Populism and Its Pathologies
Many people during recent years have been asking questions about the worldwide upsurge of populism. Does burgeoning talk of “the people”, and action by governments in their name, offer fresh hopes for democrats in these darkening times? Can populism rescue us from the corruption and decay of the ideals and institutions of parliamentary democracy, now under attack from a potent variety of corrosive and contradictory forces? Are Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, and other practitioners of populism basically right when colourfully they call upon “the people” to take back “their country” by sparking a revolt in support of “democracy” against a corrupted “political class”?
Democracy’s Auto-Immune Disease
Intellectuals, journalists, and democrats everywhere are divided deeply in their replies to such questions, and about what can and should be done to deal with the upsurge of populism. Without doubt, they find the new populism fascinating. For several years, hypnotised by its headline-grabbing antics, populism has been among their favourite topics of discussion. Some are genuinely unsure about what to think, or what to do. They sit on the fence or interpret populism as the pharmákon of democracy. They keep their minds open to the perplexing dialectics and potentially surprising, if unintended, practical effects of populist politics.
These abreactions are understandable, not least because populism - paradoxically - is a political phenomenon marked by democratic qualities. What could be more democratic than public attacks on financial and governing oligarchs, unrepresentative plutocrats, in the name of a sovereign people? Isn’t democracy after all a way of life founded on the authority of “the people”? And what about the populist account of the dysfunctions of contemporary parliamentary democracy? When measured in terms of political theatrics, isn’t populism understandably to be seen as a spectre of things to come: a frontal rejection of the sensed marginalisation of citizens by middle-of-the-road cartel parties and politicians who cheat and dissemble in favour of the powerful and wealthy? Isn’t the populist mobilisation of public hope, its insistence that things can be different, and that people should expect better, consonant with the spirit of democracy and its equality principle?
The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), my latest contribution to rethinking the history of democracy’s spirit, language, and institutions, replies to these questions by analysing populism as a recurrent auto-immune disease of democracy. What’s meant by this? Put simply, populism is not just a symptom of the failure of democratic institutions to respond effectively to anti-democratic challenges such as the growing influence of unelected agencies. rising inequality and the dark money poisoning of elections. Populism is itself a problematic democratic response that inflames and self-destructively damages the cells, tissues, and organs of democratic institutions. Populism resembles a bad mutation within the body politic known as democracy. It takes advantage of its immune mechanisms - freedom of public assembly, open communications, free elections, and multi-party competition – to overload those mechanisms with attacks that paralyse these immune mechanisms and threaten the whole body politic.
The simile is only a simile, but the key point should not be ignored: populism is a false friend of democracy, a pseudo-democratic mode of politics. In the name of an imagined “people” defined as if it were a demiurge, something akin to a metaphysical gift to earthlings from the gods, populism is a style of politics whose “inner logic” or “spirit” (Montesquieu) destroys power-sharing democracy committed to the principle of equality. Yes, populism can have positive unintended consequences, as historians teach us. In the name of “the people”, populism can spark long-lasting democratic reforms, as happened during the Progressive era in the United States. But everywhere, always, the inner logic of populist politics and its volkisch slogans are anything but folksy: their practical effect is to rob life from power-sharing democracy. Populism necessitates demagogic leadership, we’re about to see. It encourages attacks on independent media, expertise, rule-of-law judiciaries, election commissions and other power-monitoring institutions. It promotes hostility to “enemies” and flirts with violence. It is generally gripped by a territorial mentality that prioritises borders and nation states against “foreigners” and “foreign” influences, including multilateral institutions and “globalisation”.
Understanding populism as an auto-immune disease of democracy may seem exaggerated, or one-sided, but the evidence in its favour is compelling. Not only does the interpretation pay attention to the inner dynamics (let’s call them) or functional imperatives of populism. It reminds us that populism and efforts by past democrats to heal the democratic disease of populism are recurrent features of the history of democracy.
