Me the People

How Populism Transforms Democracy

Nadia Urbinati

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674243583
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A timely and incisive assessment of what the success of populism means for democracy. Populist movements have recently appeared in nearly every democracy around the world. Yet our grasp of this disruptive political phenomenon remains woefully inadequate. Politicians of all stripes appeal to the interests of the people, and every opposition party campaigns against the current establishment. What, then, distinguishes populism from run-of-the-mill democratic politics? And why should we be concerned by its rise?In Me the People, Nadia Urbinati argues that populism should be regarded as a new form of representative government, one based on a direct relationship between the leader and those the leader defines as the "good" or "right" people. Populist leaders claim to speak to and for the people without the need for intermediaries—in particular, political parties and independent media—whom they blame for betraying the interests of the ordinary many. Urbinati shows that, while populist governments remain importantly distinct from dictatorial or fascist regimes, their dependence on the will of the leader, along with their willingness to exclude the interests of those deemed outside the bounds of the "good" or "right" people, stretches constitutional democracy to its limits and opens a pathway to authoritarianism.Weaving together theoretical analysis, the history of political thought, and current affairs, Me the People presents an original and illuminating account of populism and its relation to democracy.

1

FROM ANTIESTABLISHMENT TO ANTIPOLITICS

They are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions.

—C. WRIGHT MILLS, The Power Elite

THE CENTRAL CLAIM of all populist movements is to get rid of “the establishment,” or whatever is posited as lying between “us” (the people outside) and the state (inside apparatuses of decision makers, elected or appointed).¹ This was the core theme running through Donald Trump’s inaugural address:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.²

As we shall see in this chapter, this antiestablishment rhetoric does not refer to socioeconomic elites and is neither class based nor money based. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and indeed Trump were (and are) part of the economic superelite. But this seemed to be acceptable to their electors, who were ultimately looking for a person who was successful but who still shared the same values as theirs: someone “like” them. Just as ordinary citizens supposedly do, Trump tried to navigate the law for his own benefit, yet he was smart enough to take effective care of his interests and take advantage of tax loopholes. He was proud to confess, during his campaign, that he used all legal means at his disposal to avoid paying taxes or to pay as little as possible. People who voted for Perot similarly felt uplifted by someone who had “made it” and who displayed competence and skill.³ To be one of “the people” does not thus mean to be pure in any moral sense. Berlusconi was like many ordinary men of his country, and like them he practiced what in Trump’s campaign was called “locker room talk.” To be “a man of the people” was also the slogan of Alberto Fujimori, whose 1990 campaign was crafted according to the nonelite slogan, “A President like You.”⁴ The list goes on and on.⁵ Populist voters did not want Berlusconi or Fujimori or Trump to be pure, like saints, because they themselves were not. Subjective immorality is not an issue, nor is class inequality. The issue is the exercise of power. “When Perot supporters talked about ‘us’ against ‘them,’ they meant the people—all the people—against the politicians.”⁶

In this chapter, I will argue that the hostility of populism is directed at the political establishment, because it is this establishment that has the power to connect the various social elites and undermine political equality. Populism takes advantage of a discontent, that is endogenous to democracy, with the domineering attitude of the few over the people. Indeed, criticism of political elites (or aristocracy) lay at the source of modern democracy in the late eighteenth century and returned during the several transformations of representative government throughout its history, including the emergence of party democracy, which was born out of an antiestablishment cry against liberal parliamentarianism and its government of notables.⁷ The populist polemic against “the establishment” is meant to put political parties on trial. It is meant not to reclaim the primacy of the sovereign people over its parts but rather to establish that only one part of the people is the legitimate sovereign.

