Question 3

Populism and Democracy1

Craig Calhoun Arizona State University and LSE

Abstract

Before there were any modern democracies, populists pressed for wider popular participation

and governmental attention to popular concerns. They were often associated with social

upheaval and uncomfortable challenges to property. In response, elites designed modern

constitutions mostly along republican lines, allowing some democracy but with limitations on

popular will. Populists have resented limits and pressed for greater political inclusion.

Populism has also shaped responses to dramatic social changes and disruptions, like recent

deindustrialization and abrupt insertion into global capitalism. Populists have advanced

legitimate concerns, but also often been willing to abandon constitutional protections for

pluralism, minorities, free expression, due process, and even rule of law that distinguish liberal

democracy. Sustainable democracy depends not only on popular voice, but also on such

protections – and continual renewal of social solidarity and social institutions.

Introduction

1 This text is based on the Thesis Eleven Lecture delivered by Craig Calhoun at La Trobe University, May 16, 2017. The lecture

was transcribed by Simon Kastberg with revisions from Alonso Casanueva-Baptista and Raul Sanchez Urribarri. It has been

revised to reflect the version which served as a keynote speech to the 25th International Congress of Europeanists, in Chicago,

March 28, 2018.

‘Populism’ is often a derogatory label for anti-democratic but popular leaders, and for popular

voices raised in anger and resentment to condemn elites and politics as usual. But populism is

not, in general, an attack on democracy.

First, populism expresses one core dimension of democracy, the will of the people. This can be

positive, demanding attention to important issues and potentially expanding political inclusion.

But populists purport to speak not just for but as ‘the people,’ unmediated and whole. Others

may point out that the populists of the moment are not even a majority, let alone the whole of the

people. The populist response is often just that the other people have not yet awakened to how

they are threatened. Or, populists may say, those others are not part of the ‘real’ people. They are

elites, or immigrants, or minorities, or deviants, or even enemies of the people. The claim to

express a Rousseauian ‘general will’ is typically tendentious.

Second, populism predates democracy. It flourishes in non-democratic societies so long as there

is some notion of popular political membership and the idea that political legitimacy might

derive at least ultimately from the will or well-being of the people. It can be a demand for more

democracy.

Third, claiming to speak directly for the people, populists challenge liberal and republican

constitutional provisions. These are intended to achieve greater justice, e.g. by ensuring wide

political representation and protecting minorities; to minimize corruption by promoting civic

virtue and punishing self-dealing; and to stabilize democracy by ensuring that reflection has a

chance to override transitory passions and that winners and losers work together after

contentious elections. But the liberal and republican provisions produce a representative rather

than direct democracy and a mixed government in which laws, courts, and legislative processes

check and limit immediate expressions of popular (or executive) will. They give disproportionate

influence to educated elites and professionals from lawyers and judges to journalists and

scientists. On republican principles, these may govern or shape policy on behalf of the whole

society. But they add to the frustration of populists when they feel that they are being ignored or

even denigrated by elites.

Populism Has a Long History

Many ancient Greek political philosophers thought that all democracy tended toward populism.

For this reason, they distrusted it. They thought it would be unstable, driven by resentment and

other passions, and vulnerable to demagogues who could transform it into mob rule and then

make that a short path to tyranny. Plato took it as exemplary that that the citizens of Athens

compelled the death of Socrates precisely when they were organizewd as a democracy.

Greek thinkers typically saw all government as likely to cycle through phases of monarchy,

aristocracy, and democracy—or worse, their degenerate forms of tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy

or mob rule. But democracy in their eyes was the least stable and most dangerous form of

government.2 Plato, especially, bequeathed this anxiety about democracy to the ensuring

centuries of political thought.

While surely not an advocate for unalloyed democracy as practiced in his time, Aristotle saw a

greater place for the expression of popular will, or at least recognition of popular grievances

against elite monopolization of power and economic resources. He therefore recommended a

2 See Ober (2008) for a wider view of democracy in Athens, showing limits to the views of the jaundiced philosophers. It needs

to be stressed that even at its most democratic, Athens remained a slave society in which the large majority of residents—

including women—were without political voice.

form of political rule that came to be at the center of the republican tradition: mixed government.

This is an attempt to stabilize politics by balancing elements from each of monarchy, aristocracy,

and democracy in a virtuous polity. Jill Frank (2005) describes the result as a “democracy of

distinction.” Crucially, it is only partly democracy.

The Roman Republic gave proof that this project could work. It achieved considerable stability

with a mixed constitution that gave all citizens the right to participate in electoral decisions, but

unequally. Aristocrats had more votes and dominated the Senate and the actual work of

government. A faction of Populares represented plebeians – commoners - including many

farmers. A rational for this hierarchy was that plebeian citizens were thought less able to

prioritize public over private interests and cultivate civic virtue. More complete exclusions

affected non-citizens including women and slaves). But there were also ‘tribunes of the people’

to limit the power of the aristocratic Senate and magistrates. This arrangement did not resolve

conflict between the different ‘orders’ of citizens, but for 400 years, it tamed it.

The Republic ended in the wake amid civil wars and intrigues. A populist leader, the victorious

general Julius Caesar, attempted to seize power, becoming in effect the first Emperor. He was

assassinated by rivals with a range of motives, but in the name of defending of the Republic,

leaving posterity with an enduring moral drama (familiar to many through Shakespeare who

examined it in ways directly relevant to his era). The Republic had become corrupt, chaotic, and

disorganized. But writing in self-imposed exile, the aristocratic former consul and philosopher

Cicero gave enduring articulation to republican ideals even as the Republic died.

