For a Left Populism
Populism claimed from the left
Description
In 2018, the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe published a short, almost combative book called For a Left Populism. It arrived in a moment that felt, to many observers, like an emergency. Donald Trump had been in the White House for a year. Brexit had happened. Marine Le Pen had reached the second round of a French presidential election. Across Europe and the Americas, parties and movements that the press kept labeling populist were pulling voters away from the familiar center. The word itself had become an accusation, a shorthand for demagoguery, resentment, and the manipulation of a frightened crowd.
Mouffe's wager was to refuse that framing entirely. Populism, for her, is not a pathology or a style of lying. It is a way of doing politics — a logic that divides society into two camps and builds a collective subject out of the division. The far right had learned to use that logic with devastating effect, naming an enemy and offering belonging to people the mainstream had stopped addressing. Her question was blunt: if the mechanism works, why had the left abandoned it to its opponents?
Behind that question sits a longer argument about what had gone wrong with democracy over the previous three decades. Mouffe had spent her career insisting that conflict is not the failure of democratic life but its raw material. For a Left Populism takes that insistence and turns it into a strategy, one meant to answer the rise of the right not by scolding its voters but by competing for them.
The question we’re asking : If populism is a technique rather than a disease, what would it mean for the left to use it well?What we’ll see : How Mouffe reclaims a feared word, grounds it in conflict rather than consensus, and turns it into a plan for rebuilding a democratic majority.
Table of contents
01 Chapter 1 — The moment populism stopped being a slur
Mouffe opens with a diagnosis of timing. The late 2010s, she argues, marked the end of a particular era — one she calls, borrowing a phrase, the post-democratic consensus. For roughly thirty years, mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right had converged on the same basic program: open markets, light-touch regulation, the management of the economy by experts rather than the clash of political visions. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schröder — the names changed, the framework held. Elections offered voters a choice between competent administrators of the same order.
That convergence had a cost, and the cost came due. When the two main options start to feel interchangeable, the space for genuine alternatives collapses, and the frustration that democracy is supposed to channel has nowhere to go. Mouffe reads the populist surge of the 2010s as exactly this frustration breaking through. People who felt unrepresented, ignored, talked down to by a confident elite, were finally being addressed by someone — and that someone, overwhelmingly, was on the right.
02 Chapter 2 — Why politics runs on us and them
To understand the strategy, you have to understand the theory underneath it, which Mouffe had been developing for decades, much of it alongside her late collaborator Ernesto Laclau. Its foundation is a flat refusal of the idea that politics could or should be free of conflict. There is no neutral vantage point, no rational procedure that dissolves disagreement into consensus. Society is shot through with relations of power, and politics is the ongoing struggle over how those relations are arranged.
Central to this is a distinction she draws between 'the political' and 'politics.' The political names the dimension of antagonism that is part of all human societies — the ever-present possibility that collective life splits into opposing camps. Politics names the practices and institutions through which we try to organize that antagonism, to give it form rather than let it turn into open war. The goal is not to abolish conflict, which is impossible, but to civilize it.
03 Chapter 3 — The people is something you build
The core move of a left populist strategy, for Mouffe, is the construction of a 'people.' This phrase is easy to misread. She does not mean the people as a pre-existing group waiting to be represented — the honest workers, the real nation, some authentic community that simply exists. The people, in her account, is never found. It is made, through political work, by linking together demands that would otherwise stay separate.
The mechanism she borrows from Laclau is the chain of equivalence. In any society there are countless grievances — over wages, housing, healthcare, discrimination, the environment, democracy itself — each attached to a different group with its own concerns. Left to themselves, these demands compete for attention. A populist strategy weaves them together, so that each struggle comes to be seen as part of a common fight against a shared adversary. The adversary, for Mouffe, is the oligarchy and the neoliberal order that serves it.
04 Chapter 4 — Against the post-political consensus
Step back from the tactics and Mouffe's larger claim comes into view: the deepest threat to democracy is not too much conflict but too little. The dream of a politics beyond left and right, settled by experts and rational deliberation, is not the mature endpoint of democratic life. It is its hollowing-out. When the major parties agree on the fundamentals and compete only over competence, they tell a large part of the electorate that nothing they vote for can change anything that matters. That message, repeated long enough, corrodes the attachment to democracy itself.
This is why she is unmoved by the objection that populism is dangerous because it is divisive. Division, in her framework, is not the disease — it is the sign of a working democracy, provided the division runs through legitimate adversaries rather than enemies to be crushed. The alternative to a left populism is not a serene, consensual politics. It is a political field where the only force still willing to name an us and a them is the far right, and where the frustrations of the unrepresented keep flowing toward it.
05 Conclusion
For a Left Populism closes where it began, in a moment of danger it refuses to treat as merely a threat. The rise of the right had exposed something the comfortable center preferred not to see: that millions of people felt unheard, and that someone would eventually speak to them. Mouffe's answer is not to defend the old order against the populist wave but to ride a different one — to build, deliberately, a popular bloc capable of competing for those same frustrations and giving them a democratic rather than a reactionary form.
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