We live in an age of populism. A populism with many faces. Understanding this moment means understanding the history of something we too often take for granted – democracy itself. Because in many ways – as we’ll see – populism is democracy – and, as one scholar puts it, a shadow of democracy too.
I want to explore why we live in this strange age of populism – ask where it came from, what is it, and what that means. That’s the only way to understand what would otherwise be bewilderingly diverse; national populism, economic populism, media populism, left and right populism – how does Bernie Sanders, for example, have anything in common with Victor Orban or Nigel Farage? Even consumer brands have described themselves as populist. How can we make sense of all this?
As one scholar – Paul Taggart – puts it, ‘Populist movements have systems of belief which are diffuse; they are inherently difficult to control and organize; they lack consistency; and their activity waxes and wanes with a bewildering frequency. Populism is a difficult, slippery concept.’
To not slip up, we’ll have to go back to the founding of America, to the French Revolution, and think about the expansion of democracy – then we’ll look at populist parties and leaders – from Peron in Argentina to Le Pen in France. We’ll take a detour to look at Fox News and consumer populism, before bringing it together for you – the statistically median, hardworking, heartland, honest salt-of-the-earth YouTube viewer sick of those sponging, corrupt, parasitic elites.
The Roots of Populism
The recurring theme in populism – the central, organising feature – is the binary of the people vs elites. This makes populism a difficult, slippery, somewhat vague concept – as we’ll get to scholars disagree on what populism even is – was Julius Caesar a populist? Robin Hood? The founding fathers? In some ways yes, but modern populism – what we’re really interested in – only makes sense as part of modern democracy – the idea that the people – demos – should rule – kratos – that we the people are the sovereign.
I sat down with professor Paul Taggart – a specialist in populism – and, first, I asked him about this relationship between populism and democracy.
Which is why modern populism only makes sense after, and in reference to, the promises and the ideals of the French and American Revolutions. During the French, the revolutionaries tried to enact the idea of Rousseau’s general will of the people. That, in the words of the declaration of the rights of man in 1789, ‘the law is the expression of the general will’, which – and this is key – was expressed through a single unicameral legislative chamber to represent the people, undivided.
This was in contrast to Britain and America, both having a division of powers between the executive, the upper and lower houses, and the judiciary.
I know we’re going back a bit, but it is crucial to understand that in Britain and America, the prevailing elite belief was a scepticism about democracy, a fear of the mob, and a desire for stability as much as democracy, and so the upper houses in particular were meant for lords, aristocrats, and elites to balance the lower houses. And remember, even after the American revolution, not everyone could vote or was eligible for office.
We already see this tension between what became democracy and a constitutional democracy, or the promise of government of the people, by the people, and for the people – and government with elite checks and balances – whether senators carefully selected by parties or judges with elite qualifications or a president or king with special powers.
From the beginning, the tension is there – people vs elite.
Furthermore, in America there was the debate between Jeffersonians – who believed in democratic state-rights farmer tight-knit maybe idealistic republics closer to the people, and those like Hamilton advocating for a strong central government run by elites.
These debates ran through almost every Western country during the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century. And we have to remember, that throughout the nineteen century, full democracy only came very slowly – and historically is very new.
For example, an important but now often overlooked debate during Enlightenment was about whether truth was ‘self-evident’ or ‘common sense’ – in Jefferson and Thomas Paine’s words – accessible to all the people – or whether they were the preserve of a priesthood, aristocracy, the Enlightenment intellectuals and philosophes, the educated. These kinds of debates informed how the philosophes thought about who should govern. That maybe everyone could reach it with the right education, upbringing, or training, but that the masses of normal people would, if given the vote, say, overthrow property rights, could be swayed by demagogues, were unable to restrain their base impulses. Voltaire, for example, believed in the ‘idiocy of the masses.’ That only the Enlightened should rule. Whereas Jefferson – when he said that we hold these truths to be self-evident – believed that ordinary people could govern a republic themselves. That you didn’t need a strong government.
In a way, the history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of working out these checks and balances. How much power should an executive have? How long should a term be? When can the people vote again? How easily can laws – particularly constitutional ones – be overturned? How much authority should an elite representative of the people have over the people themselves? The big question – who are the people? Liberals, anarchists, socialists, fascists all answered these questions in different ways.
But what’s often pointed to as the first populist movement came out of Russia. In the 1860s, a group called the the Narodniks (Narod meaning volk) believed that intellectuals and modern students who wanted radical change should go to the people in the country to convince them to rise up against the Tsarist regime.
They made use of printing, pamphleteering, and had a dislike of abstract intellectual ideas, instead believing in Russian peasant communes, which they saw as a site of true authentic volkish populist democracy.
