe takes a more radical position than Fraser when she argues that the left can only conceive of itself as a ‘populist’ effort or as a ‘strategy’ in order to gain the acceptance of a ‘popular majority’ whose objective is to ‘come to power and establish a progressive hegemony’. ²⁰ Two things are clear to me about her position. First, her arguments do not differ from other theorists (such as the ultraconservatives) who are on the other side of the spectrum. Second, she has always suggested that her agonism can be tame down if opponents present themselves as such and not as diehard enemies. But the struggles of today allow us to see that this is not happening. This is questionable, because even if political identities are not essentialists, ultraconservative rightists will not easily change their ideological views/projects of exclusion once they start winning elections. The problems will come when their real policies can (or cannot) be enacted. A recent example of this can be seen in the way Matteo Salvini won with the ‘Grillines’ (Five Star Movement) with the coalition that offered him the possibility of becoming the leader. And now, Matteo Salvini can easily get rid of their partners because of his very different agendas. Another more-radical example comes from the neo-liberals in Brazil, represented by Michel Temer – the then-vice-president who impeached Dilma Roussef and then placed Lula da Silva in jail without a proper trial. Meanwhile, Temer (who is despised by everyone) could not become the candidate so he supported putting Lula in jail to help the neo-liberals elect Jair Bolsonaro (a retired military officer) as the next Brazilian President. The ‘ghost of Venezuela’ was on everybody’s mind in the single message given to the voters supporting Bolsonaro for the lack of a better candidate. The neo-liberal elites who are backing him mistakenly believe that they can still be able to ‘manage’ him now that he won the election. (Does that not remind you of how the elites thought they could control Hitler?)

In the recent Brazilian election, the Europeans have now realized that Salvini and Le Penn are closer to Orban and Kaczinski, but few understand that the ghost hanging over Europe is not ‘Chávez’ but ‘fascism’. In a recent article in the Spanish newspaper ‘El País’ entitled – ‘What happens now in Brazil? – (9 October 2018) front page a journalist stated that, ‘Bolsonaro’s success gives support to the extreme right’ and described how he will be the motor that empowers the European transformation into fascism and not Hitler and Mussolini.

One last word: Back to the weapon of war

The most extreme conservative definition of ‘populism’ has been recovered by Benjamin Harnwell, a member of the conservative Catholic think tank, Institute Dignitatis Humanae, which features Steve Bannon as its chief ideologue. Harnwell notes that, for him, ‘populism’ has two meanings: first, a reaction against globalization, and second, ‘the need to give power to the people and take it away from the elites’. ²¹ Ambiguous enough. Marine Le Pen and Salvini have made a conspicuous show of presenting themselves as independent from Bannon and Trump (though they remain in frequent contact with both men).

In my view, to understand what fascists and the Alt Right – as well as the progressive ‘populists’ or progressive neo-liberals – truly believe, we must give up the combat-concept and try to focus on the present times of crisis where the economy has substituted politics. We must also have a critical examination of the kind of ‘images’ that parties use in their campaigns during their election process and why they find or not resonance with the citizens. How these images reflect their view of the past as past, or the past as future, is of utmost importance.

Ernesto Laclau made it clear that a logical chain of equivalents is not apprehensible by determinant judgments. Each case is its own. Reflective judgment is better, which is why Aristotle used the word ‘crisis’. This is also the reason why historians and political theorists need to be quick and clear about their critical reconstructions.

At first it might not seem obvious to make a connection between the work of Laclau and Koselleck, but it can be done with help and mediation from the ‘social imaginary’.

Actors’ struggles and the ways they shape their performative interventions are discursively articulated, and, as such, they allow us to see how the ‘images’ of the future’s futures appear step by step in public. We must focus on how actors present their claims and how they manage to fill the semantic contents of loose signifiers, empty signifiers and the use or avoidance of combat-concepts. This is the reason we can focus on the political struggles of today as being developed – through ideological wars – by the logics or chains of equivalences that can go from good to bad or from bad to good, depending on how the actors construct their claims and learn to convince others.

In the actual political landscape, contingencies and the alliances of extreme positions are at stake. But if these are radical times, so too were the lengthy periods when the fascists and Communists were in control. As Koselleck said: ‘Whoever fails to base his expectation on experience is likewise in error’. ²²