Populism’s challenges to political reason: Reconfiguring the public sphere in an emotional culture

Polarisation and political representation

Contemporary populist movements have found their place in the divide between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, which these movements have helped to articulate and exasperate. ²⁴ The strict separation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ implicit in their critique ultimately replicates the objection that early critics of political representation first voiced, namely that election involves selection, and selection involves distinction, which amounts to a sort of covert aristocracy. This is especially true when there is no actual rotation in power, which happens all too often and is an indirect result of the increasing professionalisation of politics and political parties. In this way, and in spite of playing by the procedural rules of modern democracies, populist parties ultimately represent a challenge to the modern political system articulated around the election of representatives and a check on the balance of powers. Accordingly, populist parties are usually in favour of plebiscitary measures, ²⁵ which they take to be more democratic than governance through elected representatives, or else they favour a concept of political representation that privileges strict adherence to ‘the people’, conceived of illiberally or monolithically as ‘the other’ in opposition to the elite.

The fact that they separate the elite from the people demonstrates that populist movements have no conceptual place for an articulated citizenship that is shared by both rulers and the ruled, and that is functionally specified depending both on individual abilities and common needs. Indeed, populist leaders exude a monolithic conception of ‘the people’ that lacks internal differentiation and leaves no room for alternatives. Such lack of internal differentiation is not so much due to substantive commonalities – very often populist parties bring together disparate claims and identities – as to the prominence of emotions in populist discourse. Both aspects – lack of internal differentiation and prominence of emotions – explains populism’s intrinsic sectarianism, which represents a threat not just to liberalism, but also to the very notion of politics understood as the way to deal with the intellectual and practical differences we find in any society, by way of reason and argument. Indeed, as Donald Mc Rae pointed out many years ago, ²⁶ populism ‘sees politics as bound up in a single apocalyptic and restorative need; not as an ongoing fallible and necessary activity. Populist ideology is after all, yet another attempt to escape from the burden of history.’ By contrast, a more mundane version of politics is best accounted for in what we could term a pluralist account of political life:

Pluralism offers a view about society totally different to that of elitism and populism. Instead of thinking about a moral distinction between the homogeneous people and elite, pluralism assumes that societies are composed of several social groups with different ideas and interests. For this reason, pluralists favour the proliferation of many centres of powers and maintain that politics should reflect the preferences of as many groups as possible through compromise and consensus (Dahl 1982). Hence, pluralism takes for granted that it is impossible to generate something like a ‘general will’ of the people. ²⁷

Beyond their prima-facie differences both on substantive and procedural issues, which are partly contingent on the nature of the political system in which they are embedded (i.e., a presidential or a parliamentary system), right and left-wing populisms share a tendency toward using democratic procedures to favour a confrontational and overtly emotional approach to political issues. Whether the involvement of emotions in populist politics represents a threat to democracy is a more complex issue; for instance, Mouffe defends agonistic democracy that is inherently emotional. ²⁸ This approach not only precludes a basic consensus in the civil sphere, but also erodes the legitimacy of inherited political institutions and practices. Indeed, as Berezin writes, ²⁹ ‘illiberal threats to democracy lie in the interstices of ostensibly democratic procedures and regimes… Challenges to democracy lie in the ordinary not the extraordinary – the banal not the egregious’.

One notorious casualty of populist politics is the modern practice of political representation. Based on appeals to individual interests, the notion of political representation served to prevent excessive passion and achieve more sensible results; now, however, contemporary populisms use it to bring together an emotional vote articulated around identitarian concerns, which often go against the voter’s own interests. ³⁰ This would explain populists’ particular reliance on forms of what Pitkin has called ‘symbolic representation’, ³¹ as well as their reliance on extra-parliamentary action. As we have suggested, this populists’ erosion of the modern concept of political representation is closely related to the transition from a ‘rational’ to an overtly ‘emotional’ culture characteristic of later modern societies in the sense that said erosion mirrors this transition and effectively reproduces it.

