Shikha Dalmia at Persuasion: 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.
More here.
