Less Identity, More Identity

In his now-classic reading, Laclau defines populism as the construction of a frontier that polarizes society around a single antagonism: the people versus an enemy accused of systematically frustrating its demands. Such a populism is meant to articulate different grievances in their common confrontation with an elite. When such varied groups have a common enemy, they cease to see themselves as different from each other, and this generates a new popular identity: a new political subjectivity that was previously impossible due to their internal splits. Political, economic, or social crises help along this process. They foster popular discontent, providing fertile ground for the creation of a frontal opposition to the establishment.

This implies two things. Firstly, the specificities of various groups need to be at least somewhat set aside, to allow for the emergence of this new shared identity. Secondly, anyone aspiring to lead the people must be identifiable as their representative. For this reason, they must downplay their own specific traits, maintain a degree of ambiguity, and carefully choose the characteristics they adopt if they wish to become the symbol — an “empty signifier” in Laclau’s terminology — of such a broad community.

Karl Marx already knew that it is not enough to defend someone’s “interests” for them to identify with you and the political option you represent. How to make millions of people identify with you? Podemos’s founders understood that no matter how much the Left defended the social majority, few people in Spain identified with the Left’s chosen vocabulary.

Accordingly, they not only centered their discourse on “the people versus the elite” but also abandoned traditional symbols, for instance replacing the raised fist with the V sign and choosing purple as their color instead of the classic socialist red. Their language was direct and colloquial, avoiding the Left’s technical jargon and sloganeering.

It focused on creating explosive political marketing campaigns and constructing an attractive brand, as opposed to the more convoluted style of the traditional left. They understood that an electoral campaign is not merely a phase of “reaping” what has been sown over previous years of political organizing, but a period when political identities can be built at a faster pace. They rejected the idea of playing a merely “testimonial” role of moral integrity, at a distance from ordinary people.

At the same time, Podemos attempted to re-signify elements of people’s common sense. For instance, it spoke of love of country and presented itself as the only really patriotic movement, although since the Franco era this notion has traditionally been associated with the Right. The aim was to establish a fresh Spanish identity rooted in a national-popular ethos — not only to garner legitimacy but also to reinterpret Spanish identity in progressive terms and thus reclaim it from conservative narratives.

High vs. Low?

When we talk about “the establishment,” we imagine a world of carpeted floors, well-pressed suits, polite language, and the impeccable manners worthy of a president. This is what Pierre Ostiguy calls the “high” dimension of politics. In periods of stability, where governments meet popular demands enough to be seen as legitimate, this pomp and protocol is how a leader is expected to relate to those they govern. But, as Ostiguy argues, when the status quo loses legitimacy, new leaders tend to move away from that image and embody the popular dimension.

They instead enter into a proud display of the “low,” the plebeian — even if its peculiar characteristics differ from country to country. Accordingly, a populist strategy involves not only a descriptive layer (i.e., the articulation of unmet demands into a new identity and the naming of a common enemy) but also a performative one: the “people” must see themselves represented in the supposed leader’s manners, way of speaking, and acting, not just in the literal content of their discourse. We see this in current leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Javier Milei, famous for their coarse and direct manner, speaking bluntly and not holding back controversial statements.

This identification with a leader or a political project recalls Freudian reflections on the superego. The subject we politically identify with has a double nature: it must be unattainable and imitable at the same time. It is always beyond reach, and in this sense, it works as a moral ideal. However, it also needs to be sufficiently close to us, in order to be imitable and thus satisfy our narcissistic needs through identification. On the contrary, when a model becomes unattainable, it starts to become a merely repressive element: it generates feelings of inferiority and frustration. In the long run, the desire to imitate this model thus fades, and the situation of superiority of those “up above” is not recognized as fair. Then, a political space emerges for new leaders.

This, according to Freud, is what explains the psychology of the masses: the collective finds in its charismatic leader a kind of externalized, embodied common superego. They are someone to imitate — and in whose reflection you feel better than you did in some previous moral mirror. The 2008 crisis and subsequent recession condemned millions of people to see themselves as failed individuals responsible for their own sudden ruin. It was only a matter of time before leaders from either side of the political spectrum came along to offer new frameworks, allowing people to reinterpret their fate in a way that would assuage their guilt and frustration.

Unearthing Cultural Elitism

As Thomas Piketty argued in his brilliant Capital and Ideology, the sociodemographic composition of the Western left has changed significantly since the 1970s. Until then, it primarily directed its discourse at the working classes, from whom it received its main electoral support, while the Right appealed to and relied on both economic and cultural elites. But in recent years, the trend has changed. The Left increasingly appealed to cultural elites, and the manual working class increasingly abstained from voting until recent years, when right-wing populism began to harvest that abandoned vote.

In Spain, this process has not occurred exactly in this way: the PSOE maintains good support among the working people, including layers with lower levels of education. However, voters for Izquierda Unida and Podemos are mostly university graduates, with a greater cultural capital. The stereotype of the “Spanish leftist” holds a series of traits consistent with that cultural capital: convoluted and difficult-to-understand ways of speaking and an aesthetic that vaunts their ideological positioning and high-culture consumption habits.

These are expressions of what we call cultural elitism. As Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron argued, elites maintain their status by accumulating “elitizing goods” that confer exclusivity and differentiation. This is ensured in material terms by high prices and in cultural ones by restricted accessibility, although cultural elites need not deliberately limit this access.

The ritualization of culture that makes it inaccessible to most people is learned along with the acquisition of culture itself, just as all elites acquire various manners that differentiate them from other people, such as specific linguistic registers, niche cultural references, and forms of identification. This is what Bourdieu calls the habitus. Obviously, cultural elitism is not equivalent to economic elitism, and belonging to the cultural elite is not a guarantee of economic wealth, especially in today’s world. But it surely does pose a significant barrier to identification among people who may have equally low economic means but have dissimilar cultural capital.

