Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Rethinking Populism through the Method of Equality

Sun, May 28, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon F

Abstract

Many have characterized recent political transformations in Europe and the US in terms of the rise of populism. From the insurgence of the National Front in France, the Brexit from the EU, and recent populist presidential campaigns in the US, the liberal democratic order is said to be under threat from xenophobic national populist movements. In the French context, Jacques Rancière has identified three features to the perceived threat of populism: a sytle of speech addressed directly to the people, the belief that ruling elites place their own interests above the public’s, and a fear and rejection of foreigners. Rancière problematizes this dominant discourse of populism’s threat for conflating these three features and for representing the supporters of populist leaders as lacking the capacity to make reasoned political judgements. Rancière has long critiqued such defenses of liberal democratic order that perceive segments of the population as ill equipped to participate in governance. Indeed, Rancière understands democratic politics as the moments when those thought to lack the capacity to rule dispute hierarchical order through staging their equality. This paper draws from Rancière’s thinking, and in particular, what he calls a “method of equality,” to analyze the discourses of populism in the 2016 presidential campaign. In the first section I elaborate the significance of the method of equality for identifying the logics of equality and inequality that circulate in political discourse. I then use the method of equality to analyze references to populism in the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns in the US. I locate the ways in which most representations of populist sentiments were imbued with logics of inequality. For example, frequent references to the populism of the Trump campaign denigrated the uneducated white working class as the source of anti-immigration sentiments, with little attention to the policies that have stagnated wages and depleted manufacturing. Regarding Sanders, political pundits frequently attributed anti-corporate populist sentiments to the naïve dealism of his youthful supporters. I conclude with examples for how the populist political environment precipitated the conditions for the marginalized to invoke equality as a dispute of xenophobia and economic disenfranchisement.

Author