Populism As Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment (Vergara)

The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 0, Number 0, 2019, pp.
1–25
Populism as Plebeian Politics: Inequality,

Domination, and Popular Empowerment*
Camila Vergara
Law, Columbia University
I N the last decade populism has gone viral. The label “populist” has been
attached to all sorts of leaders and groups appealing to “the people,” from
left-leaning leaders and parties such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bernie
Sanders in the USA, Podemos (Spain), and Syriza (Greece), to ethnonationalist
ones such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in
Turkey, Donald Trump in the USA, and Jobbik (Hungary). So far, academia has
been unable to determine if populism is a democratizing force1 or a pathology
of democracy.2 This normative ambiguity is partially rooted in the identification
of populism mostly with a style of politics, the repertoires used to canvass
votes and achieve power. I argue that conceiving populism exclusively as a
form of political discourse,3 performance,4 or strategy5 neglects the fact that
these supposedly populist parties and leaders have very different conceptions
of the people, goals, and relations to liberal democracy. Why should we lump
together under the same label such radically different political projects?
In what follows, I first offer a brief materialist history of populism and
then a critical engagement with the recent theories that have in some sense
contributed to a “totalitarian turn” in the conception of populism towards an
*I am grateful for comments on previous drafts from Jérémie Barthas, Jeremy Kessler, Thea
Riofrancos, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Nadia Urbinati, and to the anonymous reviewer of this journal
who suggested I develop the relation between populism and socialism, which greatly improved the
article.
1
Margaret Canovan, “Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy,” Political
Studies, 47 (1999), 2–16.
2
Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014).
3
David Howarth, Aletta Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political
Analysis: Identities, Hegemony and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000);
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005); Kirk Hawkins and Cristobal Rovira,
“What the (ideational) study of populism can teach us, and what it can't,” Swiss Political Science
Review, 23 (2017), 526–42.
4
Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
5
Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American poli-
tics,” Comparative Politics, 34 (2001), 1–22; Robert Jansen, “Populist mobilization: a new theoretical
approach to populism,” Sociological Theory, 29 (2011), 75–96.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

doi: 10.1111/jopp.12203
2 Camila Vergara
identitarian, xenophobic, and oligarchic form of politics clothed in populist

rhetoric. In Section III, I present an alternative republican interpretation of
populism that appears more in tune with the parties and governments that
have been labeled as populist before the recent sharp increase in the use of
the concept. Finally, I analyze this republican interpretation of populism
in opposition to Hannah Arendt's conception of totalitarianism. Given the
rise of ethnonationalist movements across the globe and the trend to deem
populist any movement appealing to “the people,” an engagement with
Arendt's ideas on totalitarianism seems fruitful to point to the differences that
should set populism apart from proto-totalitarian forms of politics such as
ethnonationalism.
I. A MATERIALIST HISTORY OF POPULISM: FROM THE RUSSIAN

NARODNIKS TO PODEMOS
The first self-ascribed populists were the Russian Narodniks, the “friends of the
people,”6 whose ideological commitment was to help emancipate the masses and
increase their welfare. Following the teachings of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who
argued Russia could bypass capitalist development and transition directly into
communism through traditional communal land tenure,7 the populist group
Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) proclaimed the peasantry as their revolutionary
subject. Being active clandestinely first in the early 1860s, and then again in the
late 1870s, the Narodniks demanded equal distribution of land among the peasants
organized in village communes, emancipation for all subjects in the empire, and
self-government.8 In 1879 the group split into two factions: Narodnaya Volya
(People's Will), which endorsed violent methods against the Tsarist state, and
Chernyi Peredel (Black Repartition), which denounced the violence as terrorism
and sought a legal path to land redistribution. It is this latter “legal populism” that
Marxists struggled against ideologically at the turn of the century.
Protesting the increasing proletarianization of the peasantry from the point of
view of the “small producer,” the “friends of the people” proposed what, for
Vladimir Lenin, was an unscientific type of socialism that ignored the materialist
method and therefore attributed “the cause of exploitation to things lying outside
production relations.”9 Narodnik ideology did not seek to abolish the system of
private property, but merely to correct “its various imperfections,”10 and demanded
6
As Lenin called them in his 1894 pamphlet, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They
Fight the Social-Democrats, V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: Verso, 2017),
pp. 129–332.
7
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, La Possession Communale du Sol (Paris: G. Jacques, 1903).
8
Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in
Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 573. See also Margaret Canovan, Populism
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 79.
9
Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are, p. 213.
10
V. I. Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr Struve’s Book,
Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 368.
Populism as Plebeian Politics 3
from the state protection against the economic violence “of the nascent
plutocracy.”11 Narodniks promoted reformist policies sponsoring common land
tenure and land redistribution, tax reform, and access to cheap credit and subsidies
for farmers. For Lenin, populism was a flawed socialist ideology because, by
furthering the immediate welfare of the people, it “cannot see the wood for the
trees,” missing how the organization of the Russian economy turns “the peasant
into a commodity producer, transforms him into a petty bourgeois, a petty isolated
farmer producing for the market.”12 By 1883 the most prominent Narodnik
leaders had defected to Marxism. Nevertheless, the reformist strategy of the
populists endured and was institutionalized in the Socialist Revolutionary Party,
which in 1917 won a plurality of the national vote for the Russian constituent
assembly. The Narodnik leader, Viktor Chernov, served as chairman of the
assembly until it was disbanded by the Bolsheviks.
Almost in parallel with the populist experience in Russia, the concept began to
be consistently used in the USA, with the establishment in 1891 of the People's
Party, an electoral coalition of the protest movements of the Southern Farmers'
Alliance, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance, and the Knights of Labor.13 In
the aftermath of the Civil War, low agricultural prices and droughts caused the
impoverishment of yeomen and tenants, who by the early 1880s were deep in
debt. The increasing dispossession of the working classes enabled a popular
movement organized across racial and gender lines against planter and financial
elites.14
The first Populist leaders were egalitarian abolitionists, who opposed a system
of power that allowed commercial and financial elites to use the state for their
own benefit. Their appeal to equality and the moral character of the laboring
classes against plutocracy was what originally defined populism in America. Self-
styled populist preachers, many of them women, spread an egalitarian and anti-
oligarchic gospel demanding the state protect the independence of farmers from
predatory plutocrats. Mary Elizabeth Lease, a lawyer and organizer in the Knights
of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance, became involved in the social unrest in
Kansas over high mortgages and railroad rates, in 1890 helping create the “party
of the people” in Topeka.15 In a campaign trail speech that year, she told the
crowd that Wall Street owned the country and that “the great common people”
were in fact slaves to monopoly.
11
Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are, p. 237.
12
Lenin, The Economic Content of Narodism, p. 341.
13
Jack Abramowitz, “The negro in the populist movement,” Journal of Negro History, 38 (1953),
257–89.
14
Even if racial and gender integration was not part of the official populist platform, non-
discrimination was “a point of pride” especially among KoL members. For an account of the uneasy
accommodation of egalitarian ideas and white supremacist ideology coming from the White Farmers
Alliance, see Laura Grattan, Populism's Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 2.
15
She allegedly gave the name to the nascent political group; Dorothy Blumberg, “Mary Elizabeth
Lease, populist orator: a profile,” Kansas History, 1 (1978), 3–15.
4 Camila Vergara
Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in
rags … We want money, land and transportation … We want the foreclosure system
wiped out … We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if
necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the
government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of
money who dogged us thus far beware.16
The Populists became a considerable electoral force, effectively contesting the

