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The return of the repressed: populism and democracy revisited

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Abstract

This article revisits the vexed relationship between populism and democracy. The article identifies and analyzes a persistent split in the discourse of democracy between the politically fit and unfit, and argues that populism is best seen as effecting a reversal of this ancient binary. Using analytical tools from the strong program in cultural sociology, this binary is theorized as a symbolic code organizing our sense of and sensibilities for the sacred and the profane in democracy, a symbolic code that political science research on populism tends to reproduce rather than explicate. Pursuing this, the article outlines a cultural explanation of populism as well as of shortcomings and blind spots in the latest wave of research on the subject. It argues by example the need to cross over between political, social, and cultural theory in order to better understand populism and democracy and their contentious interrelationship.

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Notes

  1. Although Benjamin Moffitt’s notion of political style is helpful in its focus on populist performance, it does not relate such performance to the broader structure of meaning and affect that I pursue here (Moffitt 2016, p. 38; cf. Alexander et al. 2006).

  2. A small transcontextual sample cutting across the left-right continuum might include individuals such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Marine LePen in France (cf. Altinordu 2020; Mudde 2007; Müller 2016; Villegas 2020).

  3. Such boundaries between the sacred and the profane can of course be established, defended, and contested without use of the words ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’. American public discourse makes explicit and frequent use of ‘sacred’, while such boundary work in other contexts may be cast in other terms (Alexander et al. 2006).

  4. The translation is from the Cambridge edition cited, but I have retained in original the complexity of the Greek logos, which the translator simplifies in this instance as ‘rational principle’.

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Acknowledgements

Revising an earlier version of this article I benefited greatly from helpful comments from the editors and anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Jeffrey Alexander. I also want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Linnaeus University, who helped me clarify my initial ideas for this piece.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Linnaeus University, 351 95, Växjö, Sweden

    Henrik Enroth

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Enroth, H. The return of the repressed: populism and democracy revisited. Am J Cult Sociol 8, 246–262 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00080-z

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