On 'What is Populism?' and Müller's Seven Theses on Populism

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“There is a historic battle going on now across the West - in Europe, America and elsewhere. It is globalism against populism. And you may loathe populism, but I'll tell you a funny thing - it's becoming very popular!”

-        Nigel Farage[1]

 

As many scholars and commentators have observed, it is a relatively complex task to open a newspaper or read an exploration of the contemporary political condition without seeing a single actor or agent described as being a ‘populist’. In his short yet gripping 2016 work, ‘What is Populism?’, Jan-Werner Müller seeks to tease out some of the basic predicates that help answer the title question that his book poses. Indeed, Müller’s work goes above and beyond this ostensibly simplistic task. An oft misconstrued objective of political theory is to provide concrete and infallible answers to the political questions that we pose and the questions that sometimes haunt the era in which we reside. Müller’s case is no different. Although the title of the work may lend itself to expecting a succinct answer, i.e. ‘populism is x,y,z’, Müller goes one better and provides a framework through which we may begin to think about the contemporary populist phenomenon that we experience with the politics of Donald Trump, Marine Le-Pen, Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Jair Bolsonaro, Geert Wilders or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to name but a few.

What is Populism?’ is broken down into sections, attending to three broad discourses with the aim of understanding, which, together, provide a framework of reference that can guide our efforts to answer the title question. At the close, Müller provides a summary of his framework in seven theses. The three sections constituting the body of the book concern: (a) What populists say; (b) What populists do; and (c) How to deal with populists. The purpose of this short piece will be to note those points of Müller’s that would perhaps be missed by other thinkers of populism, before neatly recalling his seven theses on populism.

A point that is made throughout the book is that claiming populism is ‘illiberal’ can reinforce the popularity of the populist party. Indeed, Müller makes it abundantly clear that a unifying feature of populists, in his understanding, is their rebellion against liberal democracy and its failures. As such, the charge of ‘illiberalism’, although true, reinforces the appeal of populists to those who will an exclusivist reactionary political space, in some manner or other, to an open liberal society. The claim indeed reaffirms populism as a legitimate non-liberal alternative to the status-quo. When reading this, my mind was cast back to the claim by the political scientist Cas Mudde, who reminds us that populism is “an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism”.[2] Thus, to refer to populism and populists alike as ‘illiberal’ is not to undermine the populist position, but to call a spade a spade, teasing the illiberal in political society towards the populist partisan.

If there is a key claim to the book as a whole, it is that populism is the ‘shadow of representative democracy’ and yet seeks to undermine the pluralism that upholds democracy itself. As far as the difference between populism and democracy are concerned, Müller makes this abundantly clear:

“One [democracy] enables majorities to authorize representatives whose actions may or may not turn out to conform to what a majority of citizens expected or would have wished for; the other [populism] pretends that no action of a populist government can be questioned, because ‘the people’ have willed it so. The one [democracy] assumes fallible, contestable judgements by changing majorities; the other [populism] imagines a homogenous entity outside all institutions whose identities and ideas can be fully represented…Finally - and most importantly - the one [democracy] takes it that ‘the people’ can never appear in a noninstitutionalised manner and, in particular, accepts that a majority…in parliament is not ‘the people’ and cannot speak in the name of the people; the other [populism] presumes precisely the opposite.”[3]

In this sense, populism is not just contra-liberalism, but contra-democracy, as populism seeks to bid farewell to the majoritarian institutional pluralism at the heart of democratic functioning. This reasserts that, within the populist logic, the very democracy populism shadows immorally acts against the very ‘people’ the populists construct as an exclusive and homogenous entity, as the sole rights bearing body with the entitlement to engage with a pre-limited political space.[4] This is not to state that populists do not wish to couch themselves in claims to democracy or pseudo-democratic rhetoric of representation, far from it; it are these claims that pry open the space from which democracy can itself be limited.

Populism is not the same as ‘people power’. Populists should be immediately distinguished from those who utilise a notion of ‘the people’ rhetorically. The dividing line concerns the democratic differentiation between democratic pluralism and populist exclusivism. As Mudde argues, the Manichean rhetorical device of populism separates society into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: (a) the (singular) pure people, and (b) the ‘elite’ that betray the pure.[5] The very clear monism of the populist categorisation of ‘the people’ lends itself to exclusion, of excluding those considered ‘impure’, in Mudde’s terms, to the category of the ‘non-people’, i.e. ‘the elite’.