Democratic Party’s electoral dominance in every Southern state from 1892 to
1896. The Populist program included inclusive, redistributive policies, such as a
graduated income tax, state takeover of railroads, and free coinage of silver, in
addition to the opening of state colleges for women and Blacks.17 The progressive
agenda of the populist alliance begun to break down, however, as early as 1893,
when a strategy of collaboration with the Democrats meant the compromise of
the populist egalitarian and anti-oligarchic principles. The People's Party finally
collapsed after endorsing the Democratic candidate for president in 1896 and
embracing the free coinage of silver as its main issue.18
Two influential academic accounts of this brief period of populism were
published that same year, by economist Frank McVey and historian Frederick
Turner.19 While McVey saw populist ideology as decisively traditional, rooted in
the yeoman rural past and thus opposed to the industrial future, Turner conceived
of populism as an ideology tied to the American frontier and thus progressive, in
a constant quest for equality. Populists were, according to Turner, the bearers of
“pioneer ideology” born in the West, that denounced the corruption of American
democratic ideals and the economic conditions of an “apparent prosperity.” Like
the Narodniks in Russia, who struggled against the increasing proletarianization
of the peasantry, the Populists in America emerged as a political force from the
destitution brought about by industrialization and debt, and proposed to leave
behind “the ideal of competitive individualism” to demand more effective ways
to advance the people's interests, such as the nationalization of communication
and transportation agencies and progressive taxation, as well as institutional
innovations to better express the popular will and control representatives, such
as popular initiatives, referendums, and recall elections.20
After six decades of scholarly consensus on the populist moment as an alliance
of farmers and urban workers against “the money power,” demanding redistributive
16
Mary Elizabeth Lease, “Wall Street Owns the Country” [c.1890], William E. Connelley, History
of Kansas State and People (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1928), vol. 2, p. 1167.
17
Robert Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2015).
18
William Hesseltine, The Rise and Fall of Third Parties (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press,
1948), p. 17.
19
Frank McVey, “The Populist Movement,” Economic Studies, 1 (1896), 131–209; Frederick
Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920).
20
Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 305.
policies and self-government,21 the concept begun to be successfully redefined in

the late McCarthy era with Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform (1955), which
denied populism's progressivism and instead tied it to nativism and anti-
intellectualism. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning book was based on the premise
that populist ideology did not collapse or was coopted in 1896, but in fact took
over the Democratic Party, surviving “as an undercurrent of provincial resentment,
popular and ‘democratic’ rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism.”22
Building on Hofstadter, two years later Victor Ferkiss attempted to decisively
connect the origins of American fascism to populism, dismissing the alliance of
farmers across racial lines and arguing that anti-Semitism was at the center of the
populist cry against greedy elites from the beginning, the first step towards the
white supremacist ideology overtly sponsored by Democratic leaders such as Bill
Tillman and Tom Watson in the 1900s.23
Despite the popularity of this new narrative connecting the origins of populism
in the US with white supremacy, it has been proven far from cogent. While
Tillman was always considered a white supremacist,24 Watson—a fierce defender
of racial equality during the populist moment, who even sheltered Black activists
on his farm—completely reversed his position in 1904 and campaigned instead
for the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, finally shedding the populist
label and running for president as a white supremacist in 1908.25 Watson's
betrayal of the egalitarianism sponsored by the People's Party has little to say
about the connection between populist and supremacist politics. Nevertheless,
the reinterpretation of populism as nativism was partially successful, sparking
few challenges, mainly from Marxist scholars who analyzed the populist
experience as a radical, short-lived challenge to capitalism coming from a diverse
network of grassroots organizations.26
Before the redefinition of populism as nativism in the US, the term populist
was consistently used in the first half of the 20th century in Latin America to
describe leaders and governments that enfranchised the popular sectors and
developed their national economy to lift the masses out of poverty and move
away from the world's economic periphery. Perhaps the most prominent populist
was Juan Perón in Argentina (1946–55), who effectively incorporated the urban
working classes into the political system and increased their socio-economic
21
Worth Miller, “A centennial historiography of American populism,” Kansas History, 16 (1993),
54–69. For an example of this consensus, see John Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1931).
22
Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 5.
23
Victor Ferkiss, “Populist influences on American fascism,” Western Political Quarterly, 10
(1957), 350–73.
24
Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
25
C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: McMillan, 1938).
26
Norman Pollack, The Populist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); Michael Schwartz,
Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–
1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Robert McMath, Populist Vanguard: A History
of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (New York: Norton, 1977).
6 Camila Vergara
status through the writing of a new constitution (1947) containing a workers' bill
of rights, and expansive economic policies.27 As with the Russian and American
experiences, increasing industrialization and migration of peasants into cities
shaped populism in Argentina as a form of working-class politics centered on the
“struggle to redefine property in a context of indeterminate political change.”28
Perón constitutionalized workers' rights to welfare and social security,29 and
enforced these rights through policies aimed at increasing the immediate welfare
of the working classes: from the establishment of a universal pension system, paid
maternity leave, free medical care, and paid vacations, to funding low-income
housing projects, building workers' recreational centers, and expropriating land
and redistributing it to indigenous peasants.30 His second term ended in a military
coup in 1955 after he opened the country to foreign investors and proposed to
legalize divorce and prostitution.
After dependency theory fell into disuse and neoliberalism began to go
mainstream in the 1980s, “populist politics unexpectedly reappeared” in Latin
America,31 albeit this time in a new form that departed from the original thrust
of populism. In this new wave of populism, political outsiders with an anti-elite
rhetoric proposed vague promises to deal with economic crisis and the
immiseration of the popular sectors, embracing neoliberal reforms when in
government.32 The most common example of this new strand of populism in the
literature is Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000). Fujimori appealed to the
popular sectors mainly through the radio, which was the most common platform
of information for the Peruvian lower classes.33 Shortly after winning the
presidency, he implemented neoliberal policies; poverty effectively doubled and
inequality increased.34 Two years into his term, and after a self-coup, Fujimori
governed in an increasingly autocratic manner, and was accused of human rights
violations ranging from execution-style massacres of alleged terrorists to a
27
Jeremy Adelman, “Reflections on Argentine labour and the rise of Perón,” Bulletin of Latin
American Research, 11 (1992), 243–59.
28
Ibid, p. 256.
29
Perón himself introduced the “Bill of Rights of the Workers of Argentina” into the new
constitution.
30
Ian Rutledge, “Perón’s little-known land reform,” Bulletin of the Society for Latin American
Studies, 15 (1972), 20–6. By 1951, Perónism had expanded its constituency in “previously conserva-
tive-dominated, highly rural areas characterized by great social inequalities”; Walter Little, “Electoral
aspects of Perónism, 1946–1954,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 15 (1973),
267–84, at p. 274.
31
Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American poli-
tics,” Comparative Politics, 34 (2001), 1–22.
32
Kenneth Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the transformation of populism in Latin America,” World
Politics, 48 (1995), 82–116; Kurt Weyland, “Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America,”
Studies in Comparative International Development, 31 (1996), 3–31; Alan Knight, “Populism and
neo-populism in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 30 (1998), 223–48.
33
Luis Peirano, “Peruvian media in the 1990s: from deregulation to reorganization,” Elizabeth
Fox and Silvio Waisbord (eds), Latin Politics, Global Media (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
34
David Palmer, “‘Fujipopulism’ and Peru's progress,” Current History, 95, no. 598 (1996),
70–5.
massive forced sterilization program of indigenous peoples in the name of public