The man who inspired the movement, Alexander Herzen, had a famous rallying cry: ‘to the people, to the people – there is your place, you exiles from seats of learning. Show that you will become fighters on behalf of the Russian people’.
This anti-intellectualism – the idea that truths are self-evident and that people can self-govern – is something that will keep repeating throughout the history of populism.
In his book on populism Paul Taggart writes that ‘A theme running throughout Herzen’s life was that political life should not serve abstractions. Ideological abstractions were, for Herzen, fundamentally destructive. Populism in many different forms has expressed a hostility towards theory, towards ideology and towards intellectualism.’
The Narodniks, like Jefferson, Rousseau, and many others – were all trying to understand what true democracy meant. As the century went on, government machinery tended to get bigger – militaries, central banks, civil services, lobbyists, political parties, technocrats, bureaucrats, political journalists – all slowly grew into a spiralling unwieldy network of elites.
The movement ended up failing – ironically because the peasantry proved to be much more pro-Tsar, religious, conservative and resistant to change than the Narodniks expected. But is fascinating because it foreshadows so much of contemporary populism.
Look at this painting by Ilya Repin – I love this as it really has everything in it – the dangerous agitator in red, an outsider, in the authentic heartland, peasant home, side-eyeing the peasants who have betrayed him, the elites represented by the police or military with the man in the suit – or maybe he’s the elite? And a suitcase of subversive literature, much of it ripped up and discarded, intellectualism useless. It really shows the uneasy relationship between some of the themes that will keep coming up.
The Birth of Populism
In late 19th century America, a series of crashes, depressions, increasing inequality, and conflicts between unions, powers, and governments, all gave birth to a genuinely grass roots bottom-up movement which transformed into the first influential Populist party. The People’s Party of America survived for just seventeen years, between 1891 and 1908, but it’s legacy and influence outlasted it.
This was the period of Robber Barons, the growth of Wall Street, of Rockefeller, of oil and steel – the Gilded Age. But while what were seen as establishment East Coast elites were getting richer, many people – particularly farmers in the south – were getting poorer. In particular, farmers selling their produce in a new national market felt they were being overcharged out of existence by railroad monopolists.
The Texas Farmer’s Alliance formed in 1875 in protest. Drought, railroad bankruptcies, overinvestment in crops, price gouging on the trainlines, and high levels of debt all led to farmers organising for change, joining with similar groups like the Knights of Labor.
Taggart writes that ‘for farmers, the railroads and the Eastern banking establishment were at the heart of a system that seemed to systematically cheat farmers and hold them in thrall to interests other than their own. The railroads, farmers reasoned, should offer an opportunity for farmers to sell their harvests widely, and yet the high cost of the railroads meant that the farmers felt themselves to be no better off.’
Similar movements took off in other states, and they came together to form the People’s Party in 1892. The Party called for government regulated paper currency and silver coinage to counter what they saw as the East Coast banking monopoly on gold, for progressive taxation, the nationalisation or regulation of railroads, immigration restrictions, and higher taxes on trusts and stricter punishments for corporations breaking the law. They pushed for a shorter working day, called for the abolishment of strike breaking agencies, and for the direct democratic election of senators who, until 1913, were elected by the legislature – the politicians – of each state, rather than voted for by the people – emphasising again that duality between a sovereign people’s democracy and the kind of elite control American had inherited from Britain.
They were also not without their racism and nativism. Some were concerned with the plight of poor freed slaves, others in the party were avowed white nationalists. Others saw the establishment as part of a Rothschild Jewish conspiracy. While Chinese, Slavic, and Hungarian immigrants were often blamed for taking American jobs.
One of their organising focuses was the idea of a producer ethic. That America belonged to the producers.
On their most influential leaders was Ignatius Donnelly, an eccentric figure who verged between genuine radical democratic ideas and wild conspiracy theories. His Wikipedia entry reads like a Joe Rogan episode. He identified the People’s Party producer ethic when he said that “Wealth belongs to him who creates it,” contrasting the authentic worker and farmer with the money power of banks and Robber Barons. One of the goals of the People’s Party was to build a coalition between the disconnected farmers in the South and industrial workers in the North.
Ignatius Donnelly’s inaugural People Party Speech is worth reading in full as textbook populist rhetoric. In front of a crowd of 10,000, he rallied about how the ‘the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few’ – the two great classes – tramps and billionaires. He talks about conspiracy and restoring government to ‘the hands of the plain people’. It’s full of that basic populist organising duality – plain people, producers, heartland, the many – vs the few, the elite. The speech was printed, distributed, and widely read.
