At this stage one might wonder, Why would anyone ever support populists if the latter are so obviously always protoauthoritarians likely to do serious damage to democratic systems? Is the fact that populist leaders have millions of supporters in many countries evidence that these millions have authoritarian personalities (to return to one of the psychological diagnoses discussed in chapter 1)? Are so many of our fellow citizens potentially ready to exclude us, if in their eyes we don’t conform to their conception of “real Americans”? In this chapter, I want to make life a little bit more difficult for liberal democrats who by now might be tempted simply to dismiss populism as any kind of challenge at the level of ideas (as opposed to an empirical problem that has to be dealt with one way or another). I shall point to the ways in which the appeal of populism rides on what the Italian democratic theorist Norberto Bobbio used to call the broken promises of democracy. I also want to show how populism seems to solve a problem to which liberal democracy has no real answer—namely, the problem of what should constitute the boundaries of “the people” in the first place. And lastly, I shall try to explain that particular historical circumstances in the United States and Europe have facilitated an upsurge of populism in our day. I conclude with some suggestions as to how one might best talk with—and not just about—populists without thereby ending up talking like them.
What explains the attractiveness of populism? Of course, the beneficiaries of clientelism and discriminatory legalism will find things in it to like. But I would also suggest that the success of populism can be connected to what one might call promises of democracy that have not been fulfilled and that in a certain sense simply can’t be fulfilled in our societies. Nobody ever officially issued these promises. They are more like what is sometimes called the “folk theory of democracy”1—or intuitions that explain not only democracy’s attraction in the modern word but also its periodic failures.
The crucial promise, simply put, is that the people can rule. At least in theory, populists claim that the people as a whole not only have a common and coherent will but also can rule in the sense that the right representatives can implement what the people have demanded in the form of an imperative mandate. Many initial intuitions about democracy can be translated into such a picture: democracy is self-government, and who can rule ideally is not just a majority but the whole. Even in democratic Athens, this story was not the whole story, but Athens came as close as one can imagine to democracy in the sense of cultivating a sense of collective capacity and actually engaging in collective action (but, crucially, on the understanding that citizens would rule and be ruled in turn—there is no democracy without proper rotation into and out of public office).2 One has to be rather obtuse not to see the attraction of such a notion of collectively mastering one’s fate, and one might be forgiven for melancholy feelings given its loss in practice.
Now, populists speak as if such promises could be fulfilled. They speak and act as if the people could develop a singular judgment, a singular will, and hence a singular, unambiguous mandate. They speak and act as if the people were one—with any opposition, if its existence is acknowledged at all, soon to disappear. They speak as if the people, if only they empowered the right representatives, could fully master their fate. To be sure, they do not talk about the collective capacity of the people as such, and they do not pretend that the people could actually themselves occupy the offices of the state. As I’ve been stressing, populism is only thinkable in the context of representative democracy.
The major differences between democracy and populism should have become clear by now: one enables majorities to authorize representatives whose actions may or may not turn out to conform to what a majority of citizens expected or would have wished for; the other pretends that no action of a populist government can be questioned, because “the people” have willed it so. The one assumes fallible, contestable judgments by changing majorities; the other imagines a homogeneous entity outside all institutions whose identity and ideas can be fully represented. The one assumes, if anything, a people of individuals, so that in the end only numbers (in elections) count; the other takes for granted a more or less mysterious “substance” and the fact that even large numbers of individuals (even majorities) can fail to express that substance properly. The one presumes that decisions made after democratic procedures have been followed are not “moral” in such a way that all opposition must be considered immoral; the other postulates one properly moral decision even in circumstances of deep disagreement about morality (and policy). Finally—and most importantly—the one takes it that “the people” can never appear in a noninstitutionalized manner and, in particular, accepts that a majority (and even an “overwhelming majority,” a beloved term of Vladimir Putin) in parliament is not “the people” and cannot speak in the name of the people; the other presumes precisely the opposite.
It might seem then that representative democracy can make do without any appeals to “the people.” But is that true? Is anything missing at all from such a picture? Or can all legitimate democratic concerns—about increased participation, or better deliberation, or majorities not getting a raw deal in the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism in the West—be rephrased in such a way as to eliminate the need for “the people” entirely?