health.
This neo-populism was analyzed during the 1990s mostly in the field of
comparative politics, in which there was relative consensus on the labeling of the
phenomenon as ‘neo-,’ to distinguish it from classical populism, since the new
political experiments ended up with further immiseration of the popular sectors
and a more robust, discriminatory police state rather than the enfranchisement
and increased welfare of the masses. Populism of this anomalously labeled type,
referring in Latin America to charismatic political outsiders manipulating the
masses to implement neoliberal policies, was superseded by another wave of
populism possessing the original drive towards increasing the welfare of the
popular sectors and exerting state control over the economy. This new populist
wave began in 1998, as a backlash to austerity measures, with the election of
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.35
Chávez is the undisputed, exemplar populist leader in the literature, not only
because of his expansionist economic policies and the political enfranchisement
of the popular sectors, but also because of his flamboyant, antagonistic rhetoric
and authoritarian style. Chávez's road to power was paved by the Caracazo
(1989), week-long rioting after sweeping neoliberal reforms had pushed almost
two-thirds of Venezuela's population below the poverty line.36 A mestizo military
man who had led a failed coup against the government in 1992, Chávez won the
presidential election six years later in a landslide. In a country that is almost 90
per cent urban and with half of its workforce in the informal market,37 Chávez's
constituency was not farmers or industrial workers, but the urban poor living off
the informal economy. During his first five years in office, Chávez survived an
oligarchic coup d'état (2002), a prolonged strike by oil workers that hampered
government revenue and economic growth, repeated acts of political violence in
the streets, constant negative propaganda from the opposition-controlled media,
and a recall election, which he won with 59 per cent of the vote. In his 14 years
in power, Chávez sponsored an eclectic ideology he called “21st-century
socialism,” which he realized through a new pluralist constitution (1999)
containing social rights, equal protection clauses for women and minorities, a
strong and recallable executive, and mechanisms for local self-government. His
policies resulted in 40 per cent poverty reduction, one of the lowest inequality
35
For a detailed analysis of this new wave of populism, see Carlos de la Torre, Latin American
Populism in the Twenty-first Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Note that
de la Torre analyzes populism as an embodiment of power, emphasizing leadership over movements.
36
Edgardo Lander, “The impact of neoliberal adjustment in Venezuela, 1989–1993,” Latin
American Perspectives, 23 (1996), 50–73. at p. 65. For a brief account of the socio-economic state
before Chávez, see George Ciccariello-Maher, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in
Venezuela (New York: Verso, 2016), pp. 1–13.
37
“Intelligence Unit country report: Venezuela,” Economist (2000), p. 16.
8 Camila Vergara
rates in the region,38 and a network of 45,000 self-governing communal

councils.39
Following closely the experience of what is commonly known as the “Bolivarian
Revolution” carried out not only by Chávez in Venezuela, but also by Evo
Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the Spanish political party
Podemos is perhaps the only ongoing undisputed case of populism outside of
Latin America. The party was born out of the 2011 Indignados movement against
the ruling elite, protesting the austerity measures that immiserated the middle and
lower sectors of the population.40 Less than a year after being established,
Podemos became the third-strongest political force in the Spanish parliament,
securing 20 per cent of the national vote. Its egalitarian platform advocates
reforms such as nationalizing hydroelectric power stations, higher taxation of the
wealthy, increasing the minimum wage, stopping home evictions, and refinancing
mortgages—policies that, even if coherent with the original reformist thrust of
populism aimed at increasing the immediate welfare of the masses, are a far cry
from the populist agendas pursued in Latin America.
II. FROM THE DISCURSIVE TO THE TOTALITARIAN TURN IN

POPULISM STUDIES
The conceptual study of populism has been analyzed within the framework of
democratic theory, which has been unable to clarify if populism is a democratic
or anti-democratic phenomenon.41 Setting aside this fundamental dispute,
theorists agree that populism originates in a crisis of representation, a lack of
responsiveness of democratically elected leaders to a portion of the population
and their inability or unwillingness to satisfy social demands. According to
Margaret Canovan, one of the first theorists to work on the concept in the early
1980s, populism is born out of crisis as a cure for the failures of traditional forms
of representation.42 Conceiving democracy as the point where the redemptive
and pragmatic sides of politics intersect, she argues that populist interventions
are best understood as invocations of the redemptive face of democracy, as a
corrective to the excesses of pragmatism. For Canovan, populism is “an appeal to
‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant
38
UN, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2010–2011 (Santiago: United
Nations, 2011), ch. 2. For poverty reduction, see Mark Weisbrot, Luis Sandoval, and David Rosnick
“Poverty rates in Venezuela: getting the numbers right,” International Journal of Health Services, 36
(2006), 813–23. Economic and political disarray after Chávez's death should not taint the analysis of
his populist achievements. How corruption undermined them, however, should be central to it.
39
Ciccariello-Maher, Building the Commune, p. 26.
40
Spain's unemployment rate had reached 21.3% with almost 5 million people out of a job. The
youth unemployment rate was 43.5%, the highest in the European Union; OECD Data, <https://data.
oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm>.
41
For accounts of this ambivalence, see Nadia Urbinati, “Democracy and populism,” Constellations,
5 (1998), 110–24; Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
42
Canovan, ‘Trust the people!”.
ideas and values of the society,” and thus the populist leader is often an outsider
who runs against political parties and predominant elite values.43 According to
this view, populism is a democratizing phenomenon aimed at perfecting
democratic representativeness, renewing the political system from within. This
normative dimension of populism, as a “corrective,” was gradually lost within
the theoretical discussion especially after the “discursive turn” in the interpretation
of the concept in the late 2000s.
Perhaps influenced by the idiosyncratic case of Perónism—a form of populism
that became institutionalized in Argentina in a party that has been able to
accommodate different tendencies along the ideological spectrum in its more
than seven decades of existence—Ernesto Laclau proposed a theory of populism
detached from both ideology and material conditions. As a founder of the Essex
School of discourse theory, Laclau conceived of populism as a discursive process
of identity formation that is open to accommodate popular identities on both the
left and the right. In On Populist Reason (2005)—the point of departure for most
of the theoretical literature on populism coming from the left—Laclau analyzes
the process through which “the people” become a political subject. According to
him, when unsatisfied demands enter into a “logic of equivalence” and the
populist leader emerges by appealing directly to the people as a collective identity,
these demands are retrospectively unified and sublimated under an empty
signifier. This “radical retroactive ontology” is central to Laclau's theory of
populism, in which the reconstruction of a collective identity out of the
heterogeneity of the social allows for “the people” to become itself an empty
signifier without the need for any previous unity.44
Attempting to depart from democratic theory, Laclau engages with the
republican tradition by arguing that “the people” of populism relates to the
Roman plebs, a collective subject that was defined against the nobility. However,
by abstracting “the people” from the plebeian experience, Laclau formulates a
theory of populism that is still trapped in the logic of the people-as-one, which is
rooted not in the Roman republic, but in the medieval embodiment of power and
the myth of popular sovereignty coming out of 17th-century social contract
theory. “The people” of populism is for him “a plebs who claims to be the only
legitimate populus—that is, a partiality which wants to function as the totality of
the community.”45 This pars pro toto logic (partiality supplanting the totality)
would make populism a politico-theological form of power aimed at the
embodiment of power.46
Even if Laclau's theory of political identity formation—as a prevalence of
equivalence over difference through an empty signifier—is certainly the most
43
Canovan, “Trust the people!”, p. 3.
44
Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 69.
45
Ibid., p. 81.
46
For a critique of Laclau's theologizing of populism, see Andrew Arato, “Political theology and
populism,” Social Research, 80 (2013), 143–72.
10 Camila Vergara
sophisticated theoretical description of the constitutive discursive process at

work in collective action, the claim that a partial identity would necessarily aim
at hegemony, at becoming the only legitimate identity, is a conceptual leap that
remains unexplained. Why would the plebs aim not only at controlling the state
temporarily (the same as any partisan would do), but also at embodying it and
supplanting the populus? In the Roman Republic plebeians existed in the
dichotomy established by the existence of the patrician class, against material and
formal privilege. Even if the plebs certainly desired to set themselves free from
patrician domination and punish the nobles for their oppressive rule, there is no
evidence of them aiming at establishing themselves hegemonically, at taking up
“an incommensurable universal signification” to constitute a “truly universal
populus” conceived as an “ideal totality.”47 And even if the plebs were to expel all
the nobles and become the populus, their shared plebeian identity, constructed
against the few, would dissipate.
Even though Laclau goes to great lengths to connect populism to examples of
plebeian experiences in history—from popular uprisings and revolutions to civil
wars—his theory detaches populism from the plebs, their ideology and material
conditions. From this abstraction, he argues populism and politics are in fact
synonymous because the “construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par
excellence.”48 Populism is then a political logic that is not only constitutive of
politics, but is the only political logic. This absolutist move is not only self-
defeating—since populism becomes at the same time everything and nothing, an
articulation of demands that can be “appropriated by any agency for any political
construct”49—but also a decisive theoretical step towards conceptualizing
populism as potentially totalitarian.
Despite connecting populism to the long history of plebeian experiences, I
would argue Laclau's discursive theory has enabled a “conceptual stretching”50
that severed populism from these experiences, allowing for the neologism “right-
wing populism”—a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and oligarchic
politics—to be recognized not only as part of the traditional conception of
populism, but also to colonize it, attempting to supplant its original meaning.
Populism as a form of identity formation ceases to be connected exclusively to
the people-as-plebs, their emancipation and empowerment, and thus is able to
attach to other conceptions of the people and their ideologies. It is in this way
that the “discursive turn” in the interpretation of populism commenced by Laclau
has allowed for liberal and anti-populist definitions of populism to build on his
theory to define populist politics as anti-pluralist, and thus proto-totalitarian.
Moreover, given the influence of Laclau's theory of populism within the left,
47
Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 70, 94.
48
Ibid., pp. 154, 164.
49
Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (New York: Verso, 2017), p. 17.
50
Giovanni Sartori, “Concept misformation in comparative politics,” American Political Science
Review, 64 (1970), 1033–53.
alternative theoretical avenues able to question the totalitarian interpretations of