The People’s Party was so successful that it became national contenders in the 1892 and 1894 elections, gaining around 10% of the vote share, and winning several seats in the House and Senate. But after that the Party struggled and slowly watered down their demands, while the Democratic Party became more populist.
In 1896, the populist lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan became the Democrat nominee. Bryan was a master orator, just 36 years old, and like Lincoln before and MLK after, combined evangelical biblical language and zeal with the themes of the democratic promise of America. Bryan admired Lincoln, who he said made “frequent use of Bible language and of illustrations drawn from Holy Writ”, to communicate “democracy’s dream”.
He talked of the “the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day” and “the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth” were “businessmen” equal to “the few financial magnates who, in a back room, comer the money of the world.”
He rallied that “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”
Many People’s Party members and supporters jumped ship to support Bryan. But the Republican – William McKinley – was supported by every newspaper outside the South, the banking establishment, and was funded by industrialists with a unprecedented $3.5m against Bryan’s $300,000-500,000. Bryan was defeated three times between 1896 and 1908, when the People’s Party disbanded.
However, the ideas, the platform, and the tradition of ideas provided the foundation for the election of FDR and the New Deal later on. Taggart writes that ‘the populists served as markers of coming change.’
And in his book on populism in America, Michael Kazin writes that despite their demise ‘The People’s Party stood at a point of transition for [populist] language.’
A popular poem later eulogised the affectionately nicknamed Boy Bryan’s defeat. The anonymous poet waxed about the defeat of wheat, by those with dollar signs upon their coats and diamond watchchains and inbred landlord stock. And Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi. Defeat of the young by the old and silly. Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme. Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream. Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech – another populist speech worth reading in full – ended with the lines – “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
From Dictators to Populists
The many crises and movements of the twentieth century are in many ways – if not all ways – a response to the failures of the elite liberal representational democratic compromise. The Great Depression and the World Wars led to a new post-war consensus that provided a much bigger role for a state to support the welfare and needs of the ‘common people.’ Democracy was deepened by the women’s suffrage movements and extending the vote to all men – it seems like a triumphant story for democracy. But it’s easy to forget that 1941 there only eleven parliamentary democracies in the world.
It’s easy to look back at the period as the triumph of democracy – but representational democracy was close to crumbling. Everywhere – from the Soviet Union to Fascism to Populist leaders – parliamentary democracy was seen as failing, weak, slow – obstructing the will of the people rather than expressing it.
Populists and Fascists started looking similar – both had forceful charismatic leaders speaking ‘for’ the people, both were against elite checks and balances, existing laws and judiciaries, both for a national people, often excluding, sometimes killing, and at the least marginalising those outside that national community, and both – in many places – became increasingly authoritarian when they got into power.
In his book comparing fascism and populism in the post-war period, Federico Finchelstein says that ‘Unlike fascists, populists most often play the democratic game and will eventually cede power after losing an election.’ He calls populism an authoritarian form of democracy,’ that tends to challenge but not destroy democracy.
Take Huey Long – the so-called dictator of Louisiana who was governor and senator in the late 1920s – a populist who genuinely redistributed wealth to the poor – and an authoritarian who centralised power, intimidated and spied on opponents, and interfered in the judiciary.
In South America, charismatic figures have frequently drawn on populist rhetoric against an incumbent elite then have been criticized for democratic backsliding once in power. The list of populist figures in South American history is long – but the first populist to govern a country was Juan Peron in 1940s Argentina.
Since Simon Bolivar led independence movements liberating South America from the Spanish Empire, there has been a recurring tradition of charismatic leaders fighting against incumbent elites, perceived to be draining south America of its rich resources and economic potential.
In the 1940s, Argentina was going through an economic crisis. In 1943, the army, including Peron, overthrew the government in a coup. Peron had been inspired by Mussolini mobilising the labour movement in Italy to seize power. He was genuinely radical, developing and industrialising the country, distributing resources to the poor with his wife Evita, and deepening the rights of workers and indigenous Argentinians.
So what makes Peron a populist? First, despite his policies, his rhetoric wasn’t direct at the working class, nor was he an ideological intellectual thinker – a Marxist say – nor was he a technocrat, focusing on rights or the law or technocratic government. Instead, his focus was the Argentinian people expressed as an organic whole – a multiclass catholic honest group in the heartland of Argentina. He was anti-elite, targeting Argentina’s wealthy landowners.
Populism could be said to arise out of romanticism and the volkish movement – it doesn’t start from philosophy, or reason, carefully thought through propositions or ideas, from intellectualism – it starts from an organic felt sense of a people – a nation.
Peron captured this when he said “Peronism is not learned; it is felt or not felt.” And it was felt through Peron – he and Eva were both charismatic, almost saintly figures, who were embodiments of the nation.
