Abstract
This article first tries to characterize contemporary Western populist
movements. It then details the key points of E. Laclau’s penetrating
analysis of populism, with a view to using it in a perspective other
than its author’s own. It hypothesizes that the center of gravity of the
populism in the West resides in a reference to the demos, rather than
ethnos or plebs. It goes on to probe the causes of growing citizen
alienation, the main source of populism. It suggests that the social
aspect, notably the destabilization of the lower-middle classes induced
by the Neo-liberal order, does not exhaust the issue. Institutional
demands soon emerge to remedy a perceived disenfranchisement of
majorities generated over half-a-century by the rise of
culturally-defined minority groups, resulting in a “tyranny of
minorities”. Further, citizens resent being treated as minors by a
“framed democracy” in which their capacity for discernment is ignored,
and their assent dispensed with, by ruling elites in the name of a
presumed higher moral good, or directives from unelected faraway power
centers. The root cause of the malaise is the ascent, from the 1960s
onward, of individualism and the relaxation of citizenship norms,
leading to a situation where authority and power are questioned or
feared, and political leadership becomes weak. Now reduced to a
managerial role, it takes to accommodating activists, and delegates
policy-making to independent, nonpartisan authorities, experts, or
international organizations, thus becoming unresponsive to the will of
majorities. In that light, civic populism is a response to a
deactivation of democracy. Representative democracy systems, put in
place over two centuries when the masses were uneducated, are not aging
well now that average education levels have considerably increased and
majorities want to make themselves heard. Redefining the relationships
between elites and grassroots, majority and minorities, is thus in
order.