Ostraka cast against Aristides, Themistokles, Kimon and Perikles, Athens, 5th century BCE
In the age of assembly democracy, it should be remembered, citizens of Athens and other city-based democracies dealt with demagogues by voting to send them into prolonged exile, a practice known as ostrakismos. During the early modern age of representative democracy, to take another example, periodic elections, multi-party systems and parliamentary government in constitutional form were explicitly designed to check and restrain populist outbursts (“the people”, noted John Stuart Mill in On Liberty [1859], “may desire to oppress a part of their number” so that “precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power”). Our post-1945 age of monitory democracy took things further. It was born of efforts to rethink and de-emphasise the primacy of elections and to apply much tougher political restrictions to dictatorial, fascist, and other totalitarian abuses of power in the name of a fictive People. Public integrity and anti-corruption bodies, human rights commissions, written constitutions and activist courts, participatory budgeting, teach-ins, digital media gate watching, investigative journalism, bio-regional assemblies: these and scores of other innovations were designed during the past generation to monitor and check populists bent on self-aggrandisement in the name of “the people”.
Current events confirm that this old democratic problem of populism is making a comeback, and that populism is indeed an auto-immune disease of today’s monitory democracy. Political dynamics in Hungary, the US, Poland, India, Brazil and elsewhere show that the aim of the new populism is to amass a fund of power for itself and its allies. That’s why it is bent on destroying as many power-monitoring, power-restraining mechanisms as it can, in quick time, all in the name of a “people” that is never carefully defined, a phantom people that is simultaneously present and absent, everything and nothing. This new populism picks fights with key monitory institutions, such as independent courts and the “juristocracy” (Erdogan). It attacks “experts”, “fake news” platforms and other media “presstitutes” (Narendra Modi). The new populists act as if they want to turn back the clock to simpler times when (they say) democracy meant “the people” governed themselves without the interference of meddling, unaccountable “representatives”.
Left populism?
How serious is this populist threat to monitory democracy? It is hard to be sure.
Although the history under our noses is always the most difficult to assess, more than a few democrats, including those with a sense of history, suppose that the current epidemic of populism will abate. They think along the lines sketched by the American historian Richard Hofstadter, who once likened populism to a stinging bee. After causing annoyance and inflicting pain in the backside of the political establishment, populism, on this view, typically dies a slow death, especially after it reaches elected office. Hofstadter was principally concerned with the American case, where during the late 19th-century populist parties such as the Workingmen’s Party of California and the Populist Party were outflanked using democratic means, cleverly and constructively transformed by their elected opponents into catalysts of long-lasting democratic reforms. Other US historians have noted the way the dialectics of populism produced unexpected positive results. While “The Chinese Must Go!” and other outbursts of populist bigotry at first prevailed, populist politics, despite its exclusionary impulses, helped fuel the Progressive movement and trigger such inclusive democratic reforms as the full enfranchisement of women (1920), a directly elected Senate (1913), municipal socialism, new laws covering income tax and corporate regulation, and the eight-hour working day for all wage earners in the country.
More than a few analysts and defenders of democracy are today tempted to think in this tactical way about outflanking populist parties and governments. Some of them are more timid appeasers who say that mainstream politicians will need to concede ground, and to step back from their previous “liberal” commitments to open-door immigration and global trade. The overriding aim must be to defeat populist “authoritarianism” by absorbing its concerns into mainstream “liberal democratic” politics. They cite the example of Geert Wilders, whose populist PVV (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands did worse than expected in elections after Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte grasped what was happening and reacted by making significant “adjustments” of the government’s rhetoric and policy, such as declaring the Dutch experiment with “multiculturalism” to be finished.
