What Is Populism?

Jan-Werner Muller, Jan-Werner Müller

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293784
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Marine Le Pen, Hugo Chávez—populists are on the rise across the globe. But what exactly is populism? Should everyone who criticizes Wall Street or Washington be called a populist? What precisely is the difference between right-wing and left-wing populism? Does populism bring government closer to the people or is it a threat to democracy? Who are "the people" anyway and who can speak in their name? These questions have never been more pressing.In this groundbreaking volume, Jan-Werner Müller argues that at populism's core is a rejection of pluralism. Populists will always claim that they and they alone represent the people and their true interests. Müller also shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, populists can govern on the basis of their claim to exclusive moral representation of the people: if populists have enough power, they will end up creating an authoritarian state that excludes all those not considered part of the proper "people." The book proposes a number of concrete strategies for how liberal democrats should best deal with populists and, in particular, how to counter their claims to speak exclusively for "the silent majority" or "the real people."Analytical, accessible, and provocative, What Is Populism? is grounded in history and draws on examples from Latin America, Europe, and the United States to define the characteristics of populism and the deeper causes of its electoral successes in our time.

Chapter 1

What Populists Say

“A spectre is haunting the world: populism.”1 Thus wrote Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner in the introduction to an edited volume on populism published in 1969. The book was based on papers delivered at a very large conference held at the London School of Economics in 1967, with the aim “to define populism.” The many participants, it turned out, could not agree on such a definition. Yet reading the proceedings of the gathering can still be instructive. One cannot help thinking that then, just as today, all kinds of political anxieties get articulated in talk about “populism”—with the word populism being used for many political phenomena that appear at first sight to be mutually exclusive. Given that today we also don’t seem to be able to agree on a definition, one might be tempted to ask, Is there a there there?

Back in the late 1960s, “populism” appeared in debates about decolonization, speculations concerning the future of “peasantism,” and, perhaps most surprising from our vantage point at the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions about the origins and likely developments of Communism in general and Maoism in particular. Today, especially in Europe, all kinds of anxieties—and, much less often, hopes—also crystallize around the word populism. Put schematically, on the one hand, liberals seem to be worried about what they see as increasingly illiberal masses falling prey to populism, nationalism, and even outright xenophobia; theorists of democracy, on the other hand, are concerned about the rise of what they see as “liberal technocracy”—which is to say, “responsible governance” by an elite of experts that is consciously not responsive to the wishes of ordinary citizens.2 Populism might then be what the Dutch social scientist Cas Mudde has called an “illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.” Populism is seen as a threat but also as a potential corrective for a politics that has somehow become too distant from “the people.”3 There might be something to the striking image Benjamin Arditi has proposed to capture the relationship between populism and democracy. Populism, according to Arditi, resembles a drunken guest at a dinner party: he’s not respecting table manners, he is rude, he might even start “flirting with the wives of other guests.” But he might also be blurting out the truth about a liberal democracy that has become forgetful about its founding ideal of popular sovereignty.4

In the United States, the word populism remains mostly associated with the idea of a genuine egalitarian left-wing politics in potential conflict with the stances of a Democratic Party that, in the eyes of populist critics, has become too centrist or, echoing the discussion in Europe, has been captured by and for technocrats (or, even worse, “plutocrats”). After all, it is in particular the defenders of “Main Street” against “Wall Street” who are lauded (or loathed) as populists. This is the case even when they are established politicians, such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. In the United States, it is common to hear people speak of “liberal populism,” whereas that expression in Europe would be a blatant contradiction, given the different understandings of both liberalism and populism on the two sides of the Atlantic.5 As is well known, “liberal” means something like “Social Democratic” in North America, and “populism” suggests an uncompromising version of it; in Europe, by contrast, populism can never be combined with liberalism, if one means by the latter something like a respect for pluralism and an understanding of democracy as necessarily involving checks and balances (and, in general, constraints on the popular will).

