Very often the movements, parties, leaders and discourses under examination seem to have nothing or very little in common as they range from the radical left to the radical right end of the political spectrum and from egalitarian to authoritarian orientations. Yet, one thing is obviously certain. They seem to cause surprise. Mainstream media, established political forces and academics are quick to denounce their scandalous nature: all of a sudden, the unthinkable seems to be happening. Populism is seen as violating or transgressing an established order of how politics is properly, rationally and professionally done. It emerges where it should not when it should not; it disrupts a supposed “normal” course of events and can only be seen as a signal of failure. [...]
In this sense, the first fundamental challenge populism research is facing today is a self-critical one: the need to seriously reflect on the language games developed around the ideological uses of “populism” within academic and media discourse from Richard Hofstadter, from the 1950s, to the present day. When we study populism, we talk about populism, we articulate meanings in language and discourse, and language is never innocent. In the long run it naturalises significations that were initially partisan, even arbitrary, and reifies into supposedly neutral objectivity crystallisations of historically-dependent power relations.
Within the broader context of the ongoing struggle between populist and anti-populist orientations, we can understand populism primarily as a specific type of discourse which claims to express popular interests and to represent associated identities and demands (the “will of the people”) against an “establishment” or elite, which is seen as undermining them and forestalling their satisfaction. Accordingly, populist discursive representations typically articulate a polarised, antagonistic framing of the socio-political field in a bid to inspire and mobilise frustrated/excluded social groups. [...]
In populist discourses proper, then, apart from being located at the core of the discursive articulation, “the people” operates as an empty signifier, as a signifier without signified, so to speak. In contradistinction, when nationalist discourses employ the signifier the ‘people’, this is either located at the periphery of their chain of signification or, even when it is given a more central place, its populist emptiness is moderated significantly, referring it back to “race” or “nation”, discursive units that in extreme right discourse often function as naturalised, original (mythical) points of reference, as Derridean “transcendental signifieds” attempting to fix signification once and for all.
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