Postdemocracy, Postpolitics, and Populism: Fresh Political Thinking and Podemos

• Date: 01 May 2020
• Author: Juan Carlos Monedero
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19898244
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Subject Matter: Other Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19898244

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 232, Vol. 47 No. 3, May 2020, 145–167

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19898244

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

145

Postdemocracy, Postpolitics, and Populism

Fresh Political Thinking and Podemos

by

Juan Carlos Monedero

The failure of the Keynesian model in the 1970s opened the way for a neoliberal model

that works at an economic level by privileging financial capital and at a political level as

a rational frame of reference for a new postdemocratic “common sense.” Populism has both

a collision dimension (a supposedly nonideological take on the neoliberal crisis) and an

institutional dimension (a heavily ideological conception of proposals aimed at overcom-

ing current political impasses). Within the Spanish political party Podemos, a debate has

emerged between Ernesto Laclau’s “empty signifiers” and the theory put forward by

Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The former is stronger on the deconstituent dimension, but

only the latter is capable of formulating post-neoliberal agendas. The primacy of discourse

in Laclau’s theory of populism impedes the construction of a new political subject and the

consideration of a new identity. In contrast, Santos’s theory, especially his emphasis on

“translation,” lends itself to a more transformative political practice in that it widens the

spectrum of what is possible.

El fracaso del modelo keynesiano en la década de 1970 abrió el camino para un modelo

neoliberal que funciona a nivel económico privilegiando el capital financiero y a nivel

político como un marco de referencia racional para un nuevo “sentido común” pos-

democrático. El populismo tiene tanto una dimensión de la colisión (una visión supuesta-

mente no ideológica de la crisis neoliberal) y una dimensión institucional (una concepción

fuertemente ideológica de las propuestas destinadas a superar los actuales impases políti-

cos). Dentro del partido político español Podemos, ha surgido un debate entre los “sig-

nificantes vacíos” de Ernesto Laclau y la teoría presentada por Boaventura de Sousa

Santos. La primera es más fuerte en la dimensión desconstituyente, pero solo la segunda

es capaz de formular agendas post-neoliberales. La primacía del discurso en la teoría del

populismo de Laclau impide la construcción de un nuevo sujeto político y consideración

de una nueva identidad. En contraste, la teoría de Santos, especialmente su énfasis en

“traducción,” se presta a una práctica política más transformadora, ya que amplía el

espectro de lo que es posible.

Keywords: Podemos, Populism, Postdemocracy, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ernesto

Laclau

The crisis of 2008 signaled by the collapse of Lehman Brothers has stimu-

lated discussion of Western democracy along two different paths. The first

leads to a triumphant neoliberal model that proclaims the end of the postwar

Juan Carlos Monedero is a professor of political science at the Complutense Universidad de

Madrid.

898244LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19898244LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESMonedero/POSTDEMOCRACY, POSTPOLITICS, AND POPULISM

research-article2020

146 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

social contract in a society whose internal cohesion is threatened by climate

change, an ageing population, migration, violence, unemployment, employee

insecurity, low health standards, poverty, extreme inequality, and uncertainty.

The second path opens the possibility of exploring a model for which there are

no clear references, one that requires experimentation (based on trial and

error) the smallest mistakes and failures of which will be pounced upon by

those who are bent on extending and deepening the neoliberal model. One of

the models that has been proposed along these lines is based on the concept of

populism. Podemos, a party that was born in Spain in 2014 out of the move-

ment of the indignados (the outraged), claimed to be at its outset inspired by

populism with regard to its tactics, organization, and objectives, particularly

those of its political secretary and electoral campaign director Íñigo Errejón. In

the ideological aspects of Podemos’s electoral program, there is an intersection

between the populist proposals of Ernesto Laclau—the construction of the

“people”—and the major themes of the left (with regard to social, labor, eco-

logical, feminist, and LGTB concerns, as well as self-determination and par-

ticipatory democracy). Nevertheless, in the area of political discourse Errejón,

who was close to Laclau’s thinking, understood the intersection as an empty-

ing of the demands in dispute and a distancing from class conflicts and a

greater emphasis on discourse and questions of identity (Bernabé, 2018). This

emptying, along with identification with the leadership and a radical confron-

tation with the existing power, lent itself to the construction of “the people”

that articulated the alternative (Errejón and Mouffe, 2016). The postulates of

Errejón would increasingly clash with the positions of Podemos’s Secretary

General Pablo Iglesias, eventually leading to a party division in 2019, when

Errejón left the organization (Álvarez Tardío and Redondo, 2019; Monedero,

2019a; Torreblanca, 2015).

Since the 1970s, proponents of neoliberalism especially have concluded that

the Keynesian model cannot be universally applied. In its place they have pre-

scribed a form of therapy: reduction in state expenditures, open borders for

capital, financial and labor deregulation, monetarism, and a host of other initia-

tives, anthropological, political, biological, judicial, and philosophical. There

are three basic ideas at the heart of this therapy: (1) markets are not natural and

therefore require state support; (2) the private sector is inherently superior to

the public sector (which implies a moral acceptance of inequality); and (3) civil

rights have primacy over political and social rights (Escalante, 2016).

Conflict, the essence of politics, has gradually been giving way to a neolib-

eral-based narrative in which everything is supposedly reduced to consensus

(Mouffe, 2003). The idea that we might avoid politics altogether entails redefin-

ing all issues as technical ones—constructing politics on the basis of neoclassi-

cal economics, disregarding concrete realities. Once the social and historical

context is rendered irrelevant, the possibility of finding nuances or creating

alternatives disappears. The result is that neoliberalism emerges as a radically

successful ideology. While neoliberalism is best understood as a “rationaliza-

tion device” for a particular economic model, it also provides a common sense

that even the sectors that it excludes have adopted. The idea of profit in a mer-

cantilistic world and the idea of personal fulfillment (understood as the increas-

ing capacity to consume) are reproduced as values in all cultural spaces and