Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Authoritarian versus radical democratic pluralist hegemonic
practices
As we have already seen in Chapter 1, radical democratic pluralism stands utterly
opposed to all forms of domination, for it seeks to create the conditions for free
individual self-development, and this requires in turn the elimination of oppression
and exploitation. Radical democratic pluralism is also opposed to domination
insofar as it fully accepts the legitimacy of democratic differences. Authoritarian
hegemonic discourses perpetuate domination and yet may become “organic” to
the extent that they resonate with already mobilized popular anxieties and
incorporate fragments of some popular traditions. Given the fact that the
democratic revolution remains one of the defining discourses of contemporary
politics, authoritarian hegemonic projects often construct themselves as a pseudo-
“democratic” mobilization of ”the people“ against ”the establishment.“ They might,
for example, represent multicultural forces, trade union strategies, feminist
movements and even an imaginary gay voting bloc as if they constituted an
omnipotent apparatus that threatened to violate the rights of the “general
population.” Further, authoritarian projects do at times recognize the plural
character of the social, but they aim to manage difference through the deployment
of assimilatory, disciplinary and exclusionary strategies. Authoritarian discourses
may make impressive attempts to construct apparently diverse social imaginaries,
but ultimately they seek to reduce difference, to turn difference against itself, to
incite self-surveillance and demonization, and to separate difference from what it
can do (Smith 1994b).

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Contemporary authoritarian hegemonic strategies often attempt to appropriate
key elements from the democratic tradition, and to redefine democratic forces
precisely as the anti-democratic “establishment,” thereby allowing them to
represent profoundly reactionary causes as nothing less than popular liberation
struggles. Various right-wing interest groups in the United States have borrowed
substantially from the civil rights movement in the construction of their demands,
including the National Rifle Association (“freedom to defend one’s family”); the
tobacco industry (“freedom of choice”); the corporate lobby (“freedom from
oppressive regulation”); the corporate medical insurance lobby (“freedom from
socialized medicine”); mining, timber and real estate interests (“freedom from
unjust ‘takings’”) and opponents of civil rights laws (“freedom from quotas”)
(Pertschuk 1995). Homophobic forces often conceal their total rejection of liberal
democratic pluralism by replacing their blatant genocidal language with pseudo-
democratic denunciations of lesbian and gay “special rights.” Leaders of the
Christian Coalition have attempted to construct their extremist movement as a
democratic struggle by denouncing the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace and anti-
Semitism, and by calling for new coalitions between the religious right, African-
Americans and Jews.
In actuality, the religious right, neo-conservatives and new racists only pretend
to champion liberal democratic rights and freedoms in order to defend traditional
class, race, gender and sexual inequalities. We can explore the fundamentally
contradictory structure of authoritarian hegemonic strategies with reference to
the Gramscian distinction between “passive” and “popular” revolutions. A “passive
revolution,” or “transformism,” portrays itself as a popular and democratic
movement, but it actually engages in profoundly anti-democratic strategies. It
neutralizes social movements by satisfying some of their demands in a symbolic
and reformist manner, and co-opts some of the symbols and representatives of
popular movements or popular political parties and includes them—albeit in
disempowered roles—within the hegemonic bloc, while it shifts authority towards
disciplinary apparatuses. Where a radicalized form of resistance would construct
its opposition to the hegemonic bloc as an antagonistic relation, a co-opted form
of resistance would abandon this antagonistic interpretation, and express its relation
with hegemonic elements as simple, power-free difference (Laclau 1977:173). A
co-opted form of multiculturalism, for example, would construct the social as a
peaceful system of competing interest groups, while a more radical form would
emphasize the oppressive and exploitative relations that obtain between dominant
and subordinate groups.
Strictly speaking, Gramsci makes a clear distinction between “passive”
revolution and hegemony, for a “passive” traditional moment is largely statist and
bureaucratic; the “masses” do not take an active part, and brute force, rather than
the organization of consent, becomes predominant. Further, Gramsci insists that
the “passive revolution” includes substantial economic intervention by the state,
a dimension that is almost anachronistic in contemporary globalizing economies.
Gramsci’s conception of the “passive” revolution nevertheless contains the

