The publication of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason1 in 2005 inspired a generation of left populist scholars who were convinced that populist articulation could secure a democratic politics of equality against neoliberal capital. There is good reason for this. Laclau and Mouffe recognized, two decades prior to 2005, the political failures of the class-centric, revolutionary politics of twentieth-century Marxism.2 For feminist, queer, green, indigenous, decolonial, antiwar, and other social movements, Marxist theoretical and political arrogance could not account for the specificity of struggle that each demanded. Laclau's account of populism recognized the necessity of political unity against a common enemy. Yet it simultaneously recognized the multiplicity of political struggles, and insisted that even in unity differences should not, and could not, be erased. For Laclau a populist movement articulated together a range of social movements, social strata, and institutions to a common political project. Two concepts anchored this analysis. First, for Laclau, the social order is contingent. All social orders are sedimented, but the sediment can shift. No underlying principle determines in advance such shifts. Second, if a social order is contingent, then political order is maintained through a common set of identifications. On this reading, populist struggles articulate together a range of different struggles against a common enemy, an established political order that polices and maintains inequality. A populist movement requires first a common enemy, and second the common identification of different antagonistic movements with a principle, leader, or ideal—equality, for example.This vision of leftist populism both inspired, and learned from, its historical antecedents in Russia and the United States of the nineteenth century, Peronism in Argentina, Podemos in Spain, and a range of other populist parties. However, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a set of challenges to this broadly progressivist vision of populism. First, the right-wing, racist, and sexist forms of populism—premised on the protection of entitlements won through colonial and capitalist violence—have also promised redistribution of wealth and privilege to those deemed of the people.3 Such right-wing populisms undermine the easy equation of democracy with populism. Second, some question the ability of discourse theorists to conceptualize climate change. For many—including climate scientists—climate change is a threat to all humanity, but it originates in the actions of a small portion of the global population. A politics that insists on the contingency of all political struggles, and views climate threat as particular rather than universal, fails to comprehend its instant universality. Last, theorists of race and coloniality argue that the populist politics of coalition and identification cannot comprehend that the figure of blackness is and was constructed so that common identification is impossible. A politics that begins from the nonplace of blackness, from the negative place that is the underpinning of global social order, demands a fundamental remaking of this order. Post-Marxist scholars influenced by Laclau fail to address the historical complicity of their own metaphysical and conceptual apparatus in what Wynter termed “the coloniality of Being.”4In light of these challenges, this article confronts central aspects of the version of populism developed by Laclau. I accept a number of Laclau's arguments, most notably the insistence on pluralism, contingency, and populism as a formal logic of political articulation. However, I contend, first, that populism as a logic5 of political articulation bears no necessary relation to democratic politics. Populist forms of politics may have democratizing effects, but this is context-dependent and never guaranteed. Second, I therefore differentiate the distinct logics of populist and democratic politics, rejecting Laclau's argument that populism is the royal road to the political. Last, I argue that this distinction allows us better to comprehend the radical consequences of climate and decolonial politics for any form of populist politics. In brief, I contend that left populist theorists betray their own democratic commitments in failing to take seriously the concerns of decolonial, indigenous, and climate activists. This demands a rethinking of left democratic politics.Every account of populist politics makes assertions about whether or not populism is democratic. For many Latin American scholars, populism is simply the form taken by democratic politics. Populism concerns the sovereign agent of democratic politics, the people. In contrast, for many European scholars, populism represents a direct threat to liberal democracy, pluralism, and the supposed neutrality of the market. These scholars assume that democracy must take a liberal form, and contend that populism demands monism against liberal pluralism. I reject this latter view. However, rather than focus on the now too-familiar antipopulist diatribes, I address the first set of scholars, insisting on a simple distinction between populist and democratic logics.Biglieri and Cadahia,6 and Frank7 exemplify the contention that populism is always a form of democratic politics. Their arguments are both theoretical and historical. Biglieri and Cadahia draw on the political experience of the “pink tide” in Latin America. They theorize populism as a political logic of equivalential articulation, relying on Laclau's On Populist Reason.8 For them “populism is a logic constitutive of the political itself.”9 If so, then “populism as the constitutive logic of the political” should encompass both right and left forms of populism. However, they reject this view. Rather, they conceptualize right-wing populisms as a reactivation of fascism that invokes “the fantasy of . . . the longing for a life without problems