Throughout Podemos’s history, some of its leaders have demonstrated a strong cultural elitism. Following Ostiguy’s terminology, these leaders, although initially capable of distancing themselves from certain attitudes with which the Left is commonly identified, could not genuinely abandon the “high” and embody the “low.” This made it difficult for many working people to identify with them. Paradoxically, it was Errejón’s faction that mostly exhibited clear attitudes of cultural superiority, despite its proclaimed populist strategy, by forming a closed club often perceived as inaccessible, opaque, and exclusive.

When speaking, leaders like Errejón and his main allies displayed such an intelligence and culture and such a manner of speaking and dress that they dug a trench between themselves and the people. Unlike the Latin American left-wing populism from which they claimed inspiration, Podemos’s populist-minded leaders eventually replicated the patterns of urban, highly educated elites.

In this sense, unlike the stirring exuberance — sometimes disorganized, chaotic, and “dirty” — of Latin American populism (and the European right), Podemos’s populism seemed inauthentic. This was a “populism worked up in a laboratory” — too brainy, too aseptic — whose origins as a strategy conceived by academics could not be erased. This attitude has been successively replicated and amplified in the political experiment of Más País-Más Madrid.

This made it harder for the much-vaunted “people” to identify with this project. Leaders must be somehow “above” in order to inspire imitation and thus lead. However, they must not be so far above the people that they cannot be imitated, and thus followed. Due to their cultural elitism, Podemos leaders appeared unattainable. They managed to generate intellectual admiration but not political identification, and this eventually short-circuited their attempted populist operation. During Podemos’s initial rise, the populist strategy successfully managed to keep this contradiction at bay. However, it was too significant not to reveal itself when the party inevitably faced major political challenges and had to abandon its strategic discursive ambiguity.

This was visible even after the split in Podemos’s ranks. Errejonismo remained nominally faithful to the populist strategy but failed in its performative aspect, i.e., in really making the “low” and plebeian its own. Pablismo, for its part, opted to abandon the populist political gamble and return to an undisguised radical-left identity. It first did this in terms of image, vocabulary, and symbolism; such a shift was facilitated by the massive influx of loyal Communist Youth cadres promoted by Iglesias himself. From the initial freshness that made it difficult to neutralize Podemos using old ideological schemas, the party returned to occupy the stereotyped slot of the typical radical-protest force, well-exemplified by the rhetoric employed by its two main leaders, Ione Belarra and Irene Montero.

Secondly, in an attempt to connect with new social-justice movements, this shift was accompanied by the adoption of the new radical left’s talking points: a focus on identity politics and minority rights advocacy, moralizing micropolitics and various tenets of radical progressivism favored a discourse that privileges particularism over universalism and demands a high level of cultural capital for the electorate to even be able to engage with it. The points of appeal thus shifted from embodying the people, corruption, and socioeconomic issues to a kind of activist purism centered on the celebration of fragmented minorities. In particular, the past attempt to redefine Spanish national identity was abandoned, as was any aspiration to represent the whole instead of the part.

Tellingly, the problem of cultural elitism affected both wings of Podemos. Although the aesthetic register of Pablismo was less “high” than Errejonismo, the open embrace of what opponents eagerly labeled a Spanish import of “wokeness” also led to a shift toward a discourse that requires significant cultural capital to be accessible and produce identification.

For a National-Popular Left

In a now-famous passage, the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato vividly recalls the downfall of President Juan Domingo Perón — and the yawning gap between the reactions of intellectuals and that of poorer Argentinians:

That night in September 1955, while doctors, landowners, and writers in a hall noisily celebrated the fall of the tyrant, in a corner of the kitchen I saw how the two indigenous women who worked there had their eyes soaked in tears. . . . For what clearer characterization of our homeland’s drama than that double, almost exemplary scene? Many millions of dispossessed and workers were shedding tears at that moment, for them harsh and somber. Large multitudes of humble compatriots were symbolized in those two indigenous girls crying in a kitchen in Salta.

Is this not a situation analogous to the European and Western left’s inability to stand on equal footing with those it claims to represent — to connect with their desires, frustrations, and ways of life?

We find a similar reflection in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, who denounced Italian intellectuals for being distant from their people and identifying with abstract models that lacked any connection with the lived experience of the country’s common people. According to the Sardinian thinker, it is necessary “to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset.”

This was, broadly speaking, the approach that successively made the Italian Communist Party the most popular, rooted, and electorally successful such party in the West. It seems to us that this concern for the popular has been partially lost and that many on the Left are often focused, more or less consciously, on perpetuating their status as a cultural elite.

Podemos’s trajectory shows how this problem can hinder even the most successful and interesting attempts to revamp left-wing politics. The populist moment of the 2010s in which a stark polarization was possible has probably passed, with a return to the structural importance of the Left-Right axis. But the populist experience has taught us something we should not forget: the Left should not stray too far from the “low” discussed by Ostiguy, and should avoid a niche, performative leftism that only those with a high cultural capital can engage or identify with.

This implies working toward a national-popular left — that is, one rooted in a widely shared ethos, and capable of connecting with the people who should be the Left’s most natural interlocutors, i.e., working people, or what might be called the social majority. This means not only proposing social programs that will emancipate people from economic distress, but also a political aesthetic that individuals can identify with regardless of their cultural capital. This is not an easy task — indeed, it goes against the trends that have become entrenched over recent decades. But if it is difficult, it is also urgently necessary.