At the time, many Dutch citizens were reportedly shocked, not just by the physical insults and symbolic indignities inflicted on various minorities, especially Muslims, but by the realisation that far from prevailing over the populist right Rutte had instead joined its ranks. Making political concessions to populists in this way is risky business. It can end badly, in accusations of hypocrisy, outright political humiliation and electoral defeat. The dangers of conceding ground to populism, historians remind us, is why the power ambitions of populism were sometimes blocked by their opponents using more drastic means, as in late 19th-century Russia, where the public appeal of populists was snuffed out anti-democratically, killed off by armed force. Elected populist governments have in the distant and more recent past also tasted forcible overthrow by coup d'état. This has been the fate suffered by the man-of-the people Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, now under military rule. Force was also used against El Conductor, Juan Domingo Perón, the former Argentine lieutenant-general and twice-elected president who was hunted from office into exile (in September 1955), trailed by hostile allegations of demagogic corruption and dictatorship. These were charges designed to crush and erase memories of the massive support he enjoyed among millions of Argentine citizens - descamisados (“shirtless”) followers rapt by his efforts to dignify labour and to eradicate poverty of “the people”.
Supporters of a Juan Perón rally in Buenos Aires in the 1950s
Inspired by the example of Perón, the Belgian scholar Chantal Mouffe is sure there’s another way of meeting the challenge of Trump- and Bolsonaro-style populism: a new, true politics that can get us out from under the rubble of collapsing “liberal democratic” institutions. Known globally for her thinking and writing on politics and popular sovereignty, Mouffe calls for a new brand of “left-wing populism”. In recent years, she has launched spirited attacks on what she describes as the “anti-populist hysteria” of our time. She has also sided publicly with populist leaders like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and political parties such as Podemos, Syriza, and the UK’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Mouffe’s political thinking is symptomatic of a rise of aesthetic and political fascination among disaffected left-of-centre intellectuals with populism. The attraction is understandable. It has a positive side. It underscores the “truths” of contemporary populism: for instance, the ways in which contemporary populists have exposed the deep tension between democracy and predatory forms of unregulated capitalism, turned their backs on corrupted middle-of-the-road cartel parties, denounced rising social inequality, poured scorn on the deadening breaking news “churnalism” of mainstream media platforms and raised expectations among millions of people that things can and must be better.
Mouffe echoes these points, but her principal contention, in opposition to “neo-liberalism”, is that the political right enjoys no monopoly on populism. A populism with a different content is possible and is needed urgently in these post-democratic times. She concludes that the only way to counter “right-wing populism” is through support for “left-wing populism”. The argument is expressed in simple binary terms. But what exactly does she mean, in theory and practice?
Mouffe’s reply runs thus: the imperative is to defend and extend “democracy”, understood as a political form that draws strength from “the power of the people”. So understood, democracy is “ultimately irreconcilable” with, and superior to, “political liberalism” and its mantras of the rule of law, the separation of powers, free markets, and the defence of the individual. A commitment to democracy implies opposition to “post-politics”, the liberal and neo-liberal blurring of the frontier between the right and the left. Mouffe explains the recommendation at greater length in books such as On the Political (2005) and deploys it in her discussion with Íñigo Errejón in Podemos: In the Name of the People (2016). The “principles of popular sovereignty and equality”, she writes, “are constitutive of democratic politics”. What is therefore now needed, and what she predicts will have to be born, is left-wing populism, an “agonistic populism” that breaks with exhausted “social democracy’. The point is to stop philosophising and to begin drawing lines by means of a new politics (the language is obviously drawn from Marx and Engels and Gramsci) that “divides society into two camps” by engaging in a “war of position”, in support of the “underdog” against “those in power”.
How are we to assess these large claims? Her thesis certainly invites historical objections. I have noted elsewhere that Mouffe’s reliance on Carl Schmitt’s 1920s attacks on liberalism misleads her into saying that “the origin of parliamentary democracy”, the watering down of democracy by liberal representative government, resulted from the 19th-century marriage of convenience of “political liberalism” and “democracy”. In support of her potted history of parliamentary democracy, Mouffe cites the work of one of my mentors and doctoral supervisors, C.B. Macpherson, but this was not his argument (his vision of future democracy preserved plenty of liberal and parliamentary themes, for instance). Besides, as The Shortest History of Democracy shows in some detail, parliamentary representation has pre-liberal medieval roots, while the republican melding of the languages and institutions of representation and democracy happened during the last quarter of the 18th century, not in the century that followed, as Mouffe, following Schmitt, claims.