But he became repressive, curtailing freedom of speech, manipulating the law to get re-elected, preventing opponents access to the media and using a so called ‘law of disrespect’ to censor criticism of his policies. Like the Italian fascists he was inspired by, he concentrated political power through himself, as the embodiment of Argentina itself.
Roger Cohen in the New York Times writes that “Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression.”
Peron and similar populist South American leaders, along with people like Huey Long, and the ambiguous affinity with fascism represented a break for populism. To many it seemed proof of the view that went all the way back to Ancient Greece, Aristotle, and Plato – that democracy was vulnerable to demagoguery. A similar figure from the period – Father Coughlin – used a new technology – the radio – to use populist rhetoric to support both he nationalisation of industry in support of ordinary Americans and to air antisemitism in support of Nazi Germany to 30 million Americans.
But with the end of WWII and the building of welfare states and new deals across Europe and America, populists were mainly held at the side-lines of politics. But as this post-war consensus began to strain in the 70s, a new type of populism-lite entered the mainstream.
Post-War Conservative Populism
You could broadly argue that in the pre-war period, the populist claim was that the government elites were doing too little, but in the post-war period as the government elites took a more active role in economic and social life a shift happened. Populists began to protest that government elites were doing too much.
In a way, the post-war new deal consensus was inspired by a populist movement that transformed into elitist establishment status quo. The populist complaint about small government became a populist revolt against big government.
The post-war consensus allowed for further reaching welfare states, social security, and healthcare, wider scope for government intervention in the economy, the redistribution of large inequalities of wealth through progressive taxation, and in many Western European countries the nationalisation of key industries. This expansion of the state meant one thing – an increase in elites to manage the new system. The post-war period was also characterized by larger bureaucracies, more management & lobbyists, bigger militaries, and more government officials from clerks to distribute welfare to the CEOs of military contractors at the head of what Eisenhower warned of as the military-industrial complex. In other words, as illustrated by this graph, the size of government in the post-war compared to the pre-war period ballooned.
Democracy and modernity complicated relationship – progress, technology, regulations – barrier (gatekeeper) between direct unmediated and new elite figures to manage system
For various economic, cultural, and social reasons – from inflation and low-growth, oil shocks, protests at the Vietnam war, and strikes – this consensus began to fracture in the 1970s.
An unexpected populist reversal happened. It was assumed that the post-war consensus was a coalition of liberals and the working-class; that state-intervention was on behalf of the working class. But Conservatives – first in America – discovered that there was a constituency of working-class voters who believed that they didn’t need the state – that the elitist state represented the lazy scroungers on welfare and the snobbish liberal elite who wished to force their ideas about gay rights, abortion, the Church – so-called ‘family issues’ – upon them against their will. It was a constituency of voters who believed they were hardworking, honest, heartland, Christian Americans, and the sanctimonious elites had become too powerful, and were sticking their noses in where they weren’t welcome.
The figure who most epitomises this change is the conservative author and politician Pat Buchanan, who in 1975 said that:
‘If there is a role for the Republican Party, it is to be the party of the working class, not the welfare class. It is to champion the cause of producers and taxpayers, of the private sector threatened by the government sector, of the millions who carry most of the cost of government and share least in its beneficence.’
He also believed in building a sea wall to keep out immigrants and called homosexuality unnatural and AIDS retribution. Buchanan, in other words, was key in discovering a conservative populism based around an organic idea of conservative family values, hardworking and against welfare, against the incumbent establishment elite.
Buchanan advised Nixon, who coined the term the ‘silent majority’ to refer to this new found block of voters.
Nixon said that Americans should listen “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the nondemonstrators.” Saying “They’re good people. They’re decent people; they work and they save and they pay taxes and they care.”
In Buchanan and Nixon’s vision, political messaging should aim squarely at that middle constituency of hardworking, in-work, Church-going, non-elite, honest, heartland Americans who were ‘silent’, implying a forceful opposite elite that were loud – forcing their values on everyday Americans.
Kazin writes that ‘a consuming desire to cleanse sinful institutions led them to chastise judges who forbade school prayer but authorized abortions, television executives whose productions smashed sexual taboos, and school authorities who promoted an agnostic stance toward moral questions.’
Ironically, Nixon – especially by today’s standards – was pretty much a liberal. Buchanan called hi. the “least ideological statesman I even encountered”. His success was much more reliant on messaging than policy, as the famous 1969 book by Joe McGinniss, , points to. What he represents for the history of populism is the mainstreaming of populist rhetoric, and the coming of the age of television campaigning.