How should we evaluate the antiestablishment claim in normative terms? Similar to established parties, populist “movements” compete for seats in parliaments or congress and seek majorities. But they are not viewed as established parties, either by their critics or by their supporters. What makes them different, given that in running for office they risk becoming the establishment in their turn? These are the questions that guide my reading of populism as a project to substitute the whole with one of its parts. In order to dissect the various ambiguities that are connected to the dialectic between the part(s) and the whole (the people), I suggest that we study the crowded populist constellation of antis (antielitism, antipartyism, antipartisanship, anti-intellectualism) as displays of one central anti—antiestablishmentarianism. This is the paradigm that makes populism a political theology, and one that turns the constitutional power of party democracy into a new order that is truly party-kratic (that is, the power of a part). The exclusionary logic of the establishment casts light on the conundrum of populism: for populism, though it is critical of party democracy, creates parties; and though it is critical of representative democracy, it does not promote direct democracy but instead pushes for a new kind of representation, one that is based on a direct relation uniting the people and its leader.⁸ As we shall see in subsequent chapters, populists use elections as a celebration of “their people” set up by the victory of that people’s champion. And they use the support of the audience (which they orchestrate carefully and endlessly) to “purify” elections of their quantitative and formalistic character. Their goal is to fill the gap between the outside and the inside of the state and, in so doing, to deliver on the promise of getting rid of the establishment forever. To attain this, populists in power construct a new form of popular sovereignty that enhances inclusiveness (of their supporters) at the expense of the open game of contestation of, and competition for, power—in short, at the expense of the two conditions that make for constitutional democracy. Certainly, these tradeoffs “are not inevitable.”⁹ But their possibility is contained in the logic of antiestablishmentarian populism from the outset.

The Making of Factionalism and the “Spirit” of Populism

We often see populist parties being classified according to the traditional Left–Right divide that we adopt for established parties.¹⁰ This approach is deceptive, though, because it conceals what makes populist parties different from all other parties—namely, that they rely on a conception of antiestablishmentarianism that breeds hostility not simply to the existing ruling parties but to partisan divisions and the party form of political representation in general (especially because the latter promises not the attainment of consensus but rather a mere self-sustaining majority).¹¹ As Matteo Salvini declared the day he became minister of the interior on June 1, 2018, “We are at a total overturning of all the political perspectives. The issue today is the people against the elites, not the right against the left.”¹² Margaret Canovan rendered this phenomenon with surgical precision several years ago:

The notion that “the people” are one; that divisions among them are not genuine conflicts of interests but are merely self-serving factions; and that the people will be best looked after by a single unpolitical leadership that will put their interest first—these ideas are antipolitical, but they are nevertheless essential elements in a political strategy that has often been used to gain power.¹³

In Canovan’s quotation we have the main ingredients of the conundrum of populism: a party that does not merely want to advocate some interests or claims but rather seeks to mobilize social energies in order to create a large unity against its opponents so that it may rule as if the will of its majority were the will of the sovereign people. This conundrum can be rendered as follows. Although populist leaders behave like the leaders of any other party, populism is hardly reducible to a party; in fact, it resists being classified according to traditional partisan lines precisely because it wants to promote a politics that goes against party divisions.

Scholars who have analyzed Hugo Chávez’s government, and other populist governments in Latin America, depict a kind of politics that aims to identify the “popular power” directly with the government in all its instances—but without parties. The antiparty stance of populism reaffirms the sovereignty of the ordinary people. It declares them to be the creators of a “protagonistic participation,” which makes the citizens the speakers and representatives of their problems and even the administrators of their own social services. The social (understood as the sum total of the various instances of “belonging to civil society”) becomes much more important than the political. The social manages itself directly, through municipal, regional, and national institutions, as we read in Chávez’s government and propaganda documents. It has no need for other intermediary organizations, such as parties, which are viewed as complicit in the reproduction of an establishment that has failed to solve society’s problems.¹⁴ Canvassing against a corrupt and impermeable political system, Chávez entered politics by creating his own social movement, in the form of grassroots “Bolivarian committees” and diverse civic groups, which developed proposals for various constitutional reforms. But once he was in power, he gradually institutionalized those movements into a party organization within the state, thereby making his “antiparty” into a model for how a holistic party could be ingrained within institutions and the guarantor of a new establishment.¹⁵ This indicates that populist movements are both expressions of adversarial politics and the makers of a mobilized society that should avoid politicization altogether (dedicated, as it supposedly is, to the administration of the people’s needs). “The politician’s populism,” or populism in power, is thus a conscious project of a postpartisan government that wants to serve the interests of the ordinary many without ever producing a new establishment.¹⁶

