Representative democracy characterized by popular sovereignty, liberty, and political equality

1 Populism is an imprecise concept that may be rendered as "bringing politics to the people" and "the people to politics". [1] Its intrinsic vagueness is exacerbated by its usage in everyday politics as a label to denote a diffuse negative judgment by the people of the performance of representative democracy, elected politicians and governments. [2] In this article I will present populism as a phenomenon that is parasitical on (because internal to) representative democracy, which is its true and radical target. [3] This rivalry, I argue, does not necessarily produce more democratic politics, although this is populism's claim. As for its phenomenology, populism is a certain political style or set of rhetorical tropes and figures, yet is more than that because it seeks also state power to implement a political agenda whose main and recognizable character is hostility against liberalism and the principles of constitutional democracy, in particular minority rights, division of powers, and party pluralism. Although "we simply do not have anything like a theory of populism", [4] in this article I propose the following generalization from historical experience: a populist movement that succeeds in leading the government of a democratic society tend to move toward institutional forms and a political reorganization of the state that change, and even shatter constitutional democracy, like centralization of power, weakening of checks and balances, disregard of political oppositions, and the transformation of election in a plebiscite of the leader. Populism's polarized view of the political community resonates with the republican tradition in the Roman format, more than it does with democracy. I regard this point as crucial (although not studied) [5] in order to grasp the anti-individualistic meaning of the appeal to the people and the reason of populism's profound antipathy with the individualist foundation of suffrage, pluralism, dissent, minority views, and the dispersion of power, which are characteristics that democratic procedures intrinsically presume and promote. [6]

2The interpretation I advance is inspired by Norberto Bobbio's criticism of populism, Margaret Canovan's interpretation of it as an ideology, and Benjamin Ariditi's analysis of its manifestation in the space of politics. Like Bobbio, I situate populism within representative democracy not simply democracy, and argue that its critical and sometime dramatic questioning of the procedures and institutions of representative and constitutional democracy turns out to be hardly an enrichment of democracy. [7] As with demagoguery for ancient direct democracy, although is not itself a breach of democracy, populism may, if successful, open the door to an exit from democracy. Like Canovan, I take populism to be an ideology of the people that, although in communication with the democratic language, is in sharp contrast with "practical democracy", that is to say the political activity of ordinary citizens. [8] Like Arditi, I read populism as a permanent possibility within representative democracy because it is endogenous to the ideological style of politics that elections feed in promoting the struggle for voting and positions. [9] But before developing my argument, I need to clarify upfront the way in which I use this term in relation to popular movements.

Popular Movements and Populism

3I do not treat populism as the same with "popular movements" or what is "popular". Populism is something else and different, and the characteristics I am going to analyze are meant to show why this is so. As a preview of the distinction between popular movement and populism, it may be helpful to consider the two most recent movements in American politics, Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. The Occupy Wall Street slogan "We are the 99%" fits inside the formal sketch of populist discourse as polarization between the many and the few and contestation of representative institutions (two important components of populism). Yet it does not fit with the populist view of democracy I intend to analyze (and criticize) because is headless and not organized so as to conquer political power at government level. I do realize that empirical political phenomena operate in a shaky terrain and are refractory to generalizations; I do not thus disclaim that some fluidity is possible between popular movement and populism so that clear-cut distinctions may be problematic. However without the presence of a leader or a centralized leadership that seeks control of the majority a popular movement that has a populist rhetoric (i.e. polarization and anti-representative discourse) is not yet populism. The case of the Tea Party proves this by default. This is a movement that has many populist components in its ideology and rhetoric, but lacks a vertical and unified structure which instead, as we shall see, characterizes populism. [10] Yet this lack seems accidental more than premeditated since the Tea Party was and still is in search of a unifying and representative leader able to conquer and change the Republican Party and the country. Unlike Occupy Wall Street thus, since it was born the Tea Party wanted to be more than a movement of protest.

