The Specter of Populism - Transcript

Introduction

Oliver Marchart [01:13] - [01:19] Everybody is talking about populism because populism is always there.

Kolja Möller [01:22] - [01:28] Populism is a form of politics which revolves around the distinction between the people and the elite.

Jan-Werner Müller [01:32] - [01:37] In a sense, it's a sign of lazy thinking that we just use this als if it was the obvious explanation.

Faisal Devji [01:42] - [01:47] It suggests that there is no longer a national consensus possible.

Chantal Mouffe [01:54] - [02:02] A politics that is going to advance the struggle for liberty and equality today is left populism.

Jodi Dean [02:05] - [02:13] Populism can never be emancipatory because it takes the people as given rather than recognizing that politics has to be built and constructed.

William Mazzarella [02:20] - [02:26] Populism is the place where we feel anxious about the charisma of popular sovereignty.

1- Populism is...

William Mazzarella [02:35] - [03:31] Well, I think populism involves necessarily the mobilization in unpredictable ways of the energies that dwell within a collective. Because you're activating energies that don't necessarily have pre-given forms, it's also hard to know what political outcomes that will entail. The term populism contains both that moment of radical indeterminacy and its closure. That's the paradox at the heart of the notion of populism. On the one hand, it's the opening. It's the sense that there is a potentiality here, an opening, something that can be actualized and that resides in this collective that we call the people, whatever we want to make of that term. But on the other hand, it's also the closing down of that and the making of a claim in the name of a particular ethnos, a particular culture, a particular identity.

Chantal Mouffe [03:31] - [04:07] Populism is basically something that distinguishes between a people who are pure and a corrupted elite. The people from below and the people from above. In Jan Werner-Müller, we find a version of that version, too. There are others who are speaking more at a style of politics. There is a lot of discussion about populism among political theories and social science in general, I would say. Well, the understanding that I find useful, it's a way to construct the political frontier.

Oliver Marchart [04:08] - [05:03] Many definitions come down to defining populism as a relation between the people on the one hand and the elite on the other. In my view, that's not really enough. I think what you have to understand is that populism is a political strategy of mobilizing the dominated against the ruling block. It's not just anybody who comes under the term of the people. It is basically the people as the dominated. But this only works as a legitimate political strategy because in democracy, in what I would call in front of the democratic horizon, to call the people as the ruling rather than the dominated subject is perfectly legitimate, it is basically what democracy is about.

Jodi Dean [05:03] - [05:50] What are people who are talking about populism ultimately talking about? They're imagining something that's not there rather than saying OK, we're going to build a politics of the left, and we think that this politics of the left needs to center on economic problems, issues of policing, issues of racism, and issues of migration. That makes sense as a political statement that people can organize around. To say that organizing around that is populist has not really added anything. One of the things that I find deeply strange about the supposition that populism even makes sense as a political category is that it posits an imaginary unity of the people at a time of extreme fragmentation.

Faisal Devji [05:50] - [06:23] And it's this fragmentation that, I suspect, allows for the emergence of populism in the form of instrumentalization vested in the figure of an autocrat or authoritarian personality who in his own person, and it generally is a him, gets to represent the people that no longer exists. What you have is the impossibility of the people and its displacement in the figure of the leader, with the political party actually being attenuated more and more.

2- Right Populism?

Kolja Möller [06:42] - [07:31] Authoritarian populism does not stick only to the distinction between the people and the elite. It somehow inverses this contestatory dimension of populism. And also identifies other groups like outsiders, migrants, other vulnerable social groups as being an even far more or greater threat to the people than the elite at the end of the day. So it's not only directed against the elite but also against other more vulnerable social groups below. And this is, I think, quite an important distinction. Because in authoritarian populism it's not like populism pure but something is going on, an inversion in the political form of populism that is going on in authoritarian populism.

Jan-Werner Müller [07:32] - [08:26] They tell us that they basically make this claim to a moral monopoly of representing the real people. If they do that, if they engage in that kind of anti-pluralism, I think that's always bad news for democracy. That's different from asking the question: why do some citizens vote for them? It's a mistake to assume that all voters of populist parties must themselves be committed to anti-pluralism. That doesn't follow. In many cases, we simply don't know. And the typical liberal response in some quarters has been to make this jump and to say: oh, we are basically dealing with masses of people who are irrational, who must all be racist. No — it's a question of what you do next in terms of trying to address citizens differently.