I think that such concerns can indeed be rephrased—but they might fail to get traction not because “the people” have disappeared but because something else is disappearing before our very eyes: party democracy.3 Parties once mediated between a pluralist society and a political system that sooner or later had to produce authoritative decisions that would not please everyone. Even “losers” would need to give their consent, albeit secure in the knowledge that there was a reasonable chance that they’d win at some time in the future. Put simply, democracy is a system where you know you can lose, but you also know that you will not always lose. Parties formed governments and legitimate oppositions; their very existence as legitimate “parts” (as opposed to “the whole”) had an antipopulist meaning. This was true even of the large “catch-all” parties that called themselves “people’s parties,” or Volksparteien; despite the populist-sounding name, they never claimed exclusively to represent the people as a whole. Rather, they offered two or more competing conceptions of peoplehood, dramatized the differences between them, but also recognized the other side as legitimate. (This approach was particularly attractive in countries that had undergone a civil war but where the need for coexistence was eventually recognized. Think of Austria, where socialist “Reds” and conservative Catholic “Blacks” had to find fair terms of living together in the same political space.) In short, parties represented diversity; party systems symbolized unity.
Today, many indicators suggest that neither parties nor party systems fulfill their respective functions any longer. Scholars have shown that populism is strong in places with weak party systems. Where previously coherent and entrenched party systems broke down, chances for populists clearly increased: just think of how the implosion of the party system in postwar Italy in the early 1990s eventually produced Silvio Berlusconi. If Kelsen was right that democracy under modern conditions can only mean party democracy, then the slow disintegration of parties and party systems is not a tiny empirical detail. It affects the viability of democracy as such, including whatever remains of an ideal of democracy as providing political communities with a sense of unity and collective agency.
So far, I have assumed and even taken for granted that populists go wrong in extracting “the real people” from the empirical totality of the people living in a state and then excluding those citizens who dissent from the populist line. Just think back to George Wallace’s incessant talk of “real Americans” or the claim by right-wingers that Barack Obama is an “un-American” or even “anti-American” president. Yet to reproach populists with these exclusions raises a crucial question: What or who decides membership in the people, other than the historical accident of who is born in a particular place or who happens to be the son or daughter of particular parents? Put simply, the charge against populists that they are exclusionary is a normative one, but liberal democrats—unless they advocate for a world state with one single, equal citizenship status—also effectively condone exclusions of all those not part of a particular state. This challenge is known in political theory as the “boundary problem.” It famously has no obvious democratic solution: to say that the people should decide presumes that we already know who the people are—but that is the very question that demands an answer.
In fact, we see here a curious reversal. Populists always distinguish morally between those who properly belong and those who don’t (even if that moral criterion might ultimately be nothing more than a form of identity politics).4 Liberal democrats seem only to be able to appeal to the brute facts or, phrased a bit differently, to historical accidents. They can say that de facto certain people are also “real Americans” since, after all, they hold American citizenship. But that is indeed just a fact; it does not in and of itself amount to much of a normative claim.
How might we do better here? I suggest two answers. For one thing, criticizing the populists for excluding parts of the people does not require that we definitively establish who is and who is not a member of the polity. Nobody has authorized the massive disenfranchisement toward which, at least symbolically, populists gesture. This is not to say that 51 percent of voters officially eliminating the vote of the remaining 49 percent could ever be justified; it is just to point out that many citizens, when confronted with what populists imply, may well respond by saying, “I can criticize certain people in all kinds of ways without actually wanting to deny their status as free and equal fellow citizens.” Second, and more important, the boundary problem is not the kind of problem that any political theory de haut en bas can solve once and for all. Addressing it is a process in which both existing members and aspiring members can have a say; it should be a matter of democratic debate, not a once-and-for-all decision based on unchangeable criteria.5 It would be a mistake, of course, to think that this process will necessarily mean progress in the sense of more inclusiveness; perhaps, at the end of a genuine democratic debate, definitions of a people will be more restrictive than at the beginning.
