Worldview/Paul Gillespie: 'Chavez is not Castro; he is Peron with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skilful and irresponsible populist. Lopez Obrador is neither Lula nor Chavez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverria, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it".
This passage about current Latin American leaders comes from Jorge Castaneda's caustic essay on South America's left turn in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.
He distinguishes between two lefts, one "modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist", springing from the hard left of the past, learning from its mistakes and changing accordingly; the other, "born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded" and has neither learned from the past nor changed accordingly.
Castaneda resigned as Mexican foreign minister in 2003 and is a well-known figure on South America's intellectual left; so his characterisation has been influential, just as its subject matter is topical. Tomorrow Brazil goes to the polls as President Lula da Silva seeks a second four-year term; and while Lopez Obrador failed to win in Mexico, his campaign of protest against the result (which Castaneda has sharply criticised) continues. Chavez drew further headlines last week by describing Bush as a devil at the UN.
Several writers refer to a "new global populism" developed by him and Iranian president Ahmadinejad in a politics of redistributive justice seeking to offset the disproportionate power of the United States and its unilateralism, militarism and pre-emptive warfare with a new international political and economic order.
Kaveh Afrasiabi, an Iranian specialist in that country's nuclear ambitions, distinguishes, like Castaneda, between demagogic authoritarian populism and those who combine an enlightened, tough criticism of US hegemony with adherence to the norms of political pluralism and democracy.
Populism becomes a swearword, a term of denigration and ethical condemnation, in this contest - including by centre-left critics of more radical socialists. It is a problematic term which is difficult to define. Does it refer to a movement, a political ideology, a political technique or practice? Is it of the same order as socialist, conservative, liberal, communist or fascist? Is populism a moment of transition within the development of democracy or a constant dimension of it?
These large questions draw on recent political theorising of the subject, which has proliferated in an effort to explain why populism itself has flourished in the popular lexicon.
Latin America is to the fore here, although it has no monopoly of the genre. Another influential left-wing intellectual there, the political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who is from Argentina, argues that populism is a characteristic feature or syndrome of politics in a democratic age, which may be more or less present in any of these movements depending on particular circumstances.
His recent book, On Populist Reason, draws on a detailed knowledge of Peronism and other Latin American movements, comparing them to historical movements, or French Jacobinism and Gaullism, Nazism, Maoism, late-19th-century US anti-establishment movements, Turkish Kamelism and Umberto Bossi's Northern League in Italy over the last 15 years. He could have included Fianna Fáil and de Valera in the canon.
There is no such thing as pure populism, he argues; rather is it a particular way of creating political identity through the discursive construction of the people and their enemies, often by charismatic or authoritarian leaders.
Populists are characteristically uneasy with representative democracy and constitutional law. They want a direct relationship between the people and the government. The people are assumed to have a collective will directed against enemies such as the ancien regime, the Establishment, oligarchic or cultural elites, occupying powers or a world hegemon. There is an impatience with minority rights and frequently a utopian assumption that achieving power will fully resolve social divisions.
It is not hard to see why liberals and conservatives are deeply suspicious of populist movements.
Ralf Dahrendorf, writing in the Guardian, says "it does not take long for voters to discover that the promises of populists were empty. Once in power, they simply make for bad government populist episodes are signs of an underlying instability that neither serves national progress nor contributes to international order".
Another recent book, entitled Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by the conservative American historian John Lukacs, extends the critique to include "the prospect of a modern democratic society in which the corruption of words and speech may be governed by the manipulators of popular majorities, in which opposition parties and papers are permitted to exist, but their impression and influence hardly matter, since their voices are weak".
There is a rooted fear of the popular here, a pessimism about its wisdom and civility and a conviction that such values are best preserved by cultured elites. Such attitudes create populist responses, including in the most developed societies.
Berlusconi's Italy springs to mind as an example. His party's title, Forza Italia (Go Italy!), is drawn from soccer and its image is reinforced by television monopoly power.
A similar style of governing is discerned by critics in Tony Blair's triangulation techniques, media spinning and ruthless centralisation of power.
Such usage over-extends the terminology of populism, but illustrates why it is so often reached for in political commentary.
Going back to Latin America it is worth recalling Lula's comment in an interview with the Financial Times: "I won't take any populist measures of the kind that you can celebrate at night and regret the next day. I prefer caution and seriousness, because chicken soup and caution don't do any harm to anyone, much less a president of the republic."
Lula is standing on his record in office, during which he has adhered to financial orthodoxy, surprisingly so given his past as a radical trade unionist and a founder of Brazil's Workers' Party.
Despite some significant redistributive measures, he has failed to shift the country's huge inequalities significantly. Economic growth has been too sluggish to fund such change.
But he is likely to win and represents the kind of modernising left-wing Castaneda believes to represent the best face of Latin America's left, along with Chile's Michelle Bachelet.
He will face real competition for South American leadership from the more radical, if populist, Chavez in Venezuela and Bolivia's Morales over the next four years.