Populism and Knowledge

What kind of link can be established between knowledge and populism? Judging from the broader public sphere and mainstream political science, the two phenomena are opposed. One of the defining traits of populism is claimed to be its ignorance of if not actually manipulatory misrepresentation of knowledge. The use of alternative facts is inherent to populism. In this paper I question this link. Historically by re-introducing the unknown/ forgotten/ repressed story of the educational efforts of the original populists in The People’s Party. Not only did the original populists produce an abundance of educational pamphlets (on farming, economy etc.), history actually proved their economic knowledge to be superior to the academy’s of the time (T. Frank). The fact of the widespread repression of knowledge of (at least this part of) the history of The People’s Party forms the basis for the theoretical analysis of knowledge and populism. Firstly, through a deconstruction of knowledge, showing the ultimate undecidability of knowledge - the essential contamination of the knowable by the unknowable (A. Plotnitsky). Secondly, this essential deconstructability of knowledge is revealed especially clearly in the different conceptualisations of ‘populism’. The attempts of establishing the referential unity of populism – e.g. by linking it oppositionally to knowledge – must be given up, and populism should be conceptualised as a logic (i.e. not a phenomenon), of constructing a people, a logic with a specific (political) reason (E. Laclau). Thirdly, I conclude the paper by arguing that scientific knowledge neither can, nor (at least democratically speaking) should determine politics. It is a matter of contingent articulations: which scientific results do we trust, which demands do we pose as a result, and how are these articulated with other demands? Knowledge, including scientific knowledge, cannot be qualitatively distinguished from other moments shaping a political construction of a people. We should therefore not worry about how ‘populism undermines knowledge’, but how the populist reason (of articulating a people) can link demands of climate and bio-diversity with those of global social justice, of gender, ethnicity etc.