Empire and monarchy (including the peculiar combination of imperial and monarchical elements

in the Catholic Church) dominated Western European political structures through the middle

ages. The republican tradition lived on only in urban enclaves. At larger scale, there was no

attempt to organize public affairs through citizenship. Memories of local rather than distant kings

and in some places ‘tribal’ notions of self-government were kept alive and later could inform

Romantic nationalism as well as populist calls for voice and self-rule. But most people were

simply subjects, with no voice in larger polities, with limited autonomy to self-organize at very

local levels.

Feudal hierarchy was imposed with different degrees of severity. There was more freedom in

Western Europe than the institutions of serfdom allowed in the East. Ethnic and regional

solidarities underpinned opposition to consolidation of monarchical rule – as for example Anglo-

Saxon England resented the ‘Yoke’ of Norman domination. Thus King Arthur mythically ruled

with his Knights of the Round Table not simply over them. The Lords who got King John to

sign the Magna Carta in 1215 secured protections and liberties for themselves and for the Chuch

– and at least in principle greater rule of law - but nothing like a republican government. Outside

cities, neither citizenship nor a notion of public was prominent.

Common people might attempt to avoid military service, resist specific impositions of power, or

even on occasion rebel. They wanted to be treated in ways they considered right. But they did

not claim inclusion in a political public because there was none. In that significant sense, they

were not populiats. Not only rulers but people throughout the social hierarchy understood

political authority to be a matter of divine right, legitimate inheritance, or sometimes conquest -

not popular will or well-being. This changed in the early modern period.

As some Italian city-states grew wealthy from banking and trade, their elites renewed the old

Roman struggle between central power and republican citizenship. The Florentine Republic, for

example, was dominated by aristocratic families joined together by a strong ethos of mutual

restraint and a normative order forbidding corruption—on pain of death!—and demanding that

all officeholders be clearly committed to the public good over private interest. The Republic

thrived on the basis of trade and banking and Florence grew into a major center of art, literature,

and learning—the Italian Renaissance. However, the richest Florentine banking family, the

Medicis, made their wealth the basis for enough political power to supplant the Republic (and

indeed to engage in politics beyond the city, even eventually securing control of the papacy).

This establishment of something close to monarchy was a defeat for republican ideals of

government by citizens. But it should not be thought that the Florentine Republic was a

democracy, since only some 3,000 of Florence’s perhaps 50,000 residents were entitled to vote.

Corruption and inequality brought a populist sense of grievance among those who lived in the

city but were not granted much say in its governance. Simultaneously, Florence was threatened

by an invading army under Charles VII of France.

In this context of domestic and external threats, the Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola

became perhaps the first modern populist leader. His followers expelled the Medicis and

established a ‘popular’ republic. This relied on election to popular office with an expanded

proportion of Florentines able to participate, notably, artisans, who had previously been

excluded, were enfranchised. At the same time, Savonarola was always prepared to call his

followers into the streets and bolstered by this extra-institutional pressure. He could be dictatorial

and expect acclamation rather than debate from elections. Promising essentially to Make

Florence Great Again —“richer, more powerful, more glorious than ever”—he launched a

puritanical campaign against the decadence of both elite secular society and the Church

(Weinstein 2011). Processions through the city culminated in “bonfires of the vanities” burning

books, paintings, fashionable clothes, and even cosmetics. This brought down the wrath of the

rich and of the Church. Savonarola was excommunicated and in due course executed. The

Medicis regained power.

The travails of early modern Florence are especially prominent in political thought because they

were the context and focus for the work of Niccolò Machiavelli, the first modern political

theorist.3 His enormously influential work is subject to numerous competing interpretations, not

least because he explored both the potential to adapt and renew Roman Republicanism to make a

virtuous polity and the best strategy for a leader whose concerns were with power not virtue – or,

to follow Pocock (2016), with stabilizing rather than reforming the polity. Machiavelli served

both the Florentine Republic and the Medicis, and wrote his most famous book, The Prince,

hoping to gain a more prominent position with the Medicis. Neither a democrat nor a populist, he

was nonetheless in agreement with much of Savonarola’s program, including replacing

hereditary government with elections, expanding political participation in the Republic, and

trying to curb corruption. But he saw politics under the priest as rooted too much in passion and

too little in reason. This made him dependent on crowds. He “was ruined with his new order of

things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer” (Machiavelli 2015, Book VI).

Crucially, Savonarola lacked the capacity to stabilize the polity and secure its defense from

external threats, both of which were necessary to enjoying the benefits of a reformed republic.

In the background to the drama of Machiavelli’s Florence was the disunity of fragmented Italy

and its weakness before foreign invaders. Venice and Genoa were maritime powers, and trade

linked the Renaissance city-states throughout the Mediterranean and on to Asia, the European

North, and impressively much of the world. Contact with Arab civilization helped spark the

3 For this context, see Strathern (2016).

intellectual Renaissance, both because they had preserved Greek thought that Europeans had lost

and because of their own innovations. Trade helped the Italian city-states grow rich and this

wealth supported art and architecture. For all the homages done to Greek and Roman antiquity,

writing in Italian grew more prominent, not least in the work of Machiavelli himself. But there

was no Italian state and little political coordination. The republican model worked at the level of

cities not countries. The Church maintained a huge political role in Italy, even as its grip declined

in Northern Europe. But the Pope was not able to defend himself, let alone Italy. Corruption in

the Church made it less effective in worldly power struggles, ironically, even while the attention

of many in the church hierarchy came to be more focused on material ends and less on God.

Martin Luther’s critique of corruption in the Church came a mere 20 years after Savonarola. He

nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg castle church in 1517 (at least according to

legend).

The ensuing Protestant Reformation and related wars of religion helped to make the modern

European states and nations. Reading the Bible promoted literacy in vernacular languages.

Citizen armies encouraged identification among ‘the people’ of countries in a way mercenary

armies couldn’t (as indeed Machiavelli himself noted in The Prince). Efforts to administer

religion proceeded alongside administration of trade and taxation and the marshaling of

resources for war. Northern Europe grew richer and the cultural life of its cities flourished ina.

Continuation of the Renaissance. But countries remained kingdoms even as they also became

far-flung empires. This combined trade and resource extraction with a new theater for

competition among European states and missions to save souls. The story vastly exceeds our

current scope, but two conclusions are crucial.

First, the scale of political and social integration was transformed. As the modern state was

consolidated, the modern ‘nation’ appeared as the corresponding embodiment of ‘the people.’

States were not the whole story, of course, as economies and cultures were increasingly

organized in national structures.

Second, the place of individual choice in social participation was transformed. From the spread

of literacy and increasing education to wider social mobility to religious emphasis on personal

salvation to the rise of entrepreneurship, on the one hand, and a consumer society, on the other

hand, a much wider range of people claimed distinctive individual identities and the right to

make choices based on them.

Which came first, nation or state, was and is a moot point. There was a prior history to what

became modern national identities. An ‘ascending’ view of political authority had ancient roots

in the ‘folkmoot’ and other pre-feudal assemblies and these had spokespeople to claim them (and

eventually poets and composers to celebrate them).4 This combination of history and myth was

complemented by new cultural production shaping the European nations (as eventually others).

But throughout Europe, political thinkers also laid claim to “the glory that was Greece and the

grandeur that was Rome” and to the republican tradition of citizen government.5 Modern

democratic politics is shaped by both the solidarity of nations (and perceived threats to it) and

formal constitutions and institutions with their rights and procedures. Ideally complementary,

4 See Otto von Gierke’s account of descending and ascending models of political authority in Political Theories of the Middle

Ages (1987 [1900]).

5 Poe’s poem that contain’s the famous phrase, is itself testimony to the classicism that informed the cultural aspirations of 18th

and 19th century Europe and North America.

these are sometimes in tension. Partly because of its emphasis on individuals, liberalism is

closely identified with formal institutions. Populism more often articulates the solidarity of

nations.

In 17th-century England, the contest between monarchy and aristocracy was replayed in a Civil

War. Religious struggles were part and parcel of politics and vice versa. Cromwell arguably

played the part of Savonarola, though the analogy is imperfect. But Cromwell’s New Model

Army was in part a populist representation of The People. Arguably, the people were more often

off-stage in the Civil War drama, with different more elite political figures either threatening to

call them in or denouncing this possibility (see Morgan 1989). But in addition to the populist

elements in mainstream Parliamentarianism, there were Levelers and Diggers and others who

proclaimed the rights and needs of the people (Hill 1984). And there was what J.G.A. Pocock has

called ‘the Machiavellian moment’ (Pocock 2016). This is the point at which promotion of a new

and better republican constitution, including one open to more of ‘the people,’ confronts the need

for institutional capacity to achieve stability and security. But this is also a moment of risk that

capacity for leadership can bring a shift from democracy to dictatorship. Caesar’s story informed

the widespread notion that democracy would be but a waystation on the path to tyranny.

Democracy still remained a radical idea in the late 18th century, when the founders of the US

enshrined democracy in its Constitution. Overall, the text is more indebted to republicanism, but

it does begin with the very populist invocation of ‘We the People.’ Democratic demands from

below had long been growing, but this was the first large-scale acceptance of democracy by an

educated, propertied, elite.

Many among the founders were strong republicans and reluctant democrats. Some, like John

Adams, were close readers of Machiavelli. Particularly in the South, desires for limits on direct

popular action were strong. In an abundance of caution, the US founders restricted the vote to

free men with property. Slaves, women, and most of the working classes were initially excluded.

They protected the rule of law with a strong judiciary, including judges with lifetime

appointments. They gave Senators longer terms than other congressional representatives seeking

to establish a reflective elite more able to take a long-term view. Not least, they almost

immediately amended the Constitution with a Bill of Rights protecting pluralism, minorities, and

public action outside government control. In addition to stability, they sought security, both for

property and in relation to external threats. Though much of this comes from the republican

tradition rather than liberalism per se, it is more or less what is meant today by liberal

democracy.

Still, even if anxious, the founders’ embrace of democracy was remarkable. They called for

much more popular participation in and guidance of government than any other country allowed

at the time. They also set in motion an uneven but ongoing deepening of democracy that

gradually reduced restrictions on popular participation. This didn’t happen smoothly. It took

waves of popular agitation and social movements, including not least recurrent populism. Indeed,

some say that the US really became a democracy only with the Andrew Jackson’s populist

presidential election in 1828.6 For the first time, a majority of white men had the chance to vote.7

6 For example, Samuel Huntington (1991) dates his account of the ‘first wave’ of modern democracy to Jackson’s election in

1828.

7 Donald Trump has been vocal in his praise for Jackson. They are not similar in all ways, but it is noteworthy the extent to which

Trump’s base, like Jackson’s, is animated by the idea that America should be white and traditional gender roles enforced.

Jackson’s brutality in displacing or killing Native Americans anticipated Trump’s attempts to keep America white by blocking

immigration and his use of a rhetoric of ‘security’ to support this.

Jackson had enormous personal appeal, not least as a general victorious against both the British

and the native Americans with whom the US shared the continent. He rode a wave of populism

rooted in the greater inclusion of ordinary citizens as voters.8 His famously rowdy presidential

campaigns helped make politics a spectator sport. They were framed both as appeals to the

common man and as criticisms of a corrupt aristocracy. He charged, in essence, both that there

wasn’t enough democracy and that existing democracy had degenerated.

