Beyond “Populism”: The Psychodynamics of Antipolitical Popular Movements

What is it about?

I argue here that the term "populism" captures too much, including movements that are enthralled by a fantasied ideal as well as genuine movements for plural and popular sovereignty. The term is too often used to deride all popular movements, but this is to the detriment of genuinely political and democratic movements for democratic sovereignty. I distinguish popular movements that are genuinely political and generative from those that are regressive and anti-political. The latter, I argue using Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, are melancholically clinging to a lost Thing, while democratic popular movements are open to creating new societies. To explore these differences I draw on Lacan's distinctions between symptom, sublimation, and sinthome as well as Klein's distinction between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. Together, these psychoanalytic theorists point to the need for creatively and generatively working to create new collective identities rather than melancholically clinging to old fantasied ideals. I argue that these kinds of distinctions are far better than ones between left-wing and right-wing populisms as well as theories that reduce all "populisms" to one general phenomenon.

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