These are admittedly fine points over which historians and political thinkers like to bicker and tussle. They needn’t detain us, for the real trouble is with Mouffe’s unconvincing case for “left-wing populism”. My discomfort stems not only from its poor sense of the history of democracy, her wilful ignorance about monitory democracy and her unjustified nostalgia for an unadulterated “sovereign people” principle. Or from the fact that her rhetorical style is Bolshevik, a species of redemptive political thinking that preaches the need for “agonistic” (pain-in-the-backside) populism and the use of “democratic means” to “fight” with “passions” against “an adversary” (which passions? which adversary? she doesn’t say). Or discomfort triggered by the suspicion that her commitment to “democratic Hobbesian” axioms is worse than oxymoronic, but in fact self-contradictory.
The main problem with Mouffe’s “left populism” proposals is that they cynically reduce democracy to a mere tactical weapon of convenience, as well as fail to admit the pathologies of populism. Democracy is seen as a tactical weapon, a mere means of dealing agonistically with enemies. In her view, democracy has no choice but to engage and provoke potentially violent power conflicts, and to do so in accordance with the old Hobbes principle of homo homini lupus (man a wolf to men), the precept that warns that politics is about the danger that the world can lurch towards an unruly “state of nature”, in which (so much for the sovereign people principle!) actual human life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The dangers of arbitrary power seem of little concern to Mouffe. It’s true there are fleeting moments when her vision of left-wing populism admits of the dangers of “authoritarian populism”. The “antagonistic populism” of the French Revolution is the example she gives, by means of a half-hearted anachronism (the terms populist and populism were coined only in the mid-19th century). But that concession is unsatisfactory. Not only does it do damage to the meaning of democracy. It fails to recognise the politically damaging pathologies typically found within every recorded example of populism.
Pathologies
These pathologies not only drag down her whole argument for a “left-wing populism”. They also bedevil political science treatments of populism as a “thin-centred ideology” (Cas Mudde).These treatments see populism as “neither good nor bad for the democratic system” because populism is regarded as a style of politics without much content. Populism is merely defined by its commitment to denouncing “corrupt elites” in favour of a “pure people” whose volonté générale (general will) should be the measure of all things political.
Such content-centred interpretations of populism as a “thin-centred ideology” open to variations as different as “nationalism” and “socialism” are evidently mistaken. Along with Mouffe’s defence of “left-wing populism”, they fail to spot the pathologies of form inherent within every instance of populism. The most obvious formal pathology is the inner dependence of populism upon political bosses. “It is not a question of ending representative democracy, but of strengthening the institutions that give voice to the people”, says Mouffe. Fine words but, to put things bluntly, this precept wilfully ignores the way populism functionally requires big-mouthed demagogues, a devil’s pact with leaders who pretend to be the earthly avatars and “redeemers” (Enrique Krauze) of “the people”. Chavez, Wilders, Fujimori, Trump, Kaczynski, and other demagogues are neither incidental nor accidental features of populist politics: metaphysical talk of a people necessitates the personalisation of power. When seen in populist terms, the liberation of a people can never be the work of The People itself. Populism and “substitutionism” are twins. Ecuador’s most famous populist José Maria Velasco, who was elected president five times but deposed by the army four times, understood this point well. “Give me a balcony, and I will become president,” he liked to say. There are times when Big Leader populists claim they have the support of the heavens. Vox princeps, vox populi, vox dei. This is the way Modi interpreted his 2014 electoral victory: as the victory of “the will of the people” blessed by the Hindu god Lord Krishna (janata jan janārdan). In all recorded cases of populism, the rhetoric of “the people” functionally demands their materialised embodiment in a leader capable of mobilising sections of “the people” to confirm who they are: The People. Populism is demolatry. Populism is ventriloquism. Through acts of concealed representation, it incites and excites Big Leaders who are above the common herd, redeemers who attract a coterie of lesser, loyal people, citizens who are encouraged to follow because they are offered spoils, calculated gifts designed to produce followership from leadership.