or antagonisms.”10 Right-wing populisms aim to eliminate politics altogether, establishing a self-transparent people without differences. They reject Stavrakakis's more nuanced argument that what distinguishes right from left populism is a politics of inclusion or exclusion.11 Rather, they write, “if there is such a thing as populism “proper” then why continue to refer to so called derivative formations—i.e. so called “exclusionary populism,” “right-wing populism” or “nationalist populism”—as populism at all?”12 For Biglieri and Cadahia, populism as a political logic recognizes differences. It is democratic in respecting those differences as articulated elements of a popular front. Fascisms, in contrast, aim to eliminate all difference and thus to end politics as a site of agonistic contestation. Populism institutionalizes, and practices, a politics of inclusivity that recognizes the contingency of any established political order. This argument is ingenious—but difficult to sustain. The authors define what populism is in theoretical terms. They characterize populism as the logic of the political tout court.13 They then characterize right-wing populism as nonpolitical—and thus not populist. Such conceptual purification excises a troubling excess that plagues the definition of populism. In simultaneously establishing the proper limits of the political and of populism, they reject the possibility that populist logics might be contaminated with undemocratic exclusion. Populism “proper” is traversed by egalitarian logics that never allow difference to collapse into identity.As far as these authors are concerned, this is just calling a spade a spade—right-wing populism is a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility that contradicts their theoretical definition of populism. Neofascism is an apolitical logic that attempts to purify the social of all difference—and is thus not populist. The detergent of conceptual rigor delineates what is proper to populist politics. The sovereign people, invoked by populists, respond to inequality and exclusion and celebrates difference rejecting any fascistic attempt to attain transparency and unity. Left-wing theorists are thus encouraged to reject conceptual confusion and to purify populism of its fascistic contamination. This clarifies, so they argue, the antagonistic form of populist politics. Populism invokes the sovereign people in opposition to a range of attempts to neutralize the political: on the one hand, the neoliberal invocation of the neutrality of the market; on the other the fascistic purification of the body politic of all antagonists. I will have cause to return to this politics of purification in what follows.In more historical vein, Thomas Frank reconstructs the democratic history of the first modern populist party, the U.S. People's Party of the 1890s. The party itself coined the term populism in its attempt to break the Republican/Democrat duopoly characteristic of U.S. politics. Their platform articulated together an alliance of small farmers and workers in opposition to bankers, the financial elite and the political establishment. Unlike Trump's Republican Party, the People's Party rejected racism and sexism, celebrated immigration, and campaigned to limit the power of banks and financial capital with thoroughgoing reform of the monetary system. Frank discusses in some detail the continuities of this earlier movement with the populist practices of Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt repeatedly invoked the people against money lenders, banks, and the Wall Street elite that had brought the globe to the brink of economic collapse.Frank's reconstruction celebrates the democratic credentials of these populist politicians. He rejects the equation of right-wing racism, nationalism, and neofascism with populism and convincingly demonstrates that liberal and neoliberal political elites have waged a century-long war against populism. Well-funded by capital, think tanks, and political groupings such as the Liberty League in the first half of the twentieth century, a series of claims about populism developed since the 1880s are repeated word-for-word in contemporary attacks on populism: populist critiques of financial and political elites are a disguised form of anti-Semitism; irresponsible populist spending programs will bankrupt the state and disincentivize free enterprise; populist leaders are dictators; populists will tax your wealth and confiscate your property; populism is an attack on your freedom.14 In the U.S. context the equation of populism with exclusionary politics fosters the misapprehension that the right and the left are extremes that mirror each other. It preserves a hegemonic consensus precluding any transformational politics of equality. Frank thus calls on the left to fight for ownership of the term “populism.” This, it can be argued, is what Biglieri and Cadahia aim to do. After all, he asks, what respectable democrat would condemn the people? Surely the people were, and are, the subject of democratic struggles for equality?These texts are right to insist on the distinction between populism and neofascism. They are right to recognize the symbolic war waged against left populisms over many decades, in both liberal theories and capitalist social orders. They are right too that any project for democratic equality must pause before criticizing a politics that begins with the people. However, in my view, they confuse democracy and populism—with consequences that are theoretically incoherent and politically dangerous. It is uncomfortable to note that for some even right-wing populisms are democratic. Eatwell and Goodwin view nationalist populisms as a democratic response to the hollowing out of liberal and social democratic institutions. They note the exponential increase of inequality in states such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Unlike Biglieri and Cadahia, they refuse to condemn anti-immigrant