Like many populists, Jackson played to one image of the people, implying that this was the only

possible one. Famous for his war exploits against the Indian tribes of the interior South, once in

office, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. And though he personally worried about

the growing tensions over slavery, he presided over growing political polarization, especially

over slavery. He remained active after leaving the presidency and supported bringing Texas into

the Union as a slave state—a move that increased tensions. As often happens, agents of inclusion

on one dimension are voices for exclusion on others.

The French Revolution followed the US one in short order and was significantly more radical in

its embrace of the equality of citizens. But though it produced the powerful democratic slogan,

liberté, égalité, fraterité, it did not prove stable. It contained its own drama of elite republican

reformers pressed to play to the emergent political force of The People – sometimes with

democracy and sometimes with violence.

8 The founding of the Democratic Party in 1828 was part of a shift from seeing parties as shifting factions and coalitions to seeing

them more as enduring formal organizations. This reflected growing societal scale and complexity, and an early stage in the

increasing professionalization and mediatization of politics that has continued into the present day. It did not stop shifts in party

composition, appeal, and ideological orientation.

Both liberal and conservative political traditions derive in part from observing that it did not

adequately protect liberty. The conservative tradition also emphasizes the extent to which the

French Revolution failed to protect fraternity, that is the solidarity of citizens, especially in

families and communities. Radical and socialist traditions join conservatives in asserting the

importance of solidarity and criticizing liberals for allowing versions of liberty to be corrosive of

social cohesion. Of course, socialists and conservatives have different ideas about how to secure

solidarity and especially how it relates to economic life. Socialists, conservatives, and liberals

differ on the virtue of equality.

From both the mostly positive US example and the degeneration of the French Revolution into

terror, the most successful builders of modern democracies drew the conclusion that democracy

should be only part of a democratic constitution, not the whole. In any case, many argued, in a

large-scale and complex society, government would necessarily be carried out by formal

organizations led by an elite, not a matter for direct participation of all the people. The main

democratic process was choosing the elite, not running the government. Democracy would be

representative, not direct, and it would require stable institutions not constant mass mobilization.

But it was also a democratic process to protest when elites failed to act in the interests of all

citizens.

The Present Wave

The present wave of populism comes after 50 years in which ruling elites tolerated and often

personally benefitted from economic transformations that did not reflect popular will or serve to

benefit ordinary people: rising financialization, globalization organized largely to benefit

corporations and capital, abrupt deindustrialization. Of course, these transformations also

brought gains – not least a variety of new technologies. But they left individual lives, families,

and communities devastated. It was salt in the wound that the elites called this progress and

called those who resisted or complained backward.

The dominant political elites of this whole period were more or less liberal. There were conflicts

between political parties, but policy differences were muted. Ostensibly socialist or social

democratic parties stopped seeking deep economic transformation. Conservatives were not

reactionary opponents of democracy or the liberal order. Indeed, one of the staples of the period

was reference to ‘post-ideological’ politics (see Berkowitz in this volume for a further discussion

of this issue). All major parties embraced the basic project of liberal democracy, including

pluralism and rule of law. All embraced the basic marriage of liberal democracy to capitalism.

They differed mainly on how much they wanted to extend liberal rights in a project of pluralist

inclusion—of women, minorities (including immigrants), and alternative lifestyles or personal

identities.

The ‘mainstream’ parties of Western democracies were more committed to economic growth

than to equality. They supported finance-led globalization, embracing the project of

competitiveness even when it meant curtailing social spending and trying to limit unions. Most

were influenced by neoliberalism, an ideology that proclaimed liberty to be rooted in private

property and insisted that government efforts to use tax revenues to improve social conditions

were an illegitimate intrusion on these private rights.9 They were more attentive to the progress

9 In the private sector, neoliberals insisted that projects of ‘corporate social responsibility’ were an illegitimate use of profits that

should belong only to the owners of corporations. Other liberals argued for a broader recognition of legitimate stakeholders,

including employees, suppliers and customers, and the communities in which businesses were located.

of wealth, as measured, for example, by stock market indices, than to the welfare of those whose

lives were disrupted by the path of growing wealth—for example, workers who lost both their

jobs and their communities to deindustrialization. They embraced the growing power of finance,

the idea of free markets, including free trade, and globalization.

There were differences among parties on specific issues, and sometimes sharp conflicts. In the

UK, for example, Thatcherite Tories were committed to destroying unions and Labour was not,

though Labour didn’t do much to reverse the slide in union strength. Labour didn’t pursue

privatization as Tories had done, though it didn’t undo it either or regulate finance as much as it

might have. Labour did improve benefits for senior citizens. Austerity was a distinctively

conservative imposition. In the US, Republicans undermined government agencies more (though

government budgets still grew). They more actively denigrated the idea of public action to serve

public interests, but even Democrats were also usually closer to Wall Street than unions. Perhaps

the biggest difference was in judicial appointments with litmus tests for issues like abortion

rights. In neither country did either leading party attempt serious reversal of growing inequality.

Nor did those in most other developed capitalist countries—though as Thomas Piketty (2014)

has shown, France did limit inequality more than most and for a longer time.

Populism is largely a complaint against the conduct of government by these liberal elites. It is

not just a grievance against inequality and the existence of elites. It centers on the charge that

liberal elites were poor stewards of the overall collective good. It complains bitterly that the

conventional governing classes of all major parties lived well while others suffered and spoke of

progress, while others bore the costs of change. And crucially, say the populists, those elites

didn’t care about us, listen to us, or even recognize fully that we existed and had a legitimate

stake in the country. Populist charges against established elites are often unfair. They

underestimate pressures and limits and indeed accomplishments. But they are not entirely false.

