Populism. After all, what is it?
To answer this question, Thomás Zicman de Barros and Miguel Lago published an unprecedented article by Cia das Letras, “What are we talking about when we talk about populism,” in São Paulo this Thursday.
In a conversation with UOL, Zicman de Barros explained that the book stemmed from the authors’ discomfort with the use of the word populism. “It’s a word used as a stigma, used to attack opponents,” he said. In the Brazilian example, it is used to create false symmetries. “The same word is attributed to Lula and Bolsonaro to make them indistinguishable,” he said.
“We did a different analysis to think about. Instead of staying in an ivory tower to study the word, they researched 15,000 press articles between 1940 and 2022 to understand how the word was used,” he said. If the finding is that the term is commonly used to stigmatize, it has also been claimed by popular leaders to mark the entry of the masses into national politics.
Populism cannot be said in the singular in Zicman de Barros’ assessment. “We should talk about populisms in the plural.”
For example, he underlines the populist characteristics of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro. “But these are very different populisms,” he says.
In the current president’s case, he fits in with reactionary populism, which seeks to reaffirm social hierarchies and includes what Hannah Arendt calls the rabble, the ever-present and overshadowed reactionaries who now come to power. undermining democracy and discriminating against vulnerable groups,” writes the author.
Lula, according to him, is another populism. “It embodies an emancipatory populist tradition. It can make the voices of those excluded from politics heard,” he says. For the author, his government has shown that there are limits to this strategy. But it still tries to show the blind spots of liberal democracy and to question the institutions that do not welcome this marginalized population.
In an introductory text, the publisher emphasizes that the authors have reconstructed the use of the term over the years, through in-depth research in press archives and through intellectual formulations on the subject, and in the midst of conceptual inaccuracies, the word has always prevailed today, defended and demanded by political actors in Brazil and around the world. which did not have the negative connotation”.
“Thomás Zicman de Barros and Miguel Lago are representatives of the younger generation of Brazilian thinkers,” emphasizes Sérgio Abranches. “They demonstrate the rare virtue of creating rather than “rereading” what has already been written. In this concise and ambitious book, they offer a new way of understanding what populism in politics is, is, and could be.”
Launch: Livraria da Travessa, Shopping Iguatemi
Sao Paulo – Thursday, September 15. 19 hours.
source: Noticias