Indeed, the practice of political representation was originally shaped in the debates surrounding the American Constitution in the late eighteenth century, at a time when reason and rationality enjoyed cultural prestige and authority. Its scope was widened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, enfranchising large numbers of people previously excluded from voting. As such, the vote became normative for most Western countries in the twentieth century, marking an unprecedented compromise between liberalism and democracy. Yet, the transition to the twenty-first century has brought about a new social reality, marked by globalisation, cultural diversity and pluralism, which, matched with new economic and civic uncertainties, presents new challenges to our inherited political institutions and practices. An important part of this challenge has to do with the emotional climate characteristic of our increasingly individualised and rationalised societies: experiencing new fears and affected by pressing needs and problems, individuals search for community and identity as new sources of security and belonging and show little patience for opaque and slow political mediations and processes. In an era marked by an increasing demand for immediate reactions and transparent communication, the challenge lies in persuasively justifying the need for political mediations.

Emotions and performance of contemporary populisms

In this context of rising populism, a lack of appropriate governance of the substantive and communicative challenges that globalisation presents, as well as defective response to ideological fragmentation proper to twenty-first century Western societies, or its cancellation through technocratic discourses, has exacerbated a feeling of disenfranchisement among large segments of the population and has, in turn, fueled the advancement of populist discourses, which take up emotion and identity, rather than reason or interests, as the main drivers of political change.

As Nicolas Demertzis notes, despite the increase of scholarship on emotions in last decades, ‘scholars have only recently brought emotions back in the analysis of social and political movements, power relations and institutions’, ³² thus reacting against a rationalistic conception of the public sphere, which strips of the dimension of passion from the political and analyses the public sphere from a rational-choice paradigm. But finally, feelings and emotions have found their way into political analysis, especially to account for the upsurge of populism and its impact on democratic thinking. In William Davies words, ‘democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannot be ignored or reversed’. ³³ To many analysts, negative emotions stand as the emotional drivers of contemporary populism, which basically reflects discontent and alienation from political elites. In his article, Demertzis distinguishes moral and non-moral emotions and focuses on the different meanings of ‘resentment’, Nietzschean and non-Nietzschean, to explore their political significance. On this basis he discusses Hans-Georg Betz’s interpretation of this sentiment and its connection with populism, ³⁴ while Rico et al. and also Catarina Kinnvall focus on fear and anger. ³⁵ The political sociology of emotions that Demertzis refers to is in charge of analysing the sources of all these emotions. According to Mikko Salmela and Christian von Scheve, ‘socioeconomic factors can hardly fully explain the rise of the new right’. ³⁶ In order to understand its popularity, we need to consider the connection of emotions and identity. Indeed, as Ruth Wodak shows in her comparative study of the micro-politics of American and European right-wing populism, while there is no one single explanation for the continuing rise of these parties, there are nevertheless striking similarities among them not only in the style but in the contents articulated by their leaders, and identity is central to all of them. ³⁷ Borders, language and charisma, all have to do with stressing identity.

This is not to say that what we call ‘reason’ can operate in absence of emotions. As Marcus has shown, pointing to the role of anxiety in activating reason and disabling habit, ³⁸ emotion has always played a role in the exercise of political reason; yet, it is one thing to recognize the role of emotion in sparking deliberation and quite another to subordinate reason to emotional attitudes. ³⁹ By articulating emotion around identitarian concerns, populist discourses aim to fill the current institutional and cultural vacuum through different forms of symbolic representation, thereby introducing new uncertainties on the global scene.