sentiment, arguing that for many globalization has meant the destruction of community ties, traditions, and identities. In their view, a disconnected political, academic, and liberal elite condemns such populisms, but fails to recognize their democratic impulses. Such views echo Mudde's argument that right-wing populisms are democratic responses to undemocratic liberalism. Populism reanimates national communities and citizens against the twin encroachments of neoliberal capitalism and the multicultural decimation of traditional ties of family and place.15At issue in these—and many other—discussions of populism is whether or not populism is democratic. The question demands a simple answer but I reject this either/or logic. My argument is simple. There is no necessary relation between democracy and populism because populist and democratic logics differ. I outline the consequences of this argument below—but as already noted it breaks with, while building on, key arguments of both Laclau and Rancière. I strongly refute Urbinati and others, who argue that populism is inherently undemocratic. Populism, Urbinati contends, is an illiberal threat to the democratic pluralism and representative democracy. On her terms it disfigures democracy. Democratic representation, Urbinati argues, shields political communities from the “harassment of words and passions” that is the key to populist manipulation and rhetoric. Representatives advocate for particular, excluded, or marginalized sectors in the name of democratic equality but only the procedures secured in a constitutional, rights-based democracy allows for a constant process of emendation. Representation thus protects minorities who may later become a majority.16 In contrast, populism is dangerous because as: “a certain political style or set of rhetorical tropes and figures . . . it seeks also state power to implement a political agenda whose main and recognizable character is hostility against liberalism and the principles of constitutional democracy, in particular minority rights, division of powers, and party pluralism.”17 Urbinati completely misreads Laclau who, with Mouffe, argues that populism begins with and institutionalizes “the [necessary] plurality and indeterminacy of the social.”18 Urbinati contends19 that for Laclau populism requires the “creation of the people with one voice, leader, or opinion.” She has either misread or misunderstood his argument. Note the familiar antipopulist tropes that we find in Frank's account: populism is more than a style—its substantive purpose is to tear up constitutional freedoms, destroy differences, and end party pluralism; populism is opposed to liberalism. Urbinati transcribes word for word the antipopulist tracts of the 1930s cited by Frank. Her defense of liberal democracy reaches a pallid denouement in the defense of a toothless constitutional liberalism that ignores the substantive claims for equality she simultaneously proclaims. Urbinati is right in one respect only—a democratic politics of equality is not the same as populist politics.Likewise, we must reject those Marxist theorists for whom populism is symptomatic of the deeper malaise of class politics. Revelli, for example, locates the origins of populism in the ongoing hollowing out of democracy, the politics of austerity after 2008, and the increase in inequality consonant with the domination of financial capital. The modus operandi of “the financial robber barons” has remade the working class and defeated trade unionism. An increasingly impoverished middle class aligned with the defeated multitude experience ressentiment and humiliation—and are ripe fodder for right-wing populisms.I have noted only a few of the key texts in this debate. In each case populism is deemed to have either a negative or positive relation to democratic politics. Despite major differences, one assumption unites all of these scholars who all assume that democracy is a regime—nationalist, conservative, liberal, radical, or socialist. Populism either threatens existing (liberal) democratic regimes and their key institutions, or, in its proper form, extends democratic equality—so the argument goes.In my view, these disputes are simply resolved—we must maintain the distinction between democratic and populist logics, and recognize that both are political. For Laclau, populism is the logic of the political. For Rancière, politics is the putting to work of a democratic logic of equality. I contend that populism and democracy are distinct political logics. This allows us to analyze their specific articulations in different contexts. Populism as a political logic is neither inherently democratic nor undemocratic. It may have democratizing effects. Democracy as a political logic assumes axiomatic equality and puts this to work in disrupting established institutional orders that perforce limit the extension of equality. Later I clarify democratic logics. Below, I focus on populism as a particular political logic characterized by articulation, antagonism, contingency, and exclusion.Populism as a political logic articulates together different demands and antagonisms to a common movement and idea of the people.20 Articulation occurs because all social orders comprise multiple demands, institutions, movements, and mores that bear no necessary relation. Moreover, no dominant order can either fulfil or repress all demands. Populism as a form of political articulation establishes unity through antagonistic opposition—the identification of those responsible for the failure to address demands that arise in any social order. The nature of the antagonist is not given in advance, but is always overdetermined by the existing situation.Contrary then to the arguments of Mudde, Urbinati, and Müller, populism as a political logic veers between equivalence and difference—though this is never a zero-sum game as both are always at play. In any populist movement this results in tension—no matter