Populism so interpreted is a strangely anti-democratic throwback, a 21st-century and secularised version of the old European king’s “two bodies” doctrine, which supposed that the body of crowned rulers was the spiritual and visceral manifestation of the body of their subject people. This earthly worship of mortal political bosses within the new populism helps explain its other pathologies. In his book, What Is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller correctly notes the simple-minded mentality of populism, its hostility to ambivalence, complexity and pluralism, but his point needs toughening. The drive to build followers by big boss leaders always fuels their hostility to actors and institutions that stand in their way. Populists have little or no taste for institutional give-and-take politics. Unchecked ambition is their thing; so is tactical manoeuvring to deconstruct and simplify organisations and their rules. Populism loves monism.
Gripped by an inner urge to destroy checks, balances, and mechanisms for publicly scrutinising and restraining power, populist leaders and parties reveal their true colours in action. It’s a myth that election to office slakes their thirst for power. In Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, democracia plena (as he called it) meant hostility to the palabrería (excessive, idle talk) of the political class and its established media. Declaring an end to oligarchy, government secrecy and silence, it openly contradicted itself by bribing and browbeating legislators, judges, bureaucrats, and corporate executives. Boris Johnson nowadays dreams of transforming the Westminster parliament into a poodle of executive power, in the name of a fictional “British people”. Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta rails against courts run by “thugs” paid by “foreigners and other fools” who rule “against the sovereign and supreme voice of the People”. In Hungary, the government of Viktor Orbán has collared mainstream media, the judiciary, and the police, and now breathes fire down the necks of the universities and civil society organisations. Trump was not much different. His stormy four-year presidency was locked in a permanent war with the federal bureaucracy, so-called fake news media, the judiciary and intelligence services, and even the Boy Scouts of America. He hankered after trust in family ties, and demanded loyalty from his followers, egged on by their talk of the need to “bring everything crashing down” (Steve Bannon) through deep budget cuts, the centralisation of federal decision-making and refusals to fill empty leadership positions. Trump fancied himself as a lollapalooza leader, a guide and redeemer who never ever loses battles. He stood, and may yet again stand, for government by nepotism: not procedural rules that ensure fair play, but personal channels, self-styled machismo against foes at home and abroad.
Kenyan president Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta (May 2022)
None of this clientelismo within the new populism is accidental, or random. Populism yearns for a type of politics that resembles a permanent coup d’état in slow motion. Populism is “not an ideology”, claimed Mouffe. “It is a way of doing politics” guided by “the construction of a demos that is constitutive of democracy”. But this claim is not only tautological. It begs a string of important questions that lie at the heart of a power-sharing democratic politics: in the process of constituting “popular sovereignty”, who decides who gets what, when and how? Who does the politics? Who establishes the “chains of equivalence” to decide who is the demos? Who determines what counts as “democracy”, and how do its champions deal with differences and disagreements about means and ends? Are the champions of “the people” potential perpetrators of abusive power? Shouldn’t they be subject to legitimate institutional restraints of their lust for power?
Populists never provide clear answers to these perennial political questions. Their hush is revealing of a peculiar understanding of politics as the uncompromising battle to win friends and to monopolise state power over angry followers who are sure they are the promised People. The definition of politics offered by populists is typically Hobbesian. Seen as the struggle to win over allies and to crush opponents, populism is a strange and self-harming form of politics. But there’s something worse.
