On Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen

The bibliography on the subject of populism has grown considerably in recent years. Now, critical theorists have their own theory about the surge of populist movements, populist governments, and authoritarian politics. In Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy, Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen (2022) criticize the work of the Argentine historian, political philosopher, and theorist Ernesto Laclau. They also review the work of Chantal Mouffe—in particular, her claim that politics is populism as well as her ideas about rescuing Carl Schmitt’s “friend-enemy distinction,” which she calls “agonistic politics.” In this essay, I will critically explore Arato and Cohen’s arguments on populism and civil society, acknowledging areas of agreement while noting key gaps in their reasoning, particularly regarding the influence of capitalism on democracy.

As Arato and Cohen note, Mouffe sets forth a flawed concept because enemies do not seem to be limited by institutional constraints against their adversaries. Quite the contrary: these actors begin to dismiss institutional and civic rules in order to attack those who hold different views from theirs. They have discovered the effectiveness of uncivil behavior and insults. By now, it has become clear that hyper-aggressive political trickery does not tame any adversary or bring them to heel. We only have to remember the bullets sent in the mail to Pablo Iglesias, the head of Spain’s Podemos party and former vice president of the socialist government, or the insults hurled at United States congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the US Capitol. If politics is about dividing, we must consider why Schmitt saw the distinction between friends and enemies as the defining concept of politics. Our times show that “bad actors”—to use Simone Chambers’s expression (2022)—have learned how to strategically use insults to construct a Manichean portrayal of the enemy. If this phenomenon has replaced heated discussions about how to fix structural problems and how a system such as capitalism has destroyed democratic institutions, then we need to rethink what populism is expressing. Seeing a specific leader as the embodiment of evil can convince people that achieving change simply requires substituting one person for another. Moreover, these bad actors are prepared to put their worst convictions into practice in the political arena using the most extreme forms of disrespect and contempt. But they know very well how to manipulate others in order to construct enemies (usually immigrants and weaker groups) instead of searching for complex structural changes.

Seemingly, personalizing politics allows us to ignore what is truly wrong with our fragile democracies. Bear in mind how Donald Trump’s supporters not only tolerated his outrageous behavior but also found encouragement in it. Consider the example of how Republicans have reconstructed the narrative of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. As evidenced by cell phone and camera images, the violence extended everywhere, and people were furious. These far-right groups tend to be well organized—flush with money, media attention, and a nexus of questionable alliances, including with the military. As these partisans become the most aggressive part of society, they are prepared to use violence. Can we do anything to prevent this outcome—or is this catastrophe foretold? Should we, using plain language, call this kind of populism authoritarian or fascist? And can a book on populism be written without understanding the connection to the crisis of capitalism?

Arato and Cohen take a very specific path to construct their criticism against the rise of populism. They consider Laclau’s logic—his way of explaining how different interests enable the chain of equivalences through which actors articulate their counter-hegemonic version of what needs to be questioned and transformed. Once a plurality of viewpoints coalesces in support of a (populist) candidate, who is subsequently elected, according to Arato and Cohen, this logic unleashes an anti-democratic movement toward authoritarianism. This stems from the leader’s constant need to divide and to exclude some actors from “the people”—thus illustrating the danger of populist rhetoric, as well as identity politics. Distrust of institutions is another of the worst problems of today’s politics.

Arato and Cohen examine seven features of Laclau’s logic: An appeal to popular sovereignty, the empty signifier of “the people,” the chains of equivalence, the symbolic representation, the embodiment of the whole of “the people” by the leader, the construction of the friend–enemy distinction, and the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary politics. Their critical examination proves that immanent critique can be combined with ideal type construction to show how populism runs counter to democracy because it ends up being authoritarian.

