Federico Finchelstein

On Populism and Democracy

Populism became the name of a form of government after the demise of Fascism. As a political form located between constitutional government and dictatorship, it displays family resemblances with opposite political systems, like liberal democracy and fascism. Today, populism grows within both democratizing and fully democratic societies although it takes its most mature riling profile in representative democracies, which are its real target. Historically, it used representation to construct a holistic image of the people that a leader promised to bring into power at the cost of downplaying pluralism and humiliating political and cultural minorities, thus twisting democratic procedures and institutions in ways that stretched it to democracy’s extreme borders. One of the core arguments of this article is that populism is a transfiguration of representative democracy that attempts once in government to reshape the democratic fundamentals, from the people and the majority principles to elections.

Populism and Dictatorship

Dictatorship is one of the foundations of modern populism. And yet, populism is not dictatorship. In fact, in the context of the early Cold War period, modern populism represented a democratic renunciation of dictatorship. This renunciation of mass dictatorship created a new authoritarian form of democracy. By paying special attention to Peronism, the first case of a modern populist regime after 1945, this chapter argues that “mass dictatorship” is central to the genealogy of populism. More specifically, the fascist dictatorial experience was one of the reasons behind the emergence of populist regimes but it also helped define them in opposition to it. In dialogue, but also in contrast, with a literature that emphasizes the more recent oppositional links and continuities between populism and Cold War dictatorships, I stress the need to understand this ambivalent, oppositional nature of populism in terms of the populist negative response to the fascist version of dictatorial rule that had preceded the Cold War (Crespo 2014; Rouquie 2011, pp. 114–15, 119–34, 251–59). In other words, populism has been a form of anti-liberal authoritarian democracy well before the emergence of Cold War dictatorships. It was and is defined by its contextual rejection of dictatorship while still carrying some of its ideological dimensions, especially the remnants of the fascist global experience of mass dictatorship that ended after 1945.

The Holocaust as Ideology: Borges and the Meaning of Transnational Fascism

Can the written word represent trauma? Representations of trauma refer to the extremes of human experience, at the boundary between life and death. In fact, a number of works of Holocaust literature succeed in going beyond a mere symptomatic portrayal of the traumatic experience to critically interpret the experiences of the genocide. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges offers a case study of how one author sought to grapple with the problems of representing this horror. Borges, an anti-fascist Argentine writer, did not observe the Holocaust first-hand, but he bore witness to it from distant Buenos Aires where a local fascist movement was ascendant. Significantly, his peripheral position prompted Borges to consider the global dimensions of the fascist politics of the self and its effects on victims and perpetrators. Borges’s portrayals are uncannily effective in terms of what María Pía Lara has called the disclosive potential of certain narratives. Such texts generate reflective judgments. Furthermore, through their capacity to thematize evil and, more specifically, to imaginatively convey through language the extreme nature of genocidal atrocities, they enhance our comprehension of history.2 Although he never saw a Nazi extermination camp, Borges displayed a firm grasp of the ideological ramifications of the annihilation of European Jewry. I here examine Borges’s depictions of Holocaust trauma. Placing these writings in their national and global contexts offers an understanding of the Holocaust’s global dimensions. Scholars of the Holocaust might well be surprised by this focus on Borges, just as scholars of Borges might be surprised when I analyze his works in

Fascism Becomes Desire: On Freud, Mussolini and Transnational Politics

In early 1933 Sigmund Freud received an inconvenient visitor. The visitor was Giovachino Forzano, a renowned fascist opera composer and a personal friend of Benito Mussolini. Forzano’s daughter was a patient of Edoardo Weiss, the noted Italian psychoanalyst. A Freudian loyalist, Weiss wanted Freud’s personal supervision of the case and he went to the Austrian capital taking with him his patient and her fascist father. The three distinctive individuals showed up at Freud’s home on Berggasse 19 on April 26, 1933 and the fascist Forzano asked Freud to dedicate one of his books to Mussolini.2