W(h)ither the Left?
by Scott Nelson
7 July 2019
For a Left Populism
by Chantal Mouffe
Verso, 112 pp., $17.95
On 25 June, I attended an event hosted by the International Institute for Peace (IIP), Vienna, where the political theorist Chantal Mouffe had been invited to talk about the future of the left. Her remarks mainly echoed what can already be found in her latest publication, For a Left Populism, which is a quick and enjoyable read, and so I will confine my remarks to saying a word or two about her book and the type of leftist politics she would like to see emerge.
At the heart of the book, and it would seem her entire philosophy since her first major work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (co-authored with Ernesto Laclau), is the idea that socialist and social-democratic parties have an inadequate idea of politics and that “to intervene in the hegemonic crisis, it is necessary to establish a political frontier and that left populism, understood as a discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’, constitutes, in the present conjuncture, the type of politics needed to recover and deepen democracy.” (Introduction. All citations are from For a Left Populism unless otherwise indicated.)
There is a lot to unpack in that mission statement. To begin with, the idea of politics held by socialist and social-democratic parties is flawed in two major ways, according to Mouffe. It operates within the neoliberal framework and believes it can achieve its aims through consensus. Concerning neoliberalism, the problem is that left-wing parties have bought into the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, and thus we find ourselves in a “post-democracy” – the end of history, if you will – where different projects of society no longer confront each other. Our time is characterized by the tension between two traditions: political liberalism (rule of law, separation of powers, defence of individual freedom) and the democratic tradition (equality and popular sovereignty). On the one hand, the democratic logic of creating a people and defending egalitarianism is necessary to define the demos and also curb the liberal tendency to abstract universalism. On the other hand, the liberal logic is needed to challenge forms of exclusion that are inherent to democracy. At this point though, democracy has come to mean little more than free elections and the defence of human rights, while liberalism has been reduced to economic liberalism and the defence of the free market. Anyone opposed to this order of neoliberal globalization is characterized as an extremist or a populist.
Calling out the neoliberal order is important to Mouffe because of the second flaw that she identifies in social-democratic parties: they aim to reach consensus and mistakenly believe that politics is possible without an adversary or opposition. That politics is inherently conflictual is what Mouffe has called her “agonistic” view of politics, a view for which she cites an impressive lineage of thinkers including Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Max Weber. Agonistic, however, does not mean antagonistic. One’s political opponents should be regarded not as evil but rather as rivals competing in the same arena. This dispassionate view of politics, allowing and in fact advocating disagreement and (presumably non-violent) conflict, lends her prose a detached and calculating quality. The rise of the right is not a cause for indignant moral outrage; it is an opportunity for the left to define and position itself strategically in order to take power. She argues the left’s attitude toward the right has led themselves to be strategically crippled:
Classifying right-wing populist parties as ‘extreme-right’ or ‘neofascist’ and attributing their appeal to lack of education is of course especially convenient for the forces of the centre-left. It is an easy way to disqualify them, without recognizing the centre-left’s own responsibility in such an emergence. By establishing a ‘moral’ frontier so as to exclude the ‘extremists’ from the democratic debate, the ‘good democrats’ believe that they can stop the rise of ‘irrational’ passions. Such a strategy of demonization of the ‘enemies’ of the bipartisan consensus can be morally comforting, but it is politically disempowering.
For a Left Populism, Ch. 1
As politics is not a moral purity contest, Mouffe is able to be quite candid about the strategic errors of the left. Echoing The Once and Future Liberal, written by a leftist, Mark Lilla, who is as critical of his own side as Mouffe is, she argues that the left will need to go beyond protest movements and actually engage with political institutions in order to achieve real results.
It is refreshing that Mouffe does not feel the need to characterize her adversaries – be they the right-wing populists or the neoliberals – as somehow unprogressive, or that history is moving backwards as a result of them. Gone from her prose is the Hegelian notion, still to be found at times in leftist discourse, that history is moving in a particular direction and that if it is moving in any direction other than left, it is moving backwards. While there is mention made of some of the issues dear to progressives, such as support for marginalized groups, the environment, and human rights, these are not the focus of attention.
