Why Are Populists Loud and Aggressive?

The current populist moment is marked by aspirational momentum. People and marginalised communities did have aspirations in the past too, but the difference being the present ideas of mobility are unwilling to accept co-responsibility.

Aspirations, mobility and solidarity co-existed in the past because there was a sense of mutuality, in spite of yawning inequalities. When the gap was more, mutuality was not a problem; but when the gaps are reducing socially and a ‘sense’ of economic opportunity is spreading, the sense of mutuality and co-responsibility is giving way to what German philosopher Nietzsche referred to as ressentiment -- I detest what I aspire for.

The stable markers of merit and achievement are being detested without necessarily knowing what it is to be replaced with. Mobility with co-responsibility has been replaced under populist mobilisation with mobility with disgust. Every stable marker of merit and solidarity has become markers or reminders of one’s vulnerability and humiliation.

We are passing through strange times of aspirational mobility without mutuality. What this does is to inaugurate a generic process of devaluation, disrespect and uncivility as a necessary social condition. We are now realising that equality was a romanticised ideal when at a distance, but as we inch toward it, it is going to get ugly.

Social mobility and making social groups equal is not going to be linear, additive and cumulative, but crooked and fairly nauseating. Those aspiring for equality may not necessarily value equality as a universal norm or ethic but as a contingent strategy.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s universal principle of categorical imperative of treating all humans with inherent value and as an end in themselves is today viewed more as an excuse and pretense of those already well positioned. Universal norms are seen as a way of dignifying unequal positionality. It is an attempt to pretend being civil in uncivil conditions. Civility is not seen an ideal to be achieved that dominant need to commit to, as a way of dignifying the existing unfair conditions.

Solidarity is linked to collective hope to push society in a normative direction of better and relatively more equal social and economic conditions. Today, ideals and utopia are not inspiring trust and collective faith. The directionality of a society is linked to the understanding of a collective history and memory, but if we refuse to think or lose hope in directionality, we begin to necessarily distort history. This is because it does not interest where we have come from and what has been our collective journey, as that knowledge is not going to guarantee us a better future.

Politics becomes a series of strategies of here and now. Pragmatists to post-structuralists found this way of negotiating reality more realistic and certainly more optimistic in bringing mobility to the marginalised. What works in real-time is what should guide collective action, against the Kantian emphasis on a priori principles.

Populists across the globe have seized this opportunity. It is strategy not struggle; it is pragmatic calculations and not ideal-type beliefs that work more effectively in countering power as we confront on everyday basis.

Populism represents mobility without trust and solidarity. ‘Speed and scale’ have come to replace trust and the need for mutuality. Speed attempts to displace the emptiness created by eroding trust and sense of mutuality.

Populists who vouch against technocratic liberalism and come with a promise to bring back ethics and community, also end up flirting with technology and technocratic governance. They are unable to provide a way out, but what they successfully do is to correctly locate the crisis. They locate the crisis created by technocracy, and therefore articulate a public critique against it but only to return to managing the collective affairs through the same technocratic means. It is, therefore, necessary for them to shut and rigorously control public debates, media and the public sphere. Dialogic spaces carry the potential danger of exposing their utter lack of imagination and that they have no solutions to the problems they correctly articulate. Old time elites and liberal-progressives not yet making sense of the problem only adds to the brazenness of the claims made by populists.

Populists are necessarily loud and aggressive because they know the problem but not a way out, so they have to fix the collective gaze on the problem and convince the collective that in naming the problem they could continue to pretend to know the way out.

Populists sometimes also consciously deepen the problem. It is the problem of, in this case, lack of trust and mutuality that is the source of their legitimacy. They draw the nation into a vicious cycle of creating one crisis in the process of ostensibly solving another. Crisis justifies greater control, surveillance and order. Order comes to replace trust. Since, it is already built on pragmatic calculations, people find it difficult to get out or introspect where this is leading. In fact, since directionality itself has been eschewed as a moral construct that obstructs mobility, they cannot possibly return to think of declining democratic space or deepening trust deficit.

This game of matrix began ‘originally’ with aspirations and mobility. Do people retain the ability to reflect on mobility based on their everyday experiences? Will they arrive at a point where they can tell themselves that these methods are not yielding greater mobility? Will they then return to recognise the need for solidarity as a pre-condition for mobility? The demise of authoritarian variant of populism will squarely depend on this one question, perhaps.

The writer is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The views are personal.