4We may thus say that there is a populist rhetoric yet not populism when the polarizing and anti-representative discourse is made by a social movement that wants to be a constituency independent of elected officials, resist becoming an elected entity, and keep elected officials accountable and under scrutiny: this is the case of a popular movement of contestation and protest like Occupy Wall Street. And there is a populist rhetoric and populism when a movement does not want to be a constituency independent of the elected officials but wants instead to occupy the representative institutions and win the majority in order to model the entire society to its ideology: [11] this is the case of the Tea Party, a movement with a populist project of power.

5Thus I would say that for populism to pass from movement to government it needs an organic polarizing ideology and a leader that wants to transform popular distress and protest in a strategy for mobilizing the masses toward the conquest of the democratic government. Without an organizing narrative and a leadership claiming its people to be the true expression of the people as a whole, a popular movement remains very much what it is: a sacrosanct movement of protest and contestation against a trend in society that betrays some basic democratic principles, and in particular equality. Yet populism is more than populist rhetoric and political protest. Distinction between movement form and government form is thus essential to analyze populism.

6In what follows I acknowledge these two levels and direct my attention to the examination of the characteristics and implications of populism as a conception and a form of power within a representative democracy system. In a democratic society, a popular movement of protest or criticism should not be confused or identified with a populist conception of state power. The former is consistent with the diarchic nature of representative democracy (suffrage as an authoritative power and opinion as indirect power of influencing decisions through a broad network of judgment); the latter deems diarchy an obstacle because it wants to keep the opinion of the people separate from the authoritative power of the institutions. Populism is a project of power whose aspiration is to make the opinion of the majority identical with the authority of the sovereign state, in fact to makes its leaders and elected officials use the state to favor, consolidate and extend their constituency. [12] In this article I will focus on this specific phenomenon.

An Ambiguous Concept?

7Having clarified the limits and the domain in relation to which the term is used, I can pursue in my argument and sketch first of all the historical context within which populism was born because this context has been, and still is, an important variable in evaluating populism. And the distance between European and American scholars in interpreting it is an important example of the persisting ambiguity of its meaning.

8American historian Michael Kazin considers populism a democratic expression of political life that is needed from time to time to rebalance the distribution of political power for the benefit of the majority. Through the vehicle of populism, American citizens "have been able to protest social and economic inequalities without calling the entire system into question". [13] Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote famously in mid-nineteenth century: "March without the people, and you march into the night." [14] Consistently with this maxim, the historians Gordon Wood, Harry S. Stout and Alain Heimert interpreted the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century as the first example of American democratic populism, a "new form of mass communication" thanks to which "people were encouraged ­ even commanded ­ to speak out". [15] Jonathan Edwards's followers, Heimert explained, translated the abstract language of both liberal and republican intellectual elites into their own language, one made up of religious symbols and biblical allegories, against professional theologians and political leaders as well. [16] Populism was born as a denunciation of the newly implemented republic, its intellectuals and representative government. In that early denunciation the basic populist language was de facto coined.

9A powerful allegation of that early form of populism was that democracy (but in fact "popular government" as I shall soon explain) holds an instinctive anti-intellectualist vocation in so far as it rejects linguistic styles and postures that are distant from those that the people share and practice in their everyday life. Intellectualism or indirect language was thus opposed to popular or direct style of expression. The same dualism was applied to politics as a collective action that was made either by indirect means (institutions and procedures) or direct expressions of popular opinions. These dualist couples resurfaced periodically and became the primum movens of populism. The platform of the People's Party of 1892 was forged out of the binary logic opposing the plain language of crop producers to the sophisticate language of the financiers and the politicians. [17] Polarization as a simplification of social pluralism into two broad factions ­ the popolo and the grandi ­ was since its inception the main character of populism, its Roman feature.

10 American history seems also to show that populism, both as political rhetoric and as a political movement, has been seen as a viable form of a collective expression of resentment against the domestic enemies of "the people". Its hidden force was contained in the belief of an alleged purity of the origins of popular government and its adulteration by the artificial complexity of civilization and the sophisticated institutional organization of the state. [18] As the believers in the Great Awakening aimed at an emancipation of religion from the established churches in the name of a religious purity, so the People's Party of late nineteenth century claimed the emancipation of the nation from "money power" (artificial) in the name of property and labor (natural). Directness vs. indirectness paralleled nature vs. artifice, and popular movements vs. institutional politics. When and if politics takes indirect modes it risks becoming anti-popular: in America history, this was, since the beginning of the republic, the basic message of populist ideology, and the reason of its attraction on democrats. It is interesting to notice that populism as a positive movement of elite opposition by the people was born within the ideological and institutional frame of a republic.