plebeian experiences have remained largely unexplored.51 Part of the lack of
critical engagement with the latest “totalitarian turn” of the concept appears
connected to Laclau's embrace of what he believes is the totalizing tendency of
populism, a phenomenon that, according to him, presents “most or all of the
features so accurately described by [Claude] Lefort” as being totalitarian.52
Since “there is no totalization without exclusion,” the populist logic is,
according to Laclau, necessarily aimed at creating two antagonistic camps to
allow for the construction of a totalizing popular identity.53 However, even if an
antagonistic frontier is certainly necessary for “the people” to be retroactively
constructed, the tendency towards totalization that Laclau identifies as being
central to populism does not necessarily follow from recognizing an already
existing division between the elite and the people in society. As the different
historical instances of populism evidence, populist ideology is not totalizing,
aimed at radically changing society, but reformist, demanding the state allocate
more resources to the popular sectors. And even if the populist's aim were to
change the paradigm of accumulation and dispossession promoted by
neoliberalism, which would certainly require a new hegemonic narrative, setting
the normative foundations of legitimate popular empowerment and control over
elites, this does not mean that the populist would help constitute a totalizing
identity of the people, of a part that wants to become the whole, the only “true”
people. I would argue the people-as-plebs is a part that wants to assert itself as a
legitimate part that now is effectively excluded from power, rather than to become
the totality, the only legitimate part.
Pushing back against Laclau's identification of populism and the political, but
very much influenced by his former mentor, Benjamin Arditi has argued populism
should be conceived as a specter of democratic politics, “something that both
accompanies democracy and haunts it.”54 Populism emerges “as the return of the
repressed, as a symptom of democracy, as an internal element of the democratic
system that also reveals the limits of the system and prevents its closure in the
presumed normality of institutional procedures.”55 According to Arditi, populism
is a dangerous vehicle by which to recover the idea of mass democracy, because
it could put “democracy in jeopardy” by dispelling pluralism and toleration
through the continual invocation of the unity of the people. Populism is thus a
necessary, unavoidable, and dangerous phenomenon that “functions as a mirror
in which democracy can look at the rougher, less palatable edges that remain
51
For an analysis of Laclau's inability to separate plebeian and totalitarian politics, see Miguel
Vatter, “The quarrel between populism and republicanism: Machiavelli and the antinomies of plebe-
ian politics,” Contemporary Political Theory, 11 (2012), 246–8.
52
53
Ibid., p. 78.
54
Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p. 51.
55
Ibid., p. 71.
12 Camila Vergara
veiled by the gentrifying veneer of its liberal format.”56 But the fantasy of radical
unity is present in populism only as a temptation “to confuse the government
with the state,” a possibility that appears connected to the nature of democracy
and not necessarily to populism, which, despite its authoritarian excesses, would
remain in democracy's “internal periphery.”57 In other words, for Arditi, populism
is a specter of democracy, not because it actively seeks to permanently fill the
empty space of symbolic power, but because it is a vivid reminder of democracy's
totalitarian tendencies.
Building on Arditi's notion of populism as a specter in the internal periphery
of democracy, Nadia Urbinati argues populism should be considered as a
disfigurement, having a “parasitical” relation to representative democracy.58
Even though Urbinati, like Laclau, also seeks to escape democratic theory and
embraces republican thought as the key to understanding populism, she follows
Laclau's politico-theological conception of the plebs as the people-as-one, defined
by a totalizing antagonistic frontier. Within this logic, she rightly criticizes
Laclau's conceptualization of populism as an inherently democratic force by
arguing that, despite its natural identification with the demos, populism does not
promote equal liberty—the principle of democracy—because it springs and feeds
from polarization. Urbinati argues populism is then better understood as a form
of politics of exclusion that competes with democracy for the “meaning and use
of representation,” a disfigurement that could even “open the door to regime
change.”59 Because “the people” of populism is identified through a splitting of
the plural body politic, imposing a Schmittian friend–enemy-style relation in
which “the minority is no longer honored as a partisan-friend but treated as
partisan-enemy,” Urbinati conceives populism as an hegemonic unifying ideology
that is “meant to erase” pluralism and “make the people a crowd with one voice,
leader, or opinion.”60
Even if “populism as disfigurement” is for Urbinati a corrupt form of politics—a
republican version of Aristotle's tyrannical democracy of demagogues—it is not
clear how the transition from corrupt to totalitarian politics takes place, and why
such a corrupt regime would aim at undermining minority rights to impose “a
totalizing unity of society.”61 Even if for Urbinati, as for Arditi, the leap from
Caesarist politics into the totalitarian embodiment of power is only presented as
a possibility, her view of populism as an inherently anti-pluralist political force
undergirds the theoretical conception of populism as disfigurement. Through this
56
Ibid., p. 60.
57
Ibid., p. 84.
58
Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, p. 2.
59
Ibid., p.135.
60
Ibid., pp. 143, 162. The influence of Carl Schmitt is also present in Laclau and in Chantal
Mouffe's work on populism.
61
Ibid., p. 167. For another critique of this argument, see John McCormick, “The new ochlopho-
bia? Populism, majority rule and prospects for democratic republicanism,” Yiftah Elazar and
Geneviève Rousselière (eds), Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019).
lens, the redemptive face of populism is obscured by the specter of totalitarianism.

And even if, Urbinati argues, populism is not the same as fascism, the slippage of
populism into totalitarianism seems an unavoidable theoretical implication if
populism is conceived as an anti-pluralist form of politics. If populism indeed
were to operate on such a principle of exclusion and homogeneity, then it
decisively would be anti-democratic and totalitarian.
The latest step in this conceptual turn of populism to an inherently anti-
pluralist, anti-democratic “exclusionary form of identity politics” was provided
by Jan-Werner Müller, according to whom populism is part of the same political
genus as fascism. Following Laclau, a real populist, for Müller, is the leader who
“must claim that a part of the people is the people—and that only the populist
authentically identifies and represents this real or true people.”62 Thus, the
populist is not the one who fights for the interest of the plebeian people against
the elites, helping to redeem democracy in the process, but the one who claims
that the plebs—conceived as a homogenous unity—is the people as a whole. The
populist is the leader who operates in this pars pro toto logic, imposing a
“moralized form of antipluralism.”63
According to Müller, what fundamentally defined Italian Fascism and Nazism
was their populist character based on the myth of the people-as-one, rather than
their principle of racial supremacy and glorification of violence, which he
concedes are only “exhibited traits that are not inevitable elements of populism
as such.”64 And even if Müller argues that right-wing populism is not the revival
of fascism—a “distinct form of authoritarianism or racism”—their main
difference is that “today's anti-democrats have learned from history” and refrain
from militarization and mass murder.65 Within this framework, fascism is a sub-
type of populism. In contrast to Urbinati, who argues populism is a political
disfigurement that may slip into totalitarianism, by placing populism in the same
family as fascism—an ideology promoting racial supremacy and domination—
Müller effectively eliminates populism's normative character, leaving no space for
conceiving populism as an expression of the legitimate claim of the plebeian
people to change an oppressive political regime and the socio-economic structure
in which it operates. Under this framework, populism is not understood as a
specter of the underside of democracy, but as the underside itself, as being in
essence an identitarian, proto-totalitarian form of politics.
The “conceptual stretching” that began with the severing of populism from
ideology and material conditions also allowed for the elaboration of a “minimal”
definition of populism coming from empirical political studies, which has
produced much empirical research and the further entrenchment of the
62
Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),
p. 22.
63
Ibid., p. 20.
64
Ibid., p. 93.
65
Jan-Werner Müller, “Populism and the people,” London Review of Books, 41, no. 10 (May
2019), 35–7.
14 Camila Vergara
“totalitarian” interpretation. The most influential definition of populism in the

