Reconsidering Authoritarian Statism and Authoritarian Populism Today

• In Event: Rethinking Power, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy

Abstract

The contemporary emergence of populist, anti-elite movements has often been seen as a direct response to the neoliberal policies pursued by liberal-democratic, capitalist states since the 1990s. While these analyses are correct in diagnosing the symbiotic relationship between populism and neoliberalism, this paper suggests that these explanations need to be supplemented by an account of the constitutive role played by populism in the emergence of neoliberalism. To do so, it focuses on how the transformation of the welfare state on the threshold of the neoliberal era in the late 1970s was understood by Nicos Poulantzas as “authoritarian statism” and by Stuart Hall as “authoritarian populism.” For Poulantzas, authoritarian statism was characterized by the expansion of executive power, the insulation of state institutions from democratic oversight and control, and state encroachment on the fundamental components of democratic citizenship, including individual rights and liberties. Hall further developed this account to explain the rise of the Thatcher and Reagan coalitions, which he argued effectively fused a discourse of resentment against the welfare state and the ideology of the free market with popular support for a racialized coercive state apparatus. By reexamining this historical moment, this paper argues that contemporary populisms’ fusion of anti-elite and xenophobic discourses are neither pure expressions of racial out-group hostility nor of economic anxiety in the face of the disembedding logic of neoliberalism. Rather, they are complex hegemonic articulations that have their roots in a decades-long process, combining a decline in democratic institutions, the racialization of capitalist economies, and new forms of political representation encouraging the identification of the “true people” with a charismatic authority. This makes modern populism not simply a response to neoliberalism, but its historical contemporary and correlate.

Author

• Rafael Khachaturian, University of Pennsylvania