11This line of thought deserves to be pursued: in this paper I suggest that populism can be seen as an interpretation of democracy made from within a republican structure and perspective of government and politics. Popular government is its reference point, rather than democracy. The analysis of the work of theorists who support populism, from Ernesto Laclau to John McCormick, confirms this interpretation, with which I will conclude this paper.

12Based on the American experience scholars have proposed to advance the idea that the difference between "good" and "bad" populism is one between a sincere democratic faith and an instrumental faith ­ like a thermometer populism would thus measure the tenor of democracy in a given society. This scheme returns in the work of the most representative scholars of populism, supporters and critics as well. Peter Worsley proposes populism and elitism as the two extreme poles of the continuum of politics, whose democratic tenor is like a pendulum from the former (more democracy) to the latter (less democracy). [19] Margaret Canovan suggests we read populism as "politics of faith" that aims at emending normal politics of its unavoidable skeptical and pragmatic mood. The same insight shapes Ernesto Laclau's interpretation of populist movements in Latin America as processes of hegemonic re-balancing within the power bloc attained through the incorporation of the popular-democratic ideology of the masses. Laclau, perhaps the scholar who has produced the most comprehensive theory of populism, goes further and identifies populism not simply with "political action" or forms of discourse (i.e. an ideological form of political discourse) but with democracy itself because a political action that gives the class of ordinary or working people a central role. Populism seems thus to be a more egalitarian or democratic politics than the one obtained through representative procedures, which is its true and direct adversary. [20]

13Political theorists have thus stressed the role of people's mobilization as a symptom of political discontent with ordinary politics among ordinary citizens, regardless of the outcomes it attains, as characteristic of populism. [21] As Newt Gingrich has said about President Barack Obama and the Democrats, "they are a government of the elite, for the elite and through the elite". [22] Protest against intellectuals, high culture, and college people, attacks against the cosmopolitan "trash" of "fat cats" in the name of "the common sense of the common people" who live by their work and inhabit the narrow space of a village or a neighborhood are the components of an ideology that is everywhere recognizable as populist. [23] This has brought Laclau to declare populism a vivid expression of the democratic imaginary, and moreover a strategy to merge together the various claims, discontents and demands that political parties fragment and filter instead in the moment they provide for the institutional personnel, or occupy the state. [24] Canovan has thus advanced the idea that people's mobilization works as a redemptive force of democracy because its meaning is "bringing politics to the people". [25]

14In sum, according to this consolidate reading, populism belongs in the democratic family not merely because it relies upon speech and opinion ­ which is certainly the case­but more importantly because of its two structural characteristics: polarization (the many versus the few), and the alliance with the democratic side or the many, in fact the incorporation of the vision of largest majority in one collective actor: the people as a collective united against another collective (as the many against the few).

15This reading is not convincing though because polarization makes the ideology of the people less inclusive than democratic citizenship. In populism's ideology, the concept of the people is endogenously sociological and identified with a portion of the people or the many or the less affluent or the lower class. Populism prefigures thus a politics not of inclusion but of exclusion: this is what polarization is for. It is not by chance that "the people" is its sovereign core, not the citizen as in a democracy. Incorporation is not the same as isonomic equality (from the Greek word of isonomia, or equality by law as the condition for political equality or having one's opinion counted as one), so that if equal liberty is what characterizes democracy populism is a poorer not a richer rendering of it.

