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  • Populism Revived:Donald Trump and the Latin American Leftist Populists
  • Carlos De La Torre

The twenty-first century could well become known as the populist century. No longer confined to Latin America or to the margins of European politics, populism has spread to Africa, Asia, and, with Donald Trump's election, to the cradle of liberal democracy.1 Even though it is uncertain what impact Trump's populism will have on American democracy, it is worth learning from Latin America, where populists have been in power from the 1930s and 1940s to the present. Even as Latin American populists like Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez included the poor and the nonwhite in the political community, they moved toward authoritarianism by undermining democracy from within. Are the foundations of American democracy and the institutions of civil society strong enough to resist US president Donald Trump's right-wing populism?

This lecture compares recent left-wing populist experiences in Latin American history with the more recent history of the Tea Party and Trump's right-wing populism in the United States. I make my argument in four parts. The first looks at how scholars have interpreted the relationship between populism and democracy in Latin America and the United States. The second section compares populist ruptures in the Americas generally with the more recent populist breakaway of the United States. Whereas Latin American left-wing populist ruptured the neoliberal order and the rule of traditional political parties, Trump promised to break down the neoliberal multicultural consensus of the elites of the Republican and Democratic parties. I then explore different constructions of the "the people," and analyze how "the people" is performed [End Page 733] to create solidarity among followers while elevating a politician as their savior. The fourth part analyzes the experiences of Latin American populists in power to speculate about the future of democracy under Trump.

Populism, Democracy, and Authoritarianism

Writing after the traumas of fascism, the first round of historians and social scientists of modern populism were suspicious of the democratic credentials of mass movements that based their legitimacy in appeals to the people. Notions of crisis, of the irrational responses of the masses to stress, and manipulation in conditions of anomie were at the center of social scientific and historical scholarship. Analyzing McCarthyism, the sociologist Talcott Parsons wrote, "It is a generalization well established in social sciences that neither individuals nor societies can undergo major structural changes without the likelihood of producing a considerable element of 'irrational' behavior."2 The expected responses to the stress produced by major structural transformations were anxiety, aggression focused on what was felt to be the source of strain, and a desire to reestablish a fantasy in which everything would be all right—preferably as it was before the disturbing situation arose.

Going contrary to the prevailing view of the US populist movement of the 1890s as progressive and democratizing, historian Richard Hofstadter showed its ambiguities. He argued that populists "aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with strong moral convictions and with the choice of hatred as a kind of creed."3 Populists imagined the populace as innocent, productive, and victimized by predatory elites. This view of politics, he claimed, "assumed a delusive simplicity."4 Populists held a Manichean and conspiratorial outlook that attributed "demonic qualities to their foes."5 Populism was the result of an agrarian crisis, and the "expression of a transitional stage" in the history of agrarian capitalism.6 Populists aimed to restore a golden age. The base of support of populism, wrote Hofstadter, were "those who have attained only a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel [End Page 734] themselves completely deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power."7

Nonetheless, Hofstadter asserted that the Populist movement and party, "for all its zany fringes, was not an unambiguous forerunner of modern authoritarian movements."8 He traced the reappearance of the paranoid style in American politics to McCarthyism, and other forms of crank "pseudo-conservatism."9 This opinion...

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