This article is co-authored with Jason Glynos.
Introduction:
‘The European elections have delivered their truth, and it is painful’. François Hollande’s assessment of the 2014 European election results was damning, pointing to widespread ‘distrust of Europe and of government parties’ (Higgins 26 May 2014). This evaluation of the result was shared by journalists and politicians commenting on the ‘shock’, ‘earthquake’, or ‘tsunami’ that shook the continent and its leaders to their core. Later that year, the political commentator Tony Barber (Barber 16 September 2014) issued a stark warning: ‘European democracy must keep right-wing populism at bay’. The article appeared in the Financial Times as wave after wave of populist electoral advances following the European elections appeared to test the foundations of European liberal democracy at the regional, national, and local levels. While acknowledging that ‘right-wing populism displays different characteristics from country to country, possessing a nastier far-right streak in Greece and Hungary than in Germany and the UK’, right-wing populist parties were nonetheless lumped together by Barber to represent a unified albeit murky threat to democracy itself. In this view, democracy epitomizes the ideal of moderation and rational deliberation, while populism carries with it the spectre of extremism and passions gone awry. Tellingly, Barber’s explanation of the populist phenomenon to which he is witness is virtually non-existent. How European democracy is to keep right-wing populism at bay is thus left unanswered. Instead, his characterization of the current situation as an impasse sounds fateful and alarmist, conjuring, as he does, a rather curious image of the apparently robust walls of Jericho pitted against the passionate and powerful horn-blowing of the Israelites.
We argue that this Financial Times opinion piece is typical of the sort of response in the wake of the populist phenomenon in France and the United Kingdom, as well as other European countries. When reproduced endlessly across mainstream media outlets and even some academic fora, it becomes an instance of what is referred to in this article as ‘populist hype’. The term ‘populist hype’ seeks to capture at least three things. First, it aims to capture something about how politicians, as well as media and academic commentators, have tended to skew the meaning of the populist phenomenon. In our case, this involves presenting an overly simplistic and homogenized picture of the ‘meteoric’ rise of right-wing populism across Europe. This is accomplished by individual analyses and commentaries that make assertions on the basis of highly selective use, and decontextualized interpretations, of electoral results. Second, populist hype entails the exaggeration of the significance of the populist phenomenon, particularly as regards its political significance. This is accomplished primarily by the sheer volume of copy devoted to the discussion of the apparent rise of right-wing populism, as opposed to other manifestations of discontent. The ‘hyped’ response to the 2014 electoral outcomes exaggerated the political significance of the populist phenomenon by suggesting, for example, that right-wing populist parties and movements are the only (or main) political alternative to the mainstream status quo. While the Front National (FN) and UKIP have had a clear impact on the political agenda as their programme and discourse entered the mainstream, we argue that this impact was not simply a reflection of their electoral or strategic achievements, but also a product of the exaggerated role attributed to the FN and UKIP by mainstream politicians and commentators. Finally, with the term ‘populist hype’ this article highlights how many political commentators tend to characterize the populist phenomenon in apocalyptic terms. There is a tendency in the present case, for example, to emphasize how the rise of right-wing populism signals nothing less than a threat to democracy as such. In looking across the three dimensions of the hyped response to the populist phenomenon, however, it is worth pointing out how they should not be understood as entirely autonomous from one another: they are in fact often found to be in a relation of over-determination with each other (Althusser 2005[1962]).
In drawing attention to this generalized ‘populist hype’ we are not suggesting that the varying degrees of success of right-wing parties, in our case UKIP and the FN, do not deserve attention or that they do not have a real impact on politics and exclusion. Our focus is related, but distinct. We draw attention instead to the skewed interpretation of many commentators, which often identifies right-wing populism as itself a disease rather than as a mere symptom. The aim of this article is thus not to engage with right-wing populist parties themselves, but rather with a particular interpretation of, and reaction to, their recent electoral performances by the ‘mainstream’, and how it has helped distort the diagnosis on the current state of liberal democracy in the post-democratic world (Crouch 2004). Yet the article does not simply engage in a re-characterization exercise that substitutes one picture of the 2014 right-wing populist ‘wave’ in France and the UK with another more accurate one. This re-characterization is of course essential, but we seek first and foremost to re-problematize the hyped response to the populist phenomenon. In particular, we argue that the problem with populist hype is not merely that it misrepresents what is actually going on. The main issue is in fact that populist hype has a ‘logic’ whose integrity and efficacy does not rely in any straightforward way on its representational truth or untruth.
Drawing on the Essex School of discourse theory, and closely associated strands of psychoanalytic political theory (Glynos and Howarth 2007, Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Stavrakakis et al. 2000, Glynos 2001, Stavrakakis 1999, Zizek 1993), as well as recent analyses of populist parties across Europe (see for example, Mral et al. 2013, Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012, Wodak 2015) and their relationship to the media (Mudde 2007, Mazzoleni 2008), we argue that populist hype has functioned as a political logic. By qualifying it as a political logic the aim is to foreground how the dominant ‘hyped’ response to the populist conjuncture by politicians and the media has served to pre-empt the contestation of some troubling norms animating the regimes of ‘really existing’ liberal democracy and to contest other norms which many consider worthy of defence. For example, instead of serving as an occasion to broach a set of debates about the character of liberal democracy as it operates today in Europe, the horrific spectre of a populism gone amok is more often used to conjure the image of an imminent threat to democracy as such. This logic tends to marginalise meaningful debate about the way democracy tends to operate, i.e., as an electoral democracy that installs and reinforces alienating tendencies (Katsambekis 2015). Moreover, this article argues that the tenacity of populist hype – and its continued role as a political logic – indicates how it has successfully tapped into potent affective registers rooted in collective desires and fantasies structured around the idea of ‘theft of enjoyment’, giving it its energy and verve.
A key aim of the article is to show how the above-mentioned theoretical resources can be deployed to frame the 2014 populist conjuncture (and similar conjunctures) in a productive way. More systematic empirical research can provide sharper accounts of populist hype in precise settings, but given the limited scope of this article, and to provide a starting point, our aim rather is to make a theoretical intervention that generates some insight, points to new ‘interpretive’ hypotheses, and reframes problems. Examples to illustrate and help better formulate our hypotheses will be drawn from France and the United Kingdom. These countries were selected because of the electoral gains made by UK and French right-wing populist parties in the 2014 European elections and because of the voluminous commentary these parties have attracted more generally, a commentary that has itself been folded into a narrative about wider European populist trends, despite distinct historical origins of country-specific populist parties (Crépon et al. 2015, Startin 2015). More generally, however, this theoretical intervention offers a framework within which one could subsequently and more systematically explore and probe hypotheses about the character and significance of ‘populist hype’.
Rather than applying to the case studies our own theoretical understanding of populism, this article explores the implications of the way the term ‘populism’ is mobilised by key ‘enunciators’ (i.e., politicians, political commentators, etc.) in the 2014 populist conjuncture. To this end, the argument of this article proceeds in three steps. First, it problematises right-wing populist hype as a dominant response to the conjuncture of 2014, particularly as regards the EU elections. It then considers how a critique that relies only on pointing to the falsehood presupposed by such hype misses its political and ideological significance. We draw out its political significance by identifying two key norms at stake in ‘really existing’ liberal democracy: electoral primacy and presumptive equality. This entails articulating the political logic embodied in the ‘performance’ of populist hype. Finally, it hypothesizes that its ideological significance is linked to the fantasmatic narratives that shape the affective tenor of the mainstream response to the populist conjuncture.
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