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Review of Eric Fassin, Populisme: le grand ressentiment (Textuel, 2017).

Shunned by the White House and the right-wing US media machine, Steve Bannon recently sought to reestablish his image as a political mastermind by embarking on a European speaking tour. If Bannon had begun to suspect that Donald Trump’s presidency was no longer the vanguard of a global far-right turn, at least he could still show his support for the more serious neofascist movements across the Old Continent. And so, Bannon gave speeches on the importance of the Italian xenophobic party La Lega, praised his Brexiteer friend Nigel Farage, and appeared as the surprise guest at the convention of the French Front National. “The populist surge is not over,” he insisted in an interview with the British paper The Spectator, “it’s just beginning.” Bannon is of course not the only one to speak of “populism” in this way. While the most influential voices in the political mainstream paint populism as a danger to the survival of democracy, for others, populism is the key to democracy’s future. This latter narrative has obvious appeal to far-right figures like Bannon: far-right populists can often seem to be the most democratic political choice precisely because so many in the elite center decry them as an existential threat. And as Anton Jaeger has observed, though many of these right-wing movements never embraced democratic values in the past, the very use of the term “populism” against them has helped them reinvent themselves as champions of “the people.” Despite the word’s association with the worst elements of the Right, some on the Left have also embraced populism as the wave of the future — none more articulately or more consistently than the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Since the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, she and her late husband Ernesto Laclau have argued that the contemporary center-left has lost its way. Even as the neoliberal turn was just beginning to take hold — eroding social protections, creating a pauperized and precarious workforce, and enriching a narrow oligarchy — Mouffe castigated Third Way social liberals like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton for adopting a politics of “consensus” that failed to give people a voice for their discontent. As the social destruction of neoliberalism intensified over the years, Mouffe has argued that “de-politicized” center-left parties have failed to provide a forceful alternative. As a result, Mouffe believes that we are currently in the midst of a crisis in which political institutions no longer appear adequate to voice popular demands — a crisis to which “populism” is the only solution. Mouffe’s notion of populism is drawn from her understanding of democracy as a realm of conflict, in which adversarial groups struggle against one another for hegemonic control of the political terrain. Democratic politics is not about consensus, but about asserting an “us” against a “them.” Mouffe claims that the Right has long understood this, so the Left has to get with the program if it is to have a future. But for Mouffe and the European movements that have claimed her as an inspiration — including Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and France Insoumise in France — left populism is more than a necessity for survival. If the Left can succeed in building movements that speak in terms of “the people,” against the oligarchy or the 1 percent, she is confident that it can not only defeat the racist and xenophobic populisms of the far right, but create a new political order beyond neoliberalism.

The Passions and the Interests Mouffe’s arguments have not gone unchallenged on the Left. In the first round of last year’s election in France, one of Mouffe’s frequent interlocutors, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise, came within two percentage points of edging out the Right and far-right to face Emmanuel Macron in the final round of the vote. But in the final weeks of that campaign, the French sociologist Eric Fassin penned a short but incisive pamphlet urging the Left to reject the populist strategy Mélenchon had embraced. As the subtitle of Fassin’s book suggests, he believes that populism is, essentially an expression of “resentment,” and therefore a phenomenon of the Right that has no place in the Left’s struggle against neoliberalism and racism. “There are two sorts of cholesterol, good and bad,” Fassin quips, “but for the left, there is no such thing as good populism.” Fassin shares much of Mouffe’s interpretation of the democratic crisis brought about by decades of neoliberal de-politicization (though his preferred authority writing in English on the matter is Wendy Brown). He also takes no issue with the idea of democratic politics as essentially confrontational. His rejection of left-wing populism is nonetheless an unmistakable critique of the practical implications of Mouffe and Laclau’s theory. Fassin is no more sympathetic to the recent legacy of mainstream social-democratic parties than Mouffe is — an earlier pamphlet of his blasted the French Parti Socialiste for its rightward turn under François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls. But he believes that Mouffe’s account forgets that neoliberalism was the creation not of “social liberals” like Blair and Clinton (or Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron), but rather