recent literature was first elaborated by Cas Mudde, a scholar of the European
far right.66 Following Michael Freeden's analysis of ideologies,67 Mudde conceives
populism as a
thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two

homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,”
and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale
(general will) of the people.68
For Mudde, the anti-elitism that is at the core of the concept is what makes
populism the “direct opposite” of pluralism. He argues that, due to populism's
Manichean “distinction of society” and consequent drive for creating a
“homogenous ‘good’ and a homogenous ‘evil,’” populist actors weaken the
“broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and
interests” that characterizes pluralism.69 However, this false opposition between
populism and pluralism stems from his own definition, which introduces the
element of homogeneity as part of the concept's core. Even if an anti-pluralist
tendency is evident in cases he labels “right-wing populism”—his subject of
expertise—the claim that it is appropriate to interpret populism as intrinsically
opposed to pluralism falls apart when analyzing the most paradigmatic cases of
populist governments in Latin America, which constitutionally recognized
minority rights.70 Even if a minimal definition based on populism's undisputed
anti-elitism has produced fruitful research, due to its easy operationalization, it
has also reinforced the premise that populism is in essence a form of anti-
pluralism, resulting in the further conflation of populist and ethnocentric leaders
and parties. I would argue this anti-pluralist premise, based on populism's
supposed drive toward homogeneity and the establishment of a totalizing
hegemonic logic, should not be deployed in the study of populist politics.
Anti-pluralism is a totalitarian logic and should be recognized as such.
In what follows, I challenge the interpretation of populism as an anti-pluralist
form of politics by departing from democratic theory. Through the engagement
66
Cas Mudde, “The populist zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition, 39 (2004), 542–63.
67
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
pp. 75–82. Freeden disagrees with Mudde and Rovira's use of his theory to conceptualize populism,
arguing that, as an ideology, “it is emaciatedly thin rather than thin-centred”; Michael Freeden, “After
the Brexit referendum: revisiting populism as an ideology,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 22 (2017),
1–11, at p. 3.
68
Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), p. 6. See previous definitions by Mudde in “The populist zeitgeist” and
Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a
critique of Mudde, see Paris Aslanidis, “Is populism an ideology? A refutation and a new perspective,”
Political Studies, 64 (2015), 88–104.
69
Mudde and Rovira, Populism, p. 7.
70
See e.g. the case of Chávez's policies on race; Barry Cannon, “Class/race polarisation in
Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chávez: a break with the past or the song remains the
same?”, Third World Quarterly, 29 (2008), 731–48.
with republican thought, I propose a normative interpretation of populism in

which the populist leader or party acts to empower the people-as-plebs within the
structure of liberal representative government; other cases in which a leader or
party seeks their own advantage or that of a group against the common welfare
should be treated as deviations—such leaders are not populists but tyrants, a
corrupt form of leadership. I argue that this normative account of populism, a
democratizing form of politics aimed at increasing the welfare of the popular
sectors, is only possible through republican theory, which is based on the
recognition of the ontological social divide between the elites and the people,
and the need for establishing a dynamic balance between them to achieve liberty
as non-domination. Only through this framework, in which relative equality is
achieved through the balance of two unequal parts of society to secure liberty for
all, can the populist—understood as the champion of the plebs—be considered
virtuous, playing a positive role in preserving liberty by empowering the people
against the domination of the ruling elites.
III. A REPUBLICAN INTERPRETATION OF POPULISM

Recent reinterpretations of Machiavelli in radical democratic and republican
thought have reintroduced the people-as-plebs as a central category of analysis
within liberal democracy, highlighting the productive role of conflict in preserving
and regaining liberty. Against the predominant neo-republican, “aristocratic”
reading of Machiavelli that equates liberty with the rule of law,71 John
McCormick's “populist” interpretation unveils Machiavelli as a partisan of
plebeians, and liberty as the result of conflict between the grandi and the popolo,
two constitutive battling humors: the desire to oppress and resist oppression.72
Liberty is the result of the institutional conflict between the few and the many, a
conflict in which the many are powerful enough to “place a restraint on the
ambitions of the Nobles” and keep their independence by securing relative socio-
economic equality.73
Even though the theory of popular sovereignty that underpins liberal
representative governments has obscured the fundamental division between the
ruling elite and the common people, this split is factual and unavoidable. And it
is in times of crisis—in which common people are impoverished and disempowered
to the point of oppression—that the veil of legal equality thins out, allowing for
the division between the few and the many to become politicized and the
71
For a critique of the Cambridge School interpretation of republican thought, see John
McCormick, “Machiavelli against republicanism: on the Cambridge School's ‘Guicciardinian mo-
ments,’” Political Theory, 31 (2003), 615–43.
72
John McCormick, “Machiavellian democracy: controlling elites with ferocious populism,”
American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 297–314; John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
73
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, I.55, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan
Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 310. See McCormick's latest analysis of inequality
in his Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist
Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ch. 2.
16 Camila Vergara
people-as-plebs reconstituted through discourse and mobilization. Through

Machiavelli, McCormick points to the lack of a popular institution in our current
constitutional frameworks and the need to establish a People's Tribunate to
appropriately check elite power.74 I argue the lack of a popular institution also
serves to explain the emergence and pervasiveness of populism: as an expression
of a chronic constitutional deficiency that is connected to increasing oligarchic
domination and the desire of plebeians not to be oppressed.
Through an analysis of “plebeian thought” from Machiavelli to Rancière,
Martin Breaugh traces the discontinuous struggle for freedom of the people-as-
plebs in history and argues for conceiving the plebeian subject neither as a social
category nor as an identity, but as an experience, “the passage from a subpolitical
status to one of a full-fledged political subject.”75 According to Breaugh, a
“plebeian principle” that resurges from time to time in history defines the plebeian
experience as one of freedom and revolt, a refusing of “the limits of the possible
present of the dominant order.”76 Under this framework, the people-as-plebs only
comes into existence as an event-bound subject, inseparable from the emancipatory
movement in which it is reconstituted. The following analysis contributes to this
radical interpretation of republican ideas by proposing populism as a republican
symptom of democracy, as a particular manifestation of the plebeian principle
within the current framework of liberal democracy and electoral politics. From
this perspective, I argue modern populism should be understood as the mechanism
through which the “plebeian people” become a political subject able to impose its
authority via electoral politics to push for radical reform, as part of the
discontinuous history of political liberty.
Given the alarming degree of increasing wealth inequality since the wave of
neoliberal reforms spanning from the coup d'état against Salvador Allende in
Chile in 1973 to the imposition of recent austerity measures in Europe, we are
experiencing patterns of accumulation and dispossession comparable to those of
the ancien régime.77 If we conceive of populism as an expression of plebeian
politics, the electoral victories of a populist leader like Chávez in Venezuela or a
party like Syriza in Greece should be thought of as a symptom of a failing regime
in which oppression has increased for a majority of citizens and oligarchic power
has grown out of bounds. Increasing income inequality has enabled growing
corruption in politics: the undue influence by powerful citizens on political
representatives, who ultimately cease to legislate for the common good or the
interest of the majority. The consequent crisis of representation, in which social
74
He also advocates popular political trials; John McCormick, “Machiavelli's political trials and
the ‘free way of life,’” Political Theory, 35 (2007), 385–411.
75
Martin Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. i.
76
Ibid., p. xvi.
77
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), pp. 263–5. On oligarchic harm, see Gordon Arlen, “Aristotle and the problem of oligarchic
harm: insights for democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory, 18 (2019), 393–414.
demands remain permanently unsatisfied, further reveals inequality and naked

