Left populism after left populism

Months after the death of Ernesto Laclau in 2014, the ‘post-Marxist’ theory he developed with Chantal Mouffe was being cited as a blueprint by so-called ‘left populist’ electoral projects across the west. The varieties of failure awaiting these projects by the end of the decade present scholars with the unusual opportunity to revisit a political theory, having observed it ‘in practice’ in several contexts simultaneously. Further, the rise and fall of electoral left populism allows us to test the pertinence of earlier critiques of that theory, when it was still at the ‘hypothesis’ stage. This essay selects the famous early accusation that Laclau/Mouffe’s theory of populism constituted an illegitimate ‘retreat from class,’ and asks whether this purported weakness is borne out in analogous failures to contend with class effectively by 2010s left populists. It introduces a differentiation between the 1980s first-generation post-Marxists, who were ‘populists of choice,’ welcoming the exciting opportunities delinking from class politics could offer the left, as opposed to the 2010s ‘populists of necessity’: millennial and Gen Z socialists who have turned to Laclau/Mouffe for solutions to the peculiar challenges of navigating class in the 21st century.