With campaign ads and soundbites, messaging got pithier, how you looked was more important, ad executives and PR times were hired, polling and data slowly became more important.
All most obviously illustrated by a Hollywood actor becoming the President of the United States.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both were in a way populist figures.
Reagan’s claim to be cutting the size of government was pitched in a populist style. Increasingly, from FDR’s fireside chats and JFK’s affable style, TV – as Peggy Noonan once said – was the presidency. Reagan was inspired by Roosevelts affable down to earth conversational style.
The journalist Lou Cannon said that “When Reagan spoke, ordinary Americans did not have to make the mental translation usually required for conservative Republican speakers. He undermined the New Deal in its own vernacular.”
Like Nixon, Regan talked of “a quiet, unselfish devotion to our families, our neighbors, and our nation.”
The similar move in the UK saw Thatcher using the language of populists to cut taxes, deregulate and denationalise industries, and to try to curb the size of government in the name of the ordinary hardworking taxpayers. The people, the citizen, the public, became the taxpayer
Stuart Hall wrote that ‘‘Thatcherite populism … combines the resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism – with the aggressive themes of a revived neoliberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism.”
All of this defined a seismic shift in the political axis and set the foundations of the national populist movements that were around the corner. Kazin writes: ‘It was a remarkable shift. The vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change rather than to promote it.’
National Populists
That shift was about to change again. If Reagan and Thatcher mark the end of the new deal elites, they were themselves about to become symbols of a new elite that a new generation of populists would rally against – the globalist elite.
As the world became more connected and more mobile, as the EU grew and neoliberal free trade became the default aspiration, both people and capital flowed more freely around the world. Broadly, populists on the right protested the former – the free movement of people – and populists on the left the latter – the free movement of capital – but sometimes both combined. In their own ways, both were a response to globalisation.
In France, the National Front’s slogan was “France for the French”. Initially led by the more overtly racist and antisemitic Jean-Marie Le Pen, protesting immigration from Algeria, Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen aimed to reform the party, distance it from its most controversial views, and move it into the mainstream.
Renamed National Rally in 2018 it opposes immigration, the Islamisation of France, but also advocates for policies seen as on the left: pledging to scrap income tax for workers under 30 years old, increase child support, and raise the state pension. Like Nixon’s idea of a ‘silent’ majority, National Rally portrays itself as the voice of the ‘forgotten’, against the ‘globalist elites’.
In 2022, Le Pen secured 41.45% of the vote in the second round of the presidential election, and in the legislative elections National Rally increased won 89 seats (up from 8 seats previously) in the National Assembly. In the most recent legislative elections in 2024 it increased its representation to 142 seats.
In Germany, Alternative for Deutschland supports a significant reduction in immigration, including from other EU states, proposes a programme of ‘remigration’ – deportations from German, especially of criminals or asylum seekers who originate in countries where the security situation has improved. Like NF, AfD also support some left-wing policies around increasing pensions and the minimum wage.
In the 2017 federal election, it became the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the Nazi era, securing 94 seats with 12.6% of the vote. In the 2021 election its political fortunes declined slightly, slipping to 83 seats in the Bundestag with 10.4% of the vote, but since late 2022 the AfD’s position in the opinion polls has been hovering between 15% and 25%.
The German domestic intelligence service is currently monitoring the AfD due to its official classification by the German state as ‘extremist’. Bjorn Hocke, the former leader of the more radical Der Flugel wing of the AfD, was prosecuted for using the Nazi slogan “Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany!”
In Hungary, Victor Orbán’s policies and rhetoric became increasingly national populist across the 2000s. Much of his policy agenda has focused on immigration as a threat to Hungarian culture and society, despite the level of immigration to Hungary being relatively low compared to most Western European countries. Under Orbán’s leadership Hungary has constructed fences on its southern borders and refused to comply with EU immigration quotas.
In his second term as prime minister, from 2010 till 2014, he introduced economic reforms such as nationalising pensions and introduced a scheme to offer extra credit to small and medium businesses, which helped spur Hungary’s economic recovery. Orbán also became increasingly illiberal, introducing constitutional changes and democratic backsliding that strengthened the executive branch of the government and electoral reforms that favoured his party, Fidesz. He’s stacked the constitutional court with loyalists and curtailed its jurisdiction and gerrymandered electoral district. He’s undermined press freedom through a combination of regulation, censorship, and economic pressure on media outlets. He consistently portrays himself as the defender of ordinary Hungarians against internal elites. His targeting of groups such as migrants, the EU bureaucracy, and liberal NGOs frames them as threats to Hungary’s national sovereignty and traditional values.