The first feature is the appeal to popular sovereignty. I agree with Arato and Cohen in questioning the use of the term “the people” by populist leaders—it is a charged concept, a vehicle for manipulation. In essence, the term is an empty signifier that only serves the leader in question to divide the “good” from the “bad” (as Laclau noted in his own version). Populist leaders have appealed to the term “the people” to bring back the conception of a homogeneous will that Laclau saw as the only shared goal these groups could seek through the chain of equivalences. ¹ The second step is to tackle how populism is always engaged with “extraordinary politics”—the dilemma of how the constituent power will be “the people” represented by the leader. This is indeed the very core of the so-called populist wave. Other progressive theorists have made efforts to replace this term with others such as the “multitude” (Hardt & Negri, 2005) or “the commons” (Federici, 2020). Their efforts presuppose at least a critical perspective on the ambiguity of this concept (“the people”) that refers to bourgeois society and excludes the rest of citizens such as the plebs or the common people. Here, Arato and Cohen’s insistence on using their concept of “civil society” and they do not offer a more critical perspective on why this concept should also be connected to the crisis of liberal democracies. They do not address the serious questions about the many people who have been excluded from “civil society” due to their situations of precarity, people who find themselves on the margins of society.

As the authors note, Jürgen Habermas has shown that the concept of popular sovereignty may be understood as a procedure instead of an embodiment or a pure fiction. Habermas explains, “Whereas with Rousseau the sovereign embodied power and the legal monopoly of power, Fröbel’s public is no longer a body. Rather, it is only the medium for a multivocal process of opinion-formation” (1996, p. 476). Indeed, the fictional entity of a “homogeneous will” has been replaced by democratic theories about the different ways to conceive of sovereignty, power, and authority. Hannah Arendt’s (1963) conception of power is that it belongs to no one: It dissolves when certain actions are completed. Claude Lefort’s (2006) idea of the empty place of power is key to his notion of how contemporary democracies replaced authority with legitimacy.

While Arato and Cohen do not consider popular sovereignty as mere fiction, they never offer us critical arguments on how they envision their perspective as different from typical liberal theories. They think of the political process as the process whereby civil society engages with the dynamic processes of counter-democracy (Ronsavallon, 2008) and consider a dynamic struggle between norms and fiction versus facts. Yet, there is never a serious analysis of populism as the cause, only as the effect, of political and economic crises. Arato and Cohen never raise the most serious question: Are democracies compatible with capitalism? For them, the response to unconstitutional attempts to usurp political powers should be resistance but they never discuss structural problems. The United States is still trying to handle the various cases involving Donald Trump and his supporters, with no decisive legitimate and democratic answers yet won. But why should we oppose Evo Morales’s actions to transform the Bolivian Constitution into one that recognizes a multi-ethnic society? Why should we view Chile’s failed attempt to change the Pinochet Constitution as a populist effort, rather than a sign of transformation for the better?

Arato and Cohen also focus on how constitutional politics is specifically linked to “host ideologies” from populist leaders. This is a questionable affirmation if their intent is to describe many Latin American leaders. Candidates may appear as left- or right-wing, but what truly counts for Arato and Cohen is these leaders’ transition to authoritarianism as they increasingly express the need to stay in power for longer periods of time. Having a “host ideology” may define some leaders but not all. Arguably, European leaders more clearly exemplify this particular feature. For example, Marine Le Pen—who ran to be French president for the third time in April 2022—is now making a case for herself as stronger, less fearsome, and more responsive to the demands from the radical left, workers, and other social movements. She has positioned herself as opposed to the neoliberal policies of Emmanuel Macron, who has become the most hated leader in France. This scenario also works the other way around. Populist leaders can easily shift their positions because they want to have broad appeal and retain power. Yet, in Latin America, many progressive leaders do not to shift their positions, suggesting that this “host ideology” feature does not evenly apply across contexts.

Arato and Cohen realize how “the empty signifier of the people” could become a dangerous way of conceptualizing politics. The problem they face is how to confront this version of politics as a dynamic discursive logic—for it implies progressive hopes and dreams should be differentiated from exclusionary, clearly authoritarian views. The critical question should be the following: Why do those who have suffered more due to neoliberal policies end up defending, rather than opposing, the worst authoritarian views? Resistance is not enough. We should focus on how certain Manichean narratives are constructed to exclude marginalized members of societies, such as immigrants and the poor.

The symbolic representation of the whole seen as the mobilized part and the leader becoming the embodiment of the whole, sets the stage for excluding others, which will necessarily follow. Because all people’s expectations are so different, they cannot be reduced to a single one, which is Laclau’s most inner contradiction and the central problem with his views. To me, this affective psychic way of doing politics is a recipe for political disaster. This is also the reason why Arato and Cohen argue we must pay attention to what is at stake now: “despite being situated within the democratic imaginary, the populist worldview and logic involve the creation of a specific form of anti-establishment, anti-party party and a mode of party politics that undermines instead of enhancing democracy” (2022, p. 19).