What is to be done then? As mentioned earlier, the task is no less than “to intervene in the hegemonic crisis”, to seize this moment when so many people on both the left and the right doubt the promises of the neoliberal way of life, and change the discourse to something that will allow us to deepen democracy. The language, referring to hegemony, is intentionally Gramscian and is rooted in what Mouffe calls her “anti-essentialism”, which basically means that social groupings, such as class, do not exist in and of themselves. They are instead created by intellectuals, political representatives, etc. The goal is to create a conception of “the people” in terms broad enough to encompass the various disparate groups that have been oppressed by neoliberalism and pit them against “the oligarchy” (presumably the defenders of the neoliberal order). This will in turn unseat the neoliberal hegemonic order and replace it with a way of thinking and being that is more democratic and egalitarian.
In Mouffe’s eyes, Margaret Thatcher offers an example of how this could be done. Thatcher took advantage of the crisis of the previous hegemonic order of social-democracy, when labour and capital were united, to reframe the discourse in neoliberal terms. Mouffe quotes Stuart Hall who says that “‘Thatcherite populism…combines the resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism – with the aggressive themes of a revived neoliberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism.’” (Ch. 2). Because social-democracy in Britain had been imposed in a very bureaucratic and statist manner – as the saying went, ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’ – Thatcher could argue that she was offering the people freedom from the oppressive bureaucracy and overbearing unions, notably after the 1978-79 ‘Winter of Discontent’. Drawing on the work of F. A. Hayek, Thatcher gave preference to liberty over equality and coupled political and economic liberty, insisting that one could not enjoy political liberty without private property, free markets, and the like. She upheld the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a political order, but conceived of it in such a way that it was bound to neoliberalism as a socio-economic order.
Mouffe argues that the left should also sustain the liberal democratic political order, but attach it to a different socio-economic order. As she notes: “Clearly articulating democracy with equal rights, social appropriation of the means of production and popular sovereignty will command a very different politics and inform different socioeconomic practices than when democracy was articulated with the free market, private property and unfettered individualism.” (Ch. 3). This approach would distinguish her variety of leftist politics from that of the pure reformists and social democrats, who support liberal democracy but have also bought into the neoliberal order, as well as the revolutionaries, who desire a total rupture of the existing sociopolitical order. In fact, Mouffe is of the opinion that revolutionary Marxism has impeded the radicalization of democracy because it classifies liberal democracy as the superstructure of capitalism, thereby implying that the two go together. Mouffe would prefer to argue that political liberalism does not necessarily entail economic liberalism.
What remains is how she intends to construct and mobilize “the people” against those in power. This is the core of Mouffe’s populism, which is neither an ideology nor a programme nor a political regime, but “a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms according to both time and place, and is compatible with a variety of institutional frameworks.” (Ch. 1). With this rather broad and permissive definition, Mouffe makes some proposals that are dear even to thinkers on the right. She suggests moving away from the liberal understanding of citizenship, where it is seen as a legal status and the citizen is the individual bearer of rights, to a more democratic understanding of citizenship, where it means active involvement in the political community as a part of a “we”, with a view to securing the general interest. It just so happens that the idea of the first-person plural, the “we”, is a fundamental component of Sir Roger Scruton’s conservative political philosophy as well. Where their two understandings of “we” differ is in whether they believe this first-person plural to be constructed or given. For Scruton “the people” are already there, with all of their mores and customs and traditions and prejudices. They are pre-political. By contrast, Mouffe’s anti-essentialism permits her to argue that the people, the “we”, can be constructed. There is some truth to this: intellectuals and representatives can shape various groups’ demands and argue as if they constituted a unified people. An example of this is Bernie Sanders, who spends little time talking about specific groups (women vs blacks vs LGBT community, etc.), but the majority of his time speaking as if they were all the same and shared a common foe in Wall Street and the 1%. But is the notion of “we” or the notion of class as fluid as Mouffe’s anti-essentialism would suggest? On this matter she seems open to the same criticism she makes of others on the left:
The fundamental mistake of the ‘extreme left’ has always been to ignore this. They do not engage with how people are in reality, but with how they should be according to their theories. As a result, they see their role as making them realise the ‘truth’ about their situation. Instead of designating the adversaries in ways that people can identify, they use abstract categories like ‘capitalism’, thereby failing to mobilize the affective dimension necessary to motivate people to act politically. They are in fact insensitive to people’s effective demands. Their anti-capitalist rhetoric does not find any echo in the groups whose interests they pretend to represent. This is why they always remain in marginal positions.