Populism is typically angry, resentful, reactionary, and illiberal. It can be a problem for

democracy, but this is not because it is inherently undemocratic. It is because immediate

representation of (ostensible) popular will is at odds with institutional arrangements that stabilize

democracy and secure greater justice. Such institutional arrangements produce the hybrid

political form commonly labeled liberal democracy (though in fact they derive at least as much

from republicanism as liberalism). Populists are almost essentially illiberal; they refuse to

prioritize the liberties and rights of individuals or smaller groups over popular will and what they

understand to unite the people. Their anger at elites is often based on the view that those elites

have put minorities ahead of the majority, and that they have managed public affairs to secure

their own benefit more than that of the real ‘people’ of a country.

Populist anger has many sources, from economic grievances to a sense of cultural insult.

Claiming and inflaming this anger is the stock-in-trade of populist demagogues from Donald

Trump to Marine Le Pen to Victor Orban—or their more Leftist counterparts. Rightwing

versions of populism are dominant in the present era, but Leftwing populism has been important

in Spain and Greece. It is present among supporters of Brexit and of France’s Yellow Vests.10

Indeed, populism is more of a political style than it is a political ideology. In itself, it is neither

Leftwing nor Rightwing. But it can be harnessed to Left-Right politics and co-opted by more

conventional political parties and agendas.

10 For a direct comparison of anti-system politics from both the left and the right across Western democracies, see Hopkin and

Blyth in this volume.

When Hungary’s Orban named his populist regime ‘illiberal democracy,’ he was playing

rhetorical games, but he was not all wrong.11 His regime did command widespread popular

support. But it not only represented largely a non-metropolitan Hungary against more

cosmopolitan Budapest, it was deeply engaged in manipulating public opinion. It offered only a

very thin version of democracy, the chance to offer the regime popular acclaim and plebiscitarian

approval. To shout ‘Hurrah’ or ‘Lock them up’ when opponents are mentioned, or to vote merely

‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ is not to participate seriously in government, policy-making, or organizing life

together.

Populists have many targets, from professional elites to immigrants to foreigners exerting undue

influence over their nations. Politicians may pander to pre-existing senses of grievance or they

may seek to persuade populists to adopt targets of their own alongside those with deeper roots

among ordinary people. Specific grievances and resentments differ among countries. Indeed,

populism is always so embedded in the specifics of different national contexts, time periods, and

relationships to mainstream politics that there are serious limits to trying—as I do here—to

discuss populism in general. Nonetheless, there are also common themes and there is an inverse

potential error in discussing each instance of populist mobilization only inside a particular

national story and set of symbolic references. Throughout modernity, populism has been shaped

by shared patterns in international political economy, demographic transitions like urbanization

and immigration, and ever more intensive networks of communication.

11 Orban sometimes renders this “illiberal Christian democracy” (www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-orban/hungarian-pm-sees-

shift-to-illiberal-christian-democracy-in-2019-european-vote-idUSKBN1KI0BK). See Atanassow, Krastev, and Plattner in this

volume for further elaboration of this issue.

Very commonly, liberalism itself is among populists’ targets, as well as specific liberal elites.

The rights liberals defend can seem like special treatment for minorities. In the decades since the

1970s, liberals focused more on cultural inclusion than on economic welfare. Many liberals

defended a disempowering economic order on the grounds that it had roots in private property

rights. Too many embraced globalization uncritically, as though it derived simply from legal

equality and sheer modernity. They looked the other way as finance-led reorganization of global

capitalism benefitted investors more than workers and eroded place-based communities and

whole regions through deindustrialization. And when financial crisis struck, they spent billions

of dollars rescuing banks and other companies but not helping people who lost homes, savings,

or jobs in the crisis.

Liberals may not have been the primary drivers of these disasters, but they were among

beneficiaries as well as blinded by the hegemonic ideology of the day. Not surprisingly, this

encouraged populist resentment. This is often expressed in unfortunate ways, like protesting

against public health measures in the coronavirus pandemic. But the distrust of liberal messages

about what is best for the public good has reasons.

It is easy to talk about ‘liberal elites’ who mismanaged democratic government. We can imagine

we mean others: elected representatives, people richer and more influential than us. Perhaps

these do bear more responsibility and deserve more blame. But it is important to realize that most

of ‘us’—that is to say, educated, mainly middle-class participants in the political public sphere—

have been complicit. We have allowed our societies to grow more hierarchical—with

universities in the lead. We used what resources we had to fight for our own positions in the

hierarchies, while many of our fellow citizens found their opportunities much more severely

blocked. We have embraced the attractively ‘cosmopolitan’ side of globalization and paid less

attention to the domination of financial capitalism. Indeed, we embraced a certain cosmopolitan

style and attitude that made it harder for us even to see what was going on in the damaged

communities of those whose style was not so sleek or educated or globally cultured or dignified.

As members of this privileged class, we were at ease talking about progress and feeling confident

in it. This was reinforced when we saw things getting better in many ways. Partly, looking close

to home, we saw an improvement in our living standards. We grew more likely to own houses;

cars grew fancier; we enjoyed a rush of new consumer technologies (though sometimes we might

be uncomfortable to realize how much all of this was based on debt). We lived mostly in places

where we were not confronted directly by the downsides of either deindustrialization or

globalization. But at least as basically, we focused on those gains that could be achieved without

limiting economic growth or challenging the extent to which it was organized to advance wealth

accumulation. Specifics, of course, varied with national context, but there were major and

important gains in equality of opportunity on lines of gender, race, sexual orientation, differential

ability, and other dimensions. These co-existed, however, with dramatic increases in overall

inequality. We let returns on invested assets define national prosperity more than earned incomes

and standards of living.

