Populist reason and bourgeois rationalism
I write this article in conjunction with the recently published "What really is populism?"from partner Albert Borràs.
If Albert has chosen an analytical, descriptive and explanatory perspective on the concept of populism, I will choose a political perspective of the same.
Populist reason bursts into Spain
Very in vogue in the mass media and in the political and business elites of our country to try to discredit We can, the reviled populism seems to return to the order of the day. Much has been said about far-right populism in Europe and now it seems that the political winds of left-wing populism from Latin America are blowing strongly in our territory.
Why is populism so criticized?
As Albert explains, it is usually equated to demagogy (to win political support through favors to the people) but it obviously has a very different component. There is something common to far-right and far-left populisms that is often overlooked: both are born of the political passions of the "people”.
What have the passions traditionally been opposed to? To reason, and, more specifically, to scientific and bourgeois reason born of the French Enlightenment. The passion / reason or rationality versus irrationality debate has long since been overcome but we still suffer its impacts. If populism is criticized so much from the financial and political elites of our country, it is because of a thought structure that comes from afar: the passions would be the “lowest” of the human being and reason would be the highest, almost the very essence of the human condition, that which would distinguish us from the “beasts”, from the animals.
For me, one of the most abject essays that clearly reflects this thought is Mass psychology by Le Bon. The masses have always been assimilated to irrationality and low political passions. This has always been opposed by an elite of the privileged, an elite of people who will position themselves above the crowd and that they will believe they are the possessors of Truth and Reason, always distant and necessarily independent of the crowds. And that, therefore, they stand as our sovereigns and as our rulers (and I add, to control us).
When we read and interpret society following the classic and modern scheme of an uneducated, passionate people, low against / opposed to a rational, "meritocratic" elite and separated from the crowds we find ourselves with the hard core of the debate that we have right now around populisms. It is the very scheme of modern sovereignty that we also find in the analyzes of our own psyche (the will that our "Conscience", our "rational" conscience is sovereign over the body, over our decisions, over our "instincts" to which we are would oppose).
What is fascinating about the National Front? Why is it so powerful among the French working classes?
The conventional argument to explain these phenomena is: "simple and miraculous solutions are offered to complex problems." We have to shy away from this type of explanation for two reasons that, in my opinion, reinforce the current structure of domination.
First reason: By affirming that people are convinced with simple things in the face of complex problems, it is affirming, implicitly, that people are stupid and that they are not capable, by themselves, of understanding this world and what they herself suffers. That is, you are saying that you, as a good enlightened person, are smarter than the rest and that we should political decision-making space to technocrats who would understand the complexity of our world. This is a very classic right-wing paternalism, which was used as an argument to ban the poor, African Americans, women and children from voting during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Second reason: When the conventional wisdom affirms that "to complicated problems, simple solutions" it is affirming more its own frame of analysis than not the idea that it is transmitting. This framework continues to be that of bourgeois rationality: I make an observation of reality, I being an external element to it, and I can classify, describe, certain problems. Thus, the illusory position of the observer who observes is reproduced without influencing the process itself (an idea that quantum physics has already denied).
People suffer in our flesh the effects and oppressions of this system. Nobody has to come and tell us how or how oppressed we are, it is something we already know. If the National Front has won an election, it is not because it offers solutions, it has to do with rationality. politics that is different from the demos itself, from the people themselves, although in this case it has a character of decomposition Social. Marine Le Pen does something that other politicians are not used to: she speaks with passion. Speak as many of us speak in our streets and neighborhoods. It is aggressive. Many people from the popular classes can feel identified with her because she uses the same expressions, the same passionate force that already exists in the streets. This is neither bad nor good per sehas a very transgressive component, which is to combat bourgeois rationalism, that false game of interests and university people and well tamed who would sit around a table to discuss the evils of the world while sipping their cups of coffee or tea hot.
Whatever the social origin of Marine Le Pen is indifferent, she enunciates and speaks as it is spoken in the popular classes, while generating a new framework of oppression. And for that reason she is a danger, for that reason she has strength and for those reasons in France they are going to have a huge problem. Few people, least of all politically speaking, seem to acknowledge to Le Pen that he has the merit of having created a terrifying bond with the popular, middle and upper classes of France. She is always attacked from a position of liberal elitism instead of recognizing her as an adversary, as a party and ideas that go as equals. We must not put ourselves hierarchically or intellectually above Marine, because we fall back into the game and in the field of liberal parliamentarism, we must combat it from the popular and oppressed. It is a real threat, a threat that resides in the sad passions (in the Spinozist sense) of the crowd.
We can and populist rationality
We can, on her side, she goes much further than that. She does not make a passionate exaltation of rags and hatred towards social minorities. We can create and it is realized through a populist rationality, a rationality that emerges from the demos, from the crowds. If the National Front remains in the populism of the modern people - of ONE people, with ONE idea, that makes ONE decision, that is closed and limited in itself, that creates a separation between its people and the rest of the peoples- Podemos opens the people to become a multitude, so that there are no sovereign withdrawals, so that many decisions are made and many rationalities arise. In addition to this, it reinforces joyful passions, generating social composition and increasing collective power.
The populism of the National Front aspires to once again make of the many a first, pre-conflictual state unit (pre-class struggle constitutive of the capitalist order). On the other hand, as Paolo Virno asserts in Grammar of the multitude: “the multitude is crossed by antagonisms, it can never be a unit. The many subsist like many without aspiring to state unity ”.
Channeling and trying to confine the passions of the multitudes towards a liberal and bureaucratic game of interests is a crass attempt of the elites to be able to manage and subjugate us with the subterfuge of bourgeois Reason (Cartesian, Illuminist, elitist). So that everything can become identifiable and can be fixed, so that everything enters their rules, so that they are the ones who determine those rules and for those who can use them without changing them those who continue to decide from above as rule us. It is an update of the Platonic Idea. Reason and passion are always linked and juxtaposed.
The problem is never what is rational or what is irrational but who determines what is rational or irrational and in view of what objectives or in order to justify what social structure.
We, the citizens, the crowds, generate political reason from below, a new "reason" far removed from the usual mechanisms of libidinal repression. We separate ourselves from the old axes: reason / passion, rational / irrational, Left Right. We want to constitute a new world of the commons and for this reason we also carry out and continue the pertinent criticism of those structures that are arbitrarily rise above us, be they absolute kings and monarchies that were carried out for divine reason, that is, by a hierarchical positioning of a certain type of Reason, of pure reason that imposes a false dichotomy between reason and passion but that in truth continues to be its bourgeois reason against our reason of the people, of the crowds.