For tactical reasons, to protect its flanks, populist governments normally forge alliances with friends in high places. For all its talk of empowerment of “the people”, populism embraces the ancient political rule that governments need allies whose loyalty requires that they be treated well. Populism practises in-grouping. Rudiger Dornbusch and other scholars have shown that although populism can foster economic growth and redistribute wealth and income in favour of formerly marginalised groups – as in the Bolivia of Eva Morales, who was the great champion of natural gas-funded public works projects and social programs to fight poverty – it typically has the effect of granting privileges to new sets of elites. In Hungary, the Orbán government has cultivated a nouveau riche stratum of “poligarchs” who enjoy tax exemptions, business opportunities and luxury living. Trump’s 2016 campaign talk of “draining swamps” in the end filled them with millionaires and billionaires. So-called “left-wing populism” doesn’t escape the same rule. In the name of “the people”, it practically does what all populism does: it creates a wealthy stratum of oligarchs, like Venezuela’s boliburguesía, whose appetite for chartered flights, real estate and luxury cars has been whetted by kickbacks linked to state contracts showered on pro-government corporate executives and former military officials. The logic of in-grouping inherent in all forms of populism contradicts Mouffe’s claim that left-wing populism is straightforwardly pitted against oligarchy. It confirms the suspicions of ancient Greek democrats, who used a (now obsolete) verb dēmokrateo to describe how demagogues ruling in the name of the people typically team up with rich and powerful aristoi to snuff out democracy.
There’s another self-contradiction that plagues populism. In practice, populists and their governments not only cultivate new oligarchs. Their struggles in the name of “the people” force them to pick political fights with those it defines as deviants, dissenters and protagonists of disagreement and difference. Populism champions the tactic of out-grouping. This should come as no surprise; it is what is to be expected of a politics defined in terms of “friend-enemy” alliances. “There is no ‘we’ without a ‘they’”, Mouffe says, but at no point does she explain who would be excluded from her brand of populism. Big business, super-rich bankers, government bureaucrats, confessed neoliberals would surely be on her list. But who else, we may ask, would be among her “enemies”? Knowing perhaps that a detailed list would scare off potential supporters, she doesn’t say. It is nevertheless clear that her avowed commitment to “democracy” is contradicted by her dalliance with a politics of exclusion. The contradiction runs deep through all forms of populism: in its drive to amass a fund of power, confronted by opponents, populists must typically hit hard against those they define as Other.
In the past, the designated enemies were monarchs, aristocrats, railroad magnates, bankers, Chinese immigrants. Today, populists like Modi rail against Muslims and their “terrorism” and disloyalty to an imaginary “Hindu nation”. Populists elsewhere spit at “liberals” and unpatriotic “cosmopolitan” people from nowhere, ethnic minorities and environmental activists. Unwanted “immigrants” are usually on their hate list. “The worse things get for Germany”, Christian Lüth, former press officer of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, told a populist YouTube video blogger, “the better they are for the AfD”. He went on to add a barbed remark about migrants. “We can always shoot them later, that’s not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn’t matter to me.” It’s true that local politics always defines who exactly is under the gun, but everywhere populist talk of The People produces the outcast marginalia of flesh-and-blood people who are regarded as “not even people” (Eric Trump). The point was made repeatedly during the presidential campaign rallies of Donald Trump. “The only thing that matters”, he liked to say, “is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything”.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath
This way of thinking helps us understand why it is no accident that populists are frequently fascinated by violence, or urge violence, or speak of it as a feature of “human nature”. Some proudly take up arms. Yogi Adityanath, the priest-politician who is currently chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, says protection of the “rashtra” (nation) is the “dharma” (religion) of his government. Among his favourite personal possessions are a revolver, a rifle and two luxury SUVs, plus a reputation as a much-feared former activist known for arriving quickly with his supporters at trouble spots, to cause trouble. By 2014, the pending criminal cases against Adityanath included promoting enmity, attempted murder, defiling a place of worship, trespassing on a burial site and rioting. His whole rise to power (see my recent book with Debasish Roy Chowdhury, To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism [2021]) has been marked by violent rabble-rousing and sectarian violence, and nasty waves of state reprisal. There has been terror, torture, and the imprisonment of hundreds of activists and protesters, even schoolchildren, on trumped-up charges. The priest-politician populist likes to remind citizens that “there is no place for violence in a democracy”, and yet he has regularly issued death threats to political dissenters and Muslims and banned public demonstrations. In a new low for state high-handedness, his populist government has even seized and auctioned or bulldozed the properties of activists who dared to raise their voices against his rule.
