It's the same old problem. "Why can't we all get along." The answer, "We can't," seems disappointing. "We're not meant to," is no better but possibly true. The other answer, "Kill them all and let God decide" seems far too Roman, kind of pathetic and very expensive. Another possibility, "Liberal Democracy," might seem a little limp for a paradox I've yet to place in the dictionary of Symbolic Order.
When thinking about Mouffe's perspective on life in general the charm is the way she distinguishes between Populism and Fundamentalism. It's very much a perspective that replaces the grind and convictions of metanarratives with a pluralism she would like to be able to describe as Agonistic Pluralism. Agonistic here means passion filled, combative, argumentative, impolite, rude contestants in the struggle for hegemony who share an allegiance to the ethics and political principles of liberty and equality.
Chantal's understanding of pluralism is on the same shelf as smiling Jean-François Lyotard's multiplicity of competing narratives, sometimes thought of as coexisting authorities. And Oh Yes, there's always the example of James Madison's two contributions to the US Constitution. His coexisting and equal branches of government. His other contribution, he didn't like owning slaves, he thought it a "sad blot" on created equal, but he had to own property to keep his plantation profitable, what else mattered.
The Mouffe/Laclau understanding of the signifier Fundamentalism sees it as a complete rejection of Pluralism. Fundamentalists determine only one legitimate authority. More politely, fundamentalism mobilizes passion in a manner that results in reducing and then eliminating political space. This Eternal Order, is usually more convincing when decreed by a God or maybe a Squillionaire, rather than by a man.
Fundamentalism for Mouffe et al is a fixed ideology. Populism is not a fixed ideology, it's nothing to do with an ideology, it's a way of doing politics that builds, or clarifies the frontier between underdog interest groups, or the "The People" on the one side and the kings, queens and princes or "The Elites" on the other side. Populism, or "Us against Them," because it's not an ideology but a way of doing politics can raise passion for a single eternal order or for a pluralist order, it doesn't matter which it's still populism, and it's populism that puts the pussy foot into Elites. Big crowds get you elected and big crowds string you up from the palace balcony and make you pay taxes.
Mouffe's point is that when you're a dominant elite in a cultural hegemony tied around something like the American Dream, the passions of populism need to be either won over, redirected or discouraged. And it's just not good enough to be simple minded about "The People." We are not a lump or a blot, we, as the signified other, the subjects of hegemony, or The People, are the material out of which a cultural hegemony's focus group consultants and political theorists, build and then manipulate a political construction that might manufacture the right sort of passion.
How easy it should be! But in reality we people look more like a symbolic order of meanings than a grammatically cohesive class. We are chaotic from moment to moment and we should be understood as a chain of equivalences linked not by steel but by a collection of unsatisfied demands and unidentified holes or even by a single dissatisfaction such as the price of coffee or a tax on vodka. The political construction the hegemony builds to secure our passions increasingly fails to interpret and then represent our interests.
I'd argue that one of the results of this failure is the flatulence of Post Irony and Metamodernism with its rejection of irony, its embrace of Tinkerbell's A for Effort and that oscillation between hope a skepticism found in the fairy tales of old that challenge children to reconsider some of their decisions.
