Markus Heide
University of Hildesheim
Populism is generally understood as a form of politics that claims to speak for “the people” (Franziska Otto 2022). At first sight, this does not seem to pose a problem. After all, the people are what the government represents in a democracy. However, in the past decades, many scholars, politicians, and intellectuals have identified populism as posing a major threat to democracy. Why?
First of all, populists present themselves as speaking for the entirety of the population of a society. They do not acknowledge differences within society. Such an understanding of politics as the practice of speaking for “the people” tends to imply a national unity of a like-minded mass, ignoring diversity based on, for example, income, social status, gender, sexual preferences, religion, and ethnic identification. Secondly, populists insist on opposing established political structures; they maintain a vision of the political system in which an elite (“those at the top”) has “lost all connection to the people” (Otto). This populist self-representation denigrates other political parties and interest groups as unpatriotic. Such simplification of politics poses a serious problem for societies as it favors a form of political debate that ignores and overlooks the complexities of social differences, identities, and conflicts. Populism exists on the political Left and the political Right. Particularly parties on the populist political Right – with so-called conservative and authoritarian populism – present themselves (and, in their logic, the will of the people) as opposed to immigration and all forms of globalization.
The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) lists three examples of populism in 21st-century Europe: (1) Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, (2) The Brexit Referendum in 2016, (3) Hungary and Fidesz (for details see Otto, https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/populism/44261). In 2023 populist parties with an anti-immigration and nationalist political agenda have gained influence in all European democracies as well as in many democracies around the globe.
Research on populism
Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2012) concentrate their analysis on the
different functions of populism in democracies. They argue that “populist forces always promote the repoliticization of certain topics, which either intentionally or unintentionally are not being addressed by the establishment” (205). Thus populist movements can serve either as corrective or as a threat to democracy.
Populism on the political Left
While populism is always in tension with liberal democracy, it might help expose the hidden agendas of the ruling elites. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s politics in Mexico have been approached from such a perspective – a populist corrective to democracy. Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) political theory highlights that a democratically anchored left populism is necessary for countering right populism. Critiquing Mouffe’s left populism, Seyla Benhabib (2019) establishes that “populism is incompatible with democratic liberties and paves the way for authoritarianism” (4). This is, among other reasons, because populism views the people “as a homogenous mass” (5).
Populism on the political Right
In Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (2019) Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart concentrate on the assumed and constructed antagonism between “elites” and “the people.” In their analysis populism is understood as a “style of rhetoric reflecting first-order principles about who should rule, claiming that legitimate power rests with ‘the people’, not the elites” (4). Norris and Ingelhart emphasize the centrality of the rhetorical and symbolic quality in populist maneuvering. Norris and Inglehart explain that populism “remains silent about second-order principles, concerning what should be done, what policies should be followed, what decisions should be made” (4).
Populist rhetoric and discourse, they argue, show a “chameleon-like quality which can adapt flexibly to a variety of substantive ideological values and principles, such as socialist or conservative populism, authoritarian or progressive populism, and so on” (4). Populist forms of political communication, Norris and Inglehart emphasize, direct complaints “upwards” but also “outwards”. Upwards refers to anti-intellectualism: “Populist rhetoric directs tribal grievances ‘upwards’ toward elites, feeding mistrust of ‘corrupt’ politicians, the ‘fake’ media, ‘biased’ judges, and ‘out-of-touch’ mainstream parties, assaulting the truth and corroding faith in liberal democracy” (Norris and Inglehart, 7). But the space and people located ‘outside’ of the nation, also appear as posing threats and dangers to the national community: […] authoritarians channel tribal grievances ‘outwards’ toward scapegoat groups perceived as threatening the values and norms of the in-group, dividing ‘Us’ (the ‘real people’) and ‘Them’ (‘Not Us’) […] If the world is seen as full of gangs, criminals, and fanatics, if our borders are vulnerable to drug cartels, Muslim terrorists, and illegal aliens, if liberal democracy is broken, then logically we need high walls – and strong leaders – to protect us and our nation. (7) 3
Such authoritarian and national populist perspectives on the nation’s relation to the world favor “the protection of national sovereignty, secure borders, a strong military, and trade protection” (8). Manuel Anselmi (2018) discusses the significance of global factors in the current explosion of populism. He highlights that the current national or nationalistic forms of populism are tightly linked and shaped by the economy and the cultural discourse of globalization: “populism is less and less a phenomenon circumscribed to the confines of the nation-state” (108). As Manfred Steger (2019) writes in his review of Anselmi’s book: “Globalization continues to matter in our unsettled times, even – and perhaps especially – when its current ‘antiglobalist’ populist opponents seek to disavow its [globalization’s] relevance and deny its [globalization’s] benefits” (104). In this discourse, the strictly maintained boundaries of Self and Other generate not only domestic polarization but also non-cooperative and antagonistic foreign policy. This populist Othering does not solely focus
on the so-called liberal elites as an internal ‘enemy’; instead it focuses on the enemy outside of the nation – an enemy who – from a populist viewpoint –, through migration, aims at “infiltrating” and “destroying” the nation. Such a populist view of migration and migrants denies and ignores the complexities of global conditions, relations, and conflicts.
Works Cited
Anselmi, Manuel. Populism: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Behabib, Seyla. “Brief Reflections on Populism, Left or Right.” Critque & Practice 13/13 (2019), https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/seyla-benhabib-brief-reflections-on-populism-left-or-right/?cn-reloaded=1 [accessed 11/13/2023]
Heide, Markus. “Populism and the Politics of the Media Spectacle in the US: The Imagery of
the US-Mexico Border”. Populism, Democracy, and the Humanities. Interdisciplinary
Explorations and Critical Inquiries. Eds. Iulian Cananau and Peder Thalén.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. 143-162. Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. London and New York: Verso, 2018. Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Eds.). Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 4
Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian
Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Otto, Franziska. “What is populism: definition, characteristics, examples.” Liberties (2022), https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/populism/44261 [accessed 11/13/2023] Steger, Manfred B. “Populism: An Introduction, written by Manuel Anselmi. Populism (2019) 2.1: 101-04