This logic, as explained and criticized by Arato and Cohen, describes some particular cases well, but not all. It appropriately characterizes how Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power—although getting the whole story right requires some nuance. López Obrador won the last presidential election because he was thought to be the only candidate interested in constructing social policies to cope with the country’s endemic poverty and great gap between the upper class (the elite) and the rest of the population. The other candidates had no perspective of Mexico’s dire problems of massive state corruption, as well as state crimes and dirty dealings with drug traffickers, nor did they propose any real political agenda. Before the last election, the three brutish men who preceded López Obrador—Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón, and Enrique Peña Nieto—were the worst presidents that Mexico has had in a long time. López Obrador possessed all the features that Arato and Cohen have identified as calamitous in the logic when a candidate becomes a head of state, but the critical missing link is that he had no real contender. Democracies do not only fail because of populism; they also fail when demands or questions about legitimation arise, and no real parties address them or the elites simply do not care.

If a critical review of the logic holds true for particular examples, as well as Arato and Cohen’s critical step-by-step examination of the logic, there is a missing question about why liberal and centrist politicians and governments have also lost their legitimacy and credibility. Consider the recent case of Macron, who ran against Le Pen and won a second term. His agenda has become closer and closer to the extreme right and the growing hatred towards his policies and attitudes have made him one of the most hated presidents of our times. His second presidency has openly paved the way for Marine Le Penn’s possible triumph at last.

Yet, Arato and Cohen do not set forth any critical views about these problems. The logics of populism end up influencing many different groups, which then radicalize their views against “the Macrons” of the world. Their discontent drives them to the extremes of the spectrum, which offer these groups something different and perhaps seem to capture their concerns (in the worst ways). These situations of previously unimaginable electoral choices come to be possible not only because of bad actors but also because of defective policies. So why do Arato and Cohen bypass a deep examination of these phenomena in their book, too?

Arato and Cohen’s immanent critique disproportionately focuses on certain geographies. Unfortunately, this focus rescues some of the old Eurocentric and colonial prejudices against Latin American populism first expressed by Gino Germani (1962, 1978) and Torcuato Di Tella (1965), who thought that the populist regime in Argentina was the result of insufficient democratic traditions. Arato and Cohen’s line of thinking expresses a bias against Latin America and other marginalized world regions, implicitly positing that populism can only take place in “underdeveloped” countries or those with traditional forms of government. Their critique has much less content on ethno-nationalists and anti-democratic presidents from Europe and the United States than on progressive actors in Latin America. Arato and Cohen are right in thinking that populist leaders who want to stay in power are not the solution, not even in Latin America. Nevertheless, they fail to acknowledge the serious attempts by democratic countries in Latin America to promote social policies, nor do they question how neoliberal governments and constitutions allow people such as Angela Merkel to remain chancellor for 18 years, without considering that democracies also lose legitimacy precisely due to the lack of alternatives. They do not consider how Margaret Thatcher stayed for a similar amount of time as she redrew the political landscape, defeating unions in favor of austerity and the “individual” selfish view. British policies are much worse now after Brexit and Rishi Sunak is also closer to the extreme right with his policies on immigrants. How can we think that democracy is working well when the Tories’ strategy is to do nothing to prevent the call for general elections. Staying in power for such a long time always carries negative consequences—not only in the case of Latin American actors but also in that of Europeans.

Ours is a crisis brought by the divorce of the economy from politics. Capitalism has stolen the contents of democratic institutions in Europe and the United States, which should be our main concern today. The populist rise would be better framed by considering the ways that neoliberal policies have destroyed social programs and social rights. By making the state an obsolete actor, global financial institutions now run how each country should control its spending, illustrating how capitalist institutions have become the main political actors. Any analysis of the rise of populism should deeply question how the neoliberal agenda has affected the state’s political tasks, including policies for redistribution, social rights, and health care for all.

Finally, while I support Arato and Cohen’s assertion on the need for a “plurality of democracies,” I was anticipating a potential critical solution that was less predictable than the one they offer. I am convinced we need a better understanding of the complexities involved in political realities, which liberal theorists refuse to focus on. Perhaps “democracy versus populism” is not the real danger of our times; perhaps we should be more concerned with the leading role of capitalism that is destroying democracies.