Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory

6. Populism and the Rebellious Cultures of Democracy

179 6 Populism and the Rebellious Cultures of Democracy Laura Grattan It is clear that varied methods of social control fashioned in industrial societies have, over time, become sufficiently pervasive that a gradual erosion of democratic aspirations among whole populations has taken place. —Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment Like the American Dream itself, ever present and never fully realized, populism lives too deeply in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but without it, we are lost. —Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion A quick snapshot of populist politics in twenty-first-century America reveals an off-beat cast: Christian fundamentalists, vigilante border patrollers, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, broad-based community organizers, May Day immigration reform ralliers, grassroots ecopopulists, Occupy Wall Street, and more. Populism in the United States has always attracted this cacophony of voices and styles of expression. In the wake of the “conservative capture” of populism during the Nixon and Reagan eras, and given its increasing ubiquity as a mainstream buzzword of politicians and pundits, it is understandable that many democratic theorists and prac- 180 Laura Grattan titioners are eager to abandon populism to right-wing demagogues and megamedia spin doctors.1 Indeed, populism’s most visible and vociferous energies have seemed dedicated in recent years to shoring up the boundaries of the body politic and often to reinforcing hegemonic forms of capitalist, state, and social power that narrow the horizons of democracy. And yet radical democratic actors—from grassroots revolutionaries to insurgent farmers and laborers to agitators for the New Deal, civil rights, and the New Left—have turned to the language and practices of populism to cultivate more rebellious aspirations to power. These experiments in radical democratic populism have enacted the people and democracy in ways that open both to contest and redefinition and have created spaces for new visions and practices of democracy to emerge. This essay participates in a history of contested efforts to narrate populism by reflecting on debates in contemporary democratic theories of populism and on the resurgence of populist politics in the United States. To say, with Michael Kazin, that populism “lives deeply in our fears and expectations”2 is to acknowledge America’s ambivalence about a style of political rhetoric and practice that intensifies collective identification around competing visions of political life, arousing the people on behalf of projects that alternately create openings in or foreclose on the horizons of democracy. Yet Kazin is right in two senses that we—inheritors of America’s contested populist tradition, but also democratic theorists and actors in other contexts —are lost without ongoing efforts to evaluate populism’s resources for democratization. Democracy cannot live without populism, first, because populism elevates modern democracy’s legitimating ideal of popular sovereignty, the notion that the people are the fundamental source of power and authority in democratic politics. Popular sovereignty is an endangered ideal today. It is assailed on the one side by neoliberal political cultures that breed passive forms of citizenship and support technocratic states and on the other by critics who worry that modern democracy, in confusing popular power with sovereign power, implicates exclusionary peoples in projects of mastery .3 Yet, in calling for the return of power to the people, populist moments emerge from and repeatedly shed light on an insoluble paradox internal to democracy: the fact that “the people” is indeterminate—that is, never at one with itself. Jason Frank characterizes this familiar paradox of democratic peoplehood by contending that the people are always “at once a constituent and a constituted power.”4 They are both constituted by an existing order—its Populism and the Rebellious Cultures of Democracy 181 laws, institutions, and discourses—and capable of emerging, at times from the margins of recognized speech and action, to withdraw their authority from that order or to authorize new rules of the game. Democracy today faces severe threats of foreclosure, in part, because nominally democratic peoples, including many populisms, do reinforce the de-democratizing modes of power that constitute them. But in light of this ever-present danger, the inherent instability of the people enables—indeed, demands—persistent efforts to narrate and enact more rebellious visions of populism again and again as part of radical democratic struggles to reconstitute the terms of collective identification and democratic politics. In the United States, populism has been at the...