For a Left Populism, Ch. 3
What happens if the “people’s effective demands” are for right-wing populist policies or even policies favourable to neoliberalism? To an extent Mouffe has already anticipated this criticism and responds that left populists should not attribute to right-wing voters the responsibility for the way their demands are articulated. They should instead be brought over to the left by means of a different language and representation of their struggle. (Does this mean they should “realise the ‘truth’ about their situation”? Or does her anti-essentialism imply that there is no truth at all about their situation?) She cites the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party at bringing over Front National and UKIP voters respectively in 2017. As for neoliberalism, it is at times unclear what level of capitalism is permissible in Mouffe’s radical democracy (I have used neoliberalism and capitalism interchangeably here since it does not appear that Mouffe draws any distinction between them either). She is honest about the fact that leftists such as herself are today in the paradoxical position of defending welfare state institutions that they had criticized decades ago for not being radical enough. But does she make the same mistake as her opponents by painting neoliberalism with the same broad brushstrokes that her opponents use to paint populism? There is always the danger that as the left-wing populists steal votes from the right-wing populists the winner ends up being a party that still operates under the neoliberal paradigm. Although citing favourably the example of Jean-Luc Mélenchon pulling votes from Marine Le Pen in 2017, the winner of that election was Emmanuel Macron, whom Mouffe at the IIP event referred to as a “progressive neoliberal”. A hard populist turn on the left could moreover push more moderate social-democrats toward a neoliberal party as well.
For a Left Populism is oddly at its best when it comes to Mouffe’s criticisms of the left; the right and the neoliberals are presumed to be adversaries, but we have no indication of what it is that makes right-wing or neoliberal policies so attractive for some in the first place. Nor, for that matter, do we have a clear idea of what would make left-wing populist ideas appealing, apart from some vague notion that they would bring about more democracy, equality, and social justice. Mouffe’s arguments could lead to a bigger state, leaving her vulnerable to Thatcherite-style attacks against the oppressive bureaucracy (and Mouffe does not touch the fiscal-economic issues of a bigger state). If her views were not to be enforced through the state then they would require the majority of people to believe in them and freely choose to defend them. But then that sidelines the entire political problem that she wishes to solve, for she has not generated the support for radical democracy necessary in order to convince the people. And her emphasis on grassroots participation in politics requires a level of commitment from people that they may not wish to invest. It is true that we want democracy, but it is also true that much of the time we would like to be free from politics. It would have been useful had there been less focus on hegemonic discourses, anti-essentialism, and Thatcherite strategies for taking power, and more arguing for the desirability of more democracy, more social justice, and more equality. The book should have tried to convince us intellectually and emotionally that the goals she is aiming for are inherently superior. It should take seriously the philosophical magnetism of its own ideals. But in order to make this argument Mouffe would have to give up the idea that politics is just a confrontation between hegemonic discourses. Her anti-essentialism prevents her from admitting that these discourses exist because they correspond to something real and concrete, and that they cannot be constructed out of thin air any more than a people can be constructed.
I also find Mouffe’s characterization of our time as one of post-democracy or post-politics to be a bit misleading. She argues that without alternative visions politics has been reduced in our time to the administration of things by experts. Ironically this vision of politics as a technocratic exercise was lauded already in the 19th century by positivists such as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, before Marxism and the great political visions of that century made their reputation. In the 20th century there were several thinkers who criticized the idea of politics as administration of things, including Raymond Aron in the 1930s, Leo Strauss and Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s, and Hannah Arendt in the 1960s, prior to the neoliberal hegemonic discourse, when we were still living under the social-democratic discourse. Perhaps even more ironic is to consider that the emergence of the technocratic vision of politics coincided with the rise of democracy and the egalitarian impulse.
Chantal Mouffe’s work is worth considering particularly for those on the left who find themselves stumped about how to mobilize their people and regain power. Mouffe is level-headed and honest about many of the problems that the left faces. She is right to assert that recovering democracy starts at the level of the nation-state and that this terrain should not be abandoned to the right if the left wishes to remain relevant. Her contention that politics is agonistic enables her to look dispassionately at current political developments. Conflict is a virtue of our liberal democracies, but I do not think that conflict has ever departed the scene. Mouffe sees an extraordinary opportunity in our time for populism, one that has already been seized by populists on the right, using many of the methods that Mouffe supports. With neoliberals and right-wing populists as her adversaries, both of them generally more successful than the left-wing populists, the time may come when Chantal Mouffe might want to acknowledge the other great virtue of liberal democracy: compromise.
