No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robustcommon sense of an unstained outsider is the bestmedicine for an ailing polity.Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed hishorse asproconsul.
Alexander Cockburn. "Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy,"CounterPunch (August 30 -31, 2008).
Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In ademocracy, thecitizens haveindividual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however,individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, theLeader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.
There is a historic battle going on across the west, inEurope,America, and elsewhere. It isglobalism againstpopulism. And you may loathe populism, but I’ll tell you a funny thing. It is becoming very popular! And it has great benefits. No more financial contributions, no moreEuropean Courts of Justice. No more EuropeanCommon Fisheries Policy, no more being talked down to. No more being bullied, no moreGuy Verhofstadt! What’s not to like. I know you’re going to miss us, I know you want to ban our nationalflags, but we’re going to wave you goodbye, and we’ll look forward in the future to working with you as asovereign nation… [Farage is cut off by the chair]
Nigel Farage,EU Farewell Speech, as quoted in Nigel Farage’s Final EU Speech: Mic Gets Cut as He Waves UK Flag in Victory,Breitbart news
Populism is a path that, at its outset, can look and feeldemocratic. But, followed to its logical conclusion, it can lead to democratic backsliding or even outrightauthoritarianism.
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “How can Populism Erode Democracy? Ask Venezuela,”The New York Times, (April 2, 2017)
Modern life requires many people oftalent andintelligence to run biginstitutions, includinggovernments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it asoppressive. ThenDonald Trump came before them andsneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence.... To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In thefuture, this strategy may well be calledTrumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism.
We have been given an assignment as amonarchy, and we do as well as we can … We try to be as little populistic as possible. We don't do anything on the spur of the moment to win an opinion poll, or short-term popularity.
With awoman'sselflessness andkindness, I look to end populism and political wrangling between the blue and green camps in the coming (2016 ROC) presidential election againstTsai (Ing-wen).
Populism is at its essence [...] just determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming oureconomy, ourenvironment,energy, themedia,government. [...] One big difference between real populism and what theTea Party thing is, is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary ofcorporations. So you can't say, let's get rid of government. You need to be saying let's take over government.
Thefederalist adventure, so assured in itsidealism, had always required the honouring ofRousseau’ssocial contract, a consensual relationship between thestate and thecitizen.Europe’s diverse peoples would supportunion, but only insofar as it did not infringe their perceived character and way of life. Europe’s boomingcities might be able to absorb change, but this was not true of formerlyindustrial provinces, rural areas and ageing populations.Britain’s pro-Brexit voters–heavily provincial, rural and older–reflected this divide.Parties variously labelledright-wing,nationalist or populist gainedstrength in most if not all European states, responding to a call forvoters to ‘take back control’ of their political and social environment. Most alarmingly, the 2016 World Values Survey reported that ‘fewer than half’ of respondents born in theseventies andeighties believed it was ‘essential to live in a country that isgoverneddemocratically’. InGermany,Spain,Japan andAmerica, between twenty and forty per cent would prefer ‘a strongleader who does not have to bother withparliaments orelections’.
Simon Jenkins,A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)
Democrats have to figure out why thewhiteworking class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.
Building onLinz’s work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when apolitician 1) rejects, in words or action, thedemocratic rules of the game, 2) denies thelegitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encouragesviolence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail thecivil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians in terms of these four factors. A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern. What kinds of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test forauthoritarianism? Very often, populist outsiders do. Populists are antiestablishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the voice of “the people,” wage war on what they depict as acorrupt andconspiratorialelite. Populists tend to deny thelegitimacy of establishedparties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to “the people.” This discourse should be taken seriously. When populists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions. InLatin America, for example, of all fifteenpresidents elected inBolivia,Ecuador,Peru, andVenezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were populist outsiders:Alberto Fujimori,Hugo Chávez,Evo Morales,Lucio Gutiérrez, andRafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018)How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.
WhenReagan andThatcher came topower, “authoritarian populism” was a term academics used to describe theirpolitics. Now it’s a phenomenon, growing rapidly, cutting across old definitions ofleft andright, goes the argument. But it’s not so simple and the phenomenon is not new. The term “authoritarian populist” is a construct that, if we are not careful, could blind us to the real roots ofcentrism’s suddencrisis – and to the answers.
