Populism

THE TERM POPULISM HAS been associated with a set of different meanings that go from a political movement to a loose set of ideological principles. Originally, populism is an extensive and imprecise concept that first appeared in the vocabulary of political ideas during the 19th century in Russia. Based on a direct translation of the Russian narodnik, populism served to describe a political movement that brought a certain current of intellectuals closer to the peasantry, arguing [Page 350]that the true values of the ideal community were to be found in the village and the simple life.

Populist William Jennings Bryan came very close to winning the presidency in the 1890s, the height of populism in America.

The term populism has also been used to used to refer to a late-19th-century agrarian movement in the United States that expressed the political grievances of debt ridden farmers who felt let down by the political class. Having begun in the 1880s, the populist movement reached its zenith in the 1890s when its candidate, William Jennings Bryan, became the Democratic Party's nominee and came close to winning the presidential elections. Agrarian populism also fed the Progressive movement, a movement that had its roots among the urban middle classes and that called for economic and political reform. In particular, the Progressive movement tried to push for the introduction of anti-trust legislation in order to attempt to break the link between political and economic power.

Later, it would become a term used to describe the political experiences of Brazil and Argentina in relation to the figures of Getúlio Dorneles Vargas and Juan Peron. In general, populism makes a call to “the people,” whatever this collective group might be, and uses it for the purpose of political mobilization. The basic ideas of mobilization and the people shape populism's vision of the role of the parties, its basic understanding of political action and of the nature of governments. This call to the people is characterized by the act of mobilization itself and need to abandon all actions leading to implementing a political program on the part of political actors. Political programs are instead substituted by empty discourses of what are called popular aspirations, destined to control the masses and to impose a political regime with varying degrees of authoritarian undertones.

Populism is thus essentially negative, as it opposes the so-called virtue of the people to enemies that can be as varied as the conspiratorial aims of the political system, the financial system, the intellectuals, capitalism, and even the imperialism of other nations. Given that populism has no clearly defined ideology and can even be hostile to ideologies, it feeds itself mainly from the charismatic virtues of its absolute leader or from the exaltation of those characteristics that are meant to define “the people.” In this way, the national ideology can reach xenophobic extremes, proclaiming cultural and economic nationalist values and even ethnic purity.

In Latin America, populism has never referred to the popular agrarian movement that was in Europe or in the United States. Instead, it has always had the meaning of a particular doctrine of power. In this sense, the charismatic leader is the quintessential populist leader who instigates the masses for aims ultimately conservative even when these aims oppose themselves to the oligarchies and the “false” electoral democracies. The example of Peron serves to illustrate the meaning of populism. A military man who participated in the Argentine coup of 1930 and 1944, Peron showed strong admiration for the German and Italian fascist dictatorships of the prewar era. However, after retiring from the army and all previous government posts, he was also able to transform himself in order to contest and win the 1946 presidential elections as a democrat.

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