Populist Texts at an Academic Level

Populist Texts at an Academic Level

Populist Texts at an Academic Level

Populism is the personalist style of politics that oversaw the "entrance of the masses" into the political life of many Latin American nations on an unprecedented scale. It is generally characterized by an urban setting, a multiclass social base, an eclectic, ambiguous ideology with a tinge of nationalism, and a charismatic leader. Populist movements flourished in Latin America between 1930 and the 1960s, associated with such leaders as Juan Perón in Argentina, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, and José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador. Yet populist leaders were already in evidence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hipólito Yrigoyen in Argentina) and continued to emerge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Hugo Chávez in Venenzuela). Populists were different from their nineteenth-century predecessors, the caudillos. Unlike the caudillos, most populists were not military men; all could claim a more representative rise to power, and perhaps most importantly, populism was a truly mass phenomenon (Barker, 2000, pp.96-106).

Populist movements appeared as Latin American nations began to move beyond reliance on their traditional agricultural commodities and experiment with import-substitution industrialization in the years after 1930. Nevertheless, populism's links to industrialization were in no way absolute or necessary. Most populist leaders shared the conviction that government should take an active interest in, and thereby control through state intervention, their nations' growing wage labor sectors. Ironically, scholars have often looked upon Latin American populism as primarily a vehicle through which ruling elites, or portions of them, continued to dominate their mass followings (making comparisons to European Fascism almost inevitable). Populist movements have also been interpreted as active mobilizations of popular agency, even while allowing for their obvious role as bulwarks of the economic and political structures of elite dominance.

Beginning in the 1960s, investigations of populism were generally seen as studies of leadership. Such interpretations tended to view populist movements through the lens of modernization theory, which defined populism as an anomalous phenomenon produced by the evolution from a traditional to an industrial society. In 1965, Torcuato Di Tella described populism as a political movement that relied on the support of urban workers, and sometimes rural workers, but that did not emanate from any autonomous organizational power on their part. While recognizing populism's anti-status quo ideological leanings, he denied that the popular masses exercised an active leadership role. Other scholars stressed that, under populism, formerly passive groups entered national political life, sometimes flaring in diffuse movements of protest, but generally channeled through the existing political establishment (Bennett, 1994, pp. 217-224).

The basic critique of populism was that its leaders mouthed progressive rhetoric while at the same time subverting the interests of the masses and ultimately strengthening the hand of capitalism. The consensus position that arose from these interpretations usually contrasted the radical discourses of these movements with the ...