ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the core feature of populism is the making of claims in the name of the ordinary. However, populists also often portray the entry of ordinary people into politics as itself something extraordinary—a “return of the repressed.” To understand this dynamic, this chapter turns to Freud’s conception of the uncanny and to Stanley Cavell’s account of “the uncanniness of the ordinary.” Populism’s uncanny relationship to the ordinary helps explain the recurrence of populist antipluralism, which tries to quiet doubts about populism’s authenticity by asserting the homogeneity of the people. But if populism is a politics by and for ordinary people, there is conceptual and practical space for inclusive populism if we break with the antipluralist view of the ordinary.