power, making possible the re-emergence of the plebeian people under a populist
leader or party distinguished by a crusade against the domination of the few and
for the increased welfare of the many. Populism as an electoral type of plebeian
politics springs from the politicization of wealth inequality78 in reaction to
systemic corruption79 and the immiseration of the masses, an attempt to balance
the scales of social and political power between the ruling elite and the popular
sectors. Populist ideology is therefore not revolutionary (aimed at upending
prevailing orders) but reformist, directed at increasing the welfare of the many
within the current structure of power and preventing the further entrenchment of
oligarchy.
In addition to being a symptom of a failing democracy, populism signals to a
subject that has traditionally no place in liberal representative governments, but
nevertheless asserts itself through elections and mobilizations. The people-as-
plebs are reconstructed based on the recognition that ordinary citizens are in fact
second-class citizens, effectively excluded from economic and political power.80
But despite the people of populism being a collective partiality that relates to the
Roman plebs, because it is not represented in a popular institution such as the
Plebeian Council, but is a concealed collective subject, the people-as-plebs today
can only be reconstructed agonistically against the ruling elite through
mobilization and extraordinary leadership. While in ancient Rome popular
leaders were both empowered and limited by the popular assembly, today the
people-as-plebs only exist in the forum,81 only possible in their relation to leaders
or parties, in need of permanent mobilization. This makes elected populist leaders
less accountable to the unorganized, mobilized masses, and thus more dangerous
to liberty. I would argue the lack of institutionalized popular power in liberal
democracies is the source of the paradoxical combination of weakness and excess
that comes along with populism, which is rich in popular authority but deficient
in legitimacy,82 especially in the initial stages of government.
Following this republican interpretation of populism, the populist leader is the
one who delivers emancipation from socio-economic oppression, and thus is
bound to pursue measures to improve not only the material conditions of the
popular sectors through redistribution via land reform, progressive taxation,
subsidies, and public goods, but also to increase the symbolic and political status
of the masses, through the establishment of local participatory institutions,
78
Kenneth Roberts, “Social correlates of party system demise and populist resurgence in
Venezuela,” Latin American Politics and Society, 45, no. 3 (2003), 35–57.
79
See my analysis of systemic corruption as the oligarchization of power; Camila Vergara,
“Corruption as systemic political decay,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, online first (2019).
80
Jeffrey Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016).
81
Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, p. 167.
82
For a distinction between different sources of legitimacy in democracy, see Pierre Rosanvallon,
Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011).
18 Camila Vergara
electoral quotas for oppressed minorities, and new social rights.83 These actions
necessarily go against some of the rules protecting the status quo, and therefore
their acceptance would imply the erosion of the ruling power of elites, who
always fight back hard to keep their socio-economic and political dominance.
Consequently, a successful populist leader cannot become an ordinary elected
official, limited by the rules that keep democracy safe from both usurpation of
power and abrupt changes. For achieving the populist project, the populist needs
to bypass oligarchic institutional strongholds and exercise a power exceeding
legal prerogatives.
The interpretation of populism as a form of plebeian politics seems fruitful
because it imposes normativity on a concept that is currently so ambiguous that
it fails to distinguish between “good” and “bad” forms, allowing for genuine
champions of the people and tyrants to be categorized under the same banner.
A republican interpretation of populism allows us to see more clearly that “the
people” of populism is not the people-as-a-whole or the nation, but the plebeians:
those who experience deteriorating material conditions to the point of oppression
and whose interests are not being represented by traditional political parties.
Who are the plebeian masses today? I would argue the plebeian political
subject should be understood as a coalition of those who are being increasingly
oppressed by the oligarchic state, those who share a similar degree of socio-
economic oppression. In addition to precarious workers in the service sector and
the nascent gig economy, who receive low pay, no benefits, and no job security, the
plebeian ranks could be filled by those in debt and struggling to pay mortgages,
student loans, and healthcare bills. The people-as-plebs is not a specific class, but
its identity is constructed based on shared material conditions and socio-economic
demands. While in the 19th and 20th centuries the “populist people” were small
farmers and industrial laborers, in the 21st century the populist constituency has
been composed of the precarious urban labor force, indigenous communities,
students, debtors, and even parts of the impoverished middle classes in the cases
of Podemos and Syriza.
This interpretation also allows us to understand the extraordinary authority
of populist actors as crusaders, whose goal is to increase the welfare of the masses
against oligarchic domination, backed up by a plebeian authority that exceeds
the power conceded by the institutional structure. A force of radical reform,
populism is a threat to existing legality for the sake of a supposedly better, more
egalitarian legal and socio-economic framework. Rather than a disfigurement, I
would argue populism should be considered as a response to an already existing
deformity in liberal democracies: the overgrowth of oligarchic power. Populism
83
Such as indigenous, gay, and third-generation rights. For a radical democratic interpretation of
republican liberty and rights, see Jean-Fabien Spitz, “The reception of Machiavelli in contemporary
republicanism: some ambiguities and paradoxes,” David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila
Vergara (eds), Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
should be considered as a badly needed, corrective plebeian intervention against

oligarchy. Like the populists in Russia and the Americas during the 19th and 20th
centuries, populist groups and leaders today are those who protest the increased
“proletarianization” of the masses and whose main goal is to use the state to
push back predatory economic practices and increase the immediate welfare of
those who are being dispossessed and oppressed—even at the risk of economic
overexpansion and hyperinflation.84
IV. POPULISM AND TOTALITARIANISM

The main problem of the discursive conception of populism and the minimal
definition of the term is that they are unable to distinguish between populism and
new forms of totalitarianism. This is hardly an oversight. While Mudde's
definition is clearly influenced by his studies of the European far right, Laclau
explicitly recognized that his conception of populism shares almost all the
elements identified by Claude Lefort as totalitarian—even if Lefort never
mentioned populism as a form of totalitarian politics. By rejecting Lefort's
“simple opposition” between totalitarian and democratic forms of politics,
Laclau understands populism within a “spectrum of possible articulations” of
these forms.85 I would argue the uncritical engagement with the “totalitarian
turn” in the recent conception of populism originates in the uncritical engagement
with Laclau's theory, which is premised on an ideological continuum in which
democratic and totalitarian elements could be articulated through a populist
logic. By dismissing Lefort's normative project, which is informed by Hannah
Arendt's conception of totalitarianism as an anti-plurality movement, Laclau's
anti-normative approach has left populism scholars without tools to challenge
totalitarian interpretations of the term.
According to Arendt, totalitarianism is a new, unprecedented ideology of
“radical evil” that spawns movements and orders that go beyond the classical
conception of corrupt rule because their aim is to destroy freedom itself by
negating human plurality.86 This new phenomenon, based upon the ideological
definition of an “objective other,” reveals totalitarianism as a movement striving
“to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of
humanity were just one individual.”87 Lefort also recognized the anti-pluralist
core of totalitarianism and thought of it as the product of a “mutation of a
symbolic order” in which a party or leader emerges claiming to “represent the
84
Eliana Cardoso and Ann Helwege, “Populism, profligacy, and redistribution,” Rudiger
Dornbusch and Sebastián Edwards (eds), The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
85
86
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
87
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 438.
20 Camila Vergara
aspirations of the whole people.”88 Lefort understands modern societies as having