This is not where the problems end for the liberal democratic critique of populism, though. So far, we have also taken for granted that being an antipluralist is in and of itself undemocratic. Is it? Pluralism—just like its particular variant, multiculturalism—is often presented simultaneously as a fact and as a value. Just like the boundary problem, we’re left with the question of why a simple fact should automatically have any moral weight. Then there is the issue that pluralism and diversity are not first-order values as is, for example, freedom. Nobody could plausibly say that more pluralism must automatically always be good. While pluralism and liberalism have often been associated in liberal thought, many philosophers have also rightly insisted that, on closer inspection, it is actually very difficult to get from the presence of pluralism (especially a pluralism of values and lifestyles) to a principled endorsement of liberty.6 So we need to be much more precise about what’s wrong with antipluralism. We might want to say that the real problem with populism is that its denial of diversity effectively amounts to denying the status of certain citizens as free and equal. These citizens might not be excluded officially, but the public legitimacy of their individual values, ideas of what makes for the good life, and even material interests are effectively called into question and even declared not to count. As John Rawls argued, accepting pluralism is not a recognition of the empirical fact that we live in diverse societies; rather, it amounts to a commitment to try to find fair terms of sharing the same political space with others whom we respect as free and equal but also as irreducibly different in their identities and interests. Denying pluralism in this sense amounts to saying, “I can only live in a political world where my conception of the polity, or my personal view of who is a real American, gets to trump all others.”7 This is simply not a democratic perspective on politics.
Finally, there’s a concern with how democrats sometimes respond to populist leaders and parties. In a number of countries, the reaction of nonpopulist parties—as well as occasionally the public media—has been to erect a cordon sanitaire around populists: no cooperation with them, certainly no political coalitions with them, no debates on TV, and no concessions on any of their policy demands. In some cases, the problems with such strategies of exclusion have been obvious from the start. Nicolas Sarkozy, for instance, kept claiming that the Front National (FN) does not really share basic French republican values; at the same time, he was copying the FN’s policies on immigration, making his own party into something like an “FN lite.” The evident hypocrisy was bound to undermine any anti-FN strategy. Less obviously, the fact that all political actors other than the populists collude to exclude the latter immediately strengthens the credibility of populists in claiming that the established parties are forming a “cartel”; populists delight in pointing out that their competitors are ultimately all the same, despite their professed ideological differences—hence the tendency to fuse even the names of the established parties to reinforce the sense that only the populists offer a genuine alternative. (In France, for instance, Marine Le Pen used to speak of the “UMPS,” fusing the acronym of Sarkozy’s right-wing party with that of the socialists.)
Apart from these more practical challenges—which are more about calculating political effects as to what might actually succeed in restraining populist passions—there remains a principled worry. I have insisted that the problem with populists is that they exclude. So what are we supposed to do in return? Exclude them! I have also repeatedly pointed out that populists are committed antipluralists. So what do we do by excluding them? Reduce overall pluralism. Something seems not right here. One is reminded of what gave Wallace’s counterpunches against liberals such force in his day: he could claim with some plausibility that “the biggest bigots in the world are . . . the ones who call others bigots.”8
I suggest that, as long as populists stay within the law—and don’t incite violence, for instance—other political actors (and members of the media) are under some obligation to engage them. When they enter parliaments, they represent constituents; simply to ignore the populists is bound to reinforce those constituents’ sense that “existing elites” have abandoned them or never cared about them in the first place. Yet talking to populists is not the same as talking like populists. One can take their political claims seriously without taking them at face value. In particular, one does not have to accept the ways in which populists frame certain problems. To return to an earlier example, were there really millions of unemployed in France in the 1980s? Yes. Had every single job been taken by an “immigrant,” as the Front National wanted the electorate to believe? Of course not.
The point here is not that proper argument and evidence are guaranteed to defeat populists in parliaments, in public debate, and ultimately at the polls. If it is true that populists ultimately appeal to a certain symbolic rendering of the “true people,” the appeal of that image will not vanish automatically when voters are presented with some set of correct statistics about a particular policy area. But this doesn’t mean that proper argument and evidence cannot make a difference. A significant part of Wallace’s support in his 1968 presidential campaign disappeared, for instance, after unions started to bombard their members with information about both the actual situation of “the working man” in Alabama and how little Wallace had done as governor to improve it.9
More important still, one can also engage with populists on a symbolic level. This can take the shape of arguing about what a polity’s foundational commitments really mean. But it might also come down to the symbolic affirmation of parts of the population that had previously been excluded. As should have become clear, figures like Evo Morales or Erdoğan are not just evil authoritarians who emerged out of nowhere; Morales was justified in advocating for the indigenous peoples of Bolivia who had been largely kept out of the political process, and Erdoğan was doing something democratic when he asserted the presence of what had often been dismissed as “black Turks”—that is to say, the poor and devout Anatolian masses—against the one-sided Westernized image of the Turkish Republic celebrated by the Kemalists. The quest for inclusion did not have to take the form of the pars pro toto populist claim; arguably, some of the damage to democracy might have been averted had existing elites been willing to take steps toward both practical and symbolic inclusion.
