A poor young politician who is highly passionate about his views and activism, views and activism which are focused on working class people and their struggles, not to mention an emphasis on agriculture and a return to mother earth; one who is passionate enough to be jailed for political activism, prison time which lends itself to a rhetoric of grassroots and 'put your money where your mouth is' credibility; activism which leads to the beginning of a career in politics in small time governmental positions which gives way to campaigning for bigger positions via appealing to lower income workers and regular folks who have been disenfranchised (i.e., appeals to socialism, whether or not an accurate use of the term).
What comes to mind? Is this appealing?
If you said yes then you...
(use your mouse to highlight the text after this arrow) --> [ JUST LIKED HITLER.
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Ok, that was sadistic of me. Don't feel bad. You also like (Highlight again) --> [BERNIE SANDERS.
In case you haven't made the connection, this is the textual version of the this meme.
You have to be careful when talking about this guy. In case it isn't obvious, I don't support anything he's done. The point here is not that these two politicians are anything alike as far as rhetorical content, goals, ethics, morals, policy, etc. Nor is the point to imply that person A is as evil as person B, or that the evil person A is actually not as evil as we think. To speak crudely, but still accurately, person A is evil; Person B is not evil (you know which person is which, don't make me spell it out for you...).
Rather, the point is that [Sanders] and [Hitler] are both populist politicians. There was some outcry on the internet regarding Jair Bolsonaro and [Bernie Sanders] both being considered populists, not to mention some debate among the media outlets about what the term means (and if we do figure out what it means, whether there should be 1 or 2 populisms).
A simple definition of populism is a politics that bypasses the mediation and approval seeking of the governmental bureaucracies - the discourse and structure of prim, proper and former politics - and instead skips straight to appealing to the masses, the people and their feelings (for a good discussion on this definition, watch this lecture from New Center for Research and Practice). Non-populist politicians make arguments and take positions that refer and respond to the abstract political machinations of other politicians and their interests / systems, positions which are often felt as reformist or simply disingenuous by mass voters. The enunciation addresses are the elite, so why wouldn't it feel this way? Populism cuts to the chase and appeals to the working class and their immanent feelings and needs (think Clinton as a nonpopulist vs. [Sanders] as populist).
When we put this plainly, we see that it is theoretically strange to separate out 2 populisms other than out of a pure strategic maneuver the aim of which is to dissociate a disliked person from a liked person - 'we want people to vote [Sanders] so we don't want people associating [Sanders]with Bolsonaro as this could confuse and therefore put off voters,' etc. Why bother with the dissociation? Should not the voter be able to distinguish between the general candidate they want to vote for from the candidate they don't want to vote for, never mind the specific populist candidate they want to vote for? This of course could be debated, but luckily it is not the crux of our argument.
What is more interesting than this splitting somewhat condescendingly aimed at the intellect of the voter is the unconscious desire of which this populism split symptomatic of; it hearkens to the tendency for the left to compare Trump to Hitler. A strange but understandable move. Hitler is bad, I don't like Trump because he is bad (or, I don't like Trump so he must therefore be bad...), so Trump=Hitler. Reductio Ad Hitlrum does not need a new critique, as all critiques of it to date have been old boring news. Thus, in place of a useless critique I offer what is hopefully a new and provocative idea:
Unlike our populists discussed here, Trump has no history of political activism, no passion for particular policy - or politics at all, for that matter - but rather inflicts a raw affective infection upon the crowd (this isn't even populist politics, as its more of an unpolitics. It's rabble rousing). Sander's is like Hitler, Trump, not so much. The left needs Hitler to be put on the side of Trump to help the left disavow or repress their desire for Hitler.
The splitting of 1 populism into 2, with the first being good and the second being bad is a symptom.
What the left really wants is the structure of Hitler without his vile destructive content, its just too scared to say it because it sounds really bad.*
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*[I wanted to end the post on that zinger, but felt I should add - even the left is waking up to this hidden desire (though my point is a somewhat inverted version of this):“when I said the problem with Hitler was that he wasn’t violent enough…in the sense that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler...I’m not talking about killing – physical violence – I’m talking about radical change in social system…change – social system change – in some sense is violent….the dream of too many people today is to somehow get the change but it will not hurt – it will hurt…what the left needs today is not chaos…[folk politics]…the left should be the party of order [big Slavoj grin]…” – Zizek, Channel 4 News interview with Cathy Newman . Change that will not hurt = disavowal; What we will change about this passage is that Hitler's violence is a mad extension of the desire for ultimate political change at any cost, which is precisely what the left desires but is - understandably - afraid of].
