Debating populism in politics through the lenses of hegemony, communication and passions

Populism’s emergence has been linked with the return of the political and affects in politics, and therefore contesting the Habermasian framework of liberal public sphere as Mouffe (1993, 2000, 2018) predicted. Presence of passions in political life is central to the recent growth of populist parties, especially on the right side of the spectrum, their use of emotions both through public events and media platforms, in order to keep the connection with their audience. These parties have also been able to utilize a new public sphere, the hybrid media environment, quite effectively. This paper conducts a critical dialogue between Habermas who assumes communication’s rationality and Mouffe, and Laclau (2005) who highlight a more affects-ridden approach from their post-Marxist theorizing on hegemony and politics. Our research paper aims at discussing the advance of populism in politics around the world which rides on its use of emotional appeals, using a Laclaudian framework, that sees politics as equal to hegemony as equal to populism, where one can conclude that populist actors are no different from other political actors, while emotions and affects are always central to any political identity. In broad Habermasian terms, populism concerns more than just the system level of society; it also takes place in the lifeworld, which needs to be examined at least partly on its own terms, or without analytical reduction to being a reflection or expression of systemic developments. Not so far, Laclau sees populism as an emancipatory project for the great majority of people who feel abused by economic and political institutions and powerless in resistance against them. Thus, since the division between emotional and rational in politics serves to sediments exclusionary practices against newcomers and challengers of the status quo, and the term populism is often negatively loaded and used to refer to politicians who offer overly simplistic answers to complex questions, appealing to particular in- and outgroup agendas such as “people vs. elite” or “nationals vs. foreigners”, our elaboration points at observing what kind of emotions thrive in this context, and the cleavages they create. Isolating particular emotions is not enough, but we need to look at the affective appeal of what rather than who we oppose, and how this defines the always fleeting political “us”. While the Mouffean Left Populist project knows what is against - neoliberalism, politics in the affective contemporary space should be attentive not just to the kind of emotions that are involved but move to look at politics of “taking stands”, not as pure rationality. Ultimately, this discussion has consequences for deliberative and radically democratic forms of politics and democracy.