Beyond “Populism”: The Psychodynamics of Antipolitical Popular Movements

I argue here that the term “populism” captures too much, including movements that are enthralled by a fantasied ideal as well as genuine movements for plural and popular sovereignty. The term is too often used to deride all popular movements, but this is to the detriment of genuinely political and democratic movements for democratic sovereignty. I distinguish popular movements that are genuinely political and generative from those that are regressive and anti-political. The latter, I argue using psychoanalytic theory, are melancholically clinging to a lost Thing, while democratic popular movements are open to creating new societies. To explore these differences I draw on Lacan and Klein whose theories point to the need for creatively working to create new collective identities rather than melancholically clinging to old ones.