The invasion of Ukraine has brought any populistinspired political force to an unmistakable crossroads. A crossroads from which its leaders cannot escape, not because they are being “blackmailed by the Atlantic or NATO, but for the very reasons underlying populism. It is unmistakable because in some ways, perhaps unexpectedly but surely clarifyingly, the invasion has brought populism to its maximum fulfillment or dead end, depending on one’s perspective.
Let’s try to explain things better. Populism is a social sentiment with a very strong anthropological component. We can define it as both prepolitical, in the sense that it exists before its translation into political terms, and postpolitical, because it transcends the traditional division between right and left that has accompanied us since the French Revolution.
Whatever it is, or both, it is something which, while not codified by a manifesto or reference text, has its own welldefined cultural ‘corpus’: it is the result of a much tighter concatenation of concepts than it appears. In fact, the more extravagant the things supported, the more one has to look for the essence of one’s ideology in them.
The fundamentals of the populism that has been induced and exploded at the same time and thanks to social media are essentially: no to globalization because it abolishes national identities; no, consequently to the globalized elite, because they derive personal benefits at the expense of the rest of society; No to modernity because it represents the ideology that imposes globalization.
Populist social sentiment does not emerge out of nowhere, and if it is chronologically and logically a response to the 2008 economic crisis, its matrix is only partly economic, for it has to do with identities, with the founding cultures of individual communities and with the rejection of the political dimension as a synthesis of society.
The aspect of populist sentiment that has not been adequately captured is that its nature is inherently emotional, not rational, but tends to appreciate precisely the “irrationality” of political decisions. Anyone who wants a structured theory of how politics is based on irrationality rather than rationality will find it with Carl Schmitt.
The esoteric aspects; the ancient references to an arcane depth of reality; meaningless beliefs are not the “proof” of the falsity of the theses, but the deep substrate that nourishes their political translation. Anyone who had seen “True Detective” with wider eyes than the story written there would have understood the “irrational” sentiment that would have fueled the movement that led to Trump’s presidency.
In the United States, where these processes are seen with more clarity and anticipation than in Europe, the “irrationalist populist mood has grown and mingled with the “socialist of Bernie Sanders, who said “We are the 99% in one key of leftwing radicalism. We’ve had this growth of opposing populism for at least five years. Opposites in political translations, less so in the cultural hummus they come from.
The epidemic creates a first watershed, which is not clear and not obvious at the beginning, but gradually becomes discriminatory in the last period. The entire fight against vaccines is fought at a level that is inseparable from this “irrational” root from which it draws its foundation. The trend becomes explosive once the Green Passport is created. At this moment, all ancestral notions of an unknown power conducting the “Great Reset” are condensed; that wants to transform our societies into something that we have never known, nor can know because it is indefinite, and which in any case always bears the stamp of a society that erases the distinctive features of the identity of people and places.
This time it’s not just about markets or countries, but about the people themselves, reduced to entities that need to be bureaucratically and unstoppably managed (perhaps with the Green Passport). In short, it’s Orwell’s world.
In the same years of the pandemic, infatuation with Putin grows. A subtle narrative begins at the dawn of Covid19 to argue that if not provoked, globalization, with its continuous exchange of people and goods, has certainly spread the epidemic. And basically it was “obvious” to ask for help from Russia, a country that (at least at the time) was exempt from the pandemic because it was understood to be more closed, traditional and narrow. In short, a readytouse model.
This specific history is little more than a “nuance compared to the much more powerful belief that Putin can be an obstacle to the affirmation of globalization and the hegemony of the new globalist elite of the “landless.
David Goodhart’s definition of the ongoing conflict in the populist era between “anywhere,” people who can live and work anywhere, and “anywhere,” who can (and don’t want to) stay in one place and don’t want to be, remains perfectly that of Place where they live, nature and identity changed.
Putin becomes the “perfect leader in the eyes of populism’s political translators because he embodies tradition (his association with the hyperconservative Orthodox Church confirms this); because it is the only one that clearly fights globalization (after all, China cannot and does not want to do this, because it has focused on globalization, yes it proposes to replace the United States in its direction); for at the end of the day the one who defends man’s bond with the earth appears. The millennial factor we had seen at the root of populism. The connection between Putin and the earth, which as we see today belongs more to the conceptualization of the Russian empire, was initially seen as a secret force to maintain tradition.
Today, Putin shows with arms and with the devastation of a free and independent country where he introduces a concept that starts from the coincidence of identity between people and country; between civil society and the state; between religion (subject to political power) and the state. Putin presents a “pact” that Ukraine is experiencing dramatically, in an unbreakable chain, where one goes from the “Russian spirit”, which would have the right to its country, to the consistent denial of Ukraine as an independent country, because without its own, etnìa, and who should therefore obey the “ethnic spirit” of the beginning of time and not international law. The roots become identities; identity becomes state; the state becomes an empire; The Empire wages invasion wars.
Putin thus created the friendfoe opposition (Schmitt again), for which the enemy is proof of one’s identity and the reason for one’s existence. Europe, the West, are its main enemy because they literally represent a different world. On the one hand there is the supposed (and far from proven) ancestral spirituality, there is the people (united by feelings but not by law), the state that embodies them, and the leader that directs them (the tsar , the steppe and nothing in between); on the other hand, a pluralistic society, a religion separated from the state, a legitimate battle of opinions, the permeability of borders and identities. Two separate and opposite worlds. An existential contrast: you cannot belong to both.
It must also be added that Russian society in the postSoviet period of first attempted and then gradually emptied democracy can no longer simply be presented as tsar, steppe and nothing, because embryonic civil society has developed there too, and somehow economic pluralism (the emergence of a middle class) and a cultural one (the emergence of entertainment culture): aspects that could end up being decisive alongside and together with the Ukrainian resistance in its defeat.
So we are at a crossroads: we are faced with two worldviews that are incompatible today (quite the opposite if Russia were to resume the democratic course). How can movements, inspired by populism but not addicted or convinced of the linkages that lead directly to authoritarian state and denial of democracy, not oppose Putin?
Everything else: diplomacy, which obviously always exists, and geopolitics, which can explain some world events but is not a theory of the world because it denies the subject, i.e. politics, are distractions, no matter how relevant they may be in comparison a decision that cannot be evaded. An existential choice because it forces us to say who we are and what the world we want to build is, even here with us, on this side of the world.