We stress the word feeling because it is not so much a lack of legal rights or appropriate procedures for participating in political life that drive people to populist candidates. It is, rather, a sense of social and cultural alienation, which is expressed as disaffection with the way politics is conducted, when it is perceived as privileging the interests of big business and corporations and/or the views of cultural elites over the interests and views of the ‘common citizen’, no matter how diversely constructed that notion may be. Following Hochschild’s analysis of the American case, Inglehart and Norris note that,

Less-educated white Americans feel that they have become ‘strangers in their own land’. They see themselves as victims of affirmative action and betrayed by ‘line-cutters’ – African-Americans, immigrants, refugees, and women – who jump ahead of them in the queue for the American Dream. They resent liberal intellectuals who tell them to feel sorry for the line-cutters, and dismiss them as bigots when they don’t. Unlike most politicians, Donald Trump provides emotional support when he openly expresses racist and xenophobic feelings. ⁴⁰

Yet, this is not just an American phenomenon. Roland Robertson observes that the UKIP in Britain ‘draws much of its support from disaffected and disillusioned working-class, traditionally Labour Party, citizens, and even from “despised” ethnic minorities. In the case of the latter there is the “drawbridge” phenomenon that involves scrambling to demonstrate allegiance to the host country and keep potential or actual newcomers out’. ⁴¹ Something similar could also be said of the French National Front, or Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy – which in regard to migration policies is closer to the right, as it is apparent in the strange coalition now governing the country. More generally, populist politicians tend to choose and use signs that emotionally align them with the ‘despised’ against the elites – no matter that in other respects they actually belong to ‘the elites’ As Mudde and Kaltwasser observe,

By offering a discourse that emphasizes the worth of ‘the people’, they dignify the existence of an important number of the population that is not only poor, but also suffers different forms of cultural discrimination. Not surprisingly, Chavez and Morales do not dress and talk like the elites do, but rather as ordinary people, so facilitating the identification of the masses with the leader. To paraphrase the terminology of Canovan (1984), they attain symbolic inclusion through the shift of portraying the people as ‘the whole nation’ to defining it as ‘the plebs’. ⁴²

Symbols are important because they create emotional links. Such symbolic identification with the ‘people’ against the ‘elite’ – the ‘casta’ in the words of the Spanish left-wing populist party Podemos – can be recognised, for instance, in the fact that populist representatives often make a point of showing little respect for parliamentary conventions and practices. Indeed, populist discourse does not rely so much on reasons or facts as it does on the emotional and discursive inclusion of people who consider themselves excluded from global circuits of progress and prestige. This explains the emotional transversalism of populist movements, that is, the fact that they ‘draw upon and strategically amalgamate grudges, grievances, and complaints from all across the political–ideological spectrum’. ⁴³ Emotions and emotional performance are key ingredients in the ‘political style’ of contemporary populisms, which are strangely absent from Moffit’s approach to populism in terms of ‘political style’. ⁴⁴

Important as they are in our lives, emotions in the public arena are always ‘mixed emotions’ ⁴⁵ and marked by ambivalence; ⁴⁶ yet, in the hands of populist politicians, emotional display articulated around identitarian concerns has also become part of an overall dialectic strategy to achieve power and put their monolithic, non-politically articulated views, into practice. To reverse this tendency, politics must also read and re-articulate the messages implicit in ordinary public emotions in a moral way, as a prelude to a different kind of political transversalism. As Berezin puts it, ‘Political analysis without cultural analysis provides only a partial image of the collective forces that mobilize leaders and citizens… The thick narrative description of public events is central to excavating the meaning of politics – new and old’. ⁴⁷ Now, in highly emotional cultures, cultural analysis should often start with the analysis of public emotions. ⁴⁸

While public emotions do not have the last word in politics, they often have the first. Thus, at the international level we can speak, with Todd, ⁴⁹ of diplomacy of anger, sympathy or guilt. More focused on the national level, Marcus highlights the role of anxiety in both increasing receptivity to politics and changing voting behaviour, ⁵⁰ and Berezin recalls Aristotle’s insistence on the link between security and democracy, ⁵¹ which is particularly relevant to understand the upsurge of populist reactions. Indeed, when dominated by fear or resentment, there is little chance that a people will develop liberal attitudes. ⁵²

