What Populism Is—And Isn't

Everything you need to know about the buzziest and most dangerous political force of our time.

(Photo via Getty Images.)

Today we’re delighted to publish a primer on populism by Shikha Dalmia, the editor-in-chief of our editorial partner, The UnPopulist. Shikha also runs the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, which last month organized an excellent conference in D.C. on “Liberalism in the 21st Century,” which many Persuasion team members and subscribers attended. To read the UnPopulist’s coverage of the conference, click here.

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Populism, the rule of many, and authoritarianism, the rule of one, might seem like antipoles. But they are intimately related. Wherever populism appears, so do various forms of illiberalism that if allowed to run their course result in strongman politics with its contempt for dispersed power, checks and balances, freedom of the press, and other constraints on one-man (or woman) rule.

To understand what populism is, it is useful to understand what it is not, since the literature on it often lumps together many disparate figures and phenomena, some good, some bad, obscuring the core concept.

Popular vs Populist

For starters, populist movements are not popular uprisings like the one Mahatma Gandhi led against British colonial rule in India and Nelson Mandela against white apartheid in South Africa. There are surface similarities: for example, both are led by charismatic figures commanding a mass following. But that does not make these uprisings the same as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

One big difference is that a popular uprising is a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs. Populist movements, on the other hand, are aimed at a domestic “establishment” which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt—genuinely or allegedly.

Gandhi’s Quit India movement, for example, targeted a small—and alien—ruling power denying self-rule to an entire people. Some separatist movements, such as the one in Catalonia in Spain or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, are dubbed populist uprisings. Regardless of what one thinks of the justice of their demands, they are, however, more in the vein of anti-colonial struggles like Quit India given that they are directed against an “enemy without.”

Populist movements, by contrast, are a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule, but where the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it. So these movements are oriented against the “enemy within.” For example, Modi’s populist nationalism is directed against a secular elite that regards the majority Hindu population’s desire for a homogeneously Hindu India as anathema.

As Karen Horn, a classical liberal scholar at Germany’s University of Erfurt, puts it:

Part and parcel of populism is that it encourages antagonism, pitting “the people” against “the elites,” insisting on a Manichean “Us vs. Them” view of politics. As Michael Kazin writes, populism is “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.” The essential assumption is that “the people,” however they may be defined, see themselves as more legitimate than others, implying that it is their “will,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s volonté générale, that must prevail.

Who Are “The People”?

Rousseau’s volonté générale—the general or the single will of the whole community—informs the populist notion of democracy. But high-minded though it sounds, this kind of governance is imaginable only for small groupings such as a homeowners’ association where people can sit face-to-face, jointly deliberate, and move toward a common course of action. In large and diverse mass democracies, this kind of direct participation and total buy-in is impossible, even in theory.

The liberal-democratic solution acknowledges that there is a “will of the people” in a loose sense and that it needs to be consulted in governing decisions. However, this will is neither universal nor fixed. Rather it is changing and evolving and has to be continuously rediscovered through regularly scheduled elections. Moreover, in large polities, individuals and groups have varied—and conflicting—interests. This means the “will of the people” is not monolithic. If markets are a mechanism for discovering the will of the consumer, democracy and elections are a mechanism for discovering the will of the public.

Moreover, deliberative bodies and representative institutions are required to sift through competing demands and balance the power among various interests so that no one side gets its way all the time, and no one side loses all the time. They deliberately temper the power of dominant groups to give less powerful minorities a shot at being heard. However, minorities don’t get exclusive control over the levers of power either.

This liberal arrangement generates all kinds of discontent on the part of both minorities and the majority, which in the case of the latter can grow into a populist movement in the right circumstances.

