Hillary the Populist

One question that has bugged me over the past few months is, who exactly are Hillary’s supporters? I am, of course, not talking about the stereotypical aging “die hard” feminists who refuse to give up on their support for the first woman president. If this were the case, one would suspect that such a group would be dismayed by Hillary’s “conservative” appeal, as well as the reprehensible attacks on Michelle Obama. If, on the other hand, Hillary’s supporters are simply so-called “Reagan Democrats,” that is, white working-class voters (petit bourgeoisie), why do they not support John McCain? He is, arguably, the most hawkish on foreign policy out of all of the presidential candidates¹, as well as the most “free market” orientated.

Jodi Dean has perspicuously pointed out how the term “elitist” (in reference to Barack Obama) has come to be a coded racial buzzword for “uppity” throughout the campaign. Now, of course, one can simply dismiss the (mis-)use of this term, as Barack Obama is, objectively speaking, the least wealthy, least “elitist” of the candidates (in comparison to the Clinton’s hundreds of millions of dollars and the McCain’s eight houses, corporate jet and ownership of numerous large corporations). But, as Dean emphasizes, the point is not so much a condemnation of wealth as it is a racist supposition that Obama has “risen above himself.”

On the other hand, it seems to me too easy to entirely dismiss those who accuse Obama of being “elitist” as racists, although websites such as Hillary is 44 do little to assuage my doubts in this regard. This, in my opinion, adheres too well to the Obama party-line and does little to confront the Clintonite counter-argument that decries Obama’s campaign as being sexist. Here we can see, in concrete form, a significant abstract-political problem associated with “post-[whatever]” identity politics.

I think that this electoral mystery is elucidated within Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, particularly in the paradoxically titled chapter, “Why Populism is Good Enough in Practice (But Not Good Enough in Theory),” in which Zizek critically negotiates with Ernesto Laclau’s recent change in theoretical position from radical democracy to populism. As I have yet to read any Laclau, I have to go entirely on Zizek’s account of his work, which is obviously a limitation, but one that I am not entirely concerned with in the scope of this post. According to Zizek, then, Laclau conceives of populism as

the Lacanian objet petit a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the universal dimension of the political, which is why it is “the royal road” to understanding the political… Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political at its purest: the “inflection” of the social space that can affect any political content.

Along these lines, Zizek argues that populism can be conceived of as the “overlapping of the universal with part of its own particular content,” found within Hegel’s notion of “oppositional determination” (gegensätzliche Bestimmung). Zizek continues by stating that

populism occurs when a series of particular “democratic” demands (for better social security, health services, lower taxes, against war, and so on) is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces “the people” as the universal political subject… and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of a global antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them.”

Thus, Zizek (and, ostensibly, Laclau) conceive of populism, at the most basic level, to be (1) transcendental-formal (as opposed to ontic) and (2) composed of a chain of equivalences that constitute a universal political dimension (“the people”). Finally, this avenue opens up a dichotomy between “us” and “them” (along Schmittian lines of public “friend” and “foe”). Yet, crucial here is that

The field of politics is thus caught in an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers: some particular signifiers start to function as “empty,” directly embodying the universal dimension, incorporating into the chain of equivalences which they totalize a large number of “floating” signifiers. Laclau mobilizes this gap between the “ontological” need for a populist protest vote (conditioned by the fact that the hegemonic power discourse cannot incorporate a series of popular demands) and the contingent ontic content to which this vote gets attached…

Perhaps, given this formula, one should do the unthinkable and take Hillary’s statements that she is the “populist candidate,” not as a cynical political ploy, but literally. Regardless of her objective status (in terms of wealth, class position, and numerous political positions), her “ontic content,” her status as a “populist candidate,” is purely contingent, the result of a formal necessity at the level of the direct expression of the chain of equivalences that constitute “the people.” Consequently, one should not read anything into her candidacy as such. Instead, one should concentrate on the problem at the theoretical level. As Zizek concludes, populism is limited by an ideological mystification, the attempt to suture the inherent antagonism (within society) by transubstantiating it into an external one (hence, “us” vs. “them”).

Yet Obama’s campaign is hardly without its own limitations. On the topic of Chantal Mouffe’s “democratic paradox,” Zizek notes that the “main threat to democracy in today’s democratic countries resides in… the death of the political through the ‘commodification’ of politics.

What is at stake here is not primarily the way politicians are packaged and sold as merchandise at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they involve a competition between different merchandise-parties, and our votes are like money which buys the government we want. What gets lost in such a view of politics as just another service we buy is politics as a shared public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.

The reduction of politics to ontic commodities (the way a politician or party might be “branded” or commodified) and the ontological political-being-as-commodification (the function of the political relegated to that of the commodity-form) points to the vacuousness of contemporary so-called “post-ideological” politics that Obama (at least in part) exemplifies.² It not only reduces “change” to a mere life-style commodity, but it also concedes to the economic-reductionist view of politics as “just another service” to be provided (hence the status of “change,” like that of money, as a pure “empty signifier”). This view thereby obscures the “real change” that politics, at its core, is able to achieve: that of making possible what, retroactively, seemed impossible; changing the entire coordinates of social reality.

Yet, in the opposition between the vacuous post-modern “commodification” of politics and populist ideological mystification, one should, perhaps unexpectedly, support the former. As one may notice, the above paragraph is incredibly cliché, a very stereotypical critique of the “commodification” of daily life, the reduction of things into brand names, etc. Hence, post-modern politics takes on the status of a fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that everything, including politics, is commodified), but nevertheless…” Thus, while populism obscures the objective status antagonism located within fetishistic disavowal through the reification of antagonism into an external Other (“them”), in contrast to “the people,” post-modern politics allows one to begin the project of genuine emancipatory politics by locating the fetishistic object, the object at the center of libidinal cathexis that allows for one to avoid subjectively assuming what one objectively knows.

1. At the very least, this is the image that he has attempted to cultivate, although, as the L.A. Times has pointed out, his foreign policy record is, at best, mixed ↩
2. As a caveat I will say that Obama’s rhetorical abilities and devotional fans are, in fact, a positive contradiction to this thesis. ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment