Scholars continue to labour over the ideological credentials
of “populism.” At best, populism is ideologically emaciated; at worst, nothing
more than a style of politics—a
mode of posturing, speaking, signifying. But few dispute that a core
part of its appeal is an
ability to mobilize popular cynicism about the conduct of mainstream parties
and politicians, left and right. Even self-consciously minimal definitions insist
that a defining feature of populism is its depiction of “elites” as essentially
self-serving and self-interested. As most liberals would agree, it is entirely right
that we should be sceptical, even cynical, about those who govern us. But
populism thrives on something more extreme and visceral: an often rage-fuelled conviction
that we’re all being ripped off, lied to, preyed upon, ignored and neglected by
the establishment. “Drain the swamp!” the crowds yelled at Trump’s rallies back
in the autumn of 2016, capturing one of the few readily identifiable ideological—or stylistic—props of populism.
This is not all, of course. The other key element of
populism is “the people,” which is pitted against a corrupt elite and in whose
name the populist leader operates. The two operate together, making for the
master distinction of populism. As is often pointed out, if criticizing elites
was the hallmark of populism, then most political actors, of whatever
ideological affiliation, would qualify as populist. But the populist leader
goes further and adds a crucial anti-pluralist twist by claiming that he and he
alone—and it’s
commonly a male protagonist—speaks
for “the people.” The democratic appeal of populism is thus easy to grasp.
Democracy has somehow been subverted and captured by self-interested, liberal
elites, when really, as democracy dictates, power should reside with the people—and it’s this situation that
the populist leader claims he will reverse, returning power to where it rightfully
belongs.
More might be said about this crucial facet of populism, however
ideologically grounded or not.
Who, after all, are “the people”? Are they really as homogeneous as the
rhetoric would imply—is it not just a fictitious referent? There is a rich
literature now on the sociological mystifications of populism. Nonetheless, it
is here where the cynicism of populism is said to stop. Some scholars
indeed have argued that populism turns upon a peculiar idealization of “the
people,” which, defined in more or less exclusive nativist and/or class-based
terms, is held up not just as the true source of sovereignty but of a
fundamental moral decency and common sense. Small wonder, perhaps, that some
have sketched the conceptual roots of populism back to Rousseau’s notion of
“the general will.”
It is true that populism thrives on a distinction between a
corrupt “elite” and a morally wholesome, if perhaps naïve, “people.” But it
doesn’t necessarily follow that populism is any less cynical about those it
claims to defend and represent. Nor again that it is any less cynical when it
comes to the conduct of politics, or even the very meaning of politics.
This is most apparent in the way “the people” functions as
one of populism’s core referents, which involves a two-fold manoeuvre that is
at once overtly cynical and more subtly so. In the first place there is the altogether
limited way populists conceive of “the people” and their grievances, where
there is a striking absence of any sense that “the people” have, or should have, any additional responsibilities
or democratic capacities than they already possess. Instead, they are presented
as those who have, in one way or another, suffered because of the apparently
rampant self-interest of others, principally immigrants or elites, or some combination
of the two. It follows that what “the people” want is not the better mediation
of interests or their distribution and management—the old-school “elite” solution—but the swift and brutal
assertion of their own much-neglected self-interests, whether in the form of
their cultural resources and identity, access to welfare, or share of national
wealth. In policy terms, what populists offer can often be boiled down to a
simple formula: life must be made much harder for those who are not truly of
“the people” (immigrants, minorities and elites) and much easier for those who
are—a cynical, low-grade
politics of spite and revenge on the one hand, and entitlements and material
comfort on the other.
Perhaps this is not too unusual. After all, tax cuts and
enhanced access to welfare have long been part of the politics of established
parties. But populism is distinguished by a second and more subtle, if again
quite cynical, manoeuvre which completes the first and, in a remarkable twist, seeks
to dignify it. This, too, concerns the people, and in particular the way
populism seeks to reduce democracy to a matter of mere counting. Crudely, “the
people” are the numerical majority and therefore, as democracy dictates, in a
position of political authority: their interests and needs carry the most
weight. And yet, this very same people, so populism suggests, is also defined
by an aversion to politics and democratic association. It is this latter facet
that completes the picture, for this is also what endows “the people” with an
unassailable moral goodness: composed of average, ordinary and common folk—so-called “real people”—“the people” have no
desire to engage in the dirty and convoluted world of politics and collective
deliberation, beyond voting in secret now and then. Put another way, what
populism offers is indeed an “anti-political” politics, as scholars suggest;
but more than this, it quite cynically asserts its superior democratic
credentials on the basis of an altogether impoverished conception of democracy
as the aggregation of self-interested selves.
The above is but a sketch and a crude and abstract one at
that; and there are of course multiple other manifestations of the cynicism of
populism, not least its casual conspiracism and dismissal of uncomfortable facts
and counterarguments as the product of biased, self-interested perspectives
(“fake news”, etc.). But the key point is that this pervasive cynicism might
help to explain why populism is so ideologically thin and superficial, and why scholars grasp after
paradoxes in order to characterise its peculiar qualities (as in an “anti-political”
politics).
At any rate, “the people” of populism are decidedly not the
same as those imagined by Rousseau’s “general will,” which envisaged a perpetual
becoming of patriotic, engaged citizens.
Nor do they bear any resemblance to “the people” idealized by interwar
fascist and communist movements, which invoked transformational images of a
“New Order” and a “New Man.” Rather, they are much closer to Richard Nixon’s
“silent majority,” whose moral authority lay not just in their majority status,
but also in their quiet silence and subservience: they were unsullied and uncorrupted
by politics and a desire for more expansive forms of citizenship.
Tom is currently
writing a history of political corruption in modern Britain. He co-organised
(with Barrie Axford and Rico Isaacs) the “Populism 2.0” symposium held in
January of this year.
