The Need for Wild Populism

As in the last presidential election in Chile, which involved the participation of various marginalized sectors since the conflict between the new majority and Chile, grouped in the so-called Broad Front; or in Colombia, with the help of conservative candidate Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro, representing a new progressive alliance that has redesigned, in one way or another, the Colombian political and electoral map. . Still in Mexico, the electoral conflict is characterized not only by the old bipartisan logic between the PRI and the PAN, but also by the emergence of a new political force that attempts to represent long-delayed demands. popular sectors and break with the neoliberal pact that has successfully disrupted social change initiatives and perpetuated levels of inequality and impoverishment in this country and in the rest of Latin America .

However, the electoral victory of Sebastián Piñera in Chile, added to the previous Mauricio Macri in Argentina and the recent Iván Duque in Colombia (something more difficult to predict in Mexico, where everything seems to indicate the triumph undisputed Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Morena coalition – I write this before the official results -), seem to mark what has been called the end of the progressive cycle in Latin America; this cycle badociated with the governments of the pink tide whose redistributive program attempted to correct the excesses of the first neoliberalism that devastated the region and which reoriented their economies to geopolitically satisfy the Washington Consensus, and economically, the Consensus Merchandise (as the Called the Argentine critic Maristella Svampa.)

The end of the Progressive Cycle then perishes to express itself as a right-wing shift, grouped in a diffuse way in an agenda characterized by a radical and opportunistic pragmatism, where it is finally promised to reach superlative levels of economic development, security and citizen peace, institutional stability against the populist attacks of the anti-neoliberal sectors, using as counter-example, to polarize the electoral field, the ghost of Castro-Chavismo as incarnation of any progressive policy that attempts to attack the neoliberal pact.

None of this is casual, because the opportunistic pragmatism of the regional (and global) right is nothing but a new type of populism, which, appealing to the commonplaces and reinforced by the official discourses and the media machaconería, is presented as the only one

Indeed, beyond its usual denunciations of the populist demon, the new right operates according to a populism allowed by the monopoly of the media and inscribed in a good way thanks to a profound destruction of historical consciousness. It is a planned and coherent strategy where privatization processes of education, curricular reforms oriented towards technization and functional professionalism in general, the withdrawal of so-called humanist subjects (history and philosophy first place), and the overpopulation of the show, as well as the transformation of the media into instances of mere reproduction of security discourses and the criminalization of social protest, reproduce social imaginaries sensitive to the demagogic practices of a right that promises to end to insecurity and corruption, advance in development and modernization, and control the invasion of immigrants, previously demonized or animated.

The fundamental consequence of this finding, the fact that the right is deeply populist and its populism is publicized, is that we can no longer maintain that current The political conflicts in Latin America are between a populist and anti-neoliberal sector and a republican and liberal sector, but between at least two different versions of populism.

Beyond the growing and complex discussion surrounding this phenomenon, let us emphasize that populism is a notion that attempts to capture, on the one hand, a new political reality precipitated by the emergence irrepressible of the popular in Latin American societies in the middle of the twentieth century, consequence of the great migrations between the countryside and the city. of industrialization motivated by policies oriented towards import substitution, urban development and transformations of the traditional social structure. On the other hand, populism is also the name that is clbadically attributed to a political strategy consisting essentially of organizing a series of demands and social demands around a leadership that the articules, promising their realization. [19659002] Hence the denunciation of populism as an ideology that divides the field of political representation between an articulated or imagined people ex post factum (a fictional ethnicity would say Étienne Balibar), and a charismatic leader who embodies the homogeneous will said "City". In this sense, the notion of "people" (homogeneous and identifiable attribectively) which seems to be a fundamental condition of populist practice, is rather an effect of their own performance. It is up to the populist discourse to challenge and produce the people as a political subject that the leader will represent.

However, liberal republican criticism does not stop at this abusive characterization of leadership, but shows populism itself as a consequence of political and institutional immaturity, because populism tends to distort the integrity of the law by contaminating the legal and procedural scope of the government with the dirty demands that emanate from the people (it is not surprising that this is the exclusive feature with which the historic emergency of said "peoples": broken, nacos, blackheads, dirty faces, etc.)

It would then be necessary to ask why the progressive cycle in Latin America failed, because it could not be ratified at the electoral level ( beyond the self-perpetuation of some regional leaders held in a rampant exception), why the new right and its populism or techno-media returned to several countries (Colombia, Argentina, Ch ili) as an effective government alternative . Faced with these questions, the thesis of the conspiracy that blames North American imperialism for boycotting and intervening does not seem plausible to me, since it, without being false, does not completely explain the problem.

I will say it without major mediations. The progressive cycle failed because it was unable to escape the neoliberal capture of politics, a capture that implied, and still implies, the bureaucratic mediation of social struggles and claims based on co-opted institutional regimes. by the corporate interests of transnational capital. This is not an economist reading, but a diagnostic of the representative political structure and its undemocratic tendencies to perpetuate and replicate the status quo. Not only now, but in all modern Latin American political history.

Here is a second question about the role that these new politico-electoral forces could play in the neoliberal framework and beyond. From Frente Amplio in Chile to Morena in Mexico (including Podemos in Spain), it would be necessary to determine if they are processes of internal adjustment with the same political and clientelist structure, where young sectors and professionals want to advance their access to positions of government and administration, without going through the mediation of old and worn-out partisan structures, or if it involves articulations capable of breaking with the neoliberal capture of politics and politics; to manage the conflicting social dynamics in the context of a second-clbad neo-liberalism, which no longer opposes the state, but functionalizes it as an instance of contestation for the free deployment of its process of devastation and accumulation.

The old progressive populism, which so many social conquests have produced in Latin America, and which has been systematically demonized since the new techno-media populism of the neoliberal Right, has failed to the extent that it repressed a configuration properly populist, hiding his desire for social change in the administrative sublimation of his political impulses. Faced with this old populism, it is not enough for the juristocratic and republican logic, because the neoliberal pact seems to prefer its own perpetuation to its possible modification.

Without the populist claim, there is no possibility to change the neoliberal pact, because populism is inherent but necessary to republican thought, as long as it wants to go beyond its own formal verification as the empire of the law. In other words, this populist republicanism can not calm the demotic irruption of the popular sublimation mediation of the desire for change, it must instead radicalize its desire for institutionalization. a theory of institutional openness to the historical contingency of social struggles. These are weak or weak institutions, sensitive to democratic activation and not configured according to the immunological logic of law and force.

In this context, it seems necessary to oppose not only the old progressive populism, but also the new techno-media populism, a savage populism, which without transferring its power to the leader, functions as a vector of radicalization of the neoliberal juristocratic pact. Otherwise, the emerging political forces of change in the region will be doomed to repeat the family tragedy that pits the old and the new generations against the administration of misery.

It is then a question of imagining a populism that does not orient itself towards the instrumental conquest of the State, by repeating the hegemonic logic and counter-hegemonic who sacrificially tax social dynamics, castrating their potential for change and domesticating them as an electoral clientele. As in the famous story of Osvaldo Lamborghini, El Fiord (1969), it is not enough to destroy the old direction, he must desecrate his body to prevent him from reincarnating himself in a new sacrificial feast. In this case, a savage populism, open to institutional processes and demotic irruptions, capable of tightening the legal order of a democratic practice not captured by corporate interests, and able to resist co-optation and blackmail. privileges appears as the only alternative to the techno-media populism of a law that today monopolizes almost all places of enunciation.