Populism or Democracy?

After the December, 2012 constitutional referendum in Egypt we find that electoral success may not translate into popular support. So how do democracies come to diverge from populism?

Democratic governments claim that the will of the populace is represented in government decision-making and policy. Yet historically democracy has had two broad variants. One variation, widespread until the early 19th century, was where ordinary people by force of numbers govern, so that democracy (sometimes known as popular democracy) is shaped by a relation between all the people and a form of government. A second now more commonly accepted form is where carefully selected representatives govern.  The claim of electoral democracies to full democracy is based on the second form, which unfortunately is now widely associated with democracy to the exclusion of the earlier and still popular sense.

In the common sense of today, popular attempts to reclaim governments from the stranglehold of political and economic elites are often seen as anti-democratic, meaning that they attempt to overthrow elected officials. As a result, populism is often associated in mass media and political theory with roving mobs, like those storming the Bastille or claiming Cairo’s Tahrir Square and New York’s Zuccotti Park, bent on violent destruction and even murder while causing disorder in society. So when the cronyism that is commonly associated with neoliberal economic policies or the plutocracy associated with wealthy campaign donors is targeted by popular movements, dark predictions of social disorder seem to come true.

When a candidate popular with those below the middle class in Egypt, Hamdeen Sabahi, ran for the presidency in the primary elections and did not receive enough votes to make the runoff, he refused to support either Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, or Ahmed Shafik, a former Mubarak prime minister. Now that Morsi’s constitutional proposals have received a majority in the December constitutional referendum despite lacking compromises with a broad range of constituents  Sabahi refuses to give his support for Morsi’s constitution. Sabahi claims that Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supports the markets over the poor, is unwilling to guarantee “binding social and economic rights” for the poor, and does not know how to appeal to Egyptian populism.

Certainly provisions such as the rights of the poor might have been included in the new constitution, if its drafters were responding to popular pressure for economic change to accompany political change. Yet Frederick Deknatel has shown that the housing and development policies under Morsi duplicate Mubarak’s policies, meaning Morsi’s millionaire colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood (such as Khairat al-Shater) will soon receive the same unequal benefits as Mubarak’s cronies did, unless the Egyptian people reclaim their revolution.

Through this process in Egypt and comparable processes elsewhere, the promise of popular movements that overthrow plutocracies is appropriated under the same terms that the cronies would have us believe are democratic. Few believed that Mubarak’s elections were democratic, yet many have faith in the democratic character of December’s national elections in Egypt.

How might the reduction of the people’s desires to threats to order and government be avoided? One approach is to consider working with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of community as developed in his book, The Coming Community. While critical of the commodification under globalization of social relations, Agamben argues for a form of subjectivity that declines to rely on sovereign authorities for its rights, identity, and forms of belonging. Rather than seeing identities as “naturally” shaped by gender, region, or nation, Agamben suggests that we pursue forms of governance that are shaped as fields of possibility and transformation (which he calls “whatever being”, Fr. quelconque) rather than as regulated, policed borders of identity and territory.

Many times the seemingly fixed identities of individuals and political parties are both the major strength and weakness of movements. As a rallying point for mobilization and consensus, fixed characteristics make movements possible. As a determining limit for policies and practices, fixed characteristics also make party and movement strategies and tactics predictable and easy for opponents to counter. When those fixed limits shift is often when political change occurs, as when debates take place over whether it is really “Egyptian” or “American” to stay in public spaces (like Tahrir Square or Zucotti Park) for days at a time. By taking political works as an undetermined field of possibility of “whatever being,” social movements and political parties as traditionally understood would become impossible, since they would no longer have fixed constituencies. At the same time they would become unstoppable, not only because they would have undetermined or even limitless constituencies but also because they would become much more effective in shifting the limits and terms of strategy and goals.

In concrete terms this approach might reconfigure Egyptian lines of division that have weakened the popular movement that overthrew Mubarak, reducing their claim on efforts to mobilize in the coming general parliamentary elections.  As new possibilities emerge for working across seemingly fixed identities like gender or religion, or divisions like rural/urban or employed/unemployed, strategies and tactics might develop that will not be anticipated by those who will attempt to mobilize Muslim Brotherhood members. Very much in the way that early use of Facebook to organize unanticipated forms of opposition to Mubarak (like standing and facing the Nile), the deployment of identities and loyalties shaped as undetermined fields of possibility can be very effective in organizing to reclaim the revolution in the interest of the people.

So when asked the question that divides, whether a country’s people want popular democracy or representative democracy, the reply might be, “Yes, we want both. The people want representatives who will stand up and fight for what the people want.” Refusing the terms of questions that divide is the starting point. The stakes are high, and only time will tell what the relation will be between what the people desire and what the electoral representatives decide, whether in Egypt or Tunisia, or in France or the U.S.