Jodi Dean [08:26] - [09:49] For the majorities, this kind of extreme capitalism — capitalism without borders, capitalism without boundaries — has not given them better lives. And the authoritarian nationalists are responding to that. I don't want to call the politics that's come about as populist. Because in some ways, it acts as if: oh, everything was fine, and all of a sudden the people don't like it. Come on. What have we had in Europe and the United States in this whole era of global neoliberalism, austerity? And so you hear austerity and yet you see these skyscrapers going up, or this unbelievably luxury housing while most people can barely afford the rent. It's not populist to be opposed to that. That just seems smart. And it just seems unreasonable to think that anybody would like this. And when mainstream parties won't let this kind of anger about the inequality brought about by global capitalism — when they won't let it be expressed — it's going to be expressed somewhere. And the authoritarian nationalists have been the best at expressing this anger in part because they don't challenge the economy in the same way. They build up a nationalist identity as a way to strengthen people rather than saying: OK, we're going to dismantle this version of a competitive economy.

Oliver Marchart [09:49] - [10:23] The right-wing populists are, to a certain degree, neoliberal. I think it's important to understand that they are not only authoritarian, they're not only nationalists, they're not only racist — they're also neoliberal. If you look at their party programs — while they pretend to be on the side of the people — their voters don't read their party programs. They just believe in the rhetoric. And the rhetoric says: we are on the side of the working class. While they are actually — if you read the party programs — they're on the side of capital.

3- Left Populism?

Chantal Mouffe [10:43] - [11:23] For me, the only way to fight against right-wing populism is by developing left populism. It is not by defending the establishment. Because what we are seeing today is that populism is presented by the establishment as necessarily a danger for democracy. The solution can only be a left populist one because the left populist one is the one which is going to address the crisis of post-democracy but address it in a way which is going to further democracy, to deepen democracy.

Oliver Marchart [11:23] - [11:58] I think we will need to define what we understand by "left" because you can have a democratic left, but you can also — and history shows this — a very undemocratic left. Right? So not every movement, not every leader on the left, is necessarily a democrat. Stalin was on the left. Right? When we talk about left populism, then we should perhaps reconsider and perhaps rather talk about radical democratic populism. That, I think, would serve our purposes better.

William Mazzarella [11:58] - [13:10] Just to speak very broadly — unfortunately for someone on the left like me, I have to acknowledge that the left has generally gotten trapped in a kind of pedagogical stance. Whereas the right has been more attuned to the affective dimensions, the aesthetic dimensions, the libidinal dimensions of political life. And that has also been part of the left's frustration with the right — that they see them as making irrational or emotive appeals. But on the other hand, I often also feel that it's the political right who has a more finely tuned sensitivity, shall we say, to the libidinal and affective dimensions of the political. So I think, in some ways — if this isn't too offensive an idea — there's a lot that can be learned from rightist political mobilization and rightist political tactics as long as one dissociates oneself from the conclusions that the right draws from those kinds of attunements.

Jan-Werner Müller [13:11] - [14:21] What I'd be generally very careful with is what I see as a very simplistic account sometimes to be found on the left these days. Which basically comes down to saying — and I know it's a caricature but I think it's not unfaithful to how some people think today — we have right-wing populism on the rise allegedly everywhere and sometimes there's a gesture according to which we have to respond to that with left-wing populism. And we basically just have to explain to these benighted people that the real enemy is of course not the immigrants, migrants, refugees — no, the real enemy is neoliberalism. And once we've done that, we're going to use all that passion and all that energy that is now on the right, and somehow magically shift it over to the left. I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong… but it's usually not truly explained how that works… or how that somehow makes people more passionate or gives you more energy while at the same time you can allegedly stay safely away from the dangers — the perils — of xenophobia, exclusions of certain groups, and so on.

Chantal Mouffe [14:22] - [15:05] The main operation — let's call it like that — of a populist approach is to say that "the people" is always constructed. In the left populist approach, "the people" is always constructed. The construction of what we call in Laclauian social strategy a "chain of equivalence". They are always different, different demands. So it is not only the demands relating with class issues — which are important, they are important — but there are other demands. You need really to construct a collective will — to construct "a people". There needs to be an affective dimension.

Oliver Marchart [15:05] - [15:36] It would be about the democratization of liberal democracy. But of course, democratizing liberal democracy is a hard job. And it is a job which, I think, involves more than one movement of radical democratic populism. It means shifting the very hegemonic terrain on which politics works under current conditions.

