Our Disillusionment in People? A Modified Radicalist Perspective on Populism and a Gramscian Question

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. The Sociology of Populist Movements

Abstract

This article advocates a radicalist perspective among three strands in populism literature. I reject the liberalist (e.g., Urbinati 2014) credo over-emphasizing aspects of inherent ‘justice’ in the state institutions and minimalist (e.g., Mudde 2004) one based on narrow definition of actors in the populist politics. I argue that the radicalist credo is the ‘only’ relevant perspective since it takes historically formulated power dynamics and popular discontents into account. In this context, I put forward a constructive critique against the most prominent scholars in the radicalist circle –Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe– especially in terms of their particular way of reading Antonio Gramsci. They propose to reshuffle the Hegemony, featuring ascendant movements of popular political force, to achieve their credo of ‘radical democracy’. However 1) popular-symbols (i.e., “empty signifier”) are rather pretentious clamor, since popular-solidarity (i.e., “equivalential chain”) with the symbols cannot attain the full social totality and any political actor can issue them; and 2) further contrary to the radical democracy credo, the symbols intensify social cleavages especially when they are ascendant and intertwined with partisan politics. Subsequently, I suggest a modified radicalist perspective based on the critique. To show a better utility of radicalist perspective over liberalist and minimalist perspectives, I tentatively demonstrate a comparative historical analysis on right-wing ‘popular’ subjects in 21st-century US and South Korean liberal overturn with a significant popular movement occurred in 2016-2017. Furthermore, this comparison leads to a Gramscian question of ‘War of Position’ versus ‘War of Movement’ as praxis of the permanent revolution.

Author

• Veda Hyunjin Kim, University of Massachusetts-Amherst