This is admittedly populism in its most extreme form, but the important thing to grasp is that the populist commitment to wilful out-grouping of people judged as worthless trash necessarily results in a dalliance with violence. Trump’s advice to police officers, not to be “too nice” when handling suspects, is no exception, no idiosyncrasy. The dark energy of violence was present at every one of his campaign meetings; “knock the crap out of ’em”, “punch ’em in the face” and “carry ’em out on a stretcher” were among his favourite fighting phrases. The violent assault by his supporters on the Congress building on January 6th 2021 was simply the climax of this populist dark energy.
Mouffe’s aesthetic fascination with violence fits the same pattern. In a little-known foreword to Pierre Saint-Amand’s The Laws of Hostility (1996), she puts things plainly, in the language of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. “The same movement that brings human beings together in their common desire for the same objects,” she writes, “is also at the origin of their antagonisms. Far from being the exterior of exchange, rivalry and violence are therefore its ever-present possibility … violence is ineradicable.” Her conviction that violence is an omnipresent feature of the human condition dovetails with the way other populists typically think in territorial terms. Their attachment to bounded territorial states isn’t accidental. Because they think in terms of “friends” and “enemies”, they like borders, stricter visa and immigration rules, “national sovereignty”, tough action against “terrorists” and “illegal immigrants” and all other unwanted insider and outsider threats to the “sovereign people”.
What’s to be done?
The various local irruptions of populism and its manifest pathologies have unsurprisingly triggered a variety of responses in recent years. Some observers issue a call to understand the ways in which populism feeds upon people’s ressentiment - their angry refusal to being pushed around and their legitimate yearnings for dignity. These observers emphasise the importance of engaging populists in honest dialogue and proposing solutions to the problems they raise Respectful engagement and genuine dialogue are needed to deal with its darker side - and harness its emancipatory potential. Other observers go further by proposing that since populism is symptomatic of the breakdown of representative democracy, what is now needed is a new politics of building what Simon Tormey and others call a “non- or post-representative democracy” – a different type of democracy that will serve in practice to reduce, if not eliminate, the distance between the people and political power, for instance through the nurturing of deliberative assemblies and other forms of “liquid democracy”.
The vision of a “deliberative democracy” as a solution to the anti-democratic effects of populism has enjoyed a measure of popularity in recent years. What is urgently needed, say the champions of deliberative politics, is the recapturing of values such as calm reason, respect for evidence and the mutual acceptance and recognition of differences at all levels, from the personal to the global. Deliberative democrats question the presumption that all politics is populist politics, and they go on to urge the building of new deliberative forms that serve as reminders to elected leaders that true leaders are those who sign off on agreements freely made by citizens themselves in “mini-publics” and other forums. Populists are thus denounced as mean-spirited foes of intellectual rigour, as peddlers of base instincts, prejudices, and misconceptions. What is urgently required is more “deliberative democracy”: randomly selected public forums guided by the precious virtues of participation governed by intellectual rigour, evidence and public-spirited “deliberative reason”.
