10: Populism: What is it?

I began work on this series thinking this would be a straightforward account of the Christian nationalism on display on January 6, 2021. I soon discovered that it's far more challenging to collaborate with others concerning Christian nationalism because folks begin with various unexamined assumptions about nationalism, Christian nationalism, and, relatedly, White-Christian populism. Furthermore, part of the reason is that we disagree on the meanings of these concepts.

Nationalism and populism are contested terms because research has led to significant developments in our understanding of them over the last sixty years. Nationalism became a focus of study in the early 20th century. Early theorists saw it as a significant historical force, arising first in Europe and spreading globally, driving transformations of societal, political, economic, and cultural structures into modernity. Populism studies emerged seventy years ago, and its theorists saw its movements, in contrast to nationalism, as occasional, isolated, temporal, and aberrant events; they considered populist movements to be on the fringe. Because of these initial theories, nationalism and populism were seen as entirely different phenomena (Brubaker 2020:1-2). 

However, two significant shifts have caused scholars to conceive both phenomena differently. First, they no longer see either as an engine of modernity. Today, they recognize nationalism as an enduring and omnipresent feature of 21st-century nations. Similarly, the current scholarly consensus views populism as an enduring and regularly occurring feature of democracies. Second, most political theorists now see both phenomena as performative discourses or constituted by characteristic narratives, myths, and symbols by which leaders help people imagine their peoplehood (Moffitt 2019:9-25). 

Both phenomena are mixed discourses, with some emphasizing populist claims within nationalisms and others emphasizing nationalist claims within populisms (Brubaker 2020:2-6; Freeden 2016; Pappas 2019). Indeed, today's 21st-century populisms usually integrate nationalist or "civilizationist" claims (Brubaker 2017a).

What is Populism?

Like nationalism, populism is a contested term, with historians and social scientists using it to describe a host of movements across the world. One reason it is not easy to define is that few people or movements self-describe as such. Most scholars can agree on populism's illiberal dimension in which a leader claims to represent the authentic people over and against others within the polis, usually described as unscrupulous and unjust. Usually, populists describe these others as establishment "elites," but sometimes, they additionally target historically marginalized groups or minorities (Moffitt 2019:10).

Summarizing the current scholarship on populism, Takis Pappas helpfully proposed that we best comprehend 21st-century populism with a minimalist definition: populism = democratic illiberalism (Pappas 2019:33). In addition to achieving broad consensus, that minimalist definition invites us to focus on populism's two constitutive elements, democracy and illiberalism. 

Let’s briefly review those two constitutive terms.

Comparative politics theorist Adam Przeworski defines democracy minimally as "a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave office when the rules so dictate"(Przeworski et al. 2000: 54). That simple definition may surprise Westerners who routinely conflate democracy with classical liberal values. Nevertheless, the key to democracy is the location of sovereignty with the people. Karl Popper noted that democracy is "the only system in which citizens can overthrow their rulers by peaceful electoral means"(Popper 1945 in Pappas 2019:1). Populism minimally embraces democracy.

My favorite definition of liberal democracy comes from philosopher Michael Walzer, who points out that the adjectival use of "liberal" is vital: "liberal" modifies and complicates the nouns it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments" (Walzer 2023:4). That leads to Walzer's description of how liberal democrats act: "Liberal democrats will defend a state where power is constrained, where the common life is pluralist and inclusive, where the right of opposition is protected, where teachers make sure that the curiosity of children is cultivated rather than repressed, and where every man and woman is a political agent, able to join any and all meetings and movements and free to stay home—the equal of all the others"(Walzer 2023:28). 

Takis Pappis aptly and succinctly summarizes Walzer's expansive description of liberal democrats' actions. A liberal democracy is a polity that presupposes "a plurality of conflicting interests," and seeks to mitigate and resolve conflicts through a shared commitment to "commonly agreed institutions, the rule of law, and the protection of minority rights." Furthermore, if any of these three shared mutually reinforcing commitments is lacking, the polity may be democratic, but it ceases to be liberal (Pappas 2019:2). 

With these definitions in view, we can now say more about populism. Given our minimalist definition of populism as the politics of illiberal democracy, it is clear that populists compete in elections and leave office according to the rule of law. They reject at least one of liberalism's three mutually reinforcing commitments. They reject the mediation of established institutions, the rule of law, or the protection of minority rights, or perhaps multiple of these. We aptly describe political discourse as populist if (and only if) it embraces competitive elections and rejects at least one of the fundamentals of liberal democracy. 

Because populism is by definition democratic - meaning it embraces elections that it sees as conveying the sovereign people's authority, but also illiberal, it is intrinsically unstable. Like a pendulum, it swings between the poles of liberalism and autocracy. Remove its commitment to democracy, and it becomes authoritarianism; heal its illiberal ways, and liberal democracy may re-emerge. 

Pappas' minimal definition helps us recognize populism when we see it, and it also helps us define what it is not populism. Because "populism is always democratic but never liberal," movements that embody either political liberalism or nondemocratic autocracy are, by definition, not populist.

How Populism Operates

Populist movements are creations of the human imagination. Charismatic leaders are their architects.

Greek populist leader Andreas Papandreou summarized a vital distinction between liberal and populist democracy when he said, "There are no institutions - there's only the people" (cited in Pappas 2014a:28). He expressed the populist perspective well, but he was wrong. All democracies have two sides. On one side are institutions that are, by design, "impersonal, universally applicable, and characterized by continuity" (Pappas 2019: 107). On the other side is the body politic, a dynamic community constructed and shaped by competing and evolving narratives about who and what constitutes the people and where they are going.