The trajectory of populisms speaks to this ambiguity. Populism arises as oppositional and intense partisanship when it is first rallying against ruling parties, but its inner ambition is to incorporate the largest number of individuals into itself so that it can become the only party of the people and sweep away the plethora of partisan affiliations that preexisted its rise. In her analysis of the forms of antipartyism, such as the “party of virtue” and the “holistic party,” Nancy Rosenblum demonstrates that, no matter their animosity toward parties, old and new nonpartyists are ultimately partisans. They are partisans of one—and only one—form of party: the one that is capable of defeating the party system altogether and saving the only “good” party around.¹⁷ As we shall see in Chapter 3, one-party-ism is married to antipartyism, insofar as both of them share in the powerful myth with which democracy was born. This is the same myth that the representative system tried to reproduce, in fiction, at the symbolic and indirect level: the myth of the perfect unity of the collective sovereign endowed with a single will. Neither the adoption of the principle of majority nor the partisan pluralism that the electoral system exalts has had the power to erase this myth of unanimity. It is therefore fitting that we use it to evaluate populist antiestablishmentarianism.¹⁸

Taking this approach allows me to amend Peter Mair’s insightful idea that the success of populism’s antiestablishmentarianism in contemporary societies is an indication of the postparty trend as partyless democracy. It is “a means of linking an increasingly undifferentiated and depoliticized electorate with a largely neutral and non-partisan system of governance.” Mair states, “Populist democracy primarily tends towards partyless democracy.”¹⁹ Antiestablishmentarianism, Mair argues, discloses a project that is radical—constructing a citizenry that is “undifferentiated,” “depoliticized,” and “neutral”—and that fits a public sphere of opinion that looks like an indistinct audience rather than citizens divided according to party lines.

The crucial fact is that, in audience democracy, the channels of public communication … are for the most part politically neutral, that is, non-partisan.… It would appear, then, that today the perception of public issues and subjects (as distinct, to repeat, from judgements made about them) is more homogeneous and less dependent on partisan preferences than was the case under party democracy.²⁰

In Chapter 3 I will discuss the question that Mair poses, of whether populism indeed inaugurates a partyless democracy, or whether it rather consists in a celebration of the power of one part (and hence legitimates factionalism). In this chapter I prepare the terrain for that factionalist argument by dissecting the phobia that populism has for that part of society it targets as “the establishment.”

Some decades ago, Raymond Polin and Norberto Bobbio introduced the term “merecracy”—the kratos of méros, or the “power of the part”—in order to explain (Bobbio) and criticize (Polin) the structural condition of representative democracy as party democracy.²¹ The myth of an organic unity of popular sovereignty that refuses to be fragmented by parties is the myth that lies at the core of the populist attack against the establishment, and it forms the center of the project to construct a different kind of party. To paraphrase Pierre Rosanvallon, whereas the organization of political life in a representative democracy “rests on a fiction” that is felt as necessary—“the assimilation of the majority with unanimity”—in a populist democracy, that same fiction solidifies and becomes socially real. It becomes identified with a specific part of society, some claims and groups, or a bloc of movements.²² Populism represents a redirection of the notion of the people toward that ancestral myth of assimilation, but with a twist. It is a phenomenology of substitution of the whole with one of its parts, in which the “fiction” of universality fades away. Its success would entail replacing the juridical meaning of “the people,” and also replacing the principled generality of the law. I explain both these things in more detail in the next chapter.

Examining this conundrum of “the parts” and “the whole” that populism incarnates leads me to argue, in what follows, that populism epitomizes not so much the claim of “a part” representing “the whole” (pars pro toto) (which would be the synecdoche o...