Educated professionals may not have been the cause of the inequality, damaged communities,

and other downsides to the era of neoliberal globalization. Many of us were at least sympathetic

to Left populist critiques such as that of the Occupy movements, if not active in pursuing

structural change. So, we were shocked to find ourselves the face of the problem and focus of

resentment for Rightwing populists. But when there is support for upper-class politicians who

say “we have had enough of experts” who else is being targeted?

If experts really deserve their status and salary, critics suggest, they should have seen the mess

their fellow citizens were in and fixed it. This is a disingenuous charge coming from someone

like Michael Gove, an Oxford-educated Conservative Minister and author, who declared during

the Brexit campaign that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”12 But it is a charge

that resonates with many less elite citizens who sense that the educated professional class looks

down on the mostly non-metropolitan kinds of citizens drawn to populism.13 Centrally, populists

complain that elites—including experts—do not value and pay attention to the opinions of

ordinary citizens—though this would be democratic.

Accelerating inequality is one of the causes of populism, though this does not mean that all

populists see equality as the solution. While populists on the Left are commonly egalitarian,

those more on the Right often see the issue not as inequality, but as who gets the good positions

in an unequal system. They complain that liberals and experts have been behind distributing

more of opportunities (like elite university admissions) and more of benefits (like good jobs) to

minorities, immigrants, and women. It has been hard for liberals to realize that what they regard

as successes like more equal opportunity seem like affronts to those who believe that they have a

prior right to the relevant opportunities. But mainstream liberals have not been consistently

egalitarian. Many accepted radically unequal access to educational and other institutions, seeking

to ensure only that the inequality did not derive from certain protected categories like race or

gender. They saw this as a matter of merit, not money or privilege (and ignored the possibility of

12 H.Mance, “Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove,” Financial Times, June 3, 2016.

https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c

13 This is a prominent observation of sympathetic studies; see Hochschild (2018).

creating less hierarchical institutions). The liberal focus has typically been on fairness in

allocating unequal opportunities, not on how much inequality there should be. Implictly, they

have accepted that so long as ‘merit’ determines access, scarcity in quality provision is

acceptable. In somewhat different national packages, they have allowed education and health to

be treated as private rather than public goods.

Critics of minorities and immigrants commonly stress the burden on welfare systems. But at least

as important to populists are perceived blocks on upward mobility. Immigrant and minority

success stories do not alleviate the concern but exacerbate it. As those Arlie Hochschild

interviewed for Strangers in their Own Land put it, it’s like these new claimants are cutting in

line, but that’s who liberals support.14

Populism is not inherently an ideology of Left or Right. It is a rhetoric of complaint against elites

and self-assertion of ‘the people’ that can be drawn more in one way or the other. “We are the

99%” is as populist a slogan as “We are the Real Americans.” The former is more centrally a

critique of the power of wealth; the latter is obviously more explicitly national, and thus more

easily linked to racism and hostility to immigrants. But both are claims to the importance and

solidarity of The People. Populist movements are generally not composed of veteran politicians

or policy wonks. They tend to be stronger on complaints than concrete policy proposals. They

may develop more of these from within if they become well-organized enough and last long

enough. The Farmers Alliance did in the late 19th-century US.15 More commonly, political

parties and ideologues with more resources try to harness populists to their causes. And a

14 Ibid.

15 See Lawrence Goodwyn (1976), a valuable corrective to many common views of populism.

weakness of populist movements is the frequency with which they are claimed and mobilized,

and manipulated by demagogues. Indeed, being motivated in part by the sense of being ignored

or denigrated by one set of elites, populists are all too vulnerable to other elites who flatter them

with attention—from Peron to Trump.

The Ambiguous People

Populism is not a precise analytic concept. It is a political term that is used as an accusation as

often as it is claimed by ostensible populists. Sometimes, people say “I’m a populist. I speak for

the people. I speak in the name of the people.” But more often the label ‘populist’ is applied to

those seen as violating the norms of conventional liberal democracy. It is applied to people held

to be emotional rather than rational. It is a charge of having failed to appreciate complexity. The

accusation of “populist” is likely to be made by those who believe in the knowledge of experts

and seek a reasoned, rational debate on policy questions. These are hallmarks of liberal and

republican thoughts added to democracy to improve it. But they do privilege some modes of

participation in politics, and not the most popular.16

The moral standing of The People remains important. It is, however, more complicated than

often acknowledged. Is there a singular people? Do we mean some people? Most of the people?

What is the representation of the people that is involved? Often, appeals to The People are in

truth appeals in the name of all the people against some of the people. But there are other moral

claims. The native-born may claim to be the real people against immigrants. Youth may claim to

16 See the Introduction to this volume for a further discussion of the term populism and infelicities surrounding its use in recent

debates.

be the morally significant people because they will live the future—and, say, face the potential

devastations of climate change. The elites who are betraying the rest of the people, or those

standing in the way of necessary action are seen to be legitimately excluded from the salient

sense of The People.

In this reliance on ‘we the people,’ populism is often closely related to nationalism. Though

populism and nationalism overlap, each appears in many forms and attached to many different

ideologies. They overlap but are not identical. Nationalism shapes diplomatic relations and trade

conflicts that are in no sense populist. Populist rhetoric informs local appeals against central

states. Throughout the modern era, however, nationalism has been the primary rhetoric for

appeals to citizen solidarity and rights at the scale of states—which are not surprisingly often

described as nation-states. This can be as readily the basis for domestic projects, like providing

early childhood or old-age benefits to a whole nation without discrimination, as for international

rivalry or conflict. Demagogues too often find it easy to link nationalist and populist domestic

solidarities to international enmities—mobilized against other countries or against immigrants.