Jodi Dean [15:36] - [16:06] Yeah — left populism is a language for people who are afraid to be socialist. Folks — particularly on the left — shouldn't fall for this language that there's left populism… or that populism is something we should think with. We've got better political categories, and we organize around them. We can organize around class, we can organize around issues… and then we build the collectives we need. But let's not pretend that there is some preexisting people who are just ready for us to lead or something.

4- Who are the 'people'?

Faisal Devji [17:08] - [18:44] "The people" is a term that can no longer be uttered — at least not in polite society. The only political parties that use "the people" today tend to be — or are thought of as being — on the right, indeed the far right. Because "the people" often comes across as a homogeneous entity… to be defined by race, or by citizenship as opposed to residence… or by religion or by some other version of uniformity. All we are left with is the perversion of the idea of populism. And I think the experiment to be made in terms of political language and political thought in our time… is to move from the idea of populism to "the people". Is "the people" even… today? I'm not sure it is. I'm thinking, for instance, of Jean Baudrillard's provocation in his text In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities where he talks about how the very attempt to call up "the people" — not in electoral terms, but in terms of opinion polls and surveys and these kinds of technical ways of gathering an opinion outside the political process, but which affect the political process — how that way of calling up "the people" actually seems to result in its ever greater recession.

William Mazzarella [18:45] - [19:35] I think "a people" is a virtual entity. It's a kind of potentiality. We have these notions of the people that are exclusionary or xenophobic or culturalist or historicist or whatever… and those tend to be closed in one way or another. They tend to make a claim to closure, to authenticity, to grounding, to a particular history, to a particular identity. But I think that virtual dimension of the idea of the people is open-ended… but not necessarily always in a liberatory way and not necessarily always in an emancipatory way. We don't know. The point about something potential is we don't know what's going to happen when it actualizes. And I think this is part of the anxiety that clusters around the notion of populism as well. It's the sense — the palpable sense — of being in the presence of a kind of potentiality that is uncertain.

Chantal Mouffe [19:36] - [21:14] "The people" is always a political construction. It's not a sociological category, and it can be constructed in different ways. It depends who you are going to consider are part of the people. There are no identities that exist independently that will have a total coherence in themselves. An identity is always in relation to a difference. For instance, structuralism shows clearly that the idea of a "mother", for instance, doesn't have any consistency in itself. Mother makes sense if you relate that with father, son… It is always in a chain of differences that terms acquire their meaning. So this is a conception which is very different from the idea of essentialist identities… identities that are given in themselves. Identity always implies difference. So in order to have a "we", you need to have a "they". And this is something which it is not possible to overcome. Very often, for instance, in political discussions, people say: "Why do you — why can't we just create a 'we'? Why do we need to have a 'them'?" And I say, "Sorry, but it's impossible, because in order to have a 'we', you need to distinguish it from a 'they'." Of course, it doesn't mean that the "they" is necessarily seen as an enemy to be destroyed.

Jodi Dean [21:14] - [21:55] "The people" is something that we posit after something has happened. So "the people", rather than a cause of politics, or rather than an imaginary substance of politics, is an effect of politics. So when organizers come out and say: "The people united will never be defeated", or: "We are the people and we're going to storm this building"… the people then are an effect of the organizing, an effect of the energy. They're not presupposed by it. And that's an opening to thinking about "the people" in a much more emancipatory way. Because you're not taking them as a given foundation — you're taking them as an always open achievement.

5- How did we come here?

Chantal Mouffe [23:19] - [25:05] For me, basically, populist movements are a reaction against post-democracy. And they say: "No — we are going to give the people the possibility of real alternatives." Today we live in post-democracy because the central idea of democracy is the idea of popular sovereignty… demos — the power of the people. And it's this dimension which has been expelled from the democratic discourse today. So this is one of the aspects of what I call post-democracy. The idea, for instance, that it's not considered important in a democracy that real alternatives be offered to people when they go to an election. Because for me, this is basically what popular sovereignty is about. A good example of that is what was the motto of the Indignados in Spain during their movement. They were saying: "We've got a vote, but we don't have a voice." Because in fact, there's not much difference between centre-right and centre-left. Basically, they offer the same policies. So, yeah — we can vote, but we don't have a voice. Populist movements are saying: "No — there are alternatives, and we are going to give back to the people the power that has been taken from them by the elites."

