Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

It has been more than ten years since the first signs indicating the contemporary (re)emergence of left populism were observed: the proto-populist movements of “the squares” such as the Indignados in Spain, Aganaktismenoi in Greece, the Occupy Movement in the United States, and the various uprisings of “the Arab Spring.” A variety of political formations succeeded them, channeling their energy onto electoral representation with mixed results—such as SYRIZA in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain, the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour party in the United Kingdom, the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the United States, but also the comeback of left populism in the Latin American continent. The whole experience seems to have resulted in evident skepticism in left-wing circles about the effectiveness of “populism” as a political strategy for the left.

In this context, the rise and fall of SYRIZA, and in particular its failure to materialize its economic promise to cancel a Eurozone-enforced austerity, became emblematic of the supposed end of “the populist moment.” The American left magazine Jacobin, for example, recently dedicated a whole issue to left populism. The dominant (skeptic) strand of authors maintained that “[s]hort-lived and cruel, Europe's experiment in left populism had ground to a halt” (Jäger, 2019a, p. 127). As Jäger concludes, the left had “bet the house on populism – and lost” (Jäger, 2019a, p. 124). The solution put forward for the left that experimented with the temptation of populism seems to involve a return to its original socialist values (Sunkara, 2019). Skepticism about populism is indeed prevalent in left academic and political circles. The “left critique” of left populism seems to be grounded on the hypothesis that more “class politics” and less “populist politics” is the answer for a successful future trajectory for the contemporary left. Populism is often perceived as a form of left reformism that contaminated at some point an originary class-based purity and for this reason is (necessarily) bound to fail (Seferiades, 2020; Sotiris, 2019).

To tackle these questions, our starting hypothesis is that a re-emerging nostalgia of unmediated class purity may be of little help here. Arguments according to which left populism fails because it contaminates left purity seem to reoccupy an essentialist and reductionist terrain, ultimately misrecognizing the articulatory (impure) character of political formations and collective subjects. Such is the link established between populism (form) and the left (ideological and policy content). A link established, in fact, very long ago, well before Laclau and Mouffe, on the basis of registering the failure and gradually abandoning a prior logic of necessity. Arguably, a rigorous evaluation of left populism cannot be exclusively limited to an assessment of this

With the electoral victories of authoritarian populists in a range of parliamentary democracies in recent years, there has been a growing unease with the ability of existing democratic institutions to keep such authoritarian threats under control. The election of authoritarian leaning figures in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and the United States has led many to doubt the capacity of the institutions of parliamentary democracy to protect themselves against democratic backsliding. This perceived inability for democratic self-defense has led to a resurgence of academic interest in the idea of militant democracy in recent years (Abts & Rummens, 2010; Cappocia, 2013; Kaltwasser, 2019; Kirshner, 2014; Malkopoulou & Kirshner, 2019; Müller, 2012; Sajo, 2012).

The concept of militant democracy was originally coined by the German-Jewish émigré and constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein, who in two articles in APSR in 1937 sought to develop ways in which representative democracies could respond to the emergence of fascism. Loewenstein's argument was that free and equal political elections could open the path for a fascist dismantling of representative democracy via democratic means. Consequently, democracy had to become militant and safeguard itself by compromising with its foundational principles of freedom and equality by prohibiting extreme political parties and by curtailing the political rights of extremists (Loewenstein, 1937a, 1937b). As such, it is not difficult to see why contemporary scholars want to revive Loewenstein's idea of militant democracy as a response to populism. The main threat to present-day democracies, many argue, does not stem from revolutionary movements, which seek to subvert democracy through insurrection (Runciman, 2018, pp. 2–3; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 5–6), but rather from the gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions by elected political leaders.

Contemporary political leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States, Victor Orban in Hungary, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, and Vladimir Putin in Russia have all ascended to power via more or less legitimate electoral channels and have—to a varying degree—centralized power, dissolved institutional checks and balances, and rolled back political rights. Moreover, contemporary populists display an antipluralist, anti-institutional, and authoritarian interpretation of popular sovereignty, insofar as many populist leaders claim to be the true representative of the people, denying the political legitimacy of political opposition and constitutional limits to the executive (Finchelstein, 2017; Müller, 2016a; Rummens, 2017)¹. Although militant