Metapopulism in-between democracy and populism: tranformations of Laclau’s concept of populism with Trump and Putin

Abstract

ABSTRACTLaclau introduces three preconditions of populism: the formation of an antagonistic frontier separating the ‘people’ from the enemy; an equivalential articulation of demands; and the unification of social demands into a stable system of signification. I show that with Trump’s and Putin’s populism these preconditions change. An antagonistic frontier became perforated with double interpretation of the enemy. Dichotomy ‘we’ versus the ‘other’ is traversed by the division of the signification of the ‘other’ into the external and internal part as regards the signification of the community. An equivalential articulation of demands transforms into the paralogical chain that establishes cleavages in semantic relations among communities. There are mere ‘opening bids’ among communities without universal dimension as a result of hegemonization of a particular demand. The unification of social demands which has followed the hegemonical logic in Laclau’s account of populism turns into an allegorical unification that keeps being separated from all particular demands in order to maintain their paralogical chain. These transformations can be seen as the preconditions of metapopulism that is found in-between democracy with the particularized logic and populism with the hegemonized one.