Nationalism is sometimes bellicose, and populist resentments can exacerbate this. Frustratingly,

for those who would like good and bad dimensions of social life to remain more neatly separate,

domestic solidarity may be enhanced by mobilization for war.

Populist politics are likewise rooted in an appeal not just to the people as a population but to the

people as legitimate participants in a way of life.17 The shared culture and social order makes a

17 Here, there is an echo of Tocqueville’s point that democracy is not simply a political system but a way of life (Tocqueville

2003 [1835/1840]). See Atanassow in this volume for a fuller articulation of a Tocquevillian response to recent illiberal

movements.

whole people rather than a series of individuals. It extends from families and local communities

to the nation. It also reduces any potential sense of contradiction in excluding culturally or

racially different fellow citizens from the category of the real people. There is a special pathos to

this point today as many aggrieved citizens imagine the disappearance of people like them. From

white nationalists to Evangelical Christians to True Finns, to Englishmen who fear the loss of

Britain and those like the former Trump advisor Steve Bannon who see the eclipse of the West

on the horizon, there is a widespread anxiety about the disappearance of ways of life—and

populist identification of The People with these ways of life.

What populists seek to protect and advance cannot be reduced to either a particular set of people

at one moment in time, or their material interests. Populists do have material grievances, of

course, but populism is not merely a form of interest group politics. Indeed, populists typically

reject interest group politics as little more than bargaining among elites. Its implicit logic of

arithmetically counting the interests of individuals or responding only to organized power-groups

downplays the politics of loyalties and values.

The oppositions of trade unions to business, urban to rural areas, young to old do have some

predictive power in explaining who is more drawn to populist campaigns. Those organizing

campaigns are realistic and know where to hold rallies and what symbols to invoke. But populist

rhetoric tends to downplay these interest groupings. These imply legitimate divisions among the

people, rather than populism’s more typical distinction between the real people, as a whole, and

others. They also imply a politics of compromises and diversity, which is not the populist style.

Contemporary populism is not just the national story of the US or France or Britain or Australia

or Hungary or any other country. It is a shared story of this moment in globalization when there

is a lot of pushback from people who feel that it is not working for them; when destabilizing

socioeconomic change is causing fundamental problems. For both populists and nationalists,

these problems put pressure on who ‘we’ are. They make ‘us’ ask: What is happening to our way

of life? Will our children live in societies that are recognizably still the kind of societies that we

know? Will they have opportunities and will they be prepared to seize them? When people think

that maybe their children will be losing out, they tend to ask who is winning. In fact, a feature of

populist politics is often a search for scapegoats or the people who are winning that should not

be, or who are winning more than they should be. The scapegoat search is not a neutral analysis;

it is largely constructed in first person terms. It is an effort to identify those who are getting

ahead at ‘my’ expense or that of people like me. Material issues are entwined with cultural. It is

misleading to ask whether the issues are mainly inequality or mainly the ‘values’ and ‘identity’

concerns of ‘culture wars’. They are both at once, each exacerbating anxieties with roots in the

other. It is not that poor people join populist campaigns because elites are rich. Many have been

baffled by the enthusiasm for a billionaire like Donald Trump when people simultaneously

complain about the injustice of inequality. For some this may be a cynical evaluation of what

politician is most likely to address their issues. For many it is an expression of contempt for

politics as usual. But it is also important to recognize that populists who do not like the

professional classes may nonetheless respect rich people. They have something ordinary people

want and perhaps can imagine having. It is harder to identify with those whose standing is based

on education, professional attainment, and cultural polish.

Populists rhetorically appeal to The People – as though the referent is clear. But of course the

mental image is culturally constructed, in processes that are not at all transparent. The People is

never just a counting of votes, or an accurate representation of the various plural and

differentiated groups in modern societies. The People becomes particularly important in contexts

of polarization, where people live in somewhat different versions of the same country. There is a

geography to it, as well as an element of social differentiation that makes it such that people do

not just bump into people with different views. A common feature of the 2016 US Presidential

election, the Brexit campaign, and others was the number of people who said: “I don’t even

know anyone who voted the other way.” In the case of Brexit, there were a number of people in

the North-East of Britain and certain generational and occupational groups who did not know

anyone who was voting to stay in the European Union (EU). Conversely, there were a number of

people in London who did not know anyone who was voting to leave the EU.

The same thing was true in the US, and it is important to reflect about why this happened. Thirty

years ago, there was a viewership of a small number of television channels that would broadcast

things like the evening news. People might have complained that it was all pretty much the same:

ABC, NBC, and CBS showed the same news. The anchor person would have been different but

equally centrist. What has happened over time is the decline of the audience for that kind of

newscast and the rise of other kinds of much more differentiated channels so that different

people could get different accounts of the news. This shapes what I have called “parallel media

worlds.” We live different versions of our countries, getting different news stories, even though

we are still in the same nation. Geographical division has reinforced class, ethnic, political, and

other views. The US has its blue and red states—and insulting terms like “flyover communities.”

In Britain, London became an even richer and more diverse global center, while much of the rest

of the country—ex-industrial or ex-agricultural—declined. La France profonde is angry at Paris.

Budapest is a cosmopolitan city resented by much of Hungary.

