Alfons López Tena: Community and Authoritarian Populism

The most nutritious soil for the authoritarian populism to take root and grow are people who are already used to the stasis of living tightly held together by means of a hegemonic communitarianism. The dynamics and functions which have led different peoples to that barren plateaus are as varied as their history and prevailing ideologies and social arrangements determine, in a process with neither a subject nor a goal, in an Althusserian neither empiricist nor idealist development.

One peculiar trait that suffuses the communitarianism of the Catalans, as it is imposed by a centuries-old social set of incentives, rewards, and punishments, is a collective mindframe which is both extremely risk-averse and unwilling to grab power in a confrontation with Spain that, even if peaceful, would drive them out of their comfort zone of moral supremacy as the paramount good and smiling guys and gals: Europeans, civilized, unlike the Spaniards.

The very communitarian mindset developed by them to survive as a distinct people under the centuries-old authoritarian Spain until the 1970s prevents them from getting anything done in a global, meritocratic world, let alone gaining independence. Their mentality is an effective and resilient tool to ensure the survival of a non-independent nation in hard times. However, once it reigns as the mainstream ideology that permeates and rules over society, once it becomes the limits within which individuals may think, it only allows survival — up to a point, for the time being.

The national narrative combines love for the motherland with grievances for its plight and recurrent re-enactments of its historical mistreatments and depredations, sometimes real but always inflated, and often largely imagined, at the hands of its historical enemies, dating back centuries. Deft leaders know how to stir up grievances to bind followers together with a sense of shared beliefs and endured harms, a recipe both to conquer hegemony and to become a sect — a ruling sect.

Communitarianism, especially when its implicit populism and authoritarianism thrive, needs to be believed as all-encompassing to efficiently herd the people. The coterie-anointed enablers, with all the taxpayers’ money, media, and GONGOs controlled by the government and the institutions, define who belongs to the “good people” and who does not, treat dissent as blasphemy, launch campaigns of lies and slanders and unleash relentless assaults against anyone who dares to disagree or tries to hold them accountable. Their aim is to bully everyone into submission, to reduce everyone to silence, and to expel the dissenters, physically or symbolically, to the foreign foe they secretly work for –be it Pakistan, Spain, Soros, Brussels, or whatever– in order to expose them as traitors. As Jan-Werner Müller has noted, populists do not like having to cope with any form of political opposition or constraint: “when ruling, [populists] refuse to recognize any opposition as legitimate. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not support populist parties might not be a proper part of the people — always defined as righteous and morally pure… [their] idea of the single, homogenous, authentic people is a fantasy.” Their opponents become anti-national, any disagreement is branded as treason and sedition to the self-anointed “community of the good”, impervious to any acknowledgement of errors lest not compromise the community’s sense of righteousness, whose goodness arouses a deep feeling of warm protectiveness among its members from the outrages against a people that, like all peoples think about themselves, is uniquely and exceptionally fine.