One of the results of the analysis presented so far—counterintuitive as it might seem—is that the one party in US history that explicitly called itself “populist” was in fact not populist. Populism, as is well known, was a movement primarily of farmers in the 1890s. It briefly threatened the hold of Democrats and Republicans on the US political system. To be sure, it is not the first instance of what historians have seen as populism in American history. On the one hand, the Founding Fathers themselves were obviously wary of unconstrained popular sovereignty. They precisely tried to avoid a situation where an imagined collective whole could be played off against the new political institutions. This is the meaning of the famous words in Federalist 63: “It is clear that the principle of representation was neither unknown to the ancients nor wholly overlooked in their political constitutions. The true distinction between these and the American governments, lies IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share in the LATTER, and not in the TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE from the administration of the FORMER” (emphasis in original). Still, the Framers also invoked the “genius of the people,”10 and the Constitution contained many “popular” elements, from juries to militias.11 Thomas Jefferson from the start provided a republican and producerist language that would be revived by many political rhetoricians defending the rights of the hardworking majority; virtually all strands of Protestantism perpetuated the notion that the people themselves, unaided by clergy, could find spiritual truth; Andrew Jackson, central to the “Age of the Common Man,” with his campaign against the “money power,” is variously presented as a force for deepening democracy or as a “populist”—called “King Mob” for a reason—who created a whole new style of politics in which public figures used references to the “log cabin” and “hard cider” to demonstrate that they stood with and for the “plain people.” In the 1850s there was the nativist (in particular, anti-Catholic) Know Nothing movement. It had initially been called the “Native American Party” before it became simply the “American Party” (raising a claim to exclusive representation with its very name). Membership was only open to Protestant men and the organization was built on secrecy (hence, when questioned, its adherents were supposed to declare, “I know nothing but my country”). The year 1892 saw the formation of the People’s Party, whose adherents were first simply called “Pops”—and, eventually, “Populists.” Like so many political labels, this one was initially meant to be derogatory (with “Populites” being another contender for a negative designation) and only later came to be defiantly adopted and celebrated by those whom the name had been meant to denigrate. (The word neoconservative had a similar career in the 1970s.)12
The self-declared Populists emerged from movements of farmers no longer content to raise corn but determined to raise hell politically. Their experience of debt and dependency—and the economic downturn of the early 1890s in particular—inspired them to organize for a range of demands that variously set them against both the Democrats and the Republicans. In particular, as farmers, they needed cheap credit and transportation to get their produce to the East. Hence they felt increasingly at the mercy of banks and railroad owners. Eventually, their confrontation with what was usually just called “the interests” gave rise to two demands that largely came to define Populism’s political program: on the one hand, the creation of a subtreasury—the freeing of silver (against what the “Goldbugs” advocated)—and, on the other, the nationalization of the railroads.13
The Populists formulated their demands in political language that clearly set “the people” against self-serving elites. Mary Elizabeth Lease famously stated, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”14 Populist discourse was suffused with none-too-subtle moral claims; there was talk of “the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats”; and some of the slogans (and poetry) are reminiscent of the central tropes of the Occupy Wall Street Movement (for example, the “ninety and nine in hovels bare, the one in a palace with riches rare”).15
As said above, historians as well as political and social theorists of the 1950s and 1960s often described the Populists as driven by anger and resentment, prone to conspiracy theories, and guilty—not least—of racism. Richard Hofstadter famously spoke of the “paranoid style in American politics.”16 Evidence is not hard to find. Georgia Populist leader Tom Watson once asked, “Did [Jefferson] dream that in 100 years or less his party would be prostituted to the vilest purposes of monopoly; that red-eyed Jewish millionaires would be chiefs of that Party, and that the liberty and prosperity of the country would be . . . constantly and corruptly sacrificed to Plutocratic greed in the name of Jeffersonian democracy?”17 Yet in retrospect, it seems clear that the Cold War liberal historians and political theorists were talking more about McCarthyism and the rise of the radical conservative movement (including its outright racist factions such as the John Birch Society) than the actual Populists of the 1890s.