an “empty place” of power free of transcendental absolutes, and sees totalitarianism
as springing from the permanence of the theologico-political, as the drive for
unity as embodiment. In totalitarianism there is “condensation” of the spheres of
power, law, and knowledge, allowing the state and civil society to merge. The
moment the totalitarian leader occupies the democratic place of power, imposing
a hegemonic identity, the fundamental indeterminacy that institutes and sustains
democracy is destroyed. According to this view of totalitarianism as a mutation
of democracy, the objective of totalitarian movements is to achieve absolute unity
through a double movement abolishing the “signs of division between state and
society” and “homogenizing the social space,”89 eliminating plurality and
imposing a supreme identity to permanently institutionalize the principle of total
domination through law and policy.90
Because of their drive for absolute unity, totalitarian movements seem to have
a particular ideology of the people in which the “definition of the enemy is
constitutive of the identity of the people.”91 The people to whom totalitarianism
appeals is conceived as the “true” collective subject, which is defined according to
distinctive identitarian markers—for example, race, language, religion—against
an internal enemy, also conceived according to these substantive, quasi-essentialist
traits, which are not subject to compromise or merger. The people-as-ethnos is an
exclusionary subject; only members of a certain race or with a national heritage
or who profess a specific religion, are part of the “true” nation, its integrity
depending on the “elimination of its parasites.”92 Proto-totalitarian forms of
politics, such as ethnonationalism, use these quasi-essentialist and thus inherently
exclusionary elements to craft the “true” character of the nation through a
people-centered discourse “structured around an in/out relation”93 that is
constantly reaffirmed by the exclusion of others who are inferior and considered
a threat to the national identity. I would argue Paul Taggart's conception of the
heartland—an ideal place of cultural, past experiences rooted in affect—which he
argues is at the core of populism,94 is unable to escape the totalitarian anti-
pluralist logic that easily ends up expelling and exterminating those who are not
part of the idealized community.
88
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), p. 13; Claude Lefort, “The question of democracy,” Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of
Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). For
differences between Arendt and Lefort, see Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort:
Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
89
Lefort, “The question of democracy,” p. 286.
90
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 392.
91
Lefort, “The question of democracy,” p. 287.
92
Ibid.
93
Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and articulations: a discourse theoret-
ical framework for the study of populism and nationalism,” Javnost: The Public, 24 (2017), 301–19,
at p. 309.
94
Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), pp. 95–6.
The affect that seems most prevalent in the discursive construction of the
people-as-ethnos is fear—perhaps the strongest emotion one can experience,
since it is directly connected with survival. Fear plays a double role, depending on
which group it operates in: while the fear of losing a privileged position (in terms
of well-being, social status, political power) fuels the desire to reassert supremacy
in the dominant group by going back to the heartland and making it great again,
the fear of discrimination, exclusion, and domination takes hold of the “others,”
the enemies against which the identity of “the people” is constructed. According
to Arendt, the full realization of the totalitarian project is only possible under
absolute fear in the concentration camps, the “only form of society in which it is
possible to dominate man entirely,”95 where humans are stripped of their natural
solidarity and spontaneity.
Different from the construction of the people-as-ethnos through fear, “the
people” of populism would be defined not by their belonging to a heartland, but
by their exclusion from the political and economic power that remains the
privilege of the few. The recognition of this exclusion allows for a “dichotomic
discourse in which ‘the people’ are juxtaposed to ‘the elite’ along the lines of a
down/up antagonism.”96 The people-as-plebs appears as a collective subject,
constructed not against a parasitical outsider, but in opposition to the establishment
that rules the state and the economy. Unlike the essentialist, exclusionary
conception of the “nation” or the “true people,”97 the people-as-plebs is an
inherently heterogeneous, inclusionary subject, determined by material conditions
of exclusion and second-class citizenship rather than substantive, uncompromising
traits.98 Even if the people-as-plebs materially share in their oppression, they only
become a subject through the politicization of inequality, when the division
between the few who rule and the many who are oppressed is reconstructed and
made evident and inescapable.
Following Breaugh's conception of the plebeian experience, if we consider the
people-as-plebs as an event-bound collective subject that comes into being at the
moment of the struggle for emancipation, the people of populism appears as
contingent, fluid, and transient, determined by the struggle against exclusion and
domination at a given time. The affect that seems most prevalent in the
construction of the people-as-plebs is indignation connected to conditions of
exclusion and immiseration, a reaction to the second-class civic structures of
95
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 456. Detention centers for migrants today are examples of
such a totalitarian project.
96
Ibid., p. 310.
97
Etienne Balibar, “Racism as universalism,” New Political Science, 8 (1989), 9–22.
98
In his reconstruction of the populist master frame from Occupy and the Greek and Spanish
Indignados, Aslanidis shows populism has a radically inclusive and thus ephemeral master frame,
since stronger identity markers—such as ideology, race, religion—are bound to resurface; Paris
Aslanidis, “Populism as a collective action master frame for transnational mobilization,” Sociological
Forum, 33 (2018), 443–64.
22 Camila Vergara
liberal democracy.99 Indignation is triggered “by the thought of the possessions

