People, Populism, and Democracy

Abstract

This text discusses, in the first place, the construction of the “people” by diverse populisms, keeping in sight the constitution of a collective identity and the articulation of commonness derived from a sense of exclusion. This construction is double-sided: on the one hand, it activates the “people” by an interpellation convoking it to affirm an original sovereignty that has been sequestered by corrupt and oppressive elites; on the other hand, it deactivates it through an identitarian closure that refers the “people” to its charismatic leader. The sense of exclusion characteristic of populism determines an antagonistic relation toward the aforementioned elites and/or other groups in a struggle that opposes a “we” to a “them”, which in fact entails the exclusion of a third one, on whose behalf populism claims to speak. The notion of antagonism is discussed by way of referring to a couple of discursive instances: the Schmittian concept of the politic, and a conference by the lawyer, philosopher, politician and educator Valentín Letelier, which offers a sort of performative critique of the distribution of the political field in two antagonistic parties. The text ends addressing the question of democracy and the signification that populism may have in this respect. This is attempted discussing the concept of exception in Carl Schmitt with a view to suggest that democracy cannot be based on a sense of exclusion, acknowledging at the same time that the populist allegation is grounded on the limitations of liberal democracy. In these terms, democracy has to be conceived as radically non-excluding, and that means that democracy is radical democratization in the form of the promise not to exclude the third one.