Accordingly, any political alternative to populism should begin with an adequate interpretation of public emotions, identifying their objects, the hopes and problems they convey and their role in political behaviour, with a view towards tackling them both in real and rhetorical terms. For, as Nussbaum notes, the beliefs ‘that only fascist and aggressive societies are intensely emotional and that only such societies need to focus on the cultivation of emotions’ are ‘both mistaken and dangerous’:

They are mistaken, because all societies need to think about the stability of their political culture over time and the security of cherished values in times of stress… Ceding the terrain of emotion–shaping to antiliberal forces gives them a huge advantage in the people’s hearts and risks making people think of liberal values as tepid and boring. ⁵³

While we could probably discuss whether liberalism can of itself produce the moral emotions required to sustain a public culture, there is no doubt that moral emotions play a role in keeping liberal ideals in place. In this light, the first emotional mood that raises concerns is the widespread feeling of disenfranchisement and indifference towards politics found among many Western citizens. While this mood can certainly change when their ideals are seriously threatened, its persistence conveys the perception of either not having a real say in political matters, or that the matters that occupy the attention of politicians are too far from ordinary concerns and interests; it may also veil the impression that that there is no inspiring common goal to be pursued.

Accordingly, the first relevant problem that needs to be recognised and tackled is the absence of a persuasive articulation between people’s views, interests and concerns about what makes their lives prosper and shine, and politicians’ ability to articulate those concerns, outlining an inspiring and inclusive political project. Lack of emotional attachment to political parties and the corresponding increase in independent voters constitute a critical piece in this process. ⁵⁴ In part because of the increasing professionalisation of politics, contemporary political parties are perceived as part of the political machinery, involved in their own self-referential power struggles, ultimately closer to power than to the people; at other times, they are perceived as having little power to change the status quo.

The crisis of traditional party politics instantiates the absence of a convincing ‘meso’ level able to play a mediating role between micro and macro approaches to social and economic reality, between people’s perceptions and governmental actions. This gap, which can easily be filled with propaganda, ⁵⁵ partly explains the emergence of populism, and leads to the suggestion that Western democracies require a serious revision of political mediations to restore credibility in the power of coordinated political agency to change current practices and structures.

In this context, we must recall that political parties are not meant to be the only political actors and, hence, that the public sphere should not be monopolised by party politics. While they are hardly avoidable in complex societies such as ours, political parties need a serious reformulation if they are to mediate between people’s concerns and government policies, that is, if they are to be channels of democracy instead of constituting a ‘partitocracy’. Political parties should ask themselves whether they are able to spark and shape hope, whether they are able to articulate people’s concerns and construct alternative political reasons – working seriously to restore and channel meaningful public dialogue, and to overcome or domesticate the confrontational approach to public discourse that constitutes the seedbed of populist politics – and whether they are able to advance meaningful arguments that repair the ideological and emotional divide and promote a basic social consensus. Such argumentative effort needs to be preceded and accompanied by an emotional style coherent with democratic institutions – a sort of ‘emotional universalism’, as Diane Williamson phrased it – that matches up reason and emotion; an ‘emotional universalism’, which takes up respect for the law in light of respect for the person. ⁵⁶

Populist logic: Emotional inclusiveness plus pragmatism

The implausibility of populist promises and diagnoses, for instance in the realm of the economy, should not lead us to discard the perturbing grain of truth they contain: they have often succeeded in giving voice to people that feel themselves marginalised from the global circuits of progress, people who feel themselves unrepresented by intellectual and political elites, that is, by insatiable ‘globalists’ dismissive of their roots, by ‘professional’ politicians in ‘traditional’ political parties, who are sometimes involved in obscure cases of corruption. These people feel alienated by the sophisticated opinions and ‘feeling rules’ advanced by cultural elites, ⁵⁷ which offend or contrast with their most cherished beliefs. Populist politicians have interpreted their frustration, resentment and fear, and have articulated and voiced their own response in emotional terms, which leaves scarce room for subtle argumentation. As Hochschild writes,

