Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization

Like all variants of democratic politics, populism is constitutively aesthetic. But populism is aesthetic in a particular sense. As I argued in the first installment of this suite of essays (“Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance,” REAL 34, 2018), populism is driven by the fantasy of a type of representation that paradoxically represents itself as non-representation, i.e., as an unmediated presence and fulfillment of the popular will in the representative. Liberal democracy normally insists on the ineluctable difference between representative and represented, though on the campaign trail that difference tends to get elided for purposes of mobilization. Populist democracy, on the other hand, consistently denies that difference. It installs the logic of campaigning as the foundation of democratic
politics, and it does so through recourse to a particular set of aesthetic strategies. These strategies are designed to equip the idea of the representative (the elected leader) embodying the represented (the voters, and by extension “the people”) with a palpable sense of reality. […]