16This critical diagnosis is confirmed by the European political history after the eighteenth century. Indeed, the extension of American historians' positive judgment to European societies and politics would be hardly defensible. Europe is much a more interesting laboratory of populism, though, because in Europe this phenomenon was able to clear the floor of all ambiguity and unveil its most peculiar potentials and characteristics. This was so because in Europe national or popular unity (a collective whose members were presumed equal, not merely normatively or as juridical persons) was the pillar upon which democracy was constructed. In addition, whereas the United States was a democratic project since its inception (regardless of the intention of its most representative founders, which was not democratic) because it was a political order that was born out of consent, in European countries democracy sprung from within a society in which philosophers and political leaders (intellectuals in the broader sense) tried systematically to stop democratization or tame it by subjecting it to a bureaucratic state and a hierarchical society, in which consent was to be preferably imposed from above or orchestrated. The political experience of continental Europe shows two things: that populism was born in the representative and constitutional age, and that its role was devastating for constitutional democracy.

17Napoleon was the first leader to "manufacture" consent through public opinion, to use the means of opinion formation and propaganda that his society offered to mobilize the people on his behalf, with an increasing number of printed materials and political clubs. [26] Napoleon, facing the opposition of the public (the presses and the acculturated few) to his imperial ambitions and politics of reconciliation with Catholic clergy, excited people's anti-elite sentiments to condemn intellectuals as "ideologues" and "doctrinaires". [27] Napoleon's demagogic strategy has been recurrent in Europe. Just to focus on the Italian case (which is far from unique), Benito Mussolini exploited post-WWI economic distress of the middle class and the impoverishment of the already poor in order to polarize political life and transform Italy's liberal government in a mass regime against the political minorities. Although he never suspended the constitutional charter of the liberal state, Mussolini created a populist regime that made regular appeals to the people and used propaganda to mobilize the many and mold their opinions, while repressing pluralism and the opposition. [28] As for recent history, new versions of populism have been exemplified in Italy by the secessionist movement led by the Northern League and Silvio Berlusconi's Caesarist politics. Their main rhetorical strategy consists once again in portraying their respective movements as a "true" alternative to both the existing political parties and parliamentary democracy. They attack parliamentary politics as elitist and anti-democratic because of its distance from common people's opinion. Moreover, they make a systematic use of propaganda ­ and in some cases own half of the national television stations and printing industry ­ in order to create a uniform way of thinking and talking in public. New populists exploit doxa and seem to be able to make it their creation rather than the citizens'. [29]

18To end this brief parallel between American and European experiences of populism, I would argue that European populism, in its recurrent resurrections, has more ordinarily followed right-wing kinds of politics, or a politics that did not aim at implementing the promises of constitutional democracy but disfigured them instead. However, populist forms of mobilization can occur, and in Europe have recently occurred, also within the left-wing part of political opinion. All in all, although the symptom of a malaise in representative democracy and economics, and although its regular appeal to more popular politics, populism represents a contestation of constitutional politics, and constitutional democracy in particular, and the politics of rights it entails. [30]

19This allows me to advance the following comment on the ambiguity and vagueness of the term: although populism has not acquired the status of an uncontroversial clarity, it is not a neutral political phenomenon. Any attempt to treat it as such clashes with the bare fact that it is a radical contestation of representative and parliamentary politics in the name of direct or collective affirmation of the will of the people, wherein this will is not assessed through certain criteria but declared by some charismatic orators or leaders. The opinion of a mass of people comes to be identified with the will of the people, outside procedures and institutions that detect and regulate the assessment of that will. Populists presume that the voice of the people is identical with that of a large majority and of the leader who impersonates it.

A Radical Critique of Representative Democracy

20Populism is to representative democracy what demagoguery was to direct democracy: internal to it and parasitical on it. The parallel between ancient and modern forms of democracy is important to increase our clarity on the populist phenomenon. According to Aristotle's pivotal analysis, demagoguery within democracy is: a) a permanent possibility insofar as it relies upon the public use of speech and opinion; b) a more intense use of the principle of the majority so as to make it almost absolute or a form of power more than a method for making decisions (populism is the rule of the majority rather than a politics that uses majority rule); and c) a waiting room for a possible tyrannical regime. As Benjamin Arditi wrote aptly, populism flourishes as a fellow traveler of democracy, as a radical form of democratic action in times of social strife and economic duress; its outcome may be risky to democracy. The relationship of populism with democracy is thus an issue of contention rather than compatibility.