The Populists were an example of advocacy for the common people—without, I think, pretending to represent the people as a whole. To be sure, there were sometimes ambiguities or (perhaps conscious) slippages, even in the famous Omaha Platform, with which the People’s Party had constituted itself:
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.
Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and chief who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of “the plain people,” with which class it originated. We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
The Populists advocated democratic reforms such as the direct election of senators as well as the secret ballot—and they sought graduated taxation and the creation of what today would be called a regulatory state. But they did so with reference to the “plain people.” Implementing their ideal of a “cooperative commonwealth” may well have resulted in something that elsewhere in the world would have been called “Social Democracy.”18 As the Omaha Platform made abundantly clear, they respected the Constitution, although in an American context—unlike in a European one—anticonstitutionalism will hardly serve as a useful criterion for identifying populists in the sense defended in this book. After all, the Constitution was and remains revered by virtually everyone.
The Populists rarely ever claimed to be the people as such—although they united men and women, and whites and blacks to a degree that arguably none of the other major parties did at the time. They might have been much more successful had they not been viciously attacked by Southern Democrats in particular: voting fraud and bribery were common, as was violence. Had their demands not been co-opted by both Democrats and Republicans; had they not committed both strategic and tactical errors (over which historians, in a normatively loaded debate, continue to argue today); and had the “DemoPop” ticket of William Jennings Bryan, the “the Great Commoner,” succeeded in 1896—if all these things had turned out differently, US political history may have taken a very different turn.19 Yet the Populist movement was not entirely without consequences. After the mid-1890s some Populists went into the Socialist Party; at least some of the main demands of the Populists were realized during the heyday of Progressivism; and, as C. Vann Woodward, in his attack on the misreading of populism by Cold War liberals in the 1950s pointed out, even the New Deal of the 1930s could be said to be a form of “neo-Populism.”20
None of this is to say that twentieth-century American history has not seen instances of populism in my sense of the term: McCarthyism is an obvious candidate, as would be George Wallace and his followers. Jimmy Carter claimed the label “populist” for himself, but he clearly meant to allude to the Populists of the late nineteenth century (as well as the “populist” associations of evangelical Protestantism and rural and republican—in one word, Jeffersonian—understandings of democracy). In one sense at least, Wallace had paved the way for him: it became imaginable to look to a Southern governor as a source of moral renewal for the United States. (Bill Clinton arguably still benefitted from this legacy of associations nearly two decades later.)
It is with the rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump’s astounding success in 2015–16 that populism as understood in this book has really become of major importance in American politics. Clearly, “anger” has played a role, but as noted earlier, “anger” is not by itself much of an explanation of anything. The reasons for that anger have something to do with a sense that the country is changing culturally in ways deeply objectionable to a certain percentage of American citizens:21 there is the increasing influence of, broadly speaking, social-sexual liberal values (same-sex marriage, etc.) and also concerns about the United States becoming a “majority-minority country,” in which traditional images of “the real people”—white Protestants, that is—have less and less purchase on social reality. In addition to these cultural issues, there are the very real material grievances and, not least, the sense that the economic interests of a significant number of Americans are unrepresented in Washington—an impression that is actually very much confirmed by hard social scientific data.22
As Hanspeter Kriesi has argued, Western countries have seen a new conflict line emerge in recent decades—what political scientists call a “cleavage” between citizens who favor more openness and those who prefer some form of closure.23 This conflict can play out primarily in economic terms, or it can turn into mostly a cultural issue. When identity politics predominates, populists will prosper. The problem is not an economy that less and less fits capitalist self-justifications in terms of competition and heroic entrepreneurship benefiting all. (Even The Economist, not exactly a Marxisant publication, has begun to criticize monopoly power in the United States.) Instead the issue is said to be Mexicans stealing jobs (and supposedly doing various other things). Now, one should not pretend that all identity issues can seamlessly be translated into questions of material interests; one needs to take individuals’ value commitments seriously. It is necessary, however, to remember one important difference between cultural and economic changes: many of the former do not, in the end, directly affect many individuals. People might not like the way the country is going, but who other than wedding photographers with very traditional beliefs about marriage really feel touched in their everyday lives by the legalization of same-sex marriage? It would not be the first time that the United States has developed a more inclusive, tolerant, and generous self-conception as a nation over the objections of a small but passionate faction of voters. A similarly hopeful story cannot be told about the males with no more than a high school diploma whose skills, if any, are simply not needed in the American economy today.