how strong the signifiers or antagonisms that unify a set of demands. The establishment of “a people” then is contingent, always in tension, and open to rearticulations that cannot be anticipated. Contingency is not equivalent to, but is a condition of possibility and impossibility for, the drawing of antagonistic frontiers. In essence, contingency in itself never necessitates populist politics, but it is a condition of possibility for populism.Last—and in contrast to the arguments of Laclau scholars, and indeed Laclau—the articulation of a people requires at least two exclusions. There is first the exclusion of the antagonistic enemy: capitalists, the state, the dictator, the immigrant. It is this exclusion that binds a populist movement negatively. This focus on antagonism unifies those scholars influenced by Laclau. Rarely noted, however, is the exclusion of those who are not the antagonistic other—yet are never counted as of the people. In the national democratic revolution against apartheid rule, one had to be deemed South African. Peronism was defined from the beginning as a national project. In principle populism as a logic may break national boundaries. However, it is almost invariably a subgenre of national politics despite the various failed attempts to break such primordial bonding. Yet even were this bonding to the nation broken, biopolitical forms of exclusion will always occur. For the most part, however, the existing principles of citizenship and inclusion that regulate national status frame populist logics. Populism requires giving an account of the people—and that means determining who belongs to the people.Articulation, antagonism, contingency, and exclusion are the key components of a populist politics no matter their content. Right-wing populisms—even when they resemble fascism—are always also the result of uneasy forms of articulation. Both left and right populisms require some form of unity, and both articulate together a range of antagonistic elements. The key difference concerns who and how the enemy as antagonist is identified. Contingency as a condition of possibility and impossibility of any political articulation does not predetermine the content, values, or politics of a populist movement. Biglieri and Cadahia insist that populism is always of the left. They term right-wing populism fascism. However, if all forms of political organization require coalition building then this is a matter of degree rather than kind. There is no reason why contingency in itself should admit of a progressive populism—or indeed of populist politics. Biglieri and Cadahia assume that the people are progressive and then appeal to this assumption to justify their celebration of populism. Nothing guarantees the outcome of populist political interventions—precisely because populist articulations take place on a contingent field, in large part constrained by existing national imaginaries. Mouffe at least is clear about this: “. . . populism is a discursive strategy of constructing a political frontier dividing society into two camps mobilizing the underdog against those in power. It is not an ideology and cannot be attributed a specific programmatic content. . . . [I]t is a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms according to both time and place.”21 The key point here—one with which I agree—is that populism is not an ideology with specific content. Laclau's discussion of right-wing populism in On Populist Reason makes the same point. He goes so far as to equate: Hitler in the 1930s responding to the Great Depression; De Gaulle responding to the crisis of the Fourth Republic in 1958; and Perón articulating populism as an alternative to the collapsing oligarchical system in the Argentina of the mid-1930s.22 Populist parties respond to institutional crises, and articulate an alternative vision of the people that breaks with—while of course rearticulating—existing dominant logics. Such a politics is open to both left- and right-wing political actors. In responding to organic crises populist parties and leaders have a repertoire of values on which they can draw—democratic equality is only one of a number of possible principles that may be invoked. These include notions of who constitutes “the people” as well as the historical legacies internal to particular nations and movements (such as the racist colonial and anti-Semitic histories of “enlightened” Europe). To summarize: populism is one political logic, it is not the political tout court. It is an articulatory logic that brings together a range of differences as part of a common project with a defined enemy. I will argue below that democracy is also a political logic——but that it is not populist. However, before making that argument I want to address two specific problems with what I have termed populist logics as developed by Laclau and others.I have already noted that populism as a logic requires the articulation of an appropriate subject or agent of politics. This is the case for the articulation of the political orders equated with populism; for the drawing of the bounds that define the appropriate people; and for the logics of identification that underlie populism.Laclau and Mouffe draw on Freud to argue that collective identifications are constitutive of the “mode of existence of human beings” and play a pivotal role in the field of politics. Democratic politics must have some purchase on the desires and fantasies of the subjects of any polity. Politics is not simply about the rational evaluation of alternatives. They follow Freud in insisting that signification is intimately tied to the affective dimension, theorizing affective forms of identification as the glue that binds political subjects to the people. The notion of identification, most fully developed in Freud's second topography, was anticipated in his earliest psychoanalytic works. It denotes two distinct, though similar processes: the first concerns the processes whereby