Giuseppe Martinico (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa) has posted Populists in Power and Constitutional Counternarratives on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In this essay I shall comment on A Pluralist Theory of Constitutional Justice by Professor Michel Rosenfeld, by developing three points that have to do with the legacy of Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory. The first is about the progressive weaponization of constitutional law that characterizes what I call the populist constitutional counternarrative. In particular, I will explore how populists in power use constitutional law. The second point has to do with the notion of constituent power in a context of comprehensive pluralism. The third point is about the relationship between constitutionalism and political theology. The intuition behind this is that populisms (in the plural) have evolved, so to speak, to the point of constructing a true constitutional counternarrative. By constitutional counternarrative, I mean the abuse of the categories of constitutional theory and the tools of constitutional law with the aim of manipulating the wording of constitutional provisions.
And from the paper:
We know in fact that populists do not normally acknowledge the distinction between constitutional and nonconstitutional politics, and this reveals a sort of legal skepticism that can be traced back to what Paul Blokker calls "legal resentment," which "refers to a critique of what is perceived as an excessive or skewed form of legalism." The "regeneration of the people"-as stressed by Andrew Arato-occurs by instrumentalizing constitutional categories, and is connected to populism's tendency "to occupy the space of the constituent power." This also explains why populists tend to perceive limits and procedures as obstacles in the path of establishing the democratic principle.
Highly recommended.