The United States today requires deep structural reform in this respect, and someone like Bernie Sanders clearly is right to draw attention to such a need. As should have become clear by now, Sanders is not a left-wing populist, if one is at all persuaded by the criteria developed in this book. The reason is not that there can’t be such a thing as left-wing populism by definition, as some leftists outside the United States sometimes say. Populism isn’t about policy content; it’s irrelevant that on one level Sanders can sound like Huey Long with his imperative to “Share Our Wealth.” Populism is about making a certain kind of moral claim, and the content needed to specify that claim may well come from, for instance, socialist doctrine (Chávez is the obvious example).
One implication of the analysis presented in this book is that National Socialism and Italian Fascism need to be understood as populist movements—even though, I hasten to add, they were not just populist movements but also exhibited traits that are not inevitable elements of populism as such: racism, a glorification of violence, and a radical “leadership principle.” Now, in Western Europe, one of the peculiarities of the aftermath of the high point of totalitarian politics in the 1930s and 1940s was the following: both postwar political thought and postwar political institutions were deeply imprinted with antitotalitarianism. Political leaders, as well as jurists and philosophers, sought to build an order designed, above all, to prevent a return to the totalitarian past. They relied on an image of the past as a chaotic era characterized by limitless political dynamism, unbound “masses,” and attempts to forge a completely unconstrained political subject—such as the purified German Volksgemeinschaft or the “Soviet People” (created in Stalin’s image and ratified as real in the “Stalin Constitution” of 1936).
As a consequence, the whole direction of political development in postwar Europe has been toward fragmenting political power (in the sense of checks and balances, or even a mixed constitution) as well as empowering unelected institutions or institutions beyond electoral accountability, such as constitutional courts, all in the name of strengthening democracy itself.24 That development was based on specific lessons that European elites—rightly or wrongly—drew from the political catastrophes of midcentury: the architects of the postwar Western European order viewed the ideal of popular sovereignty with a great deal of distrust; after all, how could one trust people who had brought fascists to power or extensively collaborated with fascist occupiers? Less obviously, elites also had deep reservations about the idea of parliamentary sovereignty and, more particularly, the idea of political actors claiming to speak and act for the people as a whole being empowered by parliaments (and thereby subscribing to the metapolitical illusion Kelsen had criticized). After all, had not legitimate representative assemblies handed all power over to Hitler and to Marshal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, in 1933 and 1940, respectively? Hence parliaments in postwar Europe were systematically weakened, checks and balances strengthened, and institutions without electoral accountability (again, constitutional courts serving as the prime example) tasked not just with defending individual rights but with securing democracy as a whole.25 In short, distrust of unrestrained popular sovereignty, or even unconstrained parliamentary sovereignty (what a German constitutional lawyer once called “parliamentary absolutism”) are, so to speak, built into the DNA of postwar European politics. These underlying principles of what I have elsewhere called “constrained democracy” were almost always adopted when countries were able to shake off dictatorships and turn to liberal democracy in the last third of the twentieth century—first on the Iberian peninsula in the 1970s and then in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989.
European integration, it needs to be emphasized, was part and parcel of this comprehensive attempt to constrain the popular will: it added supranational constraints to national ones.26 (Which is not to say that this entire process was masterminded by anyone, or came about seamlessly. Of course, the outcomes were contingent and had to do with who prevailed in particular political struggles—a point that is particularly clear in the case of individual rights protection, a role for which national courts and the European Court of Justice competed.) This logic was more evident initially with institutions like the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights. But the desire to “lock in” liberal-democratic commitments became more pronounced in the specific case of the European Union (EU; or, as it was known until 1993, the European Economic Community [EEC]) context with the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe in the 1970s.
Now, the upshot of this brief historical excursus is that a political order built on a distrust of popular sovereignty—an explicitly antitotalitarian and, if you like, implicitly antipopulist order—will always be particularly vulnerable to political actors speaking in the name of the people as a whole against a system that appears designed to minimize popular participation. As should have become clear from the discussion in this book, populism is actually not really a cry for more political participation, let alone for the realization of direct democracy. But it can resemble movements making such cries and hence, prima facie, gain some legitimacy on the grounds that the postwar European order really is based on the idea of keeping “the people” at a distance.
