One effect of this conflation, intended or not, is that it allows certain contingent features of actually-existing populisms to work their way in to a conception of the political figured at an ontological level, something which might ultimately naturalise certain political strategies, particularly around leadership and nationalism, as things fundamental to politics itself. In Laclau’s book, something like this was certainly visible in some less convincing sections which, leaning heavily on Freud, insisted on the necessity of a charismatic leader in the formation of a collective political community. But there has also long been something of an unspoken nationalist imaginary to both Laclau and Mouffe’s political geography more generally, which to me sits uneasily with any attempt to advocate for populism as a general political strategy outside of any specific context. In For a Left Populism, what might have earlier been read between the lines of a vision of the political as always involving a ‘we’ and a ‘they’ is finally made explicit. Mouffe asserts that it is “at the national level that the question of radicalizing democracy must first be posed” for we “cannot ignore the strong libidinal investment at work in national – or regional ¬– forms of identification and it would be very risky to abandon this terrain to right-wing populism.” In a now depressingly familiar refrain, Mouffe assures us this does not mean “promoting closed and defensive forms of nationalism” but rather a strategy fostering “a patriotic identification with the best and more egalitarian aspects of the national tradition.”¹³

These lines highlight two significant issues with Mouffe’s theoretical project. Firstly, for all the talk of radicalising democracy and partisan interventions, what is actually offered is not especially bold. Along with a fairly lukewarm ‘progressive patriotism’ we are given some extremely vague and thin gestures towards economic reform. Mouffe states that a left-populism “will no doubt include moments of rupture and a confrontation with the dominant economic interests” and that “the politics of radical reformism that I advocate is not thereby prevented in challenging the capitalist relations of production”, but there is nothing particularly anti-capitalist, or even particularly redistributive on offer in the text.¹⁴ In one particularly striking passage, Mouffe suggests that “an ambitious and well-designed ecological project could offer an attractive vision of a future democratic society that might entice some sectors currently within the neoliberal hegemonic bloc”, who would supposedly be won over to a left-populist position were they to become “aware of the grave dangers that [neoliberalism] conveys for the environment”.¹⁵ Beyond the palpable lack of political ambition, this naming of ‘neoliberalism’ specifically suggests the possibility of a more responsible capitalism, wherein profit-making and the environment might co-exist harmoniously. Radical, or even left-wing, are not words which spring to mind here.

Secondly though, and more substantively, this appeal to nationalism points to deeper problems with Mouffe’s general method. In a footnote to a discussion of resurgent far-right political movements in her earlier book On the Political, Mouffe makes a frankly astonishing statement that “[it] is obviously impossible to attribute the growing success of right-wing populist parties in Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy and France […] to the absence in those countries of a critical relationship with their past”.¹⁶ The idea that in any on these countries (though we might wish to underline Belgium and France in particular) something like an uncritical imperial nostalgia or a lack of public discussion of the realities of colonialism would have nothing to do with the gains of right-wing populists seems completely absurd. But for Mouffe, thinking about these types of historical contexts has always been secondary to considerations regarding ‘the political’ as she understands it. For Mouffe, the political is necessarily antagonistic, and in our depoliticised neoliberal democracies the reason far-right populists have gained ground is that they have been the only ones willing to express and acknowledge the ontologically necessary social division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ which liberals and ‘third way’ socialists have declared no longer exists.

This is a perfect example of how political ontology can lead to a particularly unhelpful kind of dehistoricisation, wherein contingent, complex phenomena like nationalisms become partly naturalised as expressions of more fundamental libidinal and logical aspects of the political itself. Much has been written on the naivety of attempts to harness patriotism and nostalgic visions of the nation for left-wing aims, and there is no need to revisit them all here.¹⁷ But it is still deeply disappointing for a book which argues for the necessity of grasping “the nature of the current conjuncture” to advocate for a form of ‘left-wing’ patriotic politics with so little consideration of the actual histories which are inevitably intertwined with any contemporary appeal to the nation. The primacy of the political in Mouffe’s work means that history as such either loses much of its capacity to explain things, or is else simply reduced to something which occasionally reveals the political in its ontological nature.¹⁸ Thus here we have a commitment to conjunctural fidelity in the sense in which we are urged to grasp that a hegemonic crisis has seemingly allowed a populist logic to operate, but the kinds of historical thinking which would perhaps tell us a bit more about why this is happening now—or, no less importantly, why advocating for a ‘left’ patriotism might be a bad idea strategically and morally—simply don’t figure.

The issues here can be seen quite clearly in the book’s provocatively titled chapter “Learning from Thatcherism”. The argument—that Thatcher was able to recognise the extent of the crisis of the post-war consensus and construct a new hegemony, while the left weren’t—will likely be recognisable to anyone familiar with the analysis of Thatcherism developed by Stuart Hall and others, initially in the pages of Marxism Today in the 1980s.¹⁹ But this is precisely where a bit more historical reflection would have been welcome. Laclau and Mouffe have always been fairly oblique about their own relationship with this particular historical milieu, so it is notable that in For a Left Populism Mouffe states explicitly that Hegemony was being written in London at the time Thatcher had just won her first election. Yet while Mouffe points to Blair as evidence of the success of the Thatcherite project, what she does not acknowledge is how this analysis which saw Thatcherism as a complete hegemonic rearticulation that the left failed at the time to recognise contributed to the development of the kind of thinking about the need for a Thatcherism ‘of the left’ which so influenced New Labour. There is a complex intellectual and political history here, to be sure.²⁰ But when we think about the ‘populist moment’ today, the one lesson we should probably take from Thatcherism is that the left would do well to avoid becoming too enamoured with the ways in which the right is currently winning.

As someone who has read and admired Mouffe’s work for years, my biggest disappointment reading For a Left Populism is how little it develops her theoretical project from her earlier works. This is something of an unfair assessment; For a Left Populism is a very short book—only 88 pages—and was clearly written to be a call to arms, not a theoretical treatise. But the book does not really deliver on this either. Much of the text is, by necessity, taken up going over a philosophical argument which has never been particularly easy to grasp, and what is left to say about politics as such either feels unimaginative, or already out of date. The book’s vision of a patriotic left populism will undoubtedly find sympathetic readers, especially in Britain. But as reaction to the Labour Party’s recent attempts to find appeal on more socially conservative, patriotic-nostalgic grounds have shown, there are very real contradictions within both Corbyn’s existing support, and the electoral base he needs going forward, which elude any easy formulations about building a ‘people’.

Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism is published by Verso Books.