Populism

Although populism constitutes a multimodal phenomenon involving institutional, socio-cultural, and subjective dimensions, most accounts up to now have focused on the study of political institutions (parties, movements, etc.) and ideological orientations. Analyses that purport to take into account subjective dimensions usually remain trapped within the myth of the charismatic personality, the stereotype of the populist strongman, which, in most cases, fails to register in a nuanced way the psychosocial dimensions involved. It also fails to acknowledge in a rigorous way the two-way movement constitutive of identification processes within democratic political systems. In this text, we employ a formal research strategy associated with the discursive approach initiated by Ernesto Laclau – and further developed by a host of other researchers – in order to highlight the psychosocial aspects of populist identifications and mobilizations. This particular approach is highly pertinent because it embraces many psychoanalytic ideas and has been used to stress the relevance of a variety of psychosocial dimensions: (1) the identification/interpellation loop underlying populist phenomena; (2) the centrality of affect and emotion in accounting for the discursive processes and mechanisms involved in the said loop; (3) demand and desire as the starting point of a populist sociopolitical choreography; (4) the negative ontology marking hegemony including populism; (5) charisma as a discursive, transferential mechanism facilitating populist identifications. Furthermore, the populism/anti-populism antithesis seems to inform the psychosocial dynamic underpinning the appeal of such identifications within a mirroring dialectic. The two rhetorics grip subjects through their clash, as identity formations are partly based on difference. Both the idealization of “the people” and the denunciation of populism involve valorization and demonization processes that call for further analysis.