Populist style

This paper investigates populism at the intersection of aesthetics and democracy, challenging prevailing narratives that frame “the populist urge” as an attitude, a rhetoric, or a (thin-centered) ideology. We pick up and develop a theme from Moffitt 2016 and consider populism as a style, reconfiguring aesthetic values as antagonistic social norms. Here, group appearances, social performances, and collective identities are three species of the same aesthetic genus: a particular style devised to subvert distinction. Populism, we argue, is a median aesthetic that challenges the normativity of distinction and supports a new aesthetic ethos, the average and ordinary appearance style that populists politicize and turn into an aesthetic argument. Populism contests the social statuses (the snob, the trans, the drag) and styles (punk, camp, glam, gender cosplay, etc.) that exceed the aesthetic median and mobilizes a new political aesthetic to create new social distinctions with strong political purchase. In this way, populism erodes social hierarchies by creating a space of (social and aesthetic) enfranchisement in which the pariahs of distinction (those excluded from social processes of aesthetic entitlement) seek recognition. The recent stylistic turn in the study of populism reveals an expressive dimension in the populist discourse, but it leaves the aesthetic outlook in the background. We want to operationalize the lines (or fractures) of distinction brought about by populism through a mathematical representation of the populist style as the product of a multitude of stylistic features sorting people around the median, the common, the ordinary. To reproduce the multitude and the randomness factors that shape the populist style, this paper uses the Gulton board metaphor that, in turn, empirically explains the normal distribution of random characteristics in a population. This tool, a vertical board with interleaved rows of pegs, uses beads negotiating an array of pegs to demonstrate how the outcome resulting from a large number of random events builds a normal distribution. In this metaphor, each bead represents a single member (e.g., citizen) of a given population, and each peg represents the stylistic factors guiding their distribution. Once thrown from the top of the board, beads (e.g., people) “choose” between pegs (stylistic factors) moving around the board and finally forming a bell-shaped (aka ‘normal’) distribution. Relying on visual methodologies, focusing on the issue of the “beauty myth” (after Naomi Wolf’s book of 1990) and using Amazon mechanical turk to achieve a large sample of respondents (the beads to recall the metaphor mentioned above) this work puts forth a comparative analysis of populist style(s) in two countries (Italy and Germany) and demonstrate how, besides contextual differences, populism is the expression of a style that gather people around a median, socially and aesthetically non-descript (but politically highly effective), taste.