Populist Elements in Contemporary American Political Discourse

Abstract

Granted that it would be absurd to characterize Obama as a populist president, this paper proceeds from Ernesto Laclau's conception of populism as consisting of ‘the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating the “people” from power’ and ‘an equivalential articulation of demands making the emergence of the “people” possible’ (2005:74). In the 2008 election, Obama was able to articulate a series of empty signifiers, found in such slogans as ‘Yes We Can,’ which came to represent a new collective identity of the ‘people’, thus constituting an instance of populism par excellence. As support for this theory of populism and its implications for contemporary American political discourse, this paper deconstructs the previously held functionalist assumptions and modernization theories – especially those propagated within Latin American case studies – that consign populism to a developmental stage in the capitalist mode of production or a historical outcome of underdeveloped democratic institutions in order to imagine a new science of rhetoric capable of analysing the synecdochical, metaphorical, and metonymical components ( Laclau, 2005 ) in the discursive construction of ‘the American people’.