Global Populisms

Carlos de la Torre, Treethep Srisa-nga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000421392
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking textbook describes and explains the global manifestations of populism. It reviews controversies about its relationships with democracy in the distinct and interrelated histories of the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The volume surveys the similarities and differences between populism, nationalism, fascism, and populist uses of religion and the media.

Global Populisms invites students and the general public to move beyond simplistic conceptualizations of populism as an external virus and as an irrational threat to democracy, or, alternatively, as the path to return power to the people. The book differentiates populists' correct critiques to inequalities, the loss of national sovereignty, and unresponsive politicians from its solutions. In the name of giving power to the people, populists in power from Hugo Chávez to Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Viktor Orbán entered in war with the media, made rivals into existential enemies, and attempted to concentrate power in the hands of the president.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this interdisciplinary volume will appeal to undergraduate students as well as to non-academic audiences with an interest in political science, sociology, history, and communication studies.

1 Who is afraid of populism?

DOI: 10.4324/9780429318511-1

On January 6, 2021, thousands of supporters of Donald Trump came together at Washington DC’s Ellipse park to join the “Save America” rally. Shouting “Stop the Steal” and waving flags that boasted the name of their Republican leader, the demonstrators vehemently and angrily refused to recognize the electoral triumph of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Joe Biden, insisting that their leader had won the election. At around midday, the outgoing president himself went on stage to speak to the outraged crowd. Reiterating that his victory was snatched from him because of electoral irregularities, he called on his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” to pressure the Congress not to formalize Biden’s win. True to Trump’s words that they had to “show strength” and “be strong,” his supporters – some of whom were armed – stormed into the Capitol building, assaulted security personnel, occupied the Senate floor, and tried to take lawmakers hostage. As shots were fired and chaos shook the symbol of American democracy to its core, it was revealed once again that the U.S. was no longer an exception to populism and populist seductions. Just as Trump’s 2016 electoral triumph sent a shockwave across the globe and made “populism” one of the most popular terms in the social sciences, the January 6 insurrection effectively reminded us of how far populism, polarization, and radicalization could imperil any kind of democracy, including one of the strongest in the world.

Opening social media, newspapers, or watching the news gives the impression that populism is everywhere. Scholars and pundits use this term to describe the Brexit vote, rightwing leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or the left-leaning parties Syriza in Greece and Podemos (Yes, We Can) in Spain. If at the turn of the twenty-first century left populists were in power in four Latin American nations (Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador), in 2018 “the governments of eight countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) were led by far-right nationalist, and xenophobic parties” (Traverso 2019, 3). In 2020 the three largest democracies in the world – Brazil, India, and the U.S. – were in rightwing populists’ hands.

Not long ago, the term populism was often used to describe personalist politics in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, or to analyze the U.S. Populist Party of the 1890s. When a group of renowned scholars met at the London School of Economics in 1967 to discuss the nature, history, and international aspect of populism, Europe was absent from their discussion (Ionescu and Gellner 1969). The prominence of populism in Europe is a historical novelty. Similarly, until Trump’s election in 2016 it was thought that U.S. democratic institutions would keep populism at the margins of the political system.

From a secondary topic in the social sciences and the humanities, populism is becoming a prominent field of study. The editors of the Oxford Handbook of Populism note that between 1990 and 2010 approximately twelve hundred books on populism were published in English (Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy 2017, 10). Major editorial houses like Routledge and Oxford University Press published short introductory volumes, as well as comprehensive handbooks, and a new journal, Populism, was made available by Brill.¹ The Western media continuously prints op-eds and reports on populism. The Guardian, for instance, published a series of articles on “The New Populism.”²

The proliferation of academic and journalist studies shows the importance of populism globally. The term has been used to describe movements like Occupy Wall Street or the Spanish Indignados, rightwing and leftwing administrations, past and current charismatic leaders like Trump, Chávez, or Bolsonaro. To start disentangling the ambiguous meanings of this term, it might be helpful to analyze how it is used by different political actors.

Self-definition or external label

In the U.S. the left and the right dispute over who is the “true,” “authentic,” or best populist. Criticizing candidate Donald Trump, President Barack Obama for example said, “I care about poor people who are working really hard and don’t have a chance to advance (…) I suppose that makes me a populist” (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 46). Therefore, it is not a surprise that liberals and leftists reject using this term to describe (what they consider to be) a rightwing, xenophobic, and misogynist millionaire like Donald Trump. Paul Krugman (2018) wrote in the New York Times, “Stop Calling Trump a Populist!”

The U.S. right also views populism favorably, and proudly claims it as a mark of honor. After winning the 2016 election, Steve Bannon asserted:

Trump is the leader of a populist uprising … What Trump represents is a restoration of a true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working and middle-class Americans.