Oliver Marchart [25:06] - [26:16] The lack of alternatives is one of the biggest problems of what some call post-democracy. On the other hand, other people now say: "But there are alternatives — because you have these right-wing populists, you have an authoritarian alternative." I think the real problem is that we do not have an emancipatory alternative. We do not have a progressive alternative which is strong enough to really shift the hegemonic terrain of liberal democracy — to really democratize democracy. The question is really: Are we really living in post-democracy? Is that really the correct term to describe the state of liberal democracy? And I doubt that, because the question really is: Has democracy — or has liberal democracy — ever been democratic in the first place? To some degree it has, but to some degree it hasn't. And I think the democratic element in liberal democracy is largely exaggerated by liberals.

Jodi Dean [26:17] - [27:19] The left has messed up. So basically, the left sold out in the 20th century. The left stopped defending working-class issues, in part for reasons like: it stopped believing in anything but capitalism. The left started thinking that, yeah — maybe it is true that capitalism is the only game in town. There's been a lot of sort of combination with some liberals under the name of "radical democracy" in a way to have a kinder, gentler capitalism — or capitalism with a human face. Those kinds of strategies for a more inclusive capitalism, a more just capitalism, seemed like they were gonna make a lot of sense — particularly in the '90s and maybe even in the early 2000s. It seemed like it might have made a kind of common sense — there could be some kind of multicultural capitalism that would work for the majority of people. And I think what we've seen in the last 30 years is that's not true.

Kolja Möller [27:22] - [28:02] Populism has a foothold in the political system, so it's the nearest candidate when it comes to contest within the confines of the existing constitutional order. So if you want to politicize unrest, if you want to immediately address these concerns and contest the office holders, populism is the nearest option because it takes part in the political system. You are not forced to invent something new apart from the political system. You can rely on the existing infrastructure — but to the detriment of the existing party structure, sometimes to the detriment of the existing mediation mechanisms and procedures in the political system.

Jan-Werner Müller [28:02] - [28:57] And if you remember, Tony Blair infamously said: "Debating globalization is like debating whether fall should follow summer." There's nothing to say — don't even try to politicize this. I think there's a lot to be said for pushing against this kind of rhetoric and saying: "No — democracy has to look different. Democracy has to offer choices." But that's still very different from saying, "Oh, ideally, everybody now codes every conflict along the lines of: here are the real people, and here are the corrupt elites." These supposedly freestanding triumphs of right-wing nationalist populism — Brexit and Trump — were only possible because very established conservative elite actors basically collaborated with Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

Faisal Devji [28:57] - [29:41] So what we see happening globally is the capture of actually often venerable, solid, strong political parties, and their hollowing out by these individuals with apparently popular or populist support. Now, the former President Trump, of course, is only the most egregious example of such a situation — where he literally grabs the Republican Party in the teeth of strong opposition from the Bush family and from that party's own establishment. It's snatched from their grasp and it's hollowed out, and his own relatives, et cetera, are put in place. But this happens in many other places.

6- What is the role of emotions?

William Mazzarella [30:56] - [31:56] On the whole, leftism — by comparison to the right — has taken up a kind of pedagogical stance, which is basically a kind of Enlightenment understanding of society and politics… which resolves basically into: "We need to research this, and then once we've researched it, we can explain it to you. And once we've explained it to you, you will understand that this is true. And then you will change your life, and you will live accordingly." And liberals are very bad at knowing what to do once they get to the point — when they realize, as they increasingly are — that just explaining something to someone doesn't actually change their attachments, or the things that excite them. People essentially forget — even as they're feeling exalted or excited or wound up — that something bodily is actually going on. And that the capacities of that something bodily are greater, if you like, than the particular ideological program that is being staged in that ritual.

Chantal Mouffe [31:57] - [32:32] The left does not acknowledge that in order to create a collective will, you need to appeal to the people's affects. And this is something that the right — they've got no problem. They mobilize affects. And I think that the left was like, "Oh no, we need to use only rational arguments. We should not enter the field of emotion and passion and affect." But it means that you leave all that field open for the right to intervene.

Jan-Werner Müller [32:33] - [33:16] People are constantly told by a certain part of the media: "You are being disrespected. Your people are not being given recognition." I can't say this with certainty empirically, but I suspect that in many cases people actually do not really experience this kind of disrespect as part of their daily life. It's not true that every day they have an encounter where they say: "Ah, typical bicoastal liberal elites, disrespecting flyover country." But if you watch certain TV shows, you are told this constantly — that you're being disrespected, that people are looking down on you, that your way of life isn't properly recognized in certain ways.