21These observations suggest we add a further characteristic to populism, namely that it is not a revolutionary movement because it does not create people's sovereignty but intervenes once people's sovereignty exists and its values and rules are written in a constitution. [31] Populism represents an appeal to the people in a political order in which the people is formally already the sovereign. It would be wrong thus to employ it in order to describe a democratic revolution ­ the French and the American revolutions were not populist although could not exist without people's mobilization. Populism does not create democracy. To resume Aristotle's distinction between a people leader and a demagogue, while Solon and Cleisthenes were "leaders of the people" because helped the Athenians to acquire political liberty, Pisistratus was a "bad" leader or a demagogue because in acting from within an existing democracy he subverted it. [32] Populism can be seen as a movement that expresses the ambition of a new leader to quickly get into power without waiting for political temporality that democratic procedures regulate. It grows inside an existing democracy and questions the way in which it works yet with no certainty it will make it more democratic.

22Yet although historical and political context is an important variable, populism is more than a historically contingent phenomenon; it pertains to the interpretation of democracy itself. Both the character and the practice of populism underline, and more or less consciously derive from, a vision of democracy that can become deeply inimical to political liberty insofar as it defers the political dialectics among citizens and groups, revokes the mediation of political institutions, and maintains an organic notion of the body politic that is allergic to minorities and rights. The ideology of populism displaces equality for unity, and thus opposes social and political pluralism. Its extreme consequence is to transform a political community in a corporate-like entity, where class and ideological differences are denied and mastered in the attempt to fulfill the myth of a comprehensive totality of state and society. Hence, in spite of its vociferous antagonism against the existing political order and the elite, populism, when acquires state power, has a deeply statist vocation; it is impatient with government by discussion because it longs for limitless decisionism, which the ideology of the people legitimizes. [33]

Polarization, Caesarism, and the Populus

23We may say thus that populism denotes a way of being of a political movement or a party that is characterized by a recognizable set of ideas: a) the exaltation of the sovereignty of the people as a condition for a politics of sincerity or transparency or purity against the quotidian practice of compromise and bargaining that politicians pursue; b) the appeal to, or affirmation of the correctness and even the right of the majority against any minority, political or otherwise (in Europe, populism feeds strong discriminatory ideologies against cultural, gender, religious and linguistic minorities); c) the idea that politics entails oppositional identity or the construction of a "we" against a "them"; and d) the sanctification of the unity and homogeneity of the people versus any parts of it.

24Populism treats pluralism of interests and ideas as litigious claims that should be simplified so as to create a polarized scenario that makes the people immediately know how to judge and with whom to side. Simplification and polarization are in the view of achieving a deeper unification of the masses against the existing elites and under an organic narrative that most of the time a leader embodies. Populism can hardly be conceived without a politics of personality. Hence, I would propose to identify it with two intertwined political processes: one that goes toward polarization of the citizenry in two organic classes (the many and the few), and the other that goes toward a verticalization of the political system. Polarization and Caesarism go hand in hand and both of them constitute a radical challenge to representative democracy.

25Populists do actually acknowledge political conflict since, following Carl Schmitt, [34] they conceive politics in bipolar terms, as an arena in which friends and enemies clash. But they regard conflict as a means for or a cathartic moment in the creation of a thorough unification of the people. Populism thus prizes polarization more than pluralism. Indeed, it uses political conflict and electoral procedures for the sake of an overwhelming victory and as instrumental to the mobilization of one part of the people against the other, in view of making the winner the catalyst of the many fractions or parties, whose endless litigiousness­it is thought­weakens social unity. Populism holds the multi-party system in great suspicion; hence, it is a denial of electoral representation, which is the main institution or set of institutions through which procedural democracy is implemented. [35] It depicts and theorizes democracy as hegemonic conflict for the domination of the popular sentiment and opinion over its components. In Robert Dahl's words, it gives the demos "total" and "final control" over the political order, which means empirically the control of the majority. [36]

26This unifying project makes politics into a work of simplification that narrows the possibility of a space of communication open to all equally insofar as it does not belong to anybody. Although Laclau claims that the populist occupation of the place of power is "partial" or never complete, the impression one has is that its impartiality and incompleteness are more a limit that the human practice of consent formation cannot avoid or overcome than a normative principle. Populism makes opinion public in the sense that it makes it belong only to one public.