Trump is an ‘emotions candidate.’ More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches – evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift- inspire an emotional transformation. Then he points to that transformation. ‘We have passion,’ he told the Louisiana gathering…. He derides his rivals in both parties for their inability to inspire enthusiasm. ‘They lack energy.’ Not only does Trump evoke emotion, he makes an object of it, presenting it back to his fans as a sign of collective success. ⁵⁸

By taking sides with those marginalised by the system, capitalising on resentment against the elites, populist leaders and movements have created an atmosphere of emotional inclusiveness and legitimation that leaves argument and facts in second place. ⁵⁹ This is also why populist movements try to place themselves outside of political conventions and practices: they have understood that playing by the same rules as traditional political parties would emotionally alienate them from their supporters. And they have good reason for doing so – only emotion brings together such disparate interest groups as populist politicians manage to assemble.

Yet, to the extent they receive such support, populists feel legitimised. Although their preference for extra-parliamentary action or their frequent resort to plebiscitary measures suggests that they operate against the basic assumptions of the modern political system, they nevertheless use this system to legitimise themselves. They could even develop a meta-political argument: political representation, as we are used to it in liberal democracies, lacks real popular backing, and hence real legitimacy, because it introduces too many filters, preventing many people from conveying their true views and feelings. Hence, populist abolition of such mediations would lend credibility to the claim they have ‘more’ democratic legitimacy than alternative options. At least, more ‘emotional legitimacy’.

As indicated above, populism relies heavily on symbolic representation because it tends to favour ‘messianic’ or otherwise charismatic approaches to political leadership. Yet, charismatic leadership goes hand in hand with a strong tendency toward authoritarianism, ⁶⁰ and an inclination toward regarding political institutions and practices from a merely pragmatic or instrumental perspective, as mere tools to reach power. Once in power, those institutions can be used discretionally, perhaps even be abandoned and replaced with more convenient ones – but convenient for whom? That’s the real question and suggests that discussion of political institutions is not just an instrumental issue, but also a moral one. Indeed, while ethics has to do with acting well or wrongly, politics has to do with accessing and exercising power, which can also be done well or wrongly, depending on whether the means deployed to achieve and exercise power are unethical or illegal, that is, whether they respect people and the law or not. This also depends on whether power is used to work toward a common good – that is, a good that everybody can share – or toward a sectarian good.

Communication technologies enter the picture

Although populist parties operating in contemporary Western democracies usually play by the rules of the current political system, they do so by keeping a symbolic distance with its most characteristic institutions. As mentioned above, they also tend to show a preference for plebiscitary measures and direct participation above political representation. This is by no means a new argument. In the past, advocates of direct democracy have criticised political representation as a sort of ‘veiled aristocracy’; ⁶¹ nevertheless, if only for pragmatic reasons, they could not but accept some resort to representation in recognition that large republics cannot be governed any other way.

Technological development over the last few decades has apparently come to their rescue. While there are reasons to doubt that the introduction of the internet is going to expand political participation to new social categories, ⁶² many advocates of direct democracy regard internet voting as the instrument that, in spite of its current shortcomings, ⁶³ could finally move us toward that ideal of deliberative democracy – which could be perhaps re-described as an ideal of political ‘participation without representation’. In the process leading to the constitution of the Catalan Parliament, there was even talk of inaugurating the President on the internet. This suggestion not only raises the issue of the relevance of actual presence for political action, but also for political representation as such. If virtual presence is enough to vote and host a political function, virtual parliaments might ultimately also be enough, especially if parliamentary practice does not allow for a real exchange of ideas.

