{"id":4579,"date":"2019-02-13T11:10:42","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T16:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=4579"},"modified":"2019-02-15T21:05:59","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T02:05:59","slug":"jan-werner-mueller-whats-left-of-left-wing-populism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/jan-werner-mueller-whats-left-of-left-wing-populism\/","title":{"rendered":"Jan-Werner Mueller | What\u2019s Left of Left-Wing Populism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Jan-Werner Mueller<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nicol\u00e1s Maduro is losing his grip on power in Venezuela; Podemos, the self-declared left-populist party in Spain, appears to be splitting at the top; Syriza\u2019s popularity is declining.\u00a0 Conservatives in the US and elsewhere are gleefully pointing to the disaster which Ch\u00e1vismo has become to warn of the dangers of \u201csocialism,\u201d while even more impartial observers might conclude that the long \u201cpink tide\u201d of left-populism is coming to an ignominious end.<\/p>\n

Such conclusions run together far too many phenomena which, in the end, have little to do with each other.\u00a0 There is indeed a self-declared \u201cleft populism\u201d that has not only failed economically, but also been shown to be a clear threat to democracy: the Ch\u00e1vismo which claimed exclusively to represent \u201cthe people\u201d and declared all opposition to \u201ctwenty-first century socialism\u201d to be illegitimate.\u00a0 But other supposed forms of \u201cleft-populism\u201d should be understood as attempts to re-invent social democracy for the twenty-first century, in ways that evidently respect the parameters of pluralist democracies.\u00a0 If nothing else, such attempts have generated new choices for citizens and thereby alleviated contemporary crises of democratic representation \u2013 contrary to the lazy mainstream view that new movements and parties must somehow be \u201canti-system\u201d and therefore part of the problem, rather than the solution.\u00a0 But \u2013 this is the important lesson \u2013 these parties and movements have done well because they are left, not because they are in any meaningful sense populist.<\/p>\n

Proponents of left-wing populism have put forward two main reasons for their strategy.\u00a0 Theorists like Chantal Mouffe already claimed in the 2000s that a convergence of left and right on centrist policies had led to a state of \u201cpost-democracy.\u201d\u00a0 As the Third Way policies adopted by social democrats across the West amounted to \u201cThatcherism with a human face,\u201d citizens no longer had a real choice: to stick with the metaphor, voters could only opt for Thatcherism with or without a human face, or, as Mouffe put it at one point: the difference was no bigger than that between Pepsi and Coke.\u00a0 In her eyes, the surge of right-wing populism \u2013 starting with figures like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria\u2019s J\u00f6rg Haider \u2013 was a \u201ccry of the people\u201d against a lack of genuine choices.<\/p>\n

Even if one shares this diagnosis, one does not have to adopt the second major claim made by proponents of left-populism: that the best response to this crisis of representation was mobilizing citizens with the claim that society is fractured between the people on the one hand, and the oligarchy, or la casta<\/em>, on the other.\u00a0 Note the thought that motivated this proposition: citizens are tired of anything traditionally seen as the left; in fact, people are so sick of it that even the very word \u201cleft\u201d should not appear in the rhetoric of left-wing populist leaders.\u00a0 As Podemos intellectuals put it, \u201cif you want to get it right, don\u2019t do what the left would do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The wager of this \u201ctransversal strategy\u201d cutting across traditional ideological divisions was that during the Eurocrisis citizens would be receptive to the idea that a financial oligarchy should rightfully to be blamed for their woes; but, as important, there was the hope that voters of right-wing populist parties could be persuaded to defect, if presented with a clear option de fact, if not in name, on the left.\u00a0 They would understand that their problems were not caused by immigrants, but by financialized capitalism.\u00a0 Didier Eribon\u2019s deeply moving memoir, Return to Reims<\/em>, was partly such a success in Europe, because it provided a vivid illustration of this idea: Eribon\u2019s mother used to cast her ballot for the Communists, but in the age of socialists-turned-neoliberals, she protest-votes for a Le Pen.<\/p>\n

On a very basic level, this is an empirical hypothesis: people-talk will mobilize citizens, workers in particular, whereas a reinvigorated leftist language will not.\u00a0 Obviously, one or two elections should not decide the fate of a position of political philosophy, but one can still ask: what have been the results of testing this hypothesis?\u00a0 Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, switched from a very universalist (and traditionally) socialist rhetoric in his 2012 presidential campaign to one centered on \u201cthe people\u201d in the 2017 contest; at rallies, red flags were comprehensively replaced by the Tricolore<\/em>.\u00a0 M\u00e9lenchon ended up doing very well at the polls and almost reached the run-off \u2013 but, as the French sociologist Eric Fassin has pointed out, only around 3 per cent of Front National voters switched to his party.<\/p>\n

The seemingly obvious lesson has been taken on by a number of leftists in other parts of Europe: they have to become even more nationalist in order to make the \u201ctransversal strategy\u201d work.\u00a0 Sarah Wagenknecht, a prominent leader of Germany\u2019s Die Linke, has formed a movement \u201cStand Up!,\u201d which aims not only to unite followers from different left-wing parties \u2013 but also to lure voters away from the far-right Alternative for Germany.\u00a0 The truly distinctive feature of the movement has been its opposition to \u201copen borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is very doubtful that this strategy will work \u2013 in fact, it seems more likely that a stance of at least partly accepting the parameters of right-wing populists will only strengthen the latter.\u00a0 The left has succeeded where it clearly offered alternatives on questions like housing and the regulation of finance, not where it put people-talk first: just think of Jeremy Corbyn or, for that matter, Bernie Sanders.\u00a0 These figures hardly offer \u201csocialism,\u201d but a social democratic brew that can appeal to anyone tired of the taste of Pepsi, Coke, and other, only marginally different neoliberal soft drinks (to stick with Mouffe\u2019s metaphor).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Jan-Werner Mueller Nicol\u00e1s Maduro is losing his grip on power in Venezuela; Podemos, the self-declared left-populist party in Spain, appears to be splitting at the top; Syriza\u2019s popularity is declining.\u00a0 Conservatives in the US and elsewhere are gleefully pointing to… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}