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Lessons for Left Populism: Organizing Revolt in Babylon

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Michael Illuzzi at Providence College
Michael Illuzzi
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Abstract

This study on the original Rainbow Coalition provides a few correctives to the scholarship on populism. First, contrary to what Müller (2016) argues, the Rainbow Coalition shows that populism can be pluralistic. Second, while the example largely exemplifies Rogers Smith’s tripartite theory of political peoplehood as being an interlocked story of political, economic, and ethically constitutive peoplehood, the Rainbow Coalition also shows how a moderate story of peoplehood can utilize a common enemy to mobilize this ethically constitutive story of peoplehood (something that Smith does not build into his theory). Third, the Rainbow Coalition challenges viewing populism solely through its stylistic elements.
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... With regard to the postwar world, scholars have analyzed a plethora of social movements in various sociopolitical settings. The multiracial Rainbow Coalition in Chicago (Illuzzi 2020), Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in Poland (di Tella 1997;Laclau 2005), the East German Monday demonstrations in Leipzig (Pfaff 2006), the 1989 Chinese democracy movement (Zuo and Benford 1995), the jan andolan of the mid-1990s in Uttarakhand (Kumar 2011), anti-IMF movements in Latin America during the 1980s (Walton and Seddon 1994), grassroots movements that paved the way for Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (Collins 2014), the tradition of progressive communitarian activism in the United States (Boyte and Riessman 1986; Grattan 2016), and the case of radical environmental movements (Beeson 2019;Szasz 1994) are all examples where populism has been employed as a core explanatory concept or as a feature that addresses particular aspects of left-wing mobilization. ...
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Populist politics are an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary politics around the world. In settler colonies, Indigenous resurgence is also an increasingly important feature of political contestation. Both discourses involve questions of peoplehood, pluralism, and collective agency. The goal of this paper is to explore these phenomena side by side, and ask what they reveal about the present political conjuncture. I argue that both political projects involve a constructive element, as actors build spaces of political contestation beyond the state. In this way, each movement involves an often overlooked contest between politics ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Ultimately, I conclude that the above/below distinction reveals important cleavages that are obscured by the traditional left/right distinction that structures much political analysis.
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