Populism, Glory, and Democratic Politics

• In Event: Populist Movements and Paradoxes of Membership

Abstract

At the very end of his work on glory, Giorgio Agamben asserts that “the holistic state, founded on the immediate presence of the acclaiming people, and the neutralized state that resolves itself in the communicative forms without subject, are opposed only in appearance. They are nothing but two sides of the same glorious apparatus in its two forms: the immediate and subjective glory of the acclaiming people and the mediatic and objective glory of social communication” (2011, 258). Agamben uses glory—understood as the place where a reconciliation of the tensions between immanent trinity and economic trinity, being and praxis, government and kingdom, is attempted—to show, contra Erik Peterson’s resolute denial of a Christian political theology, that the providential theological apparatus pushes theology back into politics and vice versa, in an inescapable cycle.
Some contemporary democracies seem to be under the spell of this model of “glorious politics.” New populisms have thus arisen in the United States, Mexico, and other countries, on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Populist leaders tend to lean on popular acclamation much more than in a healthy public sphere, where an informed, tolerant dialogue flows from the citizenry to the government. Interestingly, the move towards glorious politics coincides with Carl Schmitt’s emphasis on decisionism and the primacy of a sovereign capable of deciding on the exception, that is, extralegally. Citizens appear tired of democratic politics, either because they find themselves so detached from their representatives, or because they find the latter too corrupted to be able to function properly. On their part, populist leaders seem weary of institutional procedures, which sometimes slow down the desired pace of change or reform, or they simply oppose the leader’s will. Agamben’s glorious (or “doxological”) politics correctly explains the shortcut whereby the people and its leader come together or, at least, create the illusion of proximity through acclamation. Notwithstanding the relevance of this thesis for populism, it is not clear that, as Agamben affirms, public opinion performs in democracy the same function acclamatory politics does in populism.
In this work I attempt to show, first, that the current democratic crisis resembles that of the 1920-1930s, both in terms of a crisis of liberalism and of the embracement of nondemocratic politics. Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism as a reaction against both the concept of sovereignty developed by Bodin and Hobbes and the personalist element of decision is a good approximation to understand the contemporary disillusionment with liberalism and the reaction against it. Second, I claim that while Agamben’s doxological politics is a useful theoretical tool to understand contemporary populism, it nonetheless misunderstands the nature of democracy and distorts the function of the public sphere and public opinion. This confusion can be traced back to his erroneous revitalization of the theologico-political paradigm. Against Agamben, we must insist that Peterson’s closure of political theology offers the best possible approximation to the relationship between the political and the theological in Western, secular democracies. Finally, I contend, against both Agamben and Schmitt, that the nature of democracy, in general, and of public opinion, in particular, is not based on acclamation nor glory, but in what Tocqueville describe as mores, which themselves reconceptualize the theologico-political paradigm both in a secular and a democratic way. According to Tocqueville, mores regulate the access of religion in democracy, functioning as a salutary check for liberalism, the pathology of which (what he calls “individualism”) weakens social cohesion.

Author

• Juan Pablo Aranda Vargas, Universidad Popular Autonoma del Estado de Puebla