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provocative image of a pseudo-popular movement that wins some small degree of
consent by responding to some of the popular demands from the grass-roots, while
it actually uses that appearance of popular consent only to gain strategic ground
for its fundamentally anti-democratic project (Laclau 1977:116; Buci-Glucksmann
1979:216–17, 224).
1
Contrary to received wisdom about the right, authoritarian political projects
usually owe their effectiveness to their deployment of war of position strategies.
Unlike a totalitarian state formation, the state apparatuses in an authoritarian
formation never become the mere instruments of dominant social groups, and
never completely dominate or displace liberal democratic institutions. An effective
authoritarian hegemony can nevertheless achieve a substantial transformation of
key institutions such that they increasingly express its principles. An effective
authoritarian hegemony would be able to advance simultaneously in multiple
institutional settings; to adapt to the unique conditions at different sites in the
social; to develop a specific form of political intervention at each site that best
facilitates its extension and intensification; and to unify these plural micro-projects
in pseudo-popular and pseudo-democratic terms, thereby foreclosing the possibility
of radical resistance in advance.
Authoritarian hegemonic projects seek to absorb and to assimilate democratic
forces by appropriating key elements of alternative popular worldviews, neutralizing
their critical potential by redefining them, and then articulating these colonized
elements—that is, integrating them in a transformative matter—into its worldview
(Mouffe 1979b:182; Laclau 1977:161; Smith 1997a, 1997b). At this point, the
limits of Laclau and Mouffe’s invocation of singular social movements (“the
women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay movement” etc.)
become clear. Many authoritarian forces subversively borrow identity politics
strategies from the Left and either promote right-wing elements within existing
social movements or invent their own sanitized versions of grass-roots activism
and “diversity.” In conformity with the American mainstream media’s rules, role
models are substituted for political analysis, such that political struggle is displaced
by a privatized discourse on identity-specific experiences (Williams 1995:128),
with a right-wing twist. Anti-feminist women intellectuals, for example, are
celebrated as the spokespersons for the attack on Women’s Studies that is launched
in the name of vague pseudo-feminist principles, while mothers are featured as
National Rifle Association leaders. Some black men and non-Anglo immigrants
have emerged as prominent figures in the anti-affirmative action and anti-
multiculturalism movements. Speaking from what they call their special black
and ethnic minority perspectives, they condemn affirmative action and
multiculturalism for promoting racist divisions, thereby identifying the anti-racists
as the worst racists. In addition to their legitimation of right-wing policies, these
tactics also threaten to redefine feminist and anti-racist politics.
The deployment of these pseudo-popular strategies is of course a dangerous
operation for authoritarianism, for expectations are raised and a limited degree of
popular mobilization does actually take place. Even under the auspices of the

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tightly controlled religious fundamentalist organizations, for example, leaders’
promises are made, rallies are organized, cross-class and multiracial male-only
retreats are held, parents’ groups are formed, petitions are gathered, conference
motions are approved, fax, phone and internet networks are set into motion, local
participants are trained to run for office and so on. Authoritarian hegemonic forces
strive to manage their pseudo-popular mobilizations with great care, such that
genuinely autonomous grass-roots movements do not emerge (Laclau 1977:81–
142). Demonized figures such as foreign leaders, invading immigrants, hedonistic
single mothers, greedy minorities, the drug-ridden and disease-spreading urban
underclasses, corrupt union “bosses,” excessive queers and so on, must be constantly
offered as popular enemies, such that the partially mobilized masses are united in
a manner that forecloses genuinely democratic articulations. Authoritarian leaders
engage in a complex attempt to inflame their followers’ hatred while steering the
movement’s activism towards effective networking rather than the publicly visible
expressions of vicious hatred that might damage the movement’s reputation (Smith
1994b, 1997a, 1997b).
Authoritarian forms of hegemony remain fundamentally contradictory, for they
attempt to represent themselves as popular democratic movements, even though
they engage in all sorts of containment strategies and pursue initiatives that
perpetuate the unequal distribution of power. Often hegemonic politics only
requires the construction of a minority of enthusiastic followers who can be
synecdochically positioned as an imaginary majority, instead of actual popular
mobilizations. This synecdochical substitution and the populist façade depend in
turn on the demobilization of key sectors of the populace through blatant
disenfranchisement tactics. In some cases, hegemonic forces drag the political
center so far to the right that more and more people have no reason to participate
in the political system. We are now witnessing extensive efforts to lower political