Why might Europe have become particularly vulnerable to populist actors since the mid-1970s or so, and in recent years in particular? Some answers might seem obvious: a retrenchment of the welfare state, immigration, and, above all in recent years, the Eurocrisis. But a crisis—whether economic, social, or ultimately also political—does not automatically produce populism in the sense defended in this book (except, possibly, when old party systems are disintegrating). On the contrary, democracies can be said perpetually to create crises and, at the same time, to have the resources and mechanisms for self-correction.27 Rather, at least as far as the current wave of populism in Europe is concerned, I would say that it is the particular approach to addressing the Eurocrisis—for shorthand, technocracy—that is crucial for understanding the present-day rise of populism.
In a curious way, the two mirror each other. Technocracy holds that there is only one correct policy solution; populism claims that there is only one authentic will of the people.28 Most recently, they have also been trading attributes: technocracy has become moralized (“you Greeks, and so on, must atone for your sins!”—that is, profligacy in the past), whereas populism has become businesslike (think of Berlusconi and, in the Czech Republic, Babiš’ promise to run the state like one of his companies). For neither technocrats nor populists is there any need for democratic debate. In a sense, both are curiously apolitical. Hence it is plausible to assume that one might pave the way for the other, because each legitimizes the belief that there is no real room for disagreement. After all, each holds that there is only one correct policy solution and only one authentic popular will respectively.
Noting this parallel allows us to see a bit more clearly what really separates populist parties and movements on the one hand from actors who, on the other hand, might oppose, say, austerity measures and libertarian economic prescriptions while not resembling populists in any other sense. In Finland, the thing that makes the party of “True Finns” (and, more recently, just “The Finns”) a populist party is not that they criticize the EU but that they claim exclusively to represent true Finns. In Italy, it is not Beppe Grillo’s complaints about Italy’s la casta that should lead one to worry about him as a populist but his assertion that his movement wants (and deserves) nothing less than 100 percent of the seats in parliament, because all other contenders are supposedly corrupt and immoral. According to this logic, the grillini ultimately are the pure Italian people—which then also justifies the kind of dictatorship of virtue inside the Five Star Movement that I touched on earlier.
Identifying actual populists and distinguishing them from political actors who criticize elites but do not employ a pars pro toto logic (such as the indignados in Spain) is a prime task for a theory of populism in Europe today. What some observers have called “democratic activists”—as opposed to populists—first of all advance particular policies, but to the extent that they use people-talk at all, their claim is not “We, and only we, are the people”; it is rather “We are also the people.”29
It is also important to sow some doubt about left-wing strategies that attempt selectively to draw on the populist imaginary to oppose a neoliberal hegemony. The point is not that critique of the latter is somehow in and of itself populist (in line with the understanding of populism as a matter of “irresponsible policies”). Rather, the trouble is with schemes—very much inspired, it seems, by Ernesto Laclau’s maxim that “constructing a people is the main task of radical politics”—that aim to portray today’s main political conflict as one between the people (the “governed”) on the one hand and the “market people,” the de facto governors in the form of investment managers, on the other.30 Will such an opposition actually mobilize “the people”? Unlikely. Will it import the problems of a genuinely populist conception of politics? Possibly.
Hence the demand for a specific “left-wing populism” to oppose austerity policies (or, for that matter, to counter the rise of right-wing populism) in many parts of Europe is either redundant or dangerous. It is redundant if the point is simply to offer a credible left-wing alternative or a reinvented Social Democracy. Why not talk about building new majorities instead of gesturing at the “construction of a people”? What people exactly? However, if left-wing populism really means populism in the sense defined and defended in this book, it is clearly dangerous.
What is the alternative? An approach that seeks to bring in those currently excluded—what some sociologists sometimes call “the superfluous”—while also keeping the very wealthy and powerful from opting out of the system. This is really just another way of saying that some sort of new social contract is needed. Broad-based support is required for such a new social contract in Southern European countries, and that support can only be built through an appeal to fairness, not just fiscal rectitude. To be sure, lofty appeals are not enough; there has to be a mechanism to authorize such a new settlement. It might come in the shape of a grand coalition actually empowered at election time. Alternatively, societies could officially renegotiate their very constitutional settlements, as Iceland and, in a much less dramatic way, Ireland have been trying to do, albeit without much success.