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Populism: a Shape-Shifting Ghost

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Populism: a Shape-Shifting Ghost School of Journalism and Mass Communications Faculty of Economic and Political Sciences Populism: A Shape-Shifting Ghost BY Ilker Yaman A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF DIGITAL MEDIA, COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM Specialization: European Journalism Supervisor: Vasilis Vamvakas January 2019 1 CONTENTS ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION 4 CONCEPTUAL HISTORY 6 LITERATURE REVIEW 12 3.1 Literature Review on the Populist Party in the United States 12 3.2 Literature Review on the Narodnik Movement in Russia 19 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 25 4.1 Civil Society 25 4.2 Hegemony 30 4.3 Intellectuals 34 4.4 Manipulative Discourses 40 CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF POPULISM 51 5.1 The Origin of the Concept of Populism 51 5.1.1 The Conceptual Approach to Populism 54 5.2 Populism in the Interwar Period 72 5.3 The Beginning of the Pejoration 80 5.3.1 The Spectre Haunting the World: Populism? 85 5.4 Populism from Latin America To Europe 89 5.5 Populism from Big P Populism to small p Populism 92 5.6 Populism from Financial Crisis to Present 101 CONCLUSIONS 105 BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 ABSTRACT Of all “-isms” in the political science lexicon and in the journalistic discourse, populism easily distinguishes itself from others. We usually know what’s liberalism, socialism or feminism and we are able to identify who belongs to their ideological communities. However, when it comes to populism, confusion arises to pin down the concept. Neither scholarly consensus exist for the definition of populism, nor there is a common agreement on the ideological ingredients derived from the populist perspective. Closely related, populism is often asserted pejoratively and used extremely liberally. This is to the extent that populism does not get into a debate as to what the core meanings and theories of the concept are. To be more precise, the concept of populism has long been in an intellectual torture chamber from which it could not have managed to escape yet. This is an interesting phenomenon because populism was first introduced to the vocabulary as a self-descriptive term used by the adherents of the populist movement in the United States in the late 1800s. Almost at the same time, through in a different continent, an analogous political movement emerged onto stage in Russia and the members of this ideological community called themselves ‘narodniks’. Today, there is no doubt about the term ‘narodnik’ serving as a Russian equivalent of ‘populist’ and ‘narodchivesto’ that translate as ‘populism’. Having this knowledge in mind, a prominent question arises; “how is it possible that populism has become a pejorative concept?” The answer to this question is the consideration of this dissertation. It first undertakes a profound comparative analysis of the ideologies of these two political movements. Remaining in the realm of ideological debates, it then identifies the roles of intellectuals in the pejoration of the concept of populism. With these findings, the present dissertation hopes to give an accurate account to those who dedicate their endeavors to save populism from its conceptual slipperiness and assign it a genuine meaning. 3 1) INTRODUCTION Although much time has passed from the moment when the term populism emerged onto stage in the late 19th century, it is still in general consensus within academia that we know “who​ to call populist but not what precisely constitutes populism.” (Raadt, Hollanders, Krouwel; 2004) Despite the vagueness of the concept, ‘populism’ was selected as the word of the year in 2017 by the Cambridge Dictionary, largely due to the increasing usage of the concept of ‘populism’ in popular discourses. As it is no doubt a curious phenomenon, that is the extreme usage of the concept, recently there has been several attempts to the discovery of the concept, and the media discourses about ‘populism’ have also been analyzed by scholars. (Bale et, al; 2011, Herkman; 2016, Schrauwen; 2017) The scholars revealed that the concept of ‘populism’ is thrown around liberally to the extent that even a football coach is labelled as populist in the media (Bale, et, al; 2011; 8). Thus, populism is usually used in the pejorative sense that, “when​ the term populism was used, its meanings were mainly constructed within negative framings.” (Herkman​ 2016; 157). In the meantime however, Houwen (2011) inscribed the conceptual history of the concept of populism in which he cautiously identified major time periods of the semantic innovation of the concept. According to Houwen (2011), the concept was brought from its grave back to the literature in the mid-1950s not to praise it, but to bury it. Indeed, Houwen (2011) displays how the political concept was imprisoned in the intellectual torture chamber in the 1950s and 1960s, from which it could not have managed to escape yet. The quest of understanding the semantic changes within the definitions of populism progressed with the works of Yannis Stavrakakis. His essay, ‘How​ Did ‘Populism’ Become a Pejorative Concept? and Why is This Important Today?’ (2017) brings novelty to the literature for many reasons. Through offering a very detailed treatment of the ‘revisionist’ scholarship on American populism in the 1950s and 1960s, 4 Stavrakakis (2017) skilfully reminds political scientists, who have been increasingly reductionist in their essays and books, that the people who characterized themselves as populists truly existed once upon a time. With this, Stavrakakis (2017) also points out the gap between the fields of history and political science, since it has been so long that the revisionist interpretation of American populism has been revised by several academic papers. (Pollack, 1962; Nuget, 1963; Porterfield, 1965; Goodwyn, 1971, 1976, 1978; McMath, 1992; Miller, 1993; Clanton, 1991; Kazin, 1995; Postel, 2007; Formisano; 2008) Finally, Stavrakakis (2017) suggests the students of ‘populism’, to approach the Gramscian theoretical concepts to investigate the role of ‘intellectuals’ in the hegemonic struggles around populism. (Stavrakakis, 2017; 4) Stavrakakis (2017) simply indicates the adoption of a similar method that the feminist linguists developed through utilizing the Gramscian conceptual and theoretical instruments for the analysis of the derogatory uses of feminism and feminist. (Cameron, 1985; Sassoon, 1987; Connell, 1995; Kenway, 2001; Ledwith, 2009) According to Ledwith (2009), Gramsci (1999) provided a set of new concepts for the feminist intellectuals who have developed their political analysis of patriarchy, with ‘hegemony’ being the central concept (p; 687), while other concepts, for example, the concept of ‘war of position’ was recognized as a terrain of intellectual and moral struggle in which feminists made sense of ‘personal’ as political (p; 694) and accordingly produced new feminist discourse orders to fend off the dominant language. (Ledwith, 2009; 695) Furthermore, Ledwith (2009, p. 695) reveals that Gramsci’s theory of the ‘intellectual’ provided more clear understandings of ‘activism’ and ‘knowledge’ to the feminist community around the world. From all that has been said about the collaboration between feminist intellectuals and Gramsci one conclusion emerges and requires to be stated. As expected of him, Gramsci (1999) provided theoretical tools by which feminists have used to explore the language’s relation to gender and proved how the popular discourses that guaranteed the dominant position of men and the traditional subordination of women were produced in civil society, that the negative mainstream images of feminism were directly linked to the pejoration of ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. (Schultz, 1975; Connell, 1987, Przybylowicz, 1990; Borkowska and Kleparski, 2007) 5 Therefore, the present dissertation intend to use Stavrakakis (2017) as the guidelines and to use the Gramscian theoretical tools to bring to light the role of ‘intellectuals’ in the pejoration of the concept of ‘populism’, similar to what the feminist scholars and linguistics have successfully fulfilled in their duties. In fact, this paper is first and foremost an attempt to write the conceptual history of ‘populism’, while at the same time investigating the roles of ‘intellectuals’ through ‘semantic’ changes within the definitions of populism by utilizing Gramscian political analysis. Therefore, it contains six sections in all, including this introduction section in which the purpose is to establish the content, summarize the background, and lead the readers through the general subject. The next section examines the methodology adopted, while the third section is entirely devoted for a literature review. The fourth part explores a theoretical framework mainly derived from Gramsci’s, ‘The​ Prison Notebooks’ (1999), and defines the relevant terminologies such as, the theories of ‘hegemony’, ‘intellectual’, ‘civil society’, etc. The fifth section analyses both the political and social contexts in which the concept of populism emerged and was used, and also explores the roles of intellectuals through the changes within the definitions of populism, from the mid-1950s to today. Finally, the last section is devoted to a conclusion. 2) CONCEPTUAL HISTORY Conceptual history is a method used to study changes within the meanings of political concepts. As expected, it is a linguistic analysis, however, it does not indicate only surveying history of political concepts and identifying changes within definitions but also examining wider historical changes in society, which is by studying political, social, cultural and economic contexts. The principal purpose of the method of conceptual history is understanding historical setting within which the concept is situated, since it assumes language shapes and registers the processes of changes that transform every area of social life. At this point it is very easy to see parallels with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who reminded us of that “words​ were not separate from thought, nor thought from words.”(cited​ in, Freeden, 1996; 49) In this 6 sense, ‘historians of concepts’ incorporates with the theory of Foucault (1972, 1995) who demonstrates that there is no reality separate from words, and language is a part of historical reality itself.
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