Populist Movements

Phases of Populist Movements

Scholars conventionally identify the first historical manifestation of populism in the Russian intellectual populism of the late 1840s Narodnikis (i.e., populists in Russian; the word narodnitchestvo—populism—appeared in the 1870s). Influenced by the ideas of Aleksandr Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Nicolai Tchernichevski but devoid of any elaborate ideology, these Narodnikis emerged as a revolutionary movement adhering to some kind of idolatry of the peasantry and the rural village (obchtchina). They were ultraleftist, prone to the use of violence and even political assassinations. [Page 2076]This led, later on, to nihilism—terrorism as propagated by Nicolai Nekrassof and Sergei Netchaiev. They were also fiercely anti-Western (Orientalists) and proslavist (an extremely radical variety of revolutionary slavophiles).

Thereafter, during the last quarter of the 19th century, populism made a second appearance in the very different world of the European and North American industrialized societies. It thoroughly transformed itself into an anti-elitist, anti-parliamentarian, and nationalist-chauvinistic movement, especially in France between 1886 and 1889 (Boulangism, derived from the name of its charismatic leader General Boulanger) and in the United States during the 1890s (with the xenophobic Protestant and anticapitalist People's Party of the small White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] farmers and miners). Under these circumstances, populism shifted from the most extreme Left to the radical nationalist Right, appearing to some extent as the ancestor of today's xenophobic and anti-immigrant Western European populist parties. Both French and U.S. populism of this second period only enjoyed a short time span. In this way, they introduced a feature of populist movements that remained for a long time quite typical—that is, their short duration, due to the ephemeral excesses of popular fever generated by a recurrent hostility to the existing ruling elite or to a newly established democratic government (in Europe of the late 19th century in particular). They also inaugurated populism as an unsteady form of mass electoral movements cemented by an orientation toward the “citizens of true stock.”

Between 1925 and 1955, populism made a third appearance. This time, it emerged in Latin America, with the semidictatorships of Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Peron in Argentina (notwithstanding other populist governments, e.g., Carlos Ibañez's in Chile or General Rojas Pinilla's in Colom bia, alongside their much more recent revival in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela or Evo Morales's Bolivia). In this region, populism seems to revive in part the older tradition of caudillismo, that is, that of a predestinate Savior of the People, wielding power by virtue of Providence against the lofty and corrupt oligarchy of big landowners. This inheritance did not prevent Latin American populism from becoming the most accomplished of all populist manifestations till now, a complete political regime of some sort, offering an actual alternative to West European or North American representative democracy. This alternative could be called “incarnate democracy,” considering its embodiment of the Sovereign People by a charismatic leader. Institutionally, these regimes are based on state-controlled labor unions for the incipient working class rather than on a single party inspired by European totalitarian states. Though rather authoritarian and by no means liberal, they, indeed, introduced for the first time some kind of political participation of the Latin American masses into the political arena to gain support from this popular base. They did so to such an extent that they deserve to be considered in some countries as the real forerunners of democracy in this part of the world. This particularity makes Latin American national populist regimes unique.

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