Be that as it may, the fact is that technology is currently changing the shape of public sphere, if not dismantling its meaning. Thus, in Dean’s view, ‘instead of rule through thoughtful deliberation, we have the compulsive forces of markets’; ⁶⁴ these forces, more than any deliberative subjects, would give ‘the public’ the reality it lacks in the eyes of citizenry. Gabardi’s words, reviewing Diana Saco’s book are revealing in this regard:

She sees cyberspace as a heterotopian scape still in its infancy. Its form and content seem to be somewhere in between Habermas’s ideal of an interactive realm of communication and opinion formation and William Gibson’s dystopian vision of a corporate-controlled, simulated sensorium populated by hedonistic consumers, libertarians, and cyberpunks. ⁶⁵

Indeed, while participation through social media in public debates has been compared with comments on public events that were traditionally launched in the street or in the marketplace, these two types of participation sustain meaningful differences in terms of simultaneity and reach that could critically affect political communication and planning. The most important difference is perhaps the fact that social media are mediations themselves (Moffit, 2016: 3), although of a technological kind, whose intrinsic characteristics raise doubts about their viability for replacing current political institutions any time soon.

From a philosophical point of view, we should consider whether difference between real and virtual presence, or between being and appearing, makes any difference in political terms. According to Arendt, ⁶⁶ courage is the main political virtue because it entails risking one’s own personal safety. This argument assumes that politics involves abandoning the comfort of one’s private life in order to fight for public good, and suggests that the vulnerability associated with real presence is an essential part of political action or political representation.

Furthermore, even with acknowledging the limitations of existing electoral systems and political mediations in general, there is reason to argue that political participation through the internet is subject to emotional immediacy in a way that deliberate participation through the election of representatives or elaborate political opinion is not. This is not to say that traditional voting is an emotionally free activity. It clearly is not. Voters and even representatives themselves are often subject to the same kind of emotional pressures as everybody else, and, as suggested above, this is not necessarily a bad thing: emotions fulfil a role in our behaviour, including our political behaviour, as long as they do not disrupt the basis of political and civil coexistence. This latter possibility, however, partly explains why political behaviour is institutionally mediated: insofar as we act within institutional settings, which are subject to a variety of constraining rules and balancing acts, our decisions and opinions are prevented from being excessively harmful or uncivil. Of course, this is not a guarantee since a defective character can still lead to the distorted use of any institution. Yet, to the extent that the proper functioning of political institutions involves a large amount of people, working through the same protocols throughout time, the chances of systemic failure decrease.

On the other hand, the shaping of public opinion in the digital era has certainly become more complex. To the extent that ‘digital time’ allows for simultaneous response by a large number of people, the probability that emotions take over deliberation increases. ⁶⁷ Drawn by emotional use of social media, public debate is often polarised between self-referential groups, whose views collide both on and offline; it is also subject to unexpected influences or interferences. As a result, the presumed ‘public’ sphere not only becomes increasingly thin and feeble, but also highly emotional and rather opaque. ⁶⁸ The upsurge of populism shows how polarisation of the political debate is mirrored in the social conversation; instead of using their leadership to contribute to social cohesion, politicians often become drivers of social division.

There is certainly a need to highlight ‘the material context behind the global politics of affect’, because ‘in global politics, emotionally significant social interactions are increasingly involving dispersed participants connected through communications technologies’. ⁶⁹ At this point, we are confronted with the original purpose of political representation. Indeed, as we learn from the debates surrounding the American Constitution, among the reasons for supporting ‘filter-representation’ above ‘mirror-representation’ there was the idea that political representatives should help overcome the divisions in society, and not simply reproduce them in Parliament. ⁷⁰ Otherwise, there is little room to construct a common project. This, however, requires qualified and trustworthy representatives, able to interpret the interests of their constituency and defend them convincingly without losing sight of the common project. As mentioned above, insofar as elections are supposed to be ‘selections’ of the best representatives, ⁷¹ filter-representation cannot avoid having an aristocratic ring to it. By contrast, the more ‘democratic’ option corresponds to a lottery of choosing any citizen whomsoever. The next most democratic option is found in mirror-representation and its strict mandate to represent the constituency’s interests alone. The idea that a functioning political system should combine and balance both tendencies – the aristocratic and the democratic one – is as old as Polybius.