In other countries, populism has been on the rise in different forms – as Taggart says, chameleon-like. In Turkey, Erdogan’s populism against entrenched liberal elites was Islamic in character. And In Italy, populists have become so common and varied that some have called its entire political system a populist one.
Trump, of course, fits the populist mould but is also focused on China. Boris Johnson in the UK straddled the line between populist and liberal elite, becoming a somewhat hesitant populist figure. And it’s notable that in the period of national populism, left populists like Corbyn and Sanders break through somewhat, but have ultimately haven’t been successful as populists on the right.
Populism: Mainstreamed (The Age of Populism)
As we get today, is it true to say we live in an age of populism? Almost every major country has a populist movement, populism is the dominant style online – as I’ve talked about in this video – Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Triggernometry, the Weinsteins, Russell Brand, Elon Musk and many others are all populists – Fox News, GB News, the tabloid papers – are all populist.
As far back as 1970, TIME magazines person of the year went to the – Middle Class Americans. By the 80s, even HP was calling their new printer – ‘populist: the perfect printer for the masses. And Banana Republic had “Men’s 100% Cotton Twill POPULIST pants…steeped in grass-roots sensibility and the simple good sense of solid workmanship…No-nonsense pants for the individual in everyman.”
What accounts for this shift? Anselmi writes that ‘populism is no longer an extreme hypothesis in the democratic game; no longer a deviation, an anomaly, a degeneration or a pathology of democracy, as it was often defined in the past. Populism today is, to all intents and purposes, a highly probable option of democracy.’
Across the twentieth century, it’s become easier to reach people, the role of gatekeeps has diminished, and the techniques of persuasion have got better. Both Clinton and Blair were known for being seen with loosened ties, jackets off, sleeves rolled, Nixon hired a team that included Fox News founder Rodger Ailes to produce campaign ads. Ailes that leaned heavily on American flags and sensationalist iconography, slick presenters, and populist talking points when he started Fox News.
Before this, as newspaper presses improved, the tabloids could print of millions of cheap working-class newspapers, radio and television then cable meant more and more could get in front of more and more – the measure of success shifted more towards speaking to popular appeal.
Populists have been adept at sidestepping media and political institutions and getting their message out in a different way. National populists have been frontrunners in turning to blogs then podcasts and social media, before Front National relied on pamphleteering. Populists in 1960s America even made pioneering use of direct mail to reach people directly.
Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in selling conservative views by mail, said that ‘The liberals have had control not only of all three branches of government, but of the major universities, the three major networks, the biggest newspapers, the news weeklies, and Hollywood…. So our communication has had to begin at the grassroots level—by reaching individuals outside the channels of organized public opinion. Fortunately, a whole new technique has become available just in time—direct mail, backed by computer science, has allowed us to bypass all the media controlled by our adversaries.’
I put it to Professor Taggart that we could be living in a new age of populism. (taggart6.mp4)
You could also make the case that the belief in democratic accountability has strengthened. In his book on the democracy, David Stasavage points to the growth of monitory democracy – the growth of pressure groups, reporting about corruption, public scrutiny, watchdogs, tribunals, public inquires, committees, experts, and other forms of monitoring aimed at strengthening democratic process.
Whether these things have strengthened democracy is, of course, another question. Ironically, these types of democratic checks and balances and inquiries and committees risk becoming the very elite institutions that attract populist ire when they thwart the will of the democratic majority. They can become new elite gatekeepers. However, as technology gives us increasing ways to communicate with each other, the trend is clearly away from having an establishment at the gates. And unless some new set of institutions become the new gatekeepers – online and off (and I wouldn’t rule that out entirely) – populism is here to stay. So what does that mean for us?
Appraising Populism
With its history in mind, we’re now in a better position to think about what populism is, what it means, and what the potential risks and rewards might be.
There’s always a people vs an elite. A people who are decent, hardworking, pure vs elite that is corrupt, out of touch, gone wrong somehow. The people in the heartland are also often authentic insiders vs bad outsiders – those outsides could be immigrants or NGOs or multinational corporations, or elites that represent them, who have betrayed the real people. The most striking thing here is the Manichean binary – the good vs the bad.
There are some other recurring features. The emphasis on national identity as a response to the need for a content for what authentic people means. A charismatic – often idiosyncratic – leader that channels that authenticity and represents the true authentic people. Then a battle with the establishment (including the media) – often through an expansion of executive powers, sometimes through democratic backsliding, and worst a slide into authoritarianism. Often this battle has to be waged through alternative media – whether direct mail or podcasts – to circumvent traditional established institutions.
I asked Professor Taggart what Populists tend to do once in power.
