Democracy’s ParaDox Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 Volume 10 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE AND GLOBAL CRISIS COMMONS’ Critical Perspectives Edited by Donald M. 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Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios, editor. | Kapferer, Bruce, editor. Title: Democracy's paradox : populism and its contemporary crisis / edited by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos and Bruce Kapferer. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Critical interventions : a forum for social analysis ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018061287 (print) | LCCN 2018061741 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201567 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201550 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Populism—Western countries. | Democracy— Western countries. | Political anthropology—Western countries. | Western countries—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC JC423 (ebook) | LCC JC423.D441527 2019 (print) | DDC 320.56/62—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061287 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78920-155-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-78920-156-7 ebook contents Introduction Populism and its Paradox Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos 1 From ‘the People’ to ‘the Citizens’: The Possibilities and Limitations of Populist Discourse in Argentina Victoria Goddard 35 The Brazilian Crisis and the Ghosts of Populism John Gledhill 55 Lurching Between Consensus and Chaos: Shades of Populism in Australian Indigenous Affairs Melinda Hinkson and Jon Altman 74 Populism’s Claims: The Struggle Between Privilege and Equality Susana Narotzky 97 How Populism Works Michael Herzfeld 122 Introduction PoPulism anD its ParaDox ( Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Populism is a matter of major concern at this histori- cal juncture. Often associated with rightist and virtually fascistic extremist possibility, populism augurs for many commentators an anti-democratic politics, which harks back to the recent past of nationalist, frequently racist, exclusionism (and other manifold prejudices). Much of the liberal critique of the extremism of populism is pre- mised on an idealist conception of democratic orders. It obscures what Karl Marx recognised as the role of demo- cratic ideology in the shoring up of class power, an aspect which many kinds of populist movements reveal (if often in a manner negating the aims that have initiated their inspiration). Liberal critiques leave unacknowledged the complicity of the dominant political system in reproduc- ing new transmutations of populism, treating the latter as uncontaminated by hegemony. We stress in this volume that populism has been inte- gral to democratic processes since time immemorial (per- haps in one guise or another in most political orders, not least dictatorships). It is a vital dimension of the political history of Western democracies. Jacques Ranciere (2007) has described democracy (and the populism that he sees as integral to it) as the emergence of the political in its most complete form. From this point of view, populism 2 Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos can be seen as a logical component of the political, as Ernesto Laclau (2005) has previously asserted. Our dis- cussion here will address certain aspects of this proposi- tion leading into a consideration of the paradoxes in the democratic-political, which populism and the discourses surrounding it expose. The focus in this volume is largely on the contempo- rary manifestations of populism in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and mainly in political systems of represen- tative democracy. Populism, of course, is a phenomenon that is apparent worldwide and in situations that are far from politically democratic in the mainly western ideo- logical sense upon which the essays here concentrate. We emphasise that what is widely regarded as populism is shaped by the form and ideological (cultural) configura- tions of the socio-political orders and processes within which it emerges. In other words, populism is historically and socio-culturally relative although, as we will discuss, there are underlying commonalities. Populism is difficult to define (see Goddard this vol- ume), such difficulty probably being phenomenologically intrinsic to it. Populism, we hazard, is a political movement usually impelled within ideological contexts where demo- cratic value, frequently egalitarian in spirit, is an ideal if not a reality. A widespread feature, often in the early stages of populism, is that it breaks with controlling or dominant socio-political orders attracting an almost cultic following usually focussed on charismatic leaders. Populism typically operates at the margins of or outside accepted organiza- tions of the political and their ideological rationalities. Such is exacerbated by the cultic quality of much populism (in effect, a key organizational and unifying dynamic) and the fact that populism, by definition, appeals to values held by those who are ordinarily marginal to, oppressed by, or otherwise reduced or silenced in political agency. Anthropologists might note that populism, especially of the current historical moment, has some affinity with Introduction: Populism and its Paradox 3 cargo cults, millenarian and revitalization movements (see Cohn 1970; Worsley 1957).1 It is significant that these movements occurred at times of crisis in socio-cultural orders that accompanied, for instance, the dispossessions of colonial and imperial conquest in ancient or modern realities, or in the expanding inequalities and social re- structurings associated with the emergence of capitalism and establishment of bourgeois orders. Contemporary populism, which increasingly appears to be global, can be conceived as occurring at a major point of historical crisis and socio-cultural redirection. We contend that its current expressions, while historically and situationally specific, are driven within a potentially major moment of transition and transformation in global political and economic circumstances. In certain respects, populism might also be considered an agency within such processes—a sort of transformative impetus (see Laclau 2005, Comarroff 2011)—an important force in furthering dimensions of the changes, which have given rise to it. The current emergence of populist movements is entangled with transformations in capitalism that have major global effects. Class contradictions have reached what seem to be an explosively critical point excited in the western hemisphere, especially by the reconfigura- tions of post-industrialism. This is manifest in the redefi- nitions and realignments of class relations (including an expansion of what may be regarded as the outclasses, driven, among other things, by chronic unemployment affecting the working and increasingly the middle class). Much of this is effected by neoliberal policies, but per- haps more exactly described in the globalising dynamics of corporatism where the erstwhile potency of sovereign nation-states is being eroded whereby the economic has achieved dominance over the political (see Kapferer and Gold 2018; Kapferer 2018). Key factors in these processes are the technological advances attendant on digitalisa- tion, which might be having historically transformational