Minorities are dissatisfied because liberalism at best offers them a shot at slowly reforming the endemic—and inevitable—injustices in society, not a quick fix. Their grievances are just one among many concerns that are weighed in the deliberative process. Minorities that feel that their concerns are not getting adequate attention must obtain buy-in from other groups to advance their cause. That is difficult and takes time. Minorities can mount radical social justice movements, but their success depends on staying united among themselves and convincing a significant portion of the majority to prioritize an abstract commitment to justice and fairness over its own interest. That is a tough row to hoe because opponents have plenty of time and opportunity to mobilize. That’s why it is always two steps forward and one step backward for social justice movements. Their more radical demands that threaten to upend the status quo inevitably get tempered. (It is no coincidence that despite this country’s avowed commitment to freedom, it took nearly a hundred years to remove the legal sanction from slavery after the Revolutionary War and nearly another hundred to end Jim Crow.)

That is not the case with majoritarian movements or those movements mounted by dominant groups.

A majority can bend institutions to its will far more effectively. And when it can’t, unlike minorities, it can use its electoral clout to back a party or elect a strongman who promises to bypass—or even squash—the institutions that stand in its way.

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The Economic Cost of Right-Wing Populism

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Indeed, if popular leaders and movements claim to represent the people, populist leaders or parties claim to embody the people. But of course they cannot actually embody the will of “all” the people. Therefore, they must artificially manufacture a consensus by excluding those who don’t neatly fit in their agenda or disagree with them.

This requires separating the “real” people from all the others—rich people, foreigners, Jews, racial and religious minorities, dissidents—who stand outside and against the people. These out-groups are inevitably blamed for the problems of the “real” people—or at the very least are considered an impediment to the realization of their goals. Divisiveness and polarization is the sine qua non of populist politics and is almost always and everywhere accompanied by a coarsening of political discourse to make room for the demonization and vilification of disfavored groups. Trump is a particularly crude demagogue who thrives on demeaning minorities and vilifying political opponents. But more sophisticated authoritarians have their own ways of scapegoating out-groups and blaming them for the travails of the majority.

In a sense, then, a populist movement doesn’t just harbor a cult of the leader but also a cult of the common man that opens the door to the tyranny of the majority. Some want to believe that populism refers merely to policies that are popular because they help the “common man,” meaning the vast majority of ordinary people. But although the term has been used in that sense, that is not what it really is and not what gives it its bad odor. Populism means pursuing policies that the majority favors without subjecting them to normal deliberative processes, simply because the majority favors them.

Left- vs Right-wing Populism

To the extent that populist movements are anti-elite or anti-establishment, they can arise on either the left or the right. But there is a crucial difference between the two, as writer John B. Judis insists in The Populist Explosion:

Left-wing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top. Right-wing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favoring a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Right-wing populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also down upon an out group.

Judis, a Bernie Sanders fan, seems oblivious to left-wing populism’s capacity to turn virulent and violent (although one hopes that the latest antics of Nicolás Maduro stealing the election and cracking down on opponents in Venezuela might give him pause). Still, he has a point. Unless left-wing populism morphs into right-wing populism—hardly an impossibility—it doesn’t resort to a full-blown “nativist logic.”

Left-wing populists, in other words, are primarily driven by a concern for their own, not a disdain for some mythical “other.” Right-wing populist movements aren’t merely against the elite above—they are also against pluralism or diversity among those around them.

Left-wing populism is still dangerous because its progressive message of economic equality is inherently seductive. This is why this populism swept through a huge chunk of Latin America after the Great Depression when Juan Perón in Argentina, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, and José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador were elected to office. Under the pretext of releasing the poor from the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy, all of them to varying degrees dismantled democratic institutions and established one-man rule that turned out to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the previous regime.

However, right-wing populism is even more dangerous because along with abandoning liberal institutions it also abandons liberal values. It is, in this sense, doubly illiberal.

That is the populism that is reflected in Trump’s America, Orbán’s Hungary and Modi’s India. Out of 33 countries examined in 2018 by Timbro, a Sweden-based free-market think tank, authoritarian populists were part of 11 out of 33 governments and offered parliamentary support to the government in an additional four countries. If these movements aren’t nipped, it is hardly alarmism to suggest things could turn much, much nastier in these countries.

Shikha Dalmia is president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and editor-in-chief of The UnPopulist, which defends liberalism from the rising global autocracies.

A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist, our editorial partner.

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