Popularity is what you get when lots of people like a thing. Populism is what you get when a small group of people tell you that everyone likes a thing and if you don’t like it, you’re a traitor.
The growing power ofpolitical lobbies has given moneyed interests undue influence over policymaking, and has endowed a new class ofpolitician with the ability not only to fundamentally misunderstand their constituents but to be rewarded for this.Socioeconomic inequality, which for much of thepostwar era had been warded off by thewelfare state, has returned. In response to such developments, the streets of Western capitals have been marched upon by people in larger numbers than at any time since the high point of thecivil rights movement half a century ago. Whether it isOccupy protesters or thegilets jaunes,white supremacists or national populists, a more assertive voice is emerging beneath the battered wing ofliberal democracy and itsrepresentative institutions. Some of these movements areutopian, others demand greater rights, if only for themselves. But everywhere the clamor of popular disapproval is growing and is making its presence felt in the cordoned halls of liberal democratic debate. Democracy itself is changing before our eyes.
Simon Reid-Henry,Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017 (2019), pp. 1-2
The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned tosocialism, but it's only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's aneconomic system where the state owns themeans of production. This definition in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances. Today, states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printingmoney,debt, subsidies, controlling theinterest rate,price controls, andregulations to correct so-calledmarket failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals. This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally acceptedideologies in most Western countries arecollectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openlycommunist,fascist, socialist,social democrats,national socialists,Christian democrats,neo-Keynesians,progressives, populists,nationalists orglobalists. Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history.
David Rockefeller,Memoirs (2003), Ch. 27 : Proud Internationalist, p. 406
As Part IV of this book will chart, thefinancial and economic crisis of 2007–2012 morphed between 2013 and 2017 into a comprehensive political and geopolitical crisis of the post–cold war order. And the obvious political implication should not be dodged.Conservatism might have been disastrous as a crisis-fighting doctrine, but events since 2012 suggest that the triumph ofcentristliberalism was false too. As the remarkable escalation of the debate aboutinequality in theUnited States has starkly exposed, centrist liberals struggle to give convincing answers for the long-term problems ofmoderncapitalistdemocracy. The crisis added to those preexisting tensions of increasinginequality anddisenfranchisement, and the dramatic crisis-fighting measures adopted since 2008, for all their short-term effectiveness, have their own, negative side effects. On that score the conservatives were right. Meanwhile, the geopolitical challenges thrown up, not by the violent turmoil of theMiddle East or “Slavic” backwardness but by the successful advance ofglobalization, have not gone away. They have intensified. And though the “Western alliance” is still in being, it is increasingly uncoordinated. In 2014Japan lurched toward confrontation withChina. And theEU—the colossus that “does not do geopolitics”—“sleepwalked” intoconflict with Russia overUkraine. Meanwhile, in the wake of the botched handling of theeurozone crisis,Europe witnessed a dramatic mobilization on bothLeft andRight. But rather than being taken as an expression of the vitality of European democracy in the face of deplorable governmental failure, however disagreeable that expression may in some cases be, the new politics of the postcrisis period were demonized as “populism,” tarred with the brush of the 1930s or attributed to the malign influence ofRussia. The forces of the status quo gathered in the Eurogroup set out to contain and then to neutralize theleft-wing governments elected inGreece andPortugal in 2015. Backed up by the newly enhanced powers of the fully activatedECB, this left no doubt about the robustness of theeurozone. All the more pressing were the questions about the limits of democracy in the EU and its lopsidedness. Against the Left, preying on its reasonableness, the brutal tactics of containment did their job. Against the Right they did not, asBrexit,Poland andHungary were to prove.
Adam ToozeCrashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)
populism, which is regularly invoked as a model by the majoritarians, is at bottom a form of identity politics or cultural nationalism for so-called ordinary people. Populism and "workerism," like other variants of nationalism, define membership in a political community through the exclusion of others and defend the received values of that community against outsiders. Such movements equate collective values with dominant values, denying conflict and punishing dissidence within their own ranks.
Ellen Willis "The Majoritarian Fallacy" in Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999)
No massleft-wing movement has ever been built on amajoritarian strategy. On the contrary, every such movement-socialism, populism,labor,civil rights,feminism,gay rights,ecology-has begun with a visionary minority whose ideas were at first decried as impractical, ridiculous, crazy, dangerous, and/or immoral.
Ellen Willis "The Majoritarian Fallacy" in Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999)