The difficulty with assessing populism is how varied it has been. What you think about it will depend on the period, where you are, who you are, what populists are doing, what your ideological beliefs are – in fact, I’ve talked about populism from a left perspective on Substack – I’ll leave a link below. So instead here, I want to try to assess populism on its own terms – as an expression of popular will, of democracy, of popular sovereignty. Doing so allows us to understand populism’s tensions.
First, populism itself often doesn’t do a good job of accurately describing the very ‘people’ it’s meant to represent.
The people are never singular -as in people vs elites – they are plural, diverse, made up of millions with different views, interested in different issues, in disagreement both with each other.
As Taggart writes ‘Political scientists have long argued that a completely coherent, single “popular will” is a fantasy and that no one can credibly claim, as Juan Perón used to do, that “the political leader is the one who does what the people want.”’
As such, ‘the people’ as a concept becomes so vague, ambiguous and flexible as to hollow out any serious debate about details on policy.
As Kazin puts it ‘The traditional rhetoric pitting ordinary people against the establishment sounds, to many ears, naive if not offensive in its assumption that “the American people” share anything beyond a geographic space.’
Critics of populism then point to the consistent leaning on this kind of rhetoric as being based on a simplification at best and a lie at worst.
Muller says that the ‘the core claim of populism is thus a moralized form of antipluralism.’ It is antipolitics in that it chooses to ignore the realities of political processes – negotiations, judiciary, coalition building, policy planning, etc – and focus instead on rhetoric. As Muller succinctly puts it ‘Antipolitics cannot generate real policies’
This is a tension, but the populist response is to emphasise the necessity of democratic populist language for anyone speaking to large majorities of people with few things in common.
Second, there’s a tension between sovereign will of the ‘people’ and a single populist leader who can often become increasingly authoritarian. This is not always the case, but statistically – Peron, and other South American populists, Huey Long, Orbán, Erdogan, Modi, in Italy, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, some of Trump’s rhetoric – the literature on populism is full of figures who engage in what’s referred to as democratic backsliding. If you include fascists as populists – which some scholars do – then the risk significantly increases.
Muller writes that populists ‘quickly start tampering with the institutional machinery of democracy in the name of the so-called real people.’
Why is this? One generous reason is that populists see the state apparatus as tainted, corrupt, broken, and so on, and so the only way to break through them is through strengthening the executive office. A less generous reason is that to break through the conversation in the first place, populist movements need forceful, charismatic, often eccentric figures, who once in power, continue to drive for more power. In short, populism attracts narcissists.
This is a fascinating tension with populism – on the one hand, they’re meant to be symbols of ordinary people, but they often turn out to be highly idiosyncratic figures, outsiders, objects of ridicule as much as veneration.
This also poses a difficulty for succession and longevity within populist movements. As Taggart writes ‘Where populism relies on charismatic leaders, it has great difficulty in sustaining itself in the long term.’
The third tension is between the democratic ideal and constitutional or representative democracy.
Muller writes that ‘Populists are supposedly impatient with procedures; they are even said to be “against institutions as such,” preferring a direct, unmediated relationship between the personal leader and the people’
Of course, many argue we don’t have true democracy at all – that the entire system is either controlled, managed, or directed by elites. Others see the civil service, the judiciary, the separation of powers, the media – all as necessary features of democracy. Many will fall somewhere in between.
To take one example, In Hungary, Orbán’s government removed older opposition judges and inserted their own loyalists with long nine-year terms. In the UK, after Brexit, the Daily Mail caused controversy when it printed the faces of judges thwarting Brexit as ‘enemies of the people’. Populists often gerrymander or work with media owners to fix votes.
Taggart says populists tend to ‘colonize or occupy the state.’ Continuing that ‘Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party sought was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable the party to place loyalists in what should have been nonpartisan bureaucratic positions.’’
The next tension – or outright threat – is Authoritarianism itself.
Populists run a risky game. Even if they are democrats, in strengthening the executive office, authoritarianism becomes a real risk. Finchelstein argues that populism is not fascism – the difference is that populists are still ultimately democrats and fascists are not – but that geologically the roots, strategies, rhetoric, the aims, have a lot of similarities. After comparing the two he concludes that ‘fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon.’
I asked Professor Taggart about the link between populism and authoritarianism and he was sceptical.
All of this explains why populism often correlates with a rise of conspiracy theories, as fascism did. Because populists tend to demonize elites and those around them, means they’ve been susceptible historically to draw on conspiracies about Jewish bankers, all powerful NGOs, or in the past Popish plots.
Assessing these tensions is difficult, as having an executive office with authority – the root of authoritarianism – a balance between democracy and the processes of democracy, the difficulty in capturing what we should do as a people, the inevitability of demagoguery – all of these aren’t just features of populism, but of democracy itself. Which is why some theorists of populism see it as a threat – a shadow of democracy – while others see it as democracy itself.
