From Populism as a Threat to the Populist Threat, Chronicles of an Announced Destiny. Necessary Dialogues between Political Theory and Socio-History

Abstract

Antiestablishment Latin American neo-populist movements represent a form of negative alterity for a certain conception of the world, which was born out of the representative democratic system and specific kind of the market economy: the neoliberal. These movements reintroduced the issue of conflict and its consequent perennial nature of antagonism in the political; and with this the feeling and designation of threat. In the Latin America of global disorder, this is neither an allegory nor a discursive resource. The strategic dimension of populism not only reveals itself in the multiplicity of socio-political conflicts to which it has been linked, and for which it has been made responsible; or in its logic of the political structured around the need to define an adversary by opposing “the people” with their “enemies”. It also expresses itself, without euphemisms, when the United States regards “radical populisms” as new threats. Considered in military terms, at the beginning of the 21st century, the antiestablishment neo-populism is part of a
political theory of war. However, if its definition as a “military” concern by the United States circumscribes to a specific time ―that of the Chavist’s project and its revolutionary messianism―, populism as a threat is part of a long Latin American temporality that has been shaped by the always threatening alterity of a plebeian universe.