the identity of the ego is established. Identification in this sense is constitutive of the subject. Identity is established through identifications with key figures, or parts of these figures, in the earliest years of a life. Such primal identifications cast a spell over future identifications. Identification refers second to the identification of ourselves with another, part of another, or even an ideal in later life. Psychoanalysis rests on the gamble that the identifications that constitute the subject are organized around an ultimately mobile cathexis, and are as a consequence contingent.Freud's development of the concept of identification is febrile, uncertain, and constantly revised from its first appearance in 1897 to his final accounts in “Group Psychology” and other essays.23 He relies on rhetorical tropes to grasp what consistently escapes demarcation. Such grasping reflects the impropriety of a concept that introduces an uncanny foreignness to the ego. Yet this conceptual agility is rendered proper in the account developed by Laclau and Mouffe. Rather than treat identification as an overdetermined concept that itself resists proper demarcation, its complexity is rigidified into an Oedipal story of populist empty signifiers.24 And last, these authors forget the complicity of this concept in forms of coloniality. They foreclose from their analysis of the concept the sedimented history that constitutes the horror of our present. If populism constitutes the logic of a democratic, and leftist politics, then it must perforce unpick the sedimented violence constitutive of one of its key concepts.Freud's use of tropes to explain identification betrays its implication in a colonial politics. The account he develops in Group Psychology relies upon colonial anthropology—most notably his reliance on the idea of the savage. This historical sediment is forgotten in postfoundational theories. A key metaphor that Freud repeatedly deploys is cannibalism. Identification and introjection are deemed analogous to the ingestion of the other. The ego is constituted through the ingestion of troublesome objects of identification. If—with horrible irony—identification redeploys an idea of cannibalism that is normally projected onto the “colonial other,” used to justify the civilizing narrative of colonial modernity, for the colonized subject identification as a path to subjectivity is rendered constitutionally impossible.25 As Fanon argued in Black Skins, White Masks26 identification presupposes a passage through others and the “Other” that constitutes the self. In the colonial context this passage through the “Other” is impossible. The colonizer's identity is constituted through the abnegation of the other, a disidentification before identification. The account of identification so important to Laclau's version of populism relies on older notions of crowd psychology, identification, and passion that have—to the say the least—dubious historical correlates. Can the concept of identification escape a colonial logic that reserves identification and subjectivity for the “white” self while relying on a primary abjection constitutive of the self? Can populist forms of republicanism escape these brutal histories as Biglieri and Cadahia argue?If Freud's account of identification is so problematic for this idea of populist articulation, it also undermines the ontological framing of post-Marxist thought. The notion of identification that frames post-Marxist notions of populism relies upon a quasi-negative ontology. In Thinking Antagonism27 Marchart defends such a negative ontology. The Political (always capitalized) points to an impossibility that is characteristic of “being as such” and that is experienced as a lack. Everyday politics is deemed ideological insofar as it covers over this contingency. Being shows itself in entities as that which they lack. This argument is dressed up as quasi-transcendental but it disguises two distinct claims. The first claim is that there is no positive ontology that is the essence of the human. What the human is, what the human becomes, is a matter of work, of articulation. The second claim is that this impossibility, this lack, returns as an ontological need. This ontology is the Abgrund for the discourse theoretical account of identification as the affective mechanism necessary to the production of a people. Just as the notion of identification relies on unspoken forms of coloniality, this ontology is a disguised anthropomorphism. It erects the bereft Western ratio as its fallen standard. Derrida presents the most profound challenge to this account: It is paradoxically on the basis of a fault or failing in man that the latter will be made a subject who is master of nature and of the animal. From within the pit of that lack, an eminent lack, a quite different lack from that he assigns to the animal, man installs or claims in a single movement what is proper to him (the peculiarity of a man whose property is not to have anything that is exclusively his) and his superiority over what is called animal life. It is the law of an imperturbable logic, both Promethean and Adamic, both Greek and Abrahamic. Its invariance has not stopped being verified all the way through to our modernity.28In different ways a similar argument is affirmed by Heidegger, Lacan, and discourse theories. On this reading the human is the bearer of language. Language is contingent, the signifiers uncertain, the structure does not admit of a center, and it separates the human from the natural. Language neither allows certainty in itself, nor as a consequence does it allow us to grasp the world—but this fundamental lack must be signified. The gap has to be filled in by various props. We can analyze these orders, understand these props. The animal in contrast is incapable of taking distance from its environment. This supposed separation from the natural and the animal is original wound, the lack, that Derrida contends