The populist moment: affective orders, protest, and politics of belonging

Abstract

ABSTRACT Populism of the twenty-first century, the paper argues, emerges from the aloofness of liberal democracy’s sober regimes of rationality. This results in political movements that are explicitly affective in their strategies, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum. However, while policy research claims that left- and right-wing populism ‘look alike’ (isomorphia), the paper shows that there is only one populist logic that exceeds demarcations of ‘left’ or ‘right’. Therefore, it introduces the concept of the populist moment to describe the structure of the populist logic that is shared by a variety of protest movements. As a feminist intervention in the field of populism studies, the paper, finally, discusses how Mouffe’s political theory conflates ‘left populism’ and radical democracy. In reference to Ranciére’s and Lorey’s conceptualizations of radical democracy the paper portrays how to democratize democracy beyond Mouffe’s hegemony theory.