Steve Bannon, the former editor of the Rightwing website Breitbart and one-time senior advisor

to President Trump, has been active in weaving an alternative narrative. This combines anxiety

about the rise of China and America’s declining global power with the notion of an end to

Christian civilization and the argument that white people are threatened with ‘substitution’. He

says that the mainstream liberal press—the New York Times narrative of what it means to be an

American—is deceitful. This is part of the Donald Trump story: “They are lying to you, here is

the truth.” The demagogues may pander to prejudices, instead of trying to give you a factual

account, an account rooted in social science to possibly correct received opinions. They may play

on them and build on them, promote a paranoid world view, or, what goes on most of the time,

position real legitimate concerns and problems that people have in tendentious and not-so-

realistic accounts of why they have those problems. In this context, populism is a sort of wake-up

call, but it is not a program. One of the things we know in the case of Trump, Brexit, and other

cases is that populists in power often do not have a full set of policies.

Populism is a politics of grievances, not of aspirations. It is about what has gone wrong, more

than a program for what should go right. Yes, there is a program of America first, or Australia, or

France… There may be a nationalist program in that sense. But not a detailed program. It is not a

plan. To look for the plan that is going to lift people economically in populist politics is to

misunderstand, to think that it is a set of policy proposals rather than this more emotional

reflection of grievances. It is a defensive and often resentful response to the state of the world.

Populist identity claims may have historical roots, but they also involve accentuating differences

from denigrated others. Resentment is a problematic guide: it leads people to focus on what they

do not have rather than what they do, or on past injustices and not ways forward.

Having a legitimate grievance does not necessarily give one a reasonable analysis or a sensible

view of where to go. Donald Trump spoke to widespread anger about deindustrialization and job

loss when he claimed to save an air conditioner factory in Indiana by talking to its owners and

providing a federal subsidy. This was advertised as bringing jobs back from Mexico. But in fact

the subsidy sustained the factory as it was automated. Machinery rather than globalization still

put workers out of work. Transformation of labor markets in the world’s richer economies did

involve internationalization in search of lower-wage work, but also long, computer-managed

supply chains not just the transplanting of individual factories. It was accompanied domestically

by increased automation and a massive shift from industrial to service jobs. These were often

less well-paid and less supported by unions. Crucially, they generally went to different people,

not least women rather than men. In this transition, the interests of capital dominated over those

of labor. There was too little retraining, too little support for stricken communities.

Manufacturing industry provided good jobs from the period of World War II to the 1970s when

they began to erode, country after country. They were not all wonderful jobs, but relatively well

paid, secure jobs. Deindustrialization could have been addressed as a high-priority problem in

each country. Mitigating damages could have been at the top of policy agendas. The destruction

of communities—and lives—could have been minimized, the coming of an opiate epidemic

averted. Instead, elites focused more on the winners of the story: global investment bankers and

traders and people with computer science degrees or shares in Google or Apple.

Populism reflects a collapse in trust – among ordinary people as well as in the government.

Distrust among ‘the people’ is reflected in extremes of political polarization. But interpersonal

trust has also declined. The coronavirus pandemic spurs gun-buying in the US because people do

not trust their fellow-citizens.18 And at the same time, trust in the government has fallen sharply

18 This process did not start with the recent wave of populism, nor with the financial crisis, nor indeed with the 9/11 attacks. It

reflects longer-term transformations in citizen experience and public communication (see Meyers 2008).

in almost every advanced democracy. In the US, trust in government has fallen from

approximately 60% to 20%, whereas in Norway, it has fallen from around 95% to 75% (Pew

Research Center 2019). There are places where people trust the government more, but overall,

there has been a widespread loss of trust (either due to corruption or lack of recognition). A key

feature of this trend is the loss of trust and faith in conventional political parties. The political

party system is in large part broken. It is not just that people think that one party is bad and the

other is good; they don’t think that any of them really speak to what they need and want. They

think that the political parties are all full of people just seeking to benefit themselves or that they

are representing other people, not them; or that they have made so many compromises that you

cannot distinguish their stances. Multiparty parliamentary democracies work well when parties

forge compromises, bring groups of people together, all of whom will get some of what they

want and none of whom will get everything they want. In this way, they cooperate in order to

achieve electoral majorities. This is becoming a less common feature of the party system. France

offers an extreme example. Emmanuel Macron essentially ran as an independent against all

parties. Whatever else his victory meant, it was very bad for the way French democracy had

previously worked. Now, no established political party is responsible for working together to

solve problems.

Conclusion

We, educated elites, spend too much of our time being angry at populists and not enough time

being angry at the betrayal of the broad public interest by governing and economic elites in our

societies. To address any of these issues would require us to rebuild social solidarity and to

rebuild the cohesion of our societies. There is no addressing it by simply making a new political

announcement. It would take rebuilding the current political system from the ground up: having

moral economies and (re-)introducing the idea that there can be moral and social values in the

economy. There is no law of nature that says that the economy must be approached with no

analytic metric besides profit and the accumulation of capital. Why can’t it be approached by

asking whether it creates jobs? Why can’t it be approached by asking whether it creates good

jobs for people? Why can’t it be approached by asking whether the economy delivers on social

and moral solidarity in society? Well, it can be; it just isn’t most of the time or hasn’t been

approached this way in the past 40 years.

Though the scale and durability of modern democracy are new, the very word incorporates an

old ambiguity. Demos is the Greek word for the people. But it can be used to refer to all the

people—the way the framers of the US Constitution claimed to speak as ‘We the People’—or it

can be an elite reference to the lower classes, the ordinary people, the commoners who were not

normally powerful and influential participants in government. Populism derives from the

distance between the two usages. Populists seek to bridge the gap, to transform democracy run

by elites into democracy run by all the people. In doing so, they often abandon the protections of

pluralism, minorities, free expression, due process, and even rule of law that distinguish liberal

democracy. But populists are not intrinsically anti-democratic. And waves of populism are

commonly responses to genuine failures of the ruling elites to act with appropriate consideration

for ordinary people, or indeed, to listen.

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