While leaning towards the more democratic version, contemporary practice of political representation tries to combine both ideals, among which there exists an obvious tension. Political wisdom shows itself in the very ability to live consistently within that tension, such that defending the interests of one’s constituency does not compromise the search for a common good. Among other things, this goal entails rescuing political reason and argumentation from political slogans. In the context of a pervasive emotional culture, however, this cannot be done without an emotionally inspiring political leadership aimed at restoring the role of political institutions and reason in the configuration of a civil public space. Indeed, the mark of contemporary political leadership is found in its ability to recreate a space for proper political reason in a deeply emotional culture, which is refractory to abstract reasons and principles. The only way to do that is by uncovering the reasons implicit in public emotions and recognising the role of emotions in the construction of citizenship.

Culture matters

Examples of the latter are found all around us. We just need to consider that in the context of a global market economy, people cannot normally circulate at the same speed as goods and capital do, and neither can they reinvent themselves at the speed required by technological change. As a result, people are often left in a situation of social fragility or exclusion that can no longer be compensated by the state. This is because the twentieth century balance between market and labour, which made the welfare state possible, no longer holds in a global scenario in which states have diminished bargaining power in confrontation with big corporations who deploy the newest technology and outsource labour to cheaper countries. In these social conditions, with scarce prospects in view, sympathy with the stranger might be regarded as a cultural luxury. Trying to explain her Louisiana interviewees’ support for the Tea Party, Arlie Hochschild observed that the Party,

[…] offered them financial freedom from taxes, and emotional freedom from the strictures of liberal philosophy and its rules of feeling. Liberals were asking them to feel compassion for the downtrodden in the back of the line, the ‘slaves’ of society. They didn’t want to; they felt downtrodden themselves and wanted only to look ‘up’ to the elite… Liberals were asking them to direct their indignation at the ill-gotten gains of the overly rich, the ‘planters’; the right wanted to aim their indignation down at the poor slacker, some of whom were jumping the line. ⁸³

Now, while the Tea Party offered them emotional release, it was the absence of appropriate institutional means that balance or compensate the social dynamics derived from globalisation that created the political vacuum then filled by populist discourses. Therein, these discourses advanced implausible promises and capitalised on the resentment of large and diverse segments of the population, ⁸⁴ reaching out even to categories of people who for decades had shown indifference towards political participation. It is no coincidence that outsourcing labour has been highlighted as one of the reasons for the advance of populist politics in blue-collar regions; the same goes for technological change: insofar as technological revolution increases the demand for a highly qualified labour force, large numbers of people currently employed in low-skilled tasks will likely lose their jobs without any reasonable prospect of recovering it. ⁸⁵ In such a context, where people experience genuine fear for the future, candidates who extol protectionist or nationalist discourses are likely to receive considerable support.

Yet, if those socio-economic factors have laid the groundwork, the cultural dimension has played a catalyst role. As Inglehart and Norris write,

Support for populist authoritarian parties is motivated by a backlash against the cultural changes linked with the rise of Postmaterialist and Self-expression values, far more than by economic factors. The proximate cause of the populist vote is anxiety that pervasive cultural changes and an influx of foreigners are eroding the cultural norms one knew since childhood. The main common theme of populist authoritarian parties on both sides of the Atlantic is a reaction against immigration and cultural change. Economic factors such as income and unemployment rates are surprisingly weak predictors of the populist vote. Thus, exit polls from the U.S. 2016 presidential election, show that those most concerned with economic problems disproportionately voted for Clinton, while those who considered immigration the most crucial problem voted for Trump. ⁸⁶