 Subsequently, politicians such as Bernie Sanders, movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and theorists such as Chantal Mouffe (interestingly) would not necessarily be considered populists within this framework. This is so as in the case of Sanders and Occupy Wall Street, the rhetoric of ‘the people’ as ‘the 99%’ is not only empirically discernible, but constitutes a call to inclusion as opposed to exclusion – to include ‘the 99%’ into socio-economic concerns and systemic decisions. This is not the same as casting ‘Wall Street’ or a bourgeois capitalist class as ‘enemies of the people’ who betray a pure ‘people’ at every turn.

The case of Mouffe is far more interesting. Mouffe, once the writing partner of the late Ernesto Laclau, argues in favour of a ‘left-populism’ that she defines and conceptualises through a different framework to that of Müller or Mudde. In her terms, the notion of the ‘chain of equivalence’ -  an agonistic model of struggle in which the marginalized and disadvantaged groups of society may assemble together, as equals, in constructing a thoroughly political strategy in order to undo the hegemony that limits their existence somehow – is a mode of populism.[6] Nonetheless, due to its pluralism and inclusivity of ‘the people’, of claiming that ‘we are the people too’ and not ‘we alone are the people’, Mouffe may be labelled as a non-populist within Müller’s frame.

The notion of ‘the Elite’ has become a language game, with dual conceptualisations in operation at the same time. In traditional discourse, ‘the Elite’ implies a socio-economic upper stratum constituted of the wealthiest and most influential citizens in any given political or social system. As such, it has been rather perplexing to hear the likes of millionaires refer to others as ‘the Elite’ and themselves as somehow external to this group, as one of ‘the people’. To be perplexed by this is to misinterpret the populist conception of ‘the Elite’ as belonging to traditional discourse. Throughout ‘the populist moment’ we seem to be in the midst of, at no point have figures such as Donald Trump, Geert Wilders or Nigel Farage been publicly questioned as to how they conceptually and phenomenologically understand ‘the Elite’ if they are not part of this social grouping. To do so would uncover that, within populism, ‘the Elite’ are those with socio-political power upholding the status-quo of ‘failing’ liberal democracies and are hence not part of ‘the true people’. To not be ‘with’ the populists is to be against ‘the people’ and, as such, one of ‘the Elite’; folding back on the Manichean and puritanical construction of ‘the people’ that is a, arguably the, defining feature of the populist logic. 

Müller, overall, seeks to lay out the populist logic. Such a task characterises his project. This implies that populism is not an ideology but a reasoning, a sensibility, a rationale, that can go hand in hand with other ideologies depending on the manner in which the exclusivity of ‘the people’ is constructed. For instance: Nativism (‘natives’ as ‘the people’, against all else), Nationalism (‘nationals’ as ‘the people’, against all else), White Supremacism (‘Caucasians’ as ‘the people’, against all else), Marxism (‘the proletariat’ as ‘the people’, against all else), and so the list could go on.

The politicians of the status-quo enable the spread of populism. When debating, most ‘mainstream’ liberal politicians, irrespective of left or right leanings, cite populist leaders as intolerant demagogues, rabble-rousers or non-democratic illiberals. Following this there are two immediate potential outcomes, and two extensive effects. In the first instance, as far as immediacy is concerned, pluralists appear to turn into exclusivists, and the will to exclude the populist from the political arena serves to verify the populist’s perception that ‘the people’ are being ignored and thus betrayed by ‘the elite’.[7] Secondly, mainstream parties pander to the concerns of the populist in order to resolve internal partisan divisions or to widen their potential voter base. The best illustration of this was the 2015 widespread adoption within the British Conservative Party of the deep Euroscepticism that had led to a number of Conservative voters finding a new political home within the populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in 2013, led by Nigel Farage.[8]

To this, there are two prolonged effects. In the first case, the adoption of populist framework presents the populist parties with a monopoly over ‘what the people think’ in that their concerns are verified as a ‘truth’ – i.e. in the case of the UK, as the Conservative Party adopted its Eurosceptic stance, it became a ‘truth’ that ‘the people’ willed an exit from the European Union, and all that such an exit entailed in its discursive construction. Subsequently, the populist cat is let out of the bag and populist leaders are deemed to be the political equivalent of a psychic medium for the general will. Lastly, this shift indicates, at first, a move away from a ‘populist moment’ as support for populist parties may electorally collapse.

Nevertheless, this is only an illusion of appearances as political society has simply jumped tracks to a populist narrative. In acting like populists, in appeasing or excluding populists, the discourse drifts into a populist framework, internalising its logic. Thus, where there is a fragmented party system, and parties wish to regain votes lost to populists, there is always the ever-present danger of such a shift where populist parties free-fall into decline as mainstream parties take up their mantle. Here, populist parties become a ‘curious case of the dog in the night-time’, the curiosity being that they are nowhere to be seen yet their logic has been legitimately absorbed into the fabric of the political system.

