Populism without a People, or the Politics of Proximity

Abstract

There is a tendency to find populist characteristics in all experiences of representation based on personal leaderships which present themselves as outsiders and establish direct communication with the citizenry. This paper seeks to contribute to avoid this conceptual stretching, proposing to start from a concept of a higher level of generality, “immediate politics”, and then differentiate between a populist type and a type that I will call “proximity”. The anti-charismatic or proximity identification is based on the figure of the “ordinary person”, close and empathetic, although without the component of “extraordinary person” implied in charisma, and without the correlate of the construction of a collective subject or People. In short, this paper asks about this kind of “populism without a People” that is also present in contemporary politics.