of others” and has as its object an unjust state of affairs that, even if implying a
violation of interest, has as its focal point the violation of a norm.100 Indignation
is then grounded not on group interest, but on a just cause, as a rectification of
an injustice rather than a “gain” for a certain group.
The different conceptions of the people in populist and totalitarian forms
of politics lead to radically different goals. Following Arendt's interpretation,
the objective of totalitarian forms of politics is to impose the supremacy of the
people-as-ethnos by purging the body politic of foreign elements, eliminating
plurality, and imposing a hegemonic identity through the merger of state and
society. Closing borders to immigration, expelling foreigners, and criminalizing
“alien” forms of culture are part of the array of measures to advance the proto-
totalitarian project. In contrast, seen from a republican perspective, populism
has as its main goals restraining oligarchic power and increasing the welfare
of the masses through the establishment of social rights, redistributive policies,
and self-government institutions. While totalitarian forms have an exclusionary
project that is based on the homogenous nature of the people-as-ethnos, populism
pursues an inclusionary project based on the common condition of oppression
of the people-as-plebs. These distinct trajectories also make their use of similar
strategies and means of mobilization quite different.
While both populist and proto-totalitarian movements use propaganda to
mobilize their constituencies, as Arendt argues, the totalitarian objective of
advancing supremacy fuses propaganda and terror, which are interrelated as
“two sides of the same coin.”101 Because the message of totalitarian propaganda
itself instills visceral fear in the “enemies,” terror is its constitutive element.
According to Arendt, totalitarian propaganda is a form of terror that presents a
fundamental disregard for facts, common sense, and utilitarian considerations,
that acts on the masses who are governed by a mixture of gullibility and cynicism,
having “reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything
and nothing.”102 Terror propaganda is not limited to images and words, but is
also realized in actions by paramilitary groups that commit acts of violence
against minorities. This paramilitary propaganda of the deed is organized after
“the model of criminal gangs and used for organized murder,” private armies of
mercenaries based on secret, local organizations that instill fear in a decentralized
manner, from the ground up.103
99
Green, The Shadow of Unfairness, pp. 68–9, argues that what is at the heart of plebeian politics
is “reasonable envy,” the legitimate desire to control and punish oligarchs.
100
Jon Elster, “Emotions and economic theory,” Journal of Economic Literature, 36 (1998),
47–74.
101
102
Ibid., p. 382.
103
Ibid. An example of this “propaganda of the deed” today would be not only hate crimes by
white supremacists in the US, but also bureaucratic forms of terror at work, in which the state through
its judicial system allows individual police officers to harass and murder people of color with
impunity.
In contrast, populists tend to use propaganda the same way as the ancient
demagogues: to educate the popular sectors about interests and power,104 and to
mobilize them through rhetoric to enable their empowerment through partisan
decisions. More than disregarding facts and utility, and imposing lies as reality,
the populist message would aim at unveiling the material subordination of the
popular sectors and the injustice of the subaltern dependent position they endure
within the structure of liberal democracy, by politicizing inequality.
The relation totalitarian movements have with liberal democracy is intrinsically
antagonistic, since they strive for a homogeneity that is constructed against an
internal enemy. The principle of total domination demands the negation of rights
to the “enemies” against which the “true nation” coalesces as an absolute unity,
violating the most fundamental liberal democratic principle of equal liberty. As in
Nazi Germany “this new community was based on the absolute equality of all
Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference
from all other people.”105 Consequently, constitutional safeguards protecting
minorities from the violation of their rights by the state necessarily need to be
undermined, disregarded, and destroyed. The totalitarian government aspires to
absolute power and thus it is in a “permanent state of lawlessness,” defying all
positive laws “even to the extreme of defying those which it has itself created.”106
Despite the claims of populism being illiberal, there appears to be much
confusion on what is precisely meant by liberal. As an electoral form of plebeian
politics, populism is determined both by the nature of the electoral system—
which is representative, based on the leadership of politicians who compete for
the popular vote—and the opposition it encounters in the established order. Even
if populists could behave “illiberally”—challenging limits on executive power,
exerting control over the market, curtailing private property rights—the relation
of populism with liberal democracy appears to be one of reform, aiming at legally
innovating to achieve the popular agenda of establishing more socio-economic
and political equality.107 Given that the most common instruments to bypass the
rules that allow the oligarchic establishment to block change are plebiscites and
referendums, the populist in government is likely to behave like a plebiscitarian
leader, governing by decree with the periodic electoral acclamation of the majority.
However, the need to work around oligarchic strongholds in parliament does not
necessarily make populism an illiberal or anti-democratic political phenomenon.
In contrast to a totalitarian government, which, according to Arendt, has a
complete disregard for legality, the populist is a systemic actor who aims at
104
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), IV.4 §25–
31, pp. 168–9.
105
106
Ibid., p. 461.
107
For an empirical study on the relation between inequality, poverty, and populist mobilization,
see Rafael Piñeiro, Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, and Fernando Rosenblatt, “The engagement curve: pop-
ulism and political engagement in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, 51, no. 4 (2016),
3–23.
24 Camila Vergara
reforming the legal and political structure in order to make it more inclusive. The
populist should be considered as a revolutionary reformer seeking to set new
rules to make politics and the distribution of resources more beneficial to the
excluded and immiserated popular sectors. Unlike the totalitarian leader, the
populist would not seek to destroy the constitutional order, render it superfluous,
or use it as a tool to impose plebeian supremacy, stripping elites from equal
rights, but to empower the popular sectors within the existing constitutional
paradigm based on equal liberty. Perón’s 1947 Bill of Workers’ Rights and
Chávez’s pluralist 1999 Constitution, enshrining social rights, equal protection
clauses, and self-determination for indigenous peoples, are evidence not only of
the extraordinary constituent authority exercised by populist leaders to empower
the masses, but also of their reverence for constitutionalism and its rule of law.
Nevertheless, the empowerment of the masses cannot be achieved without
bending and even disregarding some of the rules of procedural democracy
protecting vested interests.108
The populist aims at deepening the equality of rights, which necessarily entails
the intervention of the state in relations of domination in society. Through a
positive interpretation of socio-economic and political rights, the populist project
aims at finally realizing the promise of democracy by delivering the necessary
means for the popular sectors to exercise the rights that until then had been only
formal, only enjoyed by a wealthy minority. From property, health, and education
to political decision making, rights conceived in this way impose a duty on the
state to enable their full enjoyment by all citizens. While this duty not only to
respect rights, but also to guarantee their equal enjoyment, could demand some
illiberal measures (for example, expropriation without compensation)109 these
abridgments of individual liberties and limitations on power would be means to
an end, and not intrinsic to populism. Totalitarian forms of politics, on the other
hand, are not only illiberal but also anti-liberal, directly negating the universal
character of human rights through their imposition of ethnic-based supremacy.
V. CONCLUSION
By placing modern populism within the tradition of plebeian politics—aimed at
increasing the welfare of the masses against oligarchic domination—I have
attempted to delineate a normative interpretation of populist politics through
which we can effectively distinguish the populist not only from the tyrant, who
merely manipulates the people using populist rhetoric, but also from the proto-
totalitarian leader, who appeals to the people-as-ethnos, aiming at reasserting the
strength and supremacy of the “true people” by “purifying” the body politic.
108
For the relation between procedural democracy and populism, see Jan-Werner Müller, “Towards
a political theory of populism,” Politeia, 28 (2012), 23–58; Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured. For a
critique of this approach, see McCormick, “The new ochlophobia?”.
109
The South African parliament passed in 2018 a motion presented by the Economic Freedom
Fighters party to expropriate land from white settlers without compensation.
Adding a normative layer to populism allows us not only to challenge its

conflation with ethnonationalism, but also to have sharper analytical tools to
examine difficult cases in which populism and forms of ethnocentric politics may
overlap due to contingent factors.110
Classifying populism as a form of plebeian politics that appeals to ordinary
people, who recognize themselves as second-class citizens and protest against
corruption and oligarchy, also allows us to free the concept from the left–right
political spectrum. Populist leaders are outsiders in the political party system,
who do not follow a specific doctrine and are often accused of eclecticism,
opportunism, and fiscal irresponsibility by the right and the left. I would argue
that, while the means populists use to advance the welfare of the people may be
classified as conforming to left- or right-wing doctrine (for example, universal
guarantee versus means-tested social programs), the goal and result must be
populist: to increase the welfare of the plebeian masses.
Arguing for understanding populism as a normative category does not mean
we should uncritically welcome it. Even if totalitarian forms of politics are
indisputably most dangerous to liberty, since they aim directly at obliterating it,
populist projects can also pose a serious threat to democracy. The project of popular
empowerment demands an extraordinary authority that goes beyond the electoral
legitimacy conferred by ordinary forms of representation; if electoral authority
were enough to launch a paradigm shift, all governments could potentially claim
a mandate to embark on revolutionary reforms and transgress the built-in system
of checks and balances. Even if such an extraordinary authority is recognized,
electoral majorities do not necessarily command the compliance of elites—who
often attempt to overthrow legitimate governments through economic boycott
and military force, undermining democratic governance. Moreover, virtue, trust,
and elections are not enough to secure accountability and keep an unbound
populist government, especially after the revolution has been institutionalized,
from abusing power and becoming corrupt and tyrannical.
If we conceive of populism as a plebeian reconstructive mechanism to correct
the disfigurement of oligarchic overgrowth—which is always potentially life-
threatening, as the pervasiveness of oligarchic coups in Latin America makes
evident—we should aim at controlling such interventions as much as possible
in order to secure a high probability of success. However, not only are we
currently unable to properly identify populism, tending to confuse populists and
ethnonationalist leaders and parties, but our current constitutional frameworks
seem ill prepared to effectively enable and constrain the power of the populist, to
channel populism's positive, egalitarian energy towards further democratization
while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of corruption and tyranny.
110
For an account of the influence Italian Fascism had on Argentine Perónism, see Federico
Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–
1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Populism As Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment (Vergara)

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The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 0, Number 0, 2019, pp.

Populism as Plebeian Politics: Inequality,

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

identitarian, xenophobic, and oligarchic form of politics clothed in populist

I. A MATERIALIST HISTORY OF POPULISM: FROM THE RUSSIAN

The Populists became a considerable electoral force, effectively contesting the

policies and self-government,21 the concept begun to be successfully redefined in

massive forced sterilization program of indigenous peoples in the name of public

rates in the region,38 and a network of 45,000 self-governing communal

II. FROM THE DISCURSIVE TO THE TOTALITARIAN TURN IN

sophisticated theoretical description of the constitutive discursive process at

alternative theoretical avenues able to question the totalitarian interpretations of

lens, the redemptive face of populism is obscured by the specter of totalitarianism.

“totalitarian” interpretation. The most influential definition of populism in the

thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two

with republican thought, I propose a normative interpretation of populism in

III. A REPUBLICAN INTERPRETATION OF POPULISM

people-as-plebs reconstituted through discourse and mobilization. Through

demands remain permanently unsatisfied, further reveals inequality and naked

should be considered as a badly needed, corrective plebeian intervention against

IV. POPULISM AND TOTALITARIANISM

aspirations of the whole people.”88 Lefort understands modern societies as having

liberal democracy.99 Indignation is triggered “by the thought of the possessions

Adding a normative layer to populism allows us not only to challenge its

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