From Submission to Soumission: Populist Perspectives on Culture

Abstract

Introduction: why populism and culture? 1During a parliamentary debate in December 2007, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), coined the term "linkse hobby's" 2 . These left-wing hobbies included for instance international development aid, public broadcasting companies, the EU, free integration courses for immigrants, and subsidies for arts and culture. According to Wilders, money spent on such activities would only benefit a small part of the population, elites rather than the hardworking common people. It is as a result of this kind of remarks that populism is often considered to have an antagonistic relationship with culture. On the other hand, culture's hostility towards populism seems equally true. In this latter perspective, culture is presented as a way to better understand the patterns and dangers of populism, consider for example the success of Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 after the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. It is thus widely assumed that the relation between populism and culture is simply one of mutual exclusion -populism dismisses culture as a waste of time and money, while culture perceives and represents populism as its disturbing Other. However, by affirming that populists simply oppose culture, populism's own active use of culture tends to be underestimated.To be clear on my use of the term populism, I refer to the definition proposed by Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017):Populism is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, the 'pure people' and 'the corrupt elite', and which argues that politics should be an expression of the 'volonté générale' of the people (p. 6) Following this definition, populism has two main characteristics, namely a dichotomous view of society -divided between an imagined "us" and "them" -and the 1 Some passages in this introduction have appeared earlier in Jansma (2018). 2 Wilders further elaborated on his aversion to the so-called left-wing hobbies in a column published in 2009: "Kabinet, stop met al die linkse hobby's", originally published on stopdecrisis.nl on June 30 th , 2009, an initiative of de Telegraaf. For the full text, see: https://pvv.nl/index.php/component/content/article.html?id=3413:geert-wilders-kabinet-stop-metal-die-linkse-hobbys (accessed on 20-05-2021) WHY POPULISM AND CULTURE? 2 sovereignty of the people. In the remainder of this dissertation, I will further elaborate on, and critically engage with this conceptualization of populism. In doing so, I will argue that culture is part and parcel of populism. If we want to understand how populism works and how it can be so successful, it is therefore essential to study this cultural component. Three recent examples from France and the Netherlands will now illustrate the importance of culture in populist discourse.In 2017, the year in which I started my PhD, presidential elections took place in France. These elections were different than usual...