Gramsci and Theorists of Left Populism

The difficulties that I have with the LaClau and Muf versions of taking up Gramsci is that they tied Gramsci's thought with a kind of specifically postmodern attention to the politics of discourse. But in some sense their argument, which is a very powerful argument, is that you can't win elections by being against the people. If you want to win an election, you actually have to say you're on the side of the people. And it does seem to me interesting that if populism simply means all of the parties that claim to speak for the people, then everybody is a populist in modern politics.