As if these different political usages of the same word were not already confusing enough, matters have been further complicated by the rise of new movements in the wake of the financial crisis, in particular the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Both have variously been described as populist, to the extent that even a coalition between right-wing and left-wing forces critical of mainstream politics has been suggested, with “populism” as the potential common denominator. This curious sense of symmetry has only been reinforced by the ways in which the 2016 presidential contest has widely been described in the media: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are supposedly both populists, with one on the right and the other one on the left. Both, we are frequently told, have at least in common that they are “antiestablishment insurgents” propelled by the “anger,” “frustration,” or “resentment” of citizens.

Populism is obviously a politically contested concept.6 Professional politicians themselves know the stakes of the battle over its meaning. In Europe, for instance, ostensible “establishment figures” are eager to tag their opponents as populists. But some of those labeled as populists have gone on the counterattack. They have proudly claimed the label for themselves with the argument that, if populism means working for the people, then they are indeed populists. How are we to judge such claims, and how should we draw distinctions between real populists and those who are merely branded as populists (and perhaps others who are never called populists, never call themselves populists, and yet still might be populists)? Are we not facing complete conceptual chaos, as almost anything—left, right, democratic, antidemocratic, liberal, illiberal—can be called populist, and populism can be viewed as both friend and foe of democracy?

How to proceed, then? In this chapter, I take three steps. First, I try to show why several common approaches to understanding populism in fact lead down dead ends: a social-psychological perspective focused on voters’ feelings; a sociological analysis fixated on certain classes; and an assessment of the quality of policy proposals can all be somewhat helpful in understanding populism, but they do not properly delineate what populism is and how it might differ from other phenomena. (Nor is it helpful to listen to the self-descriptions of political actors, as if one automatically becomes a populist simply by using the term.) In place of these approaches, I will follow a different path to understanding populism.7

Populism, I argue, is not anything like a codified doctrine, but it is a set of distinct claims and has what one might call an inner logic. When that logic is examined, one discovers that populism is not a useful corrective for a democracy that somehow has come to be too “elite-driven,” as many observers hold. The image according to which liberal democracy involves a balance where we can choose to have a little bit more liberalism or a little bit more democracy is fundamentally misleading. To be sure, democracies can legitimately differ on questions such as the possibility and frequency of referenda or the power of judges to invalidate laws overwhelmingly passed in a legislature. But the notion that we move closer to democracy by pitting a “silent majority,” which supposedly is being ignored by elites, against elected politician is not just an illusion; it is a politically pernicious thought. In that sense, I believe that a proper grasp of populism also helps deepen our understanding of democracy. Populism is something like a permanent shadow of modern representative democracy, and a constant peril. Becoming aware of its character can help us see the distinctive features—and, to some degree, also the shortcomings—of the democracies we actually live in.8

Understanding Populism: Dead Ends

The notion of populism as somehow “progressive” or “grassroots” is largely an American (North, Central, and South) phenomenon. In Europe, one finds a different historically conditioned preconception of populism. There populism is connected, primarily by liberal commentators, with irresponsible policies or various forms of political pandering (“demagoguery” and “populism” are often used interchangeably). As Ralf Dahrendorf once put it, populism is simple; democracy is complex.9 More particularly, there is a long-standing association of “populism” with the accumulation of public debt—an association that has also dominated recent discussions of parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, which are classified by many European commentators as instances of “left-wing populism.”

Populism is also frequently identified with a particular class, especially the petty bourgeoisie and, until peasants and farmers disappeared from the European and the American political imaginations (ca. 1979, I’d say), those engaged in cultivating the land. This can seem like a sociologically robust theory (classes are constructs, of course, but they can be empirically specified in fairly precise ways). This approach usually comes with an additional set of criteria drawn from social psychology: those espousing populist claims publicly and, in particular, those casting ballots for populist parties, are said to be driven by “fears” (of modernization, globalization, etc.) or feelings of “anger,” “frustration,” and “resentment.”

Finally, there is a tendency among historians and social scientists—in both Europe and the United States—to say that populism is best specified by examining what parties and movements that at some point in the past have called themselves “populists” have in common. One can then read the relevant features of the “-ism” in question off the self-descriptions of the relevant historical actors.

In my view, none of these perspectives or seemingly straightforward empirical criteria is helpful for conceptualizing populism. Given how widespread these perspectives are—and how often seemingly empirical and neutral diagnoses such as “lower-middle class” and “resentment” are deployed without much thinking—I want to spell out my objections in some detail.