27The author who foresaw better the populist risk contained within the government of opinion (namely representative democracy) was Claude Lefort, who not by chance ended up by describing totalitarianism in the attempt to grasp the extreme implication of a project that, while opposing pluralism, aims at materializing the sovereign collective as if it were a homogenous actor. Lefort described this process as "condensation... between the sphere of power, the sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge". [37] Populism produces concentration of power and does so in the attempt to resolve the "paradox of politics" [38] which is "determining who constitutes the people". [39] Thus whereas the proceduralist approach leaves this question always open, populism wants to close it, or, as Laclau argued in correcting Lefort's idea that while proceduralization of politics makes the place of power in democracies empty, populism wants to fill out that empty space by turning politics in the production of the emptiness through an hegemonic work of ideological realignment of social forces.

28Populism's goal consists in emptying the place of power in order to reoccupy it. [40] This entails eroding the symbolic domain and substituting it with the materiality of power. In other words, it entails that the conflicts of interests and between classes take place no longer in the language of institutions and procedures, but as the direct expression of social power that makes the state its instrument. From the recognition that the symbolic framework of power is that which sustains a political regime, populism deduces its mission, which consists in occupying and conquering that symbolic framework. From pluralism of opinions to the production of a dominant narrative: this is the main task of a political process whose goal is to merge the plurality of publics that constitutes what we call public opinion in a democratic society.

29Populism competes with representative democracy on the meaning and practice of representation since it aims at a more genuine identification between the represented and the representatives. It does so by making representation essentially a process of people's unification, not also one of advocacy and the expression of citizens' opinions and interests. Populism regards representation as a strategy for the constitution of the political order above the society and through the expulsion of social interests from politics, hence also conflicts. As Schmitt claimed, thus giving populism an important argument, representation is political insofar as it repels the liberal calls of control, monitoring and the relationship between society and politics and narrows the distance between the elected leader and the electors by incorporating society within the state. Caesarism is thus its destiny.

30People unification versus pluralism is the structural trope in modern populism as it was in ancient demagoguery. We need just to mention Schmitt's argument in favor of presidentialism against parliamentarianism. The latter, Schmitt explained, is an assemblage of elected who represent interests, parties and social classes, while the "President is elected by the entire German people". In the latter case only elections are a strategy for unity rather than disunity and representation is truly a visual reproduction of the entire nation at the symbolic and institutional level, not the expression of some portions of it or a strategy for social interests' infiltration in the state. The President embodied Schmitt's Catholic vision of representation as making visible (through the pope) the invisible divinity who was in his mind the People. Clearly, since representation was a synthesis of identity and the presence of the sovereign, party pluralism and parliamentary competition were anathema to Schmitt, a mortal sin in his political theology because the equivalent of religious schism. "The President, by contrast [to the fragmentation of parliamentary grouping] has the confidence of the entire people not mediated by the medium of a parliament splintered into parties. This confidence, rather, is directly united in his person." [41] According to populist democracy, representative institutions have essentially an instrumental value. It is the people directly ­ but in fact its majority­that legitimizes institutions with no other mediation than its actual and expressive will. "Against the will of the people", wrote Schmitt, "especially an institution based on discussion by independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence". [42] Populism denies autonomy to political institutions, but in particular to the legislative branch; for this reason it has a strong anti-parliamentary vocation. [43] This brings us once again to Caesarism, a category we should briefly explore.

