JACQUES RANCIÈRE
A day does not go by when one does not hear denounced in Europe the risk of populism. For all that, it is not easy to grasp exactly what this word means. In Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s it served to designate a certain mode of government, establishing between a people and its leader a relationship of direct embodiment, passing over and above the forms of parliamentary representation. This mode of government for which Vargas of Brazil and Perón of Argentina were the archetypes was rechristened “twenty-first-century socialism” by Hugo Chávez. But what in Europe today falls under the name of populism is something else. It is not a mode of government. On the contrary, it is a certain attitude of rejection in relationship to prevailing governmental practices. What is a populist, as defined today by our governmental elites and their ideologues? Through all the word’s vacillations, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it by three essential traits: a style of speaking that addresses itself directly to the people, going beyond its representatives and notables; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with their own interests than the state; an identitary rhetoric that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.
It is clear nevertheless that these three traits are not necessarily linked. An entity called the people exists that is the source of power and the recognized interlocutor in political discourse: that is what our constitutions assert, and it is the conviction that republican and socialist orators of the past deployed without reservation. It is tied to no form of racist sentiment or xenophobia whatsoever. Our politicians think more about their own careers than the future of their citizens, and our governments live in symbiosis with the representatives of large financial interests: it takes no demagogue to proclaim that. The same newspapers that denounce “populist” leanings provide us with the most detailed evidence of it day after day. On their side, the heads of the government and the state sometimes accused of populism, like Berlusconi or Sarkozy, are very careful not to spread the “populist” idea that the elite are corrupt. The term “populism” does not serve to characterize a defined political force. On the contrary, it benefits from the amalgams that it allows between political forces that range from the extreme right to the radical left. It does not designate an ideology or even a coherent political style. It serves simply to draw the image of a certain people.
Because “the people” does not exist. What exist are diverse or even antagonistic figures of the people, figures constructed by privileging certain modes of assembling, certain distinctive traits, certain capacities or incapacities: an ethnic people defined by the community of land or blood; a vigilant herding people by good pastureland; a democratic people putting to use the skills of those who have no particular skills; an ignorant people that the oligarchs keep at a distance; and so on. The notion of populism itself constructs a people characterized by the formidable alloy of a capacity—the brute force of great number—and an incapacity—the ignorance attributed to that same great number. The third trait, racism, is essential for this construction. It is a matter of showing the democrats, always suspected of having their heads in the clouds, what is in truth the broad mass of people: a pack possessed by a primary drive of rejection that is aimed simultaneously at the rulers whom it declares traitors, lacking an understanding of the complexity of political mechanisms, and at the foreigners whom it fears through an atavistic attachment to a way of life threatened by demographic, economic, and social change. The notion of populism effects at the least cost this synthesis between a people hostile to those governing and a people enemy to “others” in general. To do so it must again present an image of the people developed at the end of the nineteenth century by thinkers like Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon, frightened by the Commune of Paris and the rise of the workers’ movement: the one of ignorant masses impressed by the resonant words of the “agitators” and led to extreme violence by the circulation of uncontrolled rumors and contagious fears.
These epidemic outbreaks by the blind masses led by charismatic leaders were clearly very far from the reality of the workers’ movement that they aimed at stigmatizing. But they are not any more appropriate for describing the reality of racism in our societies. Whatever the grievances expressed daily regarding those called immigrants, and especially the “suburban youth,” they are not expressed in popular mass demonstrations. What earns the name of racism today in our country is essentially the conjunction of two things. First of all there are the forms of discrimination in employment and housing that are practiced perfectly in sterile offices, away from any mass pressure. Then there is a whole panoply of state measures: restricted entry to the country; refusal to give papers to those who have worked, participated, and paid taxes in France for years; restrictions on the right of birthplace; double penalty; laws against the foulard and burqa; imposed numbers of border escorts; breaking up nomadic camps. Some good souls on the left like to see these measures as an unfortunate concession made by those in power to the extreme “populist” right for “electioneering” reasons. But none of them were taken under pressure from mass movements. They are part of a strategy belonging to the state, belonging to the balance that our states go to great lengths to maintain between free circulation of capital and constraints on the free circulation of populations. Their essential goal is indeed to jeopardize a part of the population with regard to its rights to work and to citizenship, to put together a population of workers who can always be sent back home and of French who have no guarantee of remaining French.
These measures are supported by an ideological campaign, justifying this reduction of rights by the evidence of nonadherence to the traits characterizing national identity. But it is not the “populists” of the National Front that unleashed this campaign. It is the intellectuals of the so-called left who came up with the infallible argument: those people are not truly French since they are not secular. The secularism that not so long ago defined the state’s rules of conduct has thus become a quality that individuals possess, or that they lack by reason of their belonging to a community. Marine Le Pen’s recent “slip” regarding those Muslims at prayer occupying our streets like the Germans between 1940 and 1944 is instructive in this respect. It really only condenses into a concrete image a discursive sequence (Muslim = Islamist = Nazi) that is present almost everywhere in so-called republican prose. The so-called populist extreme right does not express a specific xenophobic passion emanating from the depths of the body popular; it is a satellite that profits from the strategies of the state and the distinguished intellectual campaigns. Our states base their legitimacy today on their ability to ensure security. But this legitimization has as its correlate the obligation to show at every moment the monster that threatens us, to maintain the continual feeling of an insecurity that mixes the risks of economic crisis and unemployment with those of black ice and formamide so that it can all culminate in the supreme threat of the Islamist terrorist. The extreme right only has to fill in the colors of skin and blood on the standard portrait drawn by governmental measures and ideological prose.
That is why neither the “populists” nor the people represented by the ritual denunciations of populism truly correspond to their definition. But that hardly matters to those who raise its specter. Beyond the polemics on immigrants, communitarianism, or Islam, their essential goal is to merge the very idea of a democratic people with the image of the dangerous masses. It is to draw the conclusion that we must leave matters up to those who govern us and that any contestation of their legitimacy and their integrity is the open door to totalitarianism. “Better a banana republic than a fascist France” was one of the most grim anti-Le Pen slogans of April 2002. The current campaign on the mortal dangers of populism aims to justify in theory the idea that we have no other choice.