The Dialectic of Democracy
Has democracy failed? The polls seem clear: an increasing distrust of politicians, the decline in affiliation and membership of traditional parties, increasing inequality and cultural and social division. If a system is failing, people will obviously seek alternatives.
But it’s also easy to forget that democracy isn’t one thing – it’s a complex system of processes, institutions, and rules that have evolved over time (secret ballots, campaign funding rules, political parties, legislative process, codes of conduct, regulations, unions, referendums). Study any democratic system and you’ll need to understand hundreds – if not thousands – of these moving parts. Even what’s thought of as a direct democracy like Ancient Greece was a lot more complex than is often assumed. With that in mind, I think it’s useful to think of a dialectic within democracy – a debate, a negotiation, new institutions, new ideas, change. And populism is a part of this dialectic.
There are many scholars that emphasise the dangers of populism – calling populism the ‘shadow’ of democracy, in Canovan’s phrase, or a ‘constant peril’ in Muller’s.
If you want to listen to the full conversation with professor Taggart, I’ll leave a link to the second channel in the description below
There are those that are more neutral. Like Anselmi who writes that populism at base ‘is a demand for more democracy on the part of citizens; however, once it has taken hold, it can even generate an involution of democratic institutions’ And many who are much more positive, like Chantel Mouffe who argues that populism should aim to ‘deepen and extend democracy.’ Edward Shills argued populism was like an ‘inverted egalitarianism’ because ‘it is tinged by the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers; they are actually better than their rulers’
What’s clear is it has to be taken seriously as a force, a demand, a part of a sovereign will, a general will – while also understanding the dangers.
One idea I like comes from political scientists Yves Meny and Yves Surel who start from the idea that popular sovereignty is the source of democracy, and then arguing that that popular sovereignty is, in Anselmi’s words, both ‘a source of legitimacy for the institutional structure and as a delegitimizing force. The former represents an architectural and structuring tendency, while the latter represents a dynamic and de-structuring tendency.’
That is, if democracy has a structure – an architecture – built up over centuries – in response to the demands for popular sovereignty, and that when it goes wrong, that same force, the same demands pick at that structure too – popular sovereignty can build a house and popular sovereignty can restructure a house if its not feeling homely.
When constitutional democracy veers from the sovereign will of the people, populism will result, increasing a distrust of elites, and potentially creating a counter-elite meant to change things in the name of the people.
The house building metaphor is a good one because, what do you think will happen when you renovate or neglect or extend or change a house while forgetting the people who live in some of the rooms – the Rust Belt room or the Red Wall, the marginalised room or the A&E wing. The house will inevitably collapse. The idea of the ‘shadow’ of democracy, the ‘silent’ majority, Regan’s idea of those with ‘quiet devotion’, the hardworking real nation – is a perfect representation of the idea of forgotten rooms – the blank spaces, the missed spots, the neglected districts.
It seems to me that there are three general recurring themes of populism in the modern period – post-democracy, inequality, and authority.
The first is that populism is response to post-democracy – the idea that democracy is not in the hands of the people. That no-one is in charge of the system. This is common to the left and the right.
The complaint from the left is often that democracy undermined by a global capitalism that can jump from tax country to tax country, offshore labour, lobby politicians and so on. The complaint on the right is that institutions like the ECHR or the UN are seen as taking sovereignty from domestic courts, or that global migration is undermining nation states. Both fuel populist anger.
The second theme is that populism is a response to inequality in a broad sense. Meta studies quite clearly show the positive relationship between inequality and populism. The squeeze on living standards for the working and lower middle class, plus neoliberal policies that have increased asset/pension/stock market/housing value for upper middle class/wealthy, combined with higher levels of migration and the erosion of public services is the basis of populist fuel. This is why the young tend to support left wing populists while the older support right wing populists.
Finally, both of these lead to a demand for change that hasn’t been forthcoming from within the system, leading to support for a strong charismatic authority from without. This has often led to genuine reform but hasn’t been without serious authoritarian risks. But Finding ways to radically reform a system doesn’t mean destroying pluralist democratic institutions – and I’ve talked more about this in the links in the pinned comment below. There’s much more to say on all of this, but I wanted to try and stick to what populism means, without veering off into the many, many related subjects. To end, My favourite book on this has been Kazin’s, who sums up populism like this- ‘Like the American dream itself, ever present and never fully realized, populism lives too deeply in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but, without it, we are lost.’
Sources
Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion
Paul Taggart, Populism
Jan Werner-Muller, What is Populism
Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History
Populism: An Introduction