31Laclau revives Schmitt's main themes in his theory of populist democracy. Aware of the problem of Caesarism and the dictatorial leadership, he argues that although it may take personalist forms and sometimes has been even identified with the name of a leader (Mussolini, Peron, Chavez), it is not personalization that qualifies populist politics. What qualifies it instead is the kind of thought it puts in motion: "through dichotomies such as the people versus the oligarchy, toiling masses versus exploiters, and so on". [44] Populism would thus be not simply "political action" but a democratic kind of political action because it gives the working class or the poor or the ordinary people central stage in the forum. Populism is the same as politics and moreover the same as a more egalitarian or democratic politics. Thus if personalization is in play, Laclau infers, this is not what makes populist politics what it is; identification of the movement under a leader is a means that populist politics may find convenient in order to make polarization succeed. Yet amending personalization with polarization does not help making populism the same as democratic politics as we have seen above, not even when coupled with Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

32Laclau relays on Gramsci's notion of ideology as a unifying narrative for collective identity constitution. But Gramsci was explicit in bringing to the floor the risks that the politics of hegemony contains. He thought for instance that unless it was anchored on a party organization with a collective leadership and entrenched in a conception of history and social progress that did not leave any interpreter the liberty of making it into a rhetorical tool of persuasion, hegemonic politics would be dangerously prone to become a vehicle for a reactionary Caesarism that uses populism to make itself victorious. In his Notes on Machiavelli, in which he analysis the two forms Caesarism can take, Gramsci revised classical Marxist doctrine in which all forms of government figured de facto as dictatorship of the dominant class. Gramsci's articulation of Caesarism is an interesting reformulation of Aristotle's analysis of the emergence of demagogical leadership.

33Gramsci reinterpreted Marx's category of Bonapartism so as to make sense of a progressive function of leader politics (i.e. the case of Caesar and Napoleon I) in a revolutionary scenario. Given a social deadlock or "catastrophic equilibrium" (equilibrio catastrofico) [45] which prepared for a revolution, a Caesarist leader could play a progressive role when his victory unintentionally helped the victory of the progressive force, while at the same time striking a compromise with the regressive force. The outcome, Gramsci thought, could be the exit from a "catastrophic equilibrium" that would open a political scenario that might help the progressive force to fulfill its agenda in the future. [46] As Benedetto Fontana acutely observes, Gramsci's method is dyadic or shaped by antinomy, as for instance civil society as opposite of political society, consent as opposite of coercion and hegemony opposite of violent revolution but also dictatorial or coercive power. [47] In Gramsci's work, thus, Caesarism was primed to break out in a revolutionary situation, not a situation that he defined as "war of position", in which not Caesarism but hegemony would be needed to advance a gradual social and political change. To transplant Gramsci's reflection on Caesarism ("war of movement" or revolution), which does not need the politics of hegemony because the social situation is already ripe for change, into a situation in which gradual or molecular change ("war of position") is needed is wrong: where the politics of hegemony is in place, Caesarism is out of place and vice versa (although in moments of crisis, a party leader in a parliamentary system can succeed in unifying a large coalition under his representative figure). [48]

34 We can at this point appreciate the sense of linking populism to the republican as Roman vision of politics and government. Populists think that beyond politics made of electoral campaigns, organization, ideological platforms, representatives, and publicly debated issues, there is a substance called "the People" which is made­in the words of Jeffrey Edward Green­of "the mass of ordinary, non-office-holding citizens taken in their collective capacity", and consisting in a spectatorial participation similar in kind to the populace in Rome's contio. [49] It is Laclau himself who confirms, quite appropriately, populism's genealogy in the Roman tradition when he writes that "the people" as a political category envisions the return of the populus, and in particular, the populus of the Roman Forum, not of the voting assemblies. [50] What was the people of the Roman Forum and the contio, and how different was it from the people of the comitia?