The call of deliberative democrats to rejuvenate the spirit of democracy is laudable. But their proposed vision suffers a rationalist bias. The means of achieving it are equally questionable (are elections to be boycotted or abolished, for instance?). And the vision of “deliberative democracy” is arguably no match for populism and its pathologies. Supposing that the “essence of democracy” is “deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even self-government” (John S. Dryzek’s opening words in his Deliberative Democracy and Beyond [2002]), democracy is reduced to “authentic deliberation”, or “the requirement that communication induce reflection upon preferences in a non-coercive fashion”. This way of thinking about democracy by deliberative democrats suffers multiple weaknesses. The self-understanding of its own historicity, and the age of monitory democracy to which it owes its existence, is weak. Deliberative democrats’ penchant for small-scale, face-to-face deliberative forums begs difficult tactical questions about scalability, including whether micro-level schemes can be replicated at the national, regional, and global levels. Deliberative democrats are also prone to understate such strategic challenges as the “artificiality” of pilot scheme experiments (where indefatigable citizen deliberators are expected to behave as if they are rational communicators in a scholarly seminar). The bullish veto power of power-hungry vested interests is also underestimated. The contested meanings of the word “reason” don’t feature. The propensity of calm “reasonable” talk to dissolve bigoted opinions, of the kind expressed by hardcore populists in “civic dialogues” hosted by Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland to tap rising anxiety about immigration, is arguably exaggerated.
The truth is that the whole vision of “deliberative democracy” suffers from unwarranted nostalgia. Inspired originally by the work of Habermas, as my Public Life and Late Capitalism [1993] long ago emphasised, deliberative democrats secretly yearn to be Greek. They make the mistake of supposing, rather dogmatically and without a good grasp of history, that democracy is quintessentially assembly democracy, or “participatory democracy”. They consequently downplay the strategic and normative importance of courts, media platforms and other power-monitoring institutions; and they generally seem blind to the ubiquity and continuing importance of elections and other forms of representation within public life.
Monitory democracy
So where do all these analyses leave us? No doubt, critical analyses of the pathologies of populism, the weaknesses of “deliberative democracy” and the pitfalls of “left-wing populism” should force democrats of all persuasions to ask truly basic political questions, in support of viable democratic alternatives. The historic task before us is not only to imagine new forms of democratic politics that aren’t infected with the spirit of populism. The goal must be to outflank populism politically by enabling democracy to dream of itself again, in plain words, to invent adventurous new forms of democratic politics that don’t fall prey to big boss Leaders and their blarney and blather about “the people”. At a minimum, this means not only more citizen involvement in public life but also inventing new public mechanisms of scrutinising and restraining arbitrary exercises of power, including forms of power that damage and destroy the biomes in which we humans inescapably dwell. In other words: what is needed in these difficult times are more robust ways of blocking predatory power, building sharp-toothed watchdog networks and institutions that are capable of politically rolling back unaccountable corporate and state power, promoting non-carbon energy regimes, protecting life on our planet, and generally fostering the spirit of greater social equality among participating citizens who value free and fair elections, welcome media diversity and feel utterly comfortable in the company of different others who are not treated as “enemies”, but as partners, strangers, competitors, citizens, and friends.
A priority is to say things clearly – to say again that democracy is a special type of politics that feels no urge to bow down and worship an imaginary fictional body called “The People”. Democratic politics dislikes all unaccountable imbalances and hierarchies of power. It has a punk quality. It dislikes demagoguery because it has sympathy and regard for flesh-and-blood people in all their lived heterogeneity. It refuses the urge to weaken and smash up power-monitoring institutions, to label whole groups as out-groups and threaten them with violence and expulsion beyond “sovereign” borders that are deemed natural, or sacred. It favours the public monitoring and humbling of arbitrary power. This monitory democracy is always on the lookout for new ways of equitably redistributing wealth. It stands for non-violence and champions the life chances and wellness of people. It thus exposes populism for what it really is: a corrupting form of counterfeit democracy.
Once upon a time, in the early years after 1945, this way of thinking about the equality, freedom and dignity of people went by such names as “socialism”, “liberalism”, “freedom”, “equality”, “progress”, and the “welfare state”. In the dark times we’re now passing through, what ecumenical and compelling name should we give to the radical politics of non-violent freedom and equity? Why don’t we simply call it “democracy”? Or better, “monitory democracy”?