Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

Introduction

Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.

This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.

This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).

The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).

Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.

Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).

Introduction

If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*

The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.

In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.

Introduction

In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:

The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.

Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).

Introduction

The current Russian government is revising the constitutional system and essentially curtailing the work of democratic institutions. In the process, it is increasingly turning to history as a means of self-legitimation. During the 1990s, which were difficult years for the economics of the country, ruling elites showed an indifference to history. Since the early 2000s, however, this indifference has been replaced, in the words of Alexey Miller, with ‘the escalation of historical politics’ (Miller 2012: 255), which has reached its peak in the third and fourth terms of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The authorities impose a correct picture, from their point of view, of the historical past with the help of school textbooks, large-scale multimedia projects, such as ‘Russia: My history’, and memorial laws (Koposov 2017: 207–299; Kurilla 2021), and even recently adopted amendments to the constitution.

In this chapter, I analyse the Russian government's uses of history. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss two theoretical questions: First, can the Putin regime be considered populist, and, if so, what are its defining features? Second, what uses of history are characteristic of contemporary populism and its Russian variant? I will claim that Russian uses of history can be characterized as conservative, drawing on a particular kind of presentism. After David Armitage, I would call this ‘teleological presentism’ (Armitage 2020). In the second section, I will show how this essentially conservative regime of historicity works in the Russian context by focusing on the use of the idiom ‘historical Russia’. This phrase is increasingly used today in official rhetoric when explaining domestic and foreign policy agendas. In the third and final section, I present my vision of an alternative historicity, which could become a challenge for the kind of presentism produced by the current Russian government.

Introduction

It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*

There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.

Populism

Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’

Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.

Introduction

For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.

Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.

This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.

Introduction

Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:

• 1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.

• 2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.

• 3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.

Introduction

There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.

Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).

In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.

Introduction

In Figure 9.1, we see a meme made by the Brazilian far-right portraying the president Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as a crusader. How to interpret the engagements with history embodied by images like this one?* Is it a traditional use of the past for a coherent ideological project, or is it something else? We believe that this image and, more broadly, Bolsonarist engagements with history reveal certain dimensions of contemporary historicity – by which we mean the articulation of the past, the present, and the future. In this chapter, we thus analyse how the populist movement embodied by Bolsonaro engages with history in a way that activates its heterogeneous political base. These engagements seem to be different from some aspects of modern chronosophies, such as their abandonment of synchronization and coherent presentation of a national history. Instead, the new Brazilian far-right populist historicity relies more on emotional attachment, a pragmatic and highly fragmented historical performance that, as we claim, is more akin to a historicity that we call ‘updatism’, meaning this historicity in which an empty and self-centred present is loosely and pragmatically related to the past, whereas the future is desired as a reserve for the linear expansion of an updating – and sometimes upgrading – present (see Araujo and Pereira 2019).

To demonstrate the affinity between ‘updatism’ and the specific Bolsonarist version of populism, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the concept and the theory of updatism. Next, we characterize the populist dimensions of Bolsonarism – that is, the cultural and political movement represented by Jair Bolsonaro. Then we analyse the new Brazilian populism in its engagements with history, especially the performances of history by the three secretaries of culture of Bolsonaro's government and how the defactualization of reality gains momentum, creating the conditions of possibility for the past to be like a large wardrobe full of prêt-à-porter images and templates. Taken together, we can conclude that the affinities we see between Brazilian populism, or Bolsonarism, and updatist historicity are the following: both flourish in a communicational environment characterized by a shared and simulated reality that defies modern authorities and institutions; both tend to dissolve historical synchronization and thus lead to dispersion and agitation; and both have a more pragmatic engagement with historical content.

Introduction

Rightly or not, the governments’ engagements with memory policies are often met with a shadow of suspicion. Victims’ associations, intellectuals, and activists from different parts of the world tend to warn their publics of possible abuses of memory and manipulations of the past made by political leaders. Argentina, with a dense history of mobilization around its dictatorial past, is no exception to this rule. During the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the discussion about the role played by the state in public remembrance was subject to much contention.

In this chapter, we focus on the way Kirchnerism engaged with the memory of the repression and forced disappearances that took place during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Our goal is to analyse Kirchnerist governments’ involvement in public remembrance by considering the main aspects of their narrative together with the political–institutional approach they unfolded towards memory.

In the Argentinian public debate, the discussion concerning Kirchnerist engagements with the past has so far been dominated by a dichotomous approach that swings from considering Kirchnerist uses of the past as illegitimate ‘appropriations’ to considering their engagement as a sort of automatic ‘enshrinement’ of the human rights movement's claims into the national state. We will argue that, instead, we should understand the dominant Kirchnerist memory frame in Argentina as an outcome of an ‘articulation process’ between the government and the human rights movement, formed by an ensemble of heterogeneous organizations that had historically led the struggle for memory and transitional justice in the country. As suggested by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), by ‘articulation’, we do not merely mean an alliance between two preformed entities, but rather a mutual constitution where both the Kirchnerist movement and the human rights organizations (HROs) were transformed in time. As we will argue, this articulation made it possible for memory and human rights to become an object of public policy in an unprecedented way for Argentinian democracy.

Following Laclau (2005a), we adopt a formal approach to populism. According to this perspective, a movement or government is not ‘populist’ because of its ideological contents but due to a specific logic of articulation of contents, whatever these may be.

Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

Populist Discourse, Historical Narratives, and the Hazards of Essentialism

There is a growing consensus that populism should not be approached as a clearly identifiable or coherent ideology (Morgan 2022). Instead, it might be better to analyse populism as a discourse revolving around the creation of political identity (Ostiguy 2017). Like most collective identities, populism is constructed by denying other identities. Beyond the usual left–right axis, populists pit ‘the people’ against a minority blamed for monopolizing economic and institutional resources – the elite, or those at the top (Laclau 2005).

As a reaction to the destabilization of ‘ontological securities’, populism tends to be seen as either relying on or leading to essentialist conceptions of social and political identities (Steele and Homolar 2019; Bartoszewicz 2021). It is based upon Manichean friend–enemy counter-concepts (Junge 2011), which grant it a strong ontological grounding. On the other hand, it engages in a counter-hegemonic struggle vis-à-vis an oligarchy portrayed as, in essence, deeply corrupt. Its antagonistic rhetoric is prone to the naturalization of otherness, but it typically does not entail the tactic of adopting essentialist self-identification often used by subaltern groups engaged in identity politics (Panizza 2017; Bell 2021).

Still, populism remains an identity discourse that targets the emotions of an allegedly underrepresented ‘we’ (Ferrada Stoehrel 2017). Ideational approaches to populism stress that, beyond exposing the power elite, populist discourse has among its goals the mobilization of a homogeneous community of decent and rightful commoners (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). This leads to a number of prevalent narratives in populist discourse, which are increasingly seen as a form of performative storytelling through which leaders provide meaning to extended injustices and offer simple alternatives that are appealing to the majority (Ungureanu and Popartan 2020; Nordensvard and Ketola 2021).

Specifically, populist narratives construct in-group identity by referring to the ‘people’ (Panizza 2017). Providing the people with a narrative inscribes an essentialist tension into populist discourse. Some advocates of populism are aware of this hazard: post-Marxists, in particular, critically tackle the potential hazard of essentialism by conceptualizing the people as an ‘empty signifier’ for populist ideologues to fill with contextual grievances and values (Laclau 2005).