The plebeian people of populism

The dominant definitions of populism ignore the historical and material conditions in which populism tends to emerge. The most pernicious abstraction is about the concept of a people. Any political actor who appeals to the people against the elites is called populism, regardless of its conception of the people, its political agenda or its relations with liberal democracy, which generates confusion between populism and ethno-nationalism. Following a radical republican approach, I suggest a clear distinction between the people and populism of all ethnic conceptions of the people. By relying, on the one hand, on Jacques Rancière’s thesis that the dissensus is the responsibility of politics and, on the other hand, the Jeffrey Green, which presents the plebeian subject as a second-class citizen, I advance that the people of populism, approached from a historical and material perspective, is built in a separate manner of a plebean identity that is both egalitarian and inclusive.