35The populus in the forum was an audience in a reactive relationship with political leaders, who performed before the crowd to seek support to their power plans. It was not the people in the moment of voting, or when the citizens gathered to speak by means and through voting procedures so as to give promulgation to the proposals coming from the Senate. The populus in the forum was made of citizens who gathered at their please and acted outside the institutions and procedures because they were not meant to decide; it consisted of the Roman citizens (mostly those who resided in the city of Rome) or visitors and travellers coming from far away, people who spent some of their daily time in the forum in order to attend to the show performed by political candidates and rhetoricians. It was not the people in the function of decision making, but the people in the act of cheering or booing those who competed for a political post or tried to conquer people's support for their cause. Opposite to that populist gathering was the Senate, whose building was located at the end of the forum so as to physically mark the other pole of sovereignty. Contrary to the people, the Senate was always structured and a visible body and place, and its members did not mix with the crowd in the forum. As two distinct components of the republic, their visibility was essential to the political life of the Roman state, which did not acknowledge individuals or isotes like Athenian democracy, but cives who acted always within one of the two predetermined groups. [51] This dualistic and polarized paradigm was an essential feature of both the Roman style of politics and republicanism through the centuries: non-institutionalized people en mass versus institutionalized magistrates; the organized few versus the crowded many; inclusion within polarized institutional domains versus an equal chance to participate in the process of political decision or compete for magistracies. [52]

36To populist theorists too society is made of two parts, and this is the reason they are skeptical toward the idea of political equality. Indeed, they accuse a notion of democracy that is based on the Bill of Rights and the procedural model of doing a poor job in expressing people's power because constitutionalism presumes something that does not actually exist in society: a polity made of equal individual citizens, whereas society is made of poor or ordinary and the few rich or powerful. [53] The norm, it seems, must follow facticity rather than amend or regulate it: this is the rational of populism.

37Comparison with the populus of the Forum allows us to complete the understanding of populism as a system of power, not simply a popular movement. Now, because populist politics disdains procedures and considers the crowd rather than a regulated assembly as the site of popular power, its most congenial method of selection seems to be the investiture of the leader, rather than election. Indeed its expressive language is acclamation more than discussion; hence the overlapping of populism with plebiscitarianism. A populist leader is not properly elected, it is acclaimed. Consequently, Schmitt (who followed the Roman tradition in a very distinctive way) forcefully wrote that the "will of the people" is the same whether it is expressed in the ballot or by acclamation, "[e]verything depends on how the will of the people is formed".

38Populism blurs the constitutional and representative democracy because it opposes the idea that the authoritative will and the informal opinion are and ought to remain two different forms of legitimacy that should never be identified and confused. Thus Schmitt, after he claimed that everything depends on the people, added promptly that "the will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken from granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, that through the statistical apparatus" of voting counting. [54] This serves to justify the strong reservation I suggest on the democratic character of populism.

Conclusion

39The impossibility of considering populism a political system or regime of its own has brought scholars to conclude that precisely because the "populist `dimension'" is "neither democratic nor anti-democratic", it can be compatible with democracy insofar as it serves to make sure that the rights of the majority are not "ignored". [55] Yet, if populism can play a democratizing role by mobilizing the excluded majority to criticize the existent forms of political representation and to demand further participation and better forms of representation, it can have negative effects on democracy because its criticism translates into plebiscitarian forms of participation, the paradox being that the people end up by playing more the role of an audience than of a political actor. [56] In effect, as Norberto Bobbio and Pierre Rosanvallon argued convincingly, populism is the most devastating corruption of democracy because it radically overturns representative institutions (notably elections and party pluralism) and transforms the negative power of judgment or opinion from one that controls and monitors politically elected leaders to one that rejects their electoral legitimacy in the name of a deeper unity between the leaders and the people; it opposes ideological legitimacy against the constitutional and procedural one. [57] Thus, despite the democratic intention of reversing the passivity of ordinary citizens, populist mobilization does not deliver what it promises. When an audience populist leader declares to be the true representative of people's will beyond and outside the electoral mandate, he puts in motion the destructive power of judgment and calls into question not simply a bad or corrupt performance of state institutions but electoral politics itself, its advocacy character. From this point of view, populism is a way for new elites to acquire power quickly, without waiting for increasing popularity through times and electoral competitions; in its strategy for power, the people play mostly the role of being just an instrument for support, like the plebs in the declining years of the Roman republic. The attainment of strong authority by an elite seems to be the hidden logic of the rhetoric of the masses, in spite of the populists' appeal to the common people as the true protagonist of politics.