%0 Journal Article
%T Populism and the politics of redemption
%A Filipe Carreira da Silva
%A M車nica Brito Vieira
%J Thesis Eleven
%@ 1461-7455
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0725513618813374
%X This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption through regaining possession: of a lower status, a wounded identity, a diminished or lost control. Highly moralized images of the past 每 historical or archetypal 每 are mobilized by populist leaders to castigate the present and accelerate the urgency of change in it. The argument is illustrated with Caesar＊s Column, a futuristic novel written by the Minnesota populist leader Ignatius Donnelly. The complex and ambivalent structure of this dystopian novel 每 a textual source for the Populist Party manifesto in the 1890s, which stands in contrast with agrarian populism as everyday utopia 每 enables us to move beyond the polarized positions dominating the current debate. Reading Caesar＊s Column ultimately shows that populism can be both a corrective and a danger to democracy, but not for the reasons usually stated in the literature
%K populism
%K democracy
%K redemptive politics
%K resentment
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0725513618813374