Populism and the European Culture Wars by Furedi Frank

Author:Furedi, Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Müller echoes Habermas’ disdain for the people and asserts that ‘the idea of the single, homogeneous, authentic people is a fantasy’.68

In fact, the fantasy is the belief that homogeneity is an essential ingredient of national consciousness or of movements that are characterized as populist. Homogeneity plays a role in racial nationalism, such as National Socialism. But to make a conceptual leap from the Nazi focus on racial purity to claim that all forms of nationalism and populism are devoted to a homogeneous ideal of nation is an exercise in polemical acrobatics rather than serious analysis.

The purpose of transforming diversity into a value is that it can be operationalized to corrode and undermine national and indeed community attachments. The ideological politicization of diversity is oriented towards the project of undermining majority cultures within a nation and related appeals to ‘the people’. To realize this ambition, concepts like ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ are not simply depicted as illegitimate – they are also treated as fantasies and illusions that are the product of the imagination of malevolent populists. In this vein, Müller dismisses any claim to speak for or represent the people as a ‘metapolitical illusion’:

The term illusion is justified here. For the whole people can never be grasped and represented – not least because it never remains the same, not even for a minute: citizens die, new citizens are born. Yet it is always tempting to claim that one can actually know the people as such.69

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