Belonging

The inversion of belonging is precisely what populism seizes upon. Those excluded or half-excluded find themselves drawn to rituals of collective affirmation, not because they generate agency but because they soothe the wound of distance. The gatherings, the chants, the slogans—all of these are not engines of causation but expressions of consequence, reverberations of deeper structures that demand participants without empowering them. Populism thrives on this: the crowd does not make history so much as it stabilises a narrative that has already been written. The sense of inclusion is powerful, but it is hollow, because the structure is not emergent from them; they are emergent from it.

This is why language in such contexts functions as noise, not meaning. Words are incidental, semantic content secondary to the structural cadence of repetition, resonance, and affective contagion. The terrifying durability of authoritarian and populist systems comes from this structural logic, one that sits beneath interpretation, prior to mathematics or physics, in the bare conditions of signification itself. Silence is not outside the system but part of it, a marker of what cannot be said yet still exerts force. That is the ground populism exploits: a logic of structure indifferent to truth, yet generative of belonging and exclusion with devastating efficiency.