First of all, when examining the quality of policies, it’s hard to deny that some policies justified with reference to “the people” really can turn out to have been irresponsible: those deciding on such policies did not think hard enough; they failed to gather all the relevant evidence; or, most plausibly, their knowledge of the likely long-term consequences should have made them refrain from policies with only short-term electoral benefits for themselves. One does not have to be a neoliberal technocrat to judge some policies as plainly irrational. Think of Hugo Chávez’s hapless successor as president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who sought to fight inflation by sending soldiers into electronics stores and having them put stickers with lower prices on products. (Maduro’s preferred theory of inflation came down to “parasites of the bourgeoisie” as the main cause.) Or think of the French Front National, which in the 1970s and 1980s put up posters saying “Two Million Unemployed Is Two Million Immigrants Too Many!” The equation was so simple that everyone could solve it and seemingly figure out with bon sens what the correct policy solution had to be.

Still, we cannot generate a criterion for what constitutes populism this way. For in most areas of public life, there simply is no absolutely clear, uncontested line between responsibility and irresponsibility. Often enough, charges of irresponsibility are themselves highly partisan (and the irresponsible policies most frequently denounced almost always benefit the worst-off).10 In any case, making a political debate a matter of “responsible” versus “irresponsible” poses the question, Responsible according to which values or larger commitments?11 Free trade agreements—to take an obvious example—can be responsible in light of a commitment to maximizing overall GDP and yet have distributional consequences that one might find unacceptable in light of other values. The debate then has to be about the value commitments of a society as a whole, or perhaps about the different income distributions that follows from different economic theories. Setting up a distinction between populism and responsible policies only obscures the real issues at stake. It can also be an all-too-convenient way to discredit criticism of certain policies.

Focusing on particular socioeconomic groups as the main supporters of populism is no less misleading. It is also empirically dubious, as a number of studies have shown.12 Less obviously, such an argument often results from a largely discredited set of assumptions from modernization theory. It is true that in many cases, voters who support what might initially be called populist parties share a certain income and educational profile: especially in Europe, those who vote for what are commonly referred to as right-wing populist parties make less and are less educated. (They are also overwhelmingly male—a finding that holds for the United States as well, but not for Latin America.)13 Yet this picture is by no means always true. As the German social scientist Karin Priester has shown, economically successful citizens often adopt an essentially Social Darwinist attitude and justify their support for right-wing parties by asking, in effect, “I have made it—why can’t they?” (Think of the Tea Party placard demanding “Redistribute My Work Ethic!”)14 Not least, in some countries such as France and Austria, populist parties have become so large that they effectively resemble what used to be called “catch-all parties”: they attract a large number of workers, but their voters also come from many other walks of life.

A number of surveys have shown that one’s personal socioeconomic situation and support for right-wing populist parties often do not correlate at all, because the latter is based on a much more general assessment of the situation of one’s country.15 It would be misleading to reduce perceptions of national decline or danger (“Elites are robbing us of our own country!”) to personal fears or “status anxiety.” Many supporters of populist parties actually pride themselves on doing their own thinking (even their own research) about the political situation and deny that their stances are just about them or are driven merely by emotions.16

One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as “frustration,” “anger,” and especially “resentment” to explain populism. There are at least two reasons for this. First, while commentators invoking a term like resentment might not be rehearsing Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality in the back of their minds, it is hard to see how one could entirely avoid certain connotations of ressentiment. Those suffering from resentment are by definition weak, even if in Nietzsche’s analysis those consumed by resentment can become creative, with the cleverest among the weak vanquishing the strong by reordering the rank of human values. The resentful are nonetheless defined by their inferiority and their reactive character.17 They feel bad about the strong and bottle up that feeling; their self-understanding is thus fundamentally dependent on the strong, as they ultimately long for proper recognition by the superior. In that sense, the resentful are always incapable of anything like autonomous conduct. They have to keep lying to themselves about their own actual condition, even if they can never quite believe their own lies. As Max Scheler put it, resentment leads humans slowly to poison their own souls.18

Now, maybe one really believes that this is actually true of all people who wear baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Or that those who vote for populist parties always have authoritarian personalities or perhaps what social psychologists ...