Populism’s Crowds

Donald Trump’s fascination with crowds is not anomalous but characteristic of contemporary popular authoritarianism’s bid to “body forth” the people in the form of public assemblies. For popular authoritarian movements on the Right, there is nothing unusual in sustaining the politics of popular mobilization, mass assembly, and demonstration between elections. Indeed, it is highly characteristic of these movements. How should we understand the patterned alignment between popular authoritarian leaders and their persistent and ongoing orchestration of the politics of collective assembly? Rather than interpret this as a disfiguring symptom of populism’s illiberal politics of permanent antagonistic mobilization against entrenched elites in government, this essay argues it reveals fundamental conflicts over competing claims of democratic representation and legitimation that have animated the broader history and theory of modern democracy. These are conflicts between constituent and constituted power, demos and ethnos, disincorporation and embodiment, but also between quantity and quality: between the numeric representation of the electorate and the substantive representation of popular acclamation.