(Green 2017, 236)

The journalist Bob Woodward (2018, 4) reports this conversation between Trump and his former strategist. Bannon said:

populism was for the common man, knowing the system is rigged. It was against crony capitalism and insider deals which were bleeding the workers.

“I love that. That what I am,” Trump said, “a popularist.” He mangled the word.

“No, no.” Bannon said. “It’s populist.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Trump insisted. “A popularist”.

Bannon gave up. At first he thought Trump did not understand the word. But perhaps Trump meant it in his own way – being popular with the people. Bannon knew popularist was an earlier British form of the word “populist” for the non intellectual general public.

Outside of the U.S. politicians rarely used the term to favorably define themselves. Perhaps the exceptions are the Spanish party Podemos founded by professors of political science, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. In 2010 Mélenchon said, “I do not pretend to defend myself from the accusation of being a populist [because] it repugns elites. Let them all be gone! Populism me? I assume it” (Rosanvallon 2020, 20). Occasionally, rightwing politicians like Marine Le Pen in France or Mateo Salvini in Italy describe themselves as for the people and as populists. The negative connotations of the term explain the reluctance to use it as a positive identity. In Latin America, Asia, and Europe, populism is linked to notions of irrationality and backwardness. Politicians and parties that resist neoliberal policies are often stigmatized as populists and regarded as a threat to monetary stability. Populist followers are considered to be the poorly educated; the losers of modernization; the rural backward masses that respond with their guts and not their brains and hence support demagogues who offer quick fixes to complicated problems.

By casting all critics of restricted democracy as irrational, elites cannot understand the sources of populist anger toward the establishment. Moreover, by arguing for example that Trump’s base of support is made up exclusively of the poorly educated and rural “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton depicted them, educated middle- and upper-class whites are exonerated from the responsibility of putting in office a xenophobic and misogynist politician.

Opposing the threat of populist demagogues allows political, media, and cultural elites to claim to be the last line of defense against the new barbarians that would destroy cosmopolitanism, free trade, and democratic freedoms from within. Perhaps there is an element of truth in their assertions. After all, cosmopolitan elites present themselves as protecting liberal and constitutional democracy, as well as fundamental rights and freedoms. Yet these elites wrongly assume that existing democratic institutions are functioning well and for the interests of all citizens. As populists often show, neoliberalism and globalization have resulted in increasing inequalities and precarious work with low wages, no social benefits, and few possibilities of upward mobility. Citizens have lost faith in political parties and politicians that advocated for open markets regardless of their political ideologies. In order to strengthen and make democracy more inclusive, elites have to listen to and take seriously the populist critique of real existing democracies. If institutions do not become more responsive, and if state policies do not address acute inequalities and injustices, populists will continue to profit from their politicization of issues that elites fail to address.

Beyond right and left?

The term populism is also ambiguous because many actors use it to blur traditional distinctions between the left and the right. The axis state and market distinguishes the right that favors a mostly deregulated free market from the left that uses the state to regulate the market in order to alleviate inequalities. The right also often defends traditional constructs of the family, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity. The left, on the other hand, tends to accept feminist and LGBTQ critiques of patriarchal notions of the family and sexuality.

Populists often blur these traditional distinctions. For example, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) is apparently leftist when it proposes to use the state to regulate globalization, proclaims to defend Muslim and Western women from misogynistic Muslim men, defends gay rights, and abandons her father’s anti-Semitism. Yet the National Rally is simultaneously xenophobic and racist as it constructs Muslim men with essentialist cultural and religious categories as the antithesis to Western cultural values. The Spanish party Podemos at times uses the axis the people vs. elites branded as “la casta” (the caste) to transcend left and right boundaries and to appeal to all those dispossessed by neoliberal elites. Yet at other times, they present themselves as the party of the authentic left. What to make of President Rodrigo Duterte who describes himself as a socialist, while leading a killing rampage to cleanse the Philippines of mostly poor criminals? Duterte’s first cabinet defied right and left distinctions. It was made up of “Mindanao elites, members of the left endorsed by the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front, a military official known for crushing the communist insurgency and traditional politicians” (Curato 2017, 152). Rafael Correa, who was president of Ecuador between 2007 and 2017, claimed that he was an authentic leftist even though he repressed existing leftist organizations and social movements. And as a practicing Catholic, he also opposed abortion, gay marriage, and even gender ideologies.

Should the category populism be eliminated from the social sciences?

To complicate matters even further, the concept of populism continues to be contested, and periodically scholars propose getting rid of it altogether. They point out that it refers to both the left...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Who is afraid of populism?
• 2 What do we mean by populism?
• 3 Latin America
• 4 The United States
• 5 Europe
• 6 Southeast Asia
• 7 Fascism and populism
• 8 Populism and democratization
• 9 National and transnational populisms
• 10 Populism and religion
• 11 Populism and the media
• 12 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index