Abstract
Mainstream definitions of populism have detached the concept from the historical and material conditions in which it arises. Perhaps the most pernicious of these abstractions is the conception of the people. According to most definitions, any politics appealing to “the people” against “the elites” is populist, regardless of their different conceptions of the people, platforms, and relations to liberal democracy, which has led to the conflation of populism with ethnonationalism. Through a radical republican approach, in this article I give theoretical ground to effectively separate the people of populism from conceptions of the people based on ethnicity. Relying on Jacques Ranciere’s theory of politics as disagreement and Jeffrey Green’s theory of the plebeian subject as second-class citizen, I argue that, seen from a historical and material perspective, the people of populism is constructed from a plebeian identity based on class that is egalitarian and inclusive, constructed from a position of no-rule, in resistance to the oppressive oligarchic order.
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