Thus, if socioeconomic hardship explains a basic frustration with politics, the cultural factor explains the articulation of votes around identitarian and ideological concerns, which prevent any ‘rational’ account of political behaviours in terms of interests. Sometimes, this vote veils xenophobic attitudes, which in themselves represent the collapse of political reason understood as the articulation of difference around our common humanity. Other times, however, it simply channels frustration in the face of a closed future, or perhaps in the face of a strong attachment to a culture or way of life that the voter considers under threat because of the pressure exerted by other global forces. From this latter perspective, identitarian reactions appear sometimes coupled with a post-modern version of nationalism, when those ‘experiential entities’ which we call nations must confront change. ⁸⁷

It could be argued that only declining cultures are afraid of change. Yet, the acceleration of social change found in the first decades of the twenty-first century is without precedent. Indeed, while ‘value polytheism’, which Weber foresaw as a by-product of rationalisation and secularisation, ⁸⁸ is nothing new, the individualisation proper to late-modern global societies has triggered all kinds of responses are shaped in ethical terms and, as such, fall short of considerations of interest. Recalling Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas, Hochschild notes that, ‘though appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them’. She takes to be a sign that their decisions are primarily determined by cultural factors. ⁸⁹ This would explain that, ‘to white, native-born, heterosexual men, he (Trump) offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the “left-behinds” of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities. Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men’. ⁹⁰

Culture is important; ⁹¹ at present, populists are using it to foster a dialectical approach to social life, and a spirit of value confrontation that precludes any transversal agreement and erodes the normative ideal of a civil society comprised of free and equal citizens under the same law. Such an approach does not leave the legitimacy of political and juridical institutions untouched. If, as Plato suggested, ⁹² politics is the ‘art of weaving’, populism is not interested in politics, for it seeks to keep the confrontation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ alive, emotionally reinforcing the cultural divide. By contrast, someone interested in offering an alternative to populism would need to start sewing where populism is tearing the social fabric apart.

Final remarks

Populist disregard for institutional mediations is in tune with an emotional culture that values emotional immediacy and has little time for rational argument; by contrast, the defining mark of a renewed political leadership will be its ability to restore trust in the role of political institutions in the recreation of a plural public sphere. Yet, recovering a truly public sphere in the context of a highly emotional culture cannot be done without taking the emotional side of reality into account, what Ross following Ahmed has called ‘the circulation of affect’, ⁹³ which sets the tone for political debate by highlighting people’s concerns. ⁹⁴

‘A circulation of affect is a conscious or unconscious transmission of emotion within a social environment’. ⁹⁵ Apart from the moods and emotions mentioned above – indifference towards politics, resentment of cultural or economic elites, fear or anxiety related to terrorist attacks or economic uncertainty-, there is an emotion that specifically needs to be considered when it comes to the recreation of a plural public sphere. We refer to the emotional anxiety generated by ideological dissent, which currently finds a disgraceful outlet in the polarisation found on social media.

Such polarisation constitutes a worrying sign of a deeper fracture in social life, but it also shows that pluralistic societies need to develop ways other than silence to explicitly deal with the emotions activated by cultural and ideological difference. While it may be the case that, at times, the only way we have to deal peacefully with people who think or live differently is by silencing those differences, this experience ultimately speaks to the fragility of our social bonds, if not to our own fragility.

By contrast, empathetic respect for humanity and enthusiastic appreciation for the good that everybody can contribute to society are part of ‘emotional universalism’, which is the defining mark of true political citizenship, the ground on which to recreate a new political consensus, and a new, transversal, and political culture that serves as an alternative to the dialectical culture that populism tends to reinforce.

Political leaders, because of their prominent presence in the public sphere, have a special responsibility as drivers of this emotional change. Yet, this change is only a preface to a deeper change that has still to take place, namely the return of reasons and fact-based arguments that can be shared and debated across the whole political spectrum. Only this deeper change will finally replace partisan and ideological politics with transversal, reasonable and post-ideological politics.