of the “authoritarian populists” Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Historically speaking, he writes, populism is “a weapon in the service of neoliberalism, not against it.” Fassin’s charge is not that today’s left populists are secret Thatcherites, nor even necessarily that their actions will lay the groundwork for further neoliberal or right-wing gains. Rather, he believes that the political strategy Mouffe advocates is premised on a hopeless attempt to win a certain type of right-wing voter over to the Left. Many contemporary populist movements — including those on the Left — present themselves as attempts to transcend the division between left and right. They could hardly do otherwise, since populism seeks to recast the terms of political struggle as a “vertical” opposition between the powerful and “the people,” a category that cannot plausibly be limited to the traditional bases of left or right parties, whether defined in ideological or sociological terms. Mouffe and her allies, then, are not only seeking to criticize the traditional institutions of the Left for being out of touch with the people. They aim to build an entirely new social base for the Left, one that is independent of existing parties, unions, and associations, and that includes all those impoverished and alienated from politics after decades of neoliberalism. Among these ranks of the disaffected, Mouffe and the politicians close to her claim to find many who have supported populist movements of the Right. Though a great many far-right voters are sincere racists, xenophobes, or neofascists, left populists generally believe that it’s both possible and necessary to provide an alternate, anti-racist expression for the anger these people feel. Since unlike right populism, left populism understands the real sources of this anger — that is, neoliberalism and its consequences — it claims that its message will ultimately prove more powerful to those who otherwise would vote for the likes of Trump, Farage, and Le Pen. Fassin contends that this element of left populist thinking is not only empirically false, but also politically quixotic. He argues that the common view of Donald Trump’s supporters as Americans “left behind” by neoliberal globalization is a fiction. The typical Trump voter was not an unemployed factory worker, but rather a middle- or upper-middle-class white man. But even were it factually true that far-right voters were expressing a rejection of neoliberalism — which Fassin acknowledges is closer to reality in the case of the Brexit vote — he believes there is a structural flaw in the left populist strategy to win them over. Like Mouffe and Laclau, he believes that it’s essential to take into account the role of passions and emotions in politics. The passions he identifies behind the support for far-right movements, however, are fundamentally irreconcilable with those of the Left, populist or not. The far right is motivated by what Fassin calls “resentment” — in other words, “the idea that there are others enjoying what is mine, [and that] if I am not enjoying it, this is because of them.” For those who see the world in terms of resentment, he continues, the expression of “impotent rage” against these undeserving others constitutes its own form of “enjoyment.” For Fassin, this feeling of resentment is a defining feature of the contemporary world. To a large extent, it has resulted from the creation of relatively privileged classes in economic terms who nonetheless lack what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.” Members of these classes — depicted brilliantly by the novelist Michel Houellebecq in his numerous white male protagonists — feel a profound insecurity, which produces a violent emotional response. They come to hate both highly educated liberals for parading their cultural elitism and progressive values in their faces, and the underprivileged classes that these “woke” elites appear to care about more than them. It is no mere historical accident, then, that populism played a key role in the construction of neoliberalism under the right-wing governments of the 1980s. As a political rhetoric and praxis, populism is inherently cultural, Fassin explains, which has made it an ideal tool for right-wingers from Reagan and Thatcher to Trump. The Right’s primary intention over the last four or so decades has been to mobilize the white middle classes for the benefit of the neoliberal elite, and cultural populism made it possible to present this effort as a defense of “the people” against decadent liberals and the black and brown underclasses. Fassin therefore dismisses the left populist idea that there is a base of far-right supporters whose anger can be diverted from racist populist movements to egalitarian ones. There is no subconscious desire for economic justice underneath a vote for Donald Trump or the Front National, only resentment towards perceived cultural superiors and racial inferiors. For Fassin, populism simply is resentment. Leftists can dress their ideas in populist rhetoric all they want — they can, for example, personalize their critique of neoliberalism by denouncing members of “the oligarchy” and their cultural worldview. But Fassin insists that to the extent that the Left chooses to go this route, it sacrifices properly leftist ideas and methods for a rhetoric of cultural warfare that originated on the far right, but can never satisfy the resentments and insecurities the far right feeds on.