Faisal Devji [33:17] - [34:13] I think social media is interesting because there are two sides to it. At least one, of course, is the fact that it presents to us the illusion of infinite communicability and of participation in debates everywhere and anywhere by all kinds of people, apparently unmediated by any institutions. So it really broadens out political speech — outside institutions, outside political parties, outside electoral contestations. That's one side of it. So it really socializes political debate. The other side, of course, is that all of these social media platforms are also meant to be profit-making platforms that are owned by companies and corporations which often interfere in them — not least through the use of algorithms, which are about making profit, and through advertising. So that's the other side of it.

Kolja Möller [34:13] - [34:41] In former times, there was like a specific sphere in society — the political system — which was connected to certain types of differentiation, of organization, of engaging with other people in order to coordinate political action. And I think that this is over. There is coordination of political action as well in Twitter — but on a quite immediate and short-term level.

Jodi Dean [34:42] - [35:55] When we write a post, or like a tweet or a status update on Facebook, we don't do it — it's not like I'm giving you a message, right? It's like I'm putting it out there for a bunch of other people to see. And what makes that message successful is when other people share it. So this means that my communication is not just about a message that I'm giving to a receiver who will then engage with me — my communication becomes a contribution where the value is determined by how many people share it, see it, like it. Communicative capitalism thrives on people's hot takes, on quick images, on the rapid circulation of contributions — something that people can share quickly, something that gets a little outrage or maybe a laugh. That's what's gonna get popular under communicative capitalism. That's an environment that's really well-suited to populism — 'cause populism doesn't hold up under strong kinds of arguments. It doesn't hold up when you have to really think through something. So a media form that invites outrage and quickness — that's gonna be your breeding ground for populism.

William Mazzarella [35:56] - [37:16] The interesting question is generally not whether someone is for or against something. The interesting question is whether they care about it or not — whether they show up for it, whether in a register of outrage or whether in a register of approval or support. So for me, the question is one of resonance, rather than a question of ethical judgment. And here, I think actually pre-Enlightenment philosophies have a lot to teach us in terms of being attentive to questions of resonance. And I think we're actually still living in that world — except that's not how we understand it, right? We no longer have the tools in our mainstream ways of thinking to understand correspondence, activation, resonance as an everyday feature of social life — even though we're always encountering it. We're encountering it interpersonally, we're encountering it in our relationship to the publicity that's constantly circulating around us and interpolating us and calling out to us — activating us in various ways, whether it's commercial publicity or political publicity. It's always there. That seems to me to be the first place we should look: Is something resonating or is it not? And resonance can mean disgust, it can mean indignation, but it can also mean absorption and excitement.

7- Ontological antagonism

Oliver Marchart [38:32] - [39:40] In political thought, there are — roughly speaking, and with a grain of salt — two paradigms of thinking about politics and the political. One is the dissociative paradigm, and the other one is the associative paradigm. In the associative paradigm — if you think of a political theorist like Hannah Arendt, for instance — politics is about coming together and, in Arendt's words, "acting together" or "acting in concert." So it's based on association. And this association is not in need of having conflict as that which defines the association of people. While on the other hand, in the dissociative view of politics, it is precisely conflict — or dissociation — which comes first and which allows for association. But it is always conflict which is the motivating force for bringing people together. It's not the fact that there is no assembly — but people are brought together through conflict.

Chantal Mouffe [39:40] - [41:10] You think of the political in terms of a dissociative conception. Politics is necessarily the construction of a frontier. And if you accept that, then there are some questions which you can pose. The question is then: How are you going to draw the frontier? And I think this is where it becomes interesting to distinguish the construction of the frontier in a populist way from other forms of conception of the frontier. Because, for instance, liberalism does not accept the idea that there is necessarily a "them." We should always find a way to put everybody in agreement. But if you accept that there is always a frontier, then, of course, you have different ways to construct this frontier. For instance, clearly Marxism does construct a frontier — but it constructs the frontier in terms of capital–labor. That frontier is constructed well. And this is the specificity of my theory, according to the way I understand it, following Laclau: that no, there is no possibility of a final reconciliation. Antagonism is ineliminable. You can't find a way in which you can overcome the contradiction. So the question is basically: how are you going to deal with that?

Faisal Devji [41:10] - [42:18] What we are seeing is what I'm calling a "polite civil war," which is to say the impossibility of a consensus. I don't necessarily mean a kind of violent tearing apart and sundering of a state or of a nation or of a citizenry — but rather the impossibility of manifesting the people. So you see this sort of thing happening repeatedly in country after country where it isn't clear any longer that we have a nation — a people — instead of a situation, effectively, of civil war, which has to be papered over, and we have to pretend that it's not happening. The French philosopher Alain Badiou has said in one of his books that America actually is a long-running civil war. From the very beginning of its union until today, in fact, it is nothing more than a civil war — of which its real Civil War is merely a more explosive manifestation.

