A people imposed homogenously from power is radical but never populist

Evidence

What happens, however, if the ‘people’ is conceived as an a priori homogeneous entity postulated from a centre of power which, instead of being the social precipitate of an equivalential interaction of democratic demands, is seen as determining an identical substance that any demand expresses? In that case, the internal split inherent in any democratic demand within the equivalential chain collapses; the ‘people’ loses its internal differentiations, and is reduced to a substantial unity. The ‘people’ can still be conceived as a radical force opposed to the existing status quo, but it is no longer an underdog: the essential heterogeneity which is the basis of any populist identity has been surrendered and replaced by a homogeneous unity. That is what happened in Turkey, and it explains why Kemalism might have been a radical, ruptural discourse, but it was never populist. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 414

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A people fails to emerge under both excessive difference and total equivalence — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 392; Ethnopopulism collapses the plebs-populus distinction that general populism requires. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 385; Populist reason is political reason itself, not a deviant form. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 444

Broader Connections

• Populist reason is political reason itself, not a deviant form. #expands (0.75) — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 444