{"id":4600,"date":"2019-02-18T13:28:12","date_gmt":"2019-02-18T18:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=4600"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:28:12","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T18:28:12","slug":"steven-lukes-not-a-populist-but-a-post-truth-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/steven-lukes-not-a-populist-but-a-post-truth-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Lukes | Not a Populist, But A Post-Truth Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Steven Lukes<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is, I agree, a good idea to separate out different meanings of \u2018populism\u2019 in order to open up empirical and historical questions. Here such a question is whether Chantal Mouffe\u2019s proposal to employ \u2018a soft form of strategic discourse of populism on the left\u2019 is a way to \u2018reassemble all those who feel left out, including those who have succumbed to right-wing populist discourse, and to unite them all against the oligarchs, against those in power.\u2019 And if it is feasible, does it offer the best answer to Bernard Harcourt<\/a>\u2019s guiding, overall question \u2018What is to be done?\u2019<\/p>\n

I agree with Bernard that there is a danger in answering such questions by defining populism in such a way as to make bad outcomes look inevitable, especially by \u2018clumping together\u2019 illustrative historical cases. Instead Bernard proposes what he calls a \u2018minimalist descriptive\u2019 definition of \u2018populism\u2019 as \u2018a political technique that appeals to a \u201cwe the people\u201d as opposed to the elite and thus operates as a form of anti-elitism.\u2019 He then asks whether, given this minimalist definition, there is \u2018anything inherently and necessarily authoritarian\u2019 about populism thus defined. I fear that the answer to this question is yes\u2014or at least that in this narrow, \u2018minimalist\u2019 understanding of populism there lurks a danger that the left today should shun.<\/p>\n

For it involves a massive, dichotomous simplification of social realities, dividing \u2018the people,\u2019 on the one hand from \u2018the elite,\u2019 \u2018the oligarchs,\u2019 \u2018those in power,\u2019 on the other. It thereby reproduces a trope as ancient as historical time\u2014as in the rulers and the ruled; the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate; the idle drones and the workers; the dominators and the dominated and so on. It is in full display, of course, in The Communist Manifesto\u00a0<\/em>as the bourgeois and the proletariat, though Marx, Engels and the entire Marxist tradition have ever since complicated the story in all kinds of ways. At various historical conjunctures it has, of course, been highly effective in mobilizing peasants, workers and popular movements of all kinds, but it is important to see that it does so by invoking a sort of Sorelian myth that occludes the complexities of social and political life.<\/p>\n

Chantal Mouffe says that we are living through a \u2018populist moment.\u2019 It is more pertinent, I think, to see that this is, as is often said, a \u2018post-truth\u2019 moment, a time of \u2018truth decay\u2019 in which the radical simplification of an ever more complex social world is everywhere at work. The masters of these developments are on the political right. Recall, just to mention one example, Rush Limbaugh, who in 2009 told his mass audience:<\/p>\n

We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that\u2019s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes even overlap.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chantal Mouffe, of course, recognizes that there exists, as she puts it, a \u2018multiplicity of struggles against different forms of domination\u2019 and proposes the establishment of a \u2018chain of equivalence among the manifold struggles against subordination\u2019 as a \u2018left populist strategy\u2019 that \u2018resonates with the aspirations of many people.\u2019 But what resonates often does not do so harmoniously and such \u2018chains of equivalence\u2019 have to be forged in the face of often conflicting demands and interests. These need to be addressed and understood in all their complexity. It may not be good strategy to propagate the idea that class exploitation and discrimination can be united with \u2018feminism, the gay movement, the anti-racist struggles and issues around the environment\u2019 against a common source of oppression characterized as \u2018the elite.\u2019 And by attributing all these ills to \u2018the oligarchs\u2019 and \u2018those in power\u2019 it fails to focus on what is systemic and structural.<\/p>\n

Chantal Mouffe made a valuable point in distinguishing \u2018adversaries\u2019 from \u2018enemies\u2019, proposing that the former should be struggled against politically. But this doesn\u2019t require collapsing them into a single unified bloc. The left at its best has always been committed to supporting and furthering truth-tracking practices in science, journalism, public administration and the law, and in accepting and inculcating the findings of social science. It should not now, in response to the flagrant myth-making from the right engage in making its own contribution to truth decay. If the point is to change the world, we really do need to get the interpretation right.<\/p>\n

Addendum<\/h1>\n

One such myth is the widely held idea that our societies are ever more \u2018polarized.\u2019 What the evidence shows is that what has massively grown is\u00a0party sorting<\/em>. The term \u2018polarization\u2019 can refer to at least three different processes that need to be distinguished: the clustering of people\u2019s opinions about policies and issues around poles at great or increasing distance from one another; party sorting, in which issue and policy preferences become aligned with partisanship seen as a social identity, generating intense emotions and heightened antagonism; and third, ideological unity–the alignment of people\u2019s policy preferences or opinions along a single dimension rather being cross-cutting. The evidence only supports the second of these\u2014partisan sorting. Sorted parties primarily please a minority\u2014the political class of active partisans. Most people would prefer to divide their votes across different issues, were it possible (and most people are becoming more liberal on so-called moral issues). The empirical truth is that polarization names a superficial political fact rather than a deep social fact, but the misperception that it is true is real with real consequences, namely increasing antagonism and distrust, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n

Talk of polarization involves a massive reduction of complexity and leads to stereotyping, from which it is all too easy to slip into the rhetoric of people living in different worlds in what Foucault called \u2018regimes of truth\u2019 and from there to a Schmittian vision of fixed, irreconcilable opponents each with their own truths\u2014a vision of epistemic symmetry. Practically and politically this argues not only against treating adversaries as enemies. It is also a reason not to reify\u00a0<\/em>them even as adversaries, for, once we do that we fail to see potential areas of engagement and transformation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Steven Lukes It is, I agree, a good idea to separate out different meanings of \u2018populism\u2019 in order to open up empirical and historical questions. Here such a question is whether Chantal Mouffe\u2019s proposal to employ \u2018a soft form… 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":[38974],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-9-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600","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=4600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}