Oliver Marchart [42:18] - [43:36] There is no stability because of antagonism. If antagonism is at the ground of the social — if antagonism is both that which, on the ontological level, founds all social affairs, because at the ground of every social identity, of every social relation, there is an original struggle over the definition of that identity — so at the ground of everything we know, our own identities, the democratic institutions, any other institutions — there is always the political, and there is always antagonism, because there is always a power struggle over how it should look like. So the stronger the conflict, the stronger the affect. And we can see that people take to the streets and are very well prepared to risk their own lives for some political cause — which antagonism allows them to do. In the absence of antagonism, in the absence of very strong conflict, they would never risk their lives for the very same political issue or political demand. It is the antagonism which produces these affects.

8- What can we do?

Jodi Dean [44:51] - [45:19] Revolution's on the table. That's the primary thing. I feel Chantal Mouffe's approach takes for granted the continued existence of liberal institutions, when I see that they've already crumbled, and I don't want to take those for granted anymore. We build — we have to build — a revolutionary party. And the revolutionary party — just to be clear — it doesn't make the revolution. It responds to a revolutionary moment, which will inevitably arise.

Chantal Mouffe [45:20] - [45:39] You cannot abolish capitalism. You cannot have a government saying, "I'm going to abolish capitalism." No. I say no — we need to engage with the state. But we need to engage with the state to transform it, to perform a transformation of the relations of power.

Jodi Dean [45:40] - [46:00] If you're taking for granted that our institutions are functional, then, of course, the authoritarian nationalists are going to win — because they don't think they're functional, and nobody thinks they're functional, right? Like, authoritarianism and illiberalism is official policy now in some European countries.

Oliver Marchart [46:00] - [46:44] The idea of, for instance, Jodi Dean's idea of a revolutionary party is a very nice idea, but I'm wondering where this party should come from. So where the historical subject is that would actually fulfill that task — where the proletariat is, the proletarian class. So I can't see that subject on the horizon. I would be on board if I saw it, but I can't see it. So as a political realist, I would say we have to work with the actual political forces that exist.

Kolja Möller [46:45] - [47:25] At the moment, I think it is hard to think about some sort of free-standing political imagination because obviously we have to work it out within this process of mitigating, overcoming the apparent crisis tendency. So it's something like a project — like building the ship at sea. And I see, in dealing with these issues, hopefully we can arrive at a point where there's more coherence in the projects and more like a long-term perspective. But obviously we have to react to them. And this is, to my eyes, also an opportunity for progressive forces in society.

Jan-Werner Müller [47:26] - [48:03] Even non-populists today very often buy into this dualist image of society — elites versus people — as if this were the only plausible description of politics. And there are many others. So I think the real responsibility of non-populist actors, among many other things today, is to find ways of addressing these conflicts — not pretending that this is just a matter of a quick technocratic fix, in the way that sometimes people like to pretend today — but also take special care in how they code and present these conflicts.

Faisal Devji [48:03] - [48:44] Which is why you also see the intensification, through populism, of political acts. Even in formal democracies, where people seem to choose leaders and policies that are against their ostensible self-interest, it is only the leader who serves as a mirror for the people that doesn't otherwise exist and that can no longer manifest itself in terms of voting behavior and all the rest that continue to go through the motions. But in a way, the mirror of leadership is the only site in which it can see itself, because it doesn't otherwise exist.

William Mazzarella [48:45] - [49:31] One of Claude Lefort's famous kind of phrases is that the place of power in a democracy is an empty place. And a lot of democratic theorists have taken that up to mean that in a way the ethics of democracy are premised on a kind of dis-incorporation, of a kind of denial of the body of the people. One of the things that populism does is put that back on the table. And sometimes it puts it back on the table in the form of the kind of unified body of the totalitarian or authoritarian leader. But sometimes it also puts it back on the table in the form of the headless multitude — of the crowd pouring into the square and claiming the space of the political.

Oliver Marchart [49:31] - [50:05] The interesting thing is that this specter of populism reoccurs — all the time. It is very much inscribed into the democratic horizon. So there will always be attempts at reincarnating this empty place — of putting someone there. Not necessarily a totalitarian leader — it's also possible to put the people in its original place — the place of the popular sovereign. This is what populism is about.