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Seven Theses on Populism[9]

1)  Populism is neither the authentic part of modern democratic politics nor a kind of pathology caused by irrational citizens. It is a permanent shadow of representative politics. There is always the possibility for an actor to speak in the name of the ‘real people’ as a way of contesting currently powerful elites. There was no populism in Ancient Athens; demagoguery perhaps, but no populism, since the latter exists only in representative systems. Populists are not against the principle of political representation; they just insist that only they themselves are legitimate representatives.

2) Not everyone who criticises elites is a populist. In addition to being antielitist, populists are antipluralist. They claim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. When in opposition, populists will necessarily insist the elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogenous entity whose will cannot err.

3)  It can often seem that populists claim to represent the common good as willed by the people. On closer inspection, it turns out that what matters for populists is less the product of a genuine process of will formation or a common good that anyone with common sense can glean than a symbolic representation of the ‘real people’ from which the porrect policy is then deduced. This renders the political position of a populist immune to empirical refutation. Populists can always play off the ‘real people’ or ‘silent majority’ against elected representatives and the official outcome of a vote.

4)  While populists often call for referenda, such exercises are not about initiating an open-ended process of democratic will formation among citizens. Populists simply wish to be confirmed in what they have already determined the will of the real people to be. Populism is not a path to more participation in politics.

5)  Populists can govern, and they are likely to do so in line with their basic commitment to the idea that only they represent the people. Concretely, they will engage in occupying the state, mass clientism and corruption, and the suppression of anything like critical civic society. These practices find explicit moral justification in the populist political imagination and hence can be avowed openly. Populists can also write constitutions; these will be partisan or ‘exclusive’ constitutions designed to keep populists in power in the name of perpetuating some supposed original and authentic popular will. They are likely to lead to serious constitutional conflict at some point or other.

6)  Populists should be criticised for what they are – a real danger to democracy (and not just to ‘liberalism’). But that does not mean that one should not engage them in political debate. Talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists. One can take the problems they raise seriously without accepting the ways in which they frame these problems.

7)  Populism is not a corrective to liberal democracy in the sense of bringing politics ‘closer to the people’ or even reasserting popular sovereignty, as is sometimes claimed. But it can be useful in making it clear that parts of the population really are unrepresented (the lack of representation might concern interests or identity, or both). This does not justify the populist claim that only their supporters are the real people and that they are the sole legitimate representatives. Populism then should force defenders of liberal democracy to think harder about what current failures of representation might be. It should also push them to address more general moral questions. What are the criteria for belonging to a polity? Why exactly is pluralism worth preserving? And how can one address the concerns of populist voters understood as free and equal citizens, not as pathological cases of men and women driven by frustration, anger and resentment? 



[1] Quoted from: Tom Peck  (29th January 2020) ‘Nigel Farage raved about populism to EU parliament – right after an Auschwitz survivor spoke’, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-farage-brexit-auschwitz-survivor-eu-parliament-auld-lang-syne-a9308816.html (Accessed 19th May 2021).

[2] Cas Mudde (17th February 2015) ‘The Problem with Populism’, The Guardian, ww.theguardian.com/comment isfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-side-europe (Accessed 18th May 2021).

[4] For a discussion as to how the category of ‘the people’ is constructed, cast, and recast, see: Ernesto Laclau (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso.

[5] Cas Mudde (2004) ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39(4), pp.541-563, p. 543.

[6] Chantal Mouffe (2018) For a Left Populism, London: Verso; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2014) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Second Edition, London: Verso.

[7] My mind is taken to Karl Popper’s ‘Paradox of Toleration’, whereby Popper claims an open society should not tolerate the kind of intolerance that seeks to expel the very notion of tolerance from the values of political society as a whole. To defend tolerance, one must be intolerant of those who seek to rid us of tolerance altogether. See: Karl Popper (2012) The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge, p. 581. Do we have a new ‘paradox of populism’ whereby the exclusion of those groups which seek to exclude others from the political community serves only to further the likelihood of their inclusion? If exclusion leads to verification and thus further inclusion, how is the threat of the populist inclusion to be dispelled?

[8] Matthew J. Goodwin and James Dennison (2018) “The Radical Right in The United Kingdom”, in Jens Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The Radical Right, Oxford: OUP, pp. 521-544; Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin (2018) National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, London: Pelican Books.

[9] Jan-Werner Müller (2017) What is Populism? London: Penguin Books, pp. 101-103, quoted in full.