Mike Phipps reviews Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects, by Chantal Mouffe, published by Verso

The Covid pandemic created a popular desire for greater social protection. Advocates of neoliberalism understand this and propose a more authoritarian model to achieve their aims. If the left dismisses the desire for security in society as inherently conservative, it risks ceding vital ground to the right, argues Chantal Mouffe in her new book.

Is the left in danger of doing this? Yes, answers Mouffe, because it privileges the idea of rationality in politics. This sidelines “the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values.”

Mouffe believes the creation of collective political identities transcends rational individualism and is shaped by affects. This is why far right movements, which play on emotions, are often more successful at mobilising support.

Hence, for Mouffe, “it is disappointing to see so many radicals and socialists dedicating all their energy to the elaboration of policies and programmes they are convinced people will accept by virtue of their superior rationality, while neglecting to ask how to generate the affects that will give force to those policies.”

She believes it is the left’s adherence to ‘scientific socialism’ and an orthodox version of historical materialism that has led them to disdain the notion of appealing to human passions. Increasingly, many movements for radical social change shun the vocabulary of socialism, which fails to resonate. Of course, there are good reasons for that: the reputational damage done to the ideology of socialism by Stalinism and social democracy, to start with.

There are of course excellent reasons why socialists and liberals have emphasised human rationality against the conservative belief in humanity’s intellectual, moral and psychological feebleness. From the Enlightenment onwards, human reason has been championed by progressive thinkers in the war against religion, ignorance, tradition, emotion and other non-rational impulses. Rationalism underpins the case for human freedom, because if people are rationally motivated, they can define and pursue their own interests. Hence a belief in democratic governance, social progress, education and much else.

But a commitment to rationality – and even to create, as in Che Guevara’s thinking, the ideal of the “new man”, whose thinking would be freed of the capitalist and colonialist legacies of selfishness, materialism, individualism, sexism, racism, etc. – is a long term goal, which may clash with short term electoral projects which seek to mobilise people as they actually are, with all the contradictions of false consciousness. The right exploit this: the left too often ignore it.

Far right ideologue Andrew Breitbart famously said that culture is upstream from politics. In other words, policies, however rational, which appear to challenge people’s sense of who they are, will provoke a fierce backlash – for example, proposals for gun control in the USA.

The ability of the evangelical movements in Brazil’s recent presidential election to use fake news – for example, that Lula, if elected, would close their churches – to mobilise an anti-Lula vote among the poor was startling. Similar misinformation was successful in helping to defeat the referendum to approve a new constitution for Chile among poorer classes. Conversely, one of the reasons the referendum on continued EU membership in 2016 resulted in a vote to Leave was that it reinforced a sense of nationalist identity for many voters. Rationality went out of the window, even allowing Michael Gove to say that we had had enough of experts.

Examples of the right mobilising popular sentiment behind its agenda abound and contain important lessons for the left. “The belief that one should only use rational arguments and avoid appealing  to affects leads to policies with which people cannot identify because they do not recognize in them their own problems, frustrations, and demands,” suggests Mouffe. Labour’s 2019 election manifesto shopping list failed to resonate with voters – in contrast to the appealing message of 2017’s “For the many, not the few.”

Spinoza said the only way to displace an affect is to produce a stronger one. So perhaps the left needs to spend as much time getting people to desire their policies as developing the policies themselves. Again the recent referendum defeat of Chile’s proposed new constitution comes to mind.

While these are recent examples (and mostly mine), many of the ideas here seem to be a restatement of Mouffe’s earlier positions – and I’m not alone in thinking this. But the climate catastrophe poses a new challenge for the left. Any real ecological transformation means confronting the power of finance capitalism. How can we make the scientific rationality at the heart of a transformative green politics into a widely popular, appealing narrative?

Clearly it needs to be centred on a project to democratise the economic and political system and make it work for the people – but beyond that general observation, I’m not sure Mouffe answers this critical question. For that reason this book ultimately disappoints.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.