Democracies are, like all communities, creations of the human imagination. Liberal democracies are crowd-sourced rational constructions, but charismatic leaders architect populist democracies. That is because liberalism seeks to locate political power in liberal institutions that oversee, transmit, and adjudicate general rules for communal life. In contrast, charismatic leaders create narratives through symbolic action that bypass and delegitimatize liberal institutions, promote alternative priorities, address the people's emotions rather than their reason, and defend their ethnotradition rather than prescribe detailed policies.

Populist movements grow in soil fertilized with localized mixes of "economic inequality, social injustice, and political exclusion (Pappis 2019: 109). These are "relational" and participatory grievances and not epistemic facts that can be remedied merely with institutional rationality. At stake is the people's identity and relationship to the collective. When the people do not get the love, respect, and care they believe is their due, resentment germinates. Resentment functions like race, class, religion, and language as the tie that binds individuals into a political movement. Resentment is contagious and transcends physical boundaries. When democracies undergo significant cultural and economic changes, the dysfunction or absence of needed liberal institutions becomes painfully visible. Populist entrepreneurs pounce on the grievances that result, gathering people into a political movement where the tie that binds is their resentment. 

Charismatic leaders construct a new populist group identity through symbolic action that names the causes of shared resentment and promises deliverance. Populist "entrepreneurs" construct populist discourses not with policy prescriptions but with symbolic actions, metaphors, and slogans that address voters at the emotional rather than the rational level. Charismatic leaders' chief method is to frame the existence that generates resentment in such a way that it enables individuals to organize and articulate emotions about their situation. Simple framing, constantly repeated, voices, validates and mobilizes anger. It inspires individuals to see themselves as part of a movement demanding change and united behind their populist leaders.

Populist leaders speak on behalf of "the people," a concept ambiguously denoting ordinary working-class people, a discrete group that sees itself as the state's constituting community, or all its citizens. Populists speak against those above - and sometimes below - "the people." This vertical dimension describing "the people" as threatened by internal elites above and other internal groups below is the essential feature of populist politics (Berman 2021; Brubaker 2017a; Hawkins et al., 2017; Margalit 2019, Smith 2020). This is why populist discourse is always illiberal.

At the same time, populists speak against economic, political, and cultural threats outside the polity. This horizontal "us" and "them" opposition is the nationalist dimension by which peoplehood narratives describe who counts as a member. Today's populists typically portray elites as outsiders who are also "on top" of the people (Brubaker 2017a; Brubaker 2017b; Brubaker 2020; Margalit 2019). 

Sociologist Rogers Brubaker conceives this fundamental element of populism as a "two-dimensional discursive space" (Brubaker 2020:56; Brubaker 2017a). The vertical dimension reflects the populist account of the distribution of "power, wealth, [and] institutionally consecrated prestige." The horizontal dimension reflects the nationalist "inside-outside" account of the polity, with internal insiders, "internal outsiders," and "external outsiders." "The people" and their legitimate (populist) leaders are the insiders. "Othered" groups of low power or prestige and (hypocritical, uncaring, out-of-touch) elites are internal outsiders. 

Low prestige groups may be othered for ethnoracial, cultural, or moral reasons. Populists often marginalize non-elites who possess wealth, power, and prestige due to their lifestyle, gender, or sexual identity. These groups are internal outsiders, meaning that populists acknowledge their technical membership within the polis but exclude them from "the people" due to low prestige or social marginalization. External outsiders include non-elite ethnocultural migrants or refugees, "global capital, cosmopolitan culture, [and] powerful outside states or organizations" (Brubaker 2020:56).

Populists claim to speak for "the people" and bi-vocally against the "elites" and "outsiders" who threaten them. As the 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump remind us, populist politics are phenomena we see on the Left and the Right. What distinguishes them is not their form but their substance. Their two-dimensional narrative that locates elites above and outside "the people" renders their politics populist.

The People, the Elite, and Outsiders

If populism is democratic illiberalism, it also could reasonably be described as the claim that political sovereignty arises from, for, and is exercised by "the people" and not from, for, or by mediating institutions or those outside "the people." Restating the concept of populism this way helpfully sets our eyes on a related concept: "the people." Populism conceives "the people" in ways detrimental to the interests of liberal democracy.

"The people" is a dynamic, contingent social construct, not an ontological reality. Better put, its reality is a social and temporal construction. "The people" do not preexist. The discourse they respond to, self-identifying with its claims, gathers them into a single indivisible people who see themselves as the exclusive owners of the nation's history and, therefore, as the "ultimate deciders" in whom the nation's sovereignty rests. As individuals, they are diverse, but populist discourse constructs a fictional and fluid homogeneity that claims precedence over all "outside" its union (Freeden 2016:4).

Much of that is true about the group the people oppose, "the elite," or, sometimes, "the establishment." Both groups are social constructions with fluid and flexible memberships. The "elite" - often including elected officials, the courts, legislators, law enforcement, scholars, and the media - are those responsible for abandoning, disrespecting, and incompetently serving "the people."

A person is not populist; a political style or discourse is. Populism is an attribute of the discourse that generates "insiders" and "outsiders" in a person's political imaginary, inspiring them to identify as "insiders." Because populism is an attribute of a discourse, leaders perform it through symbolic words and actions.

Populism, like Christianity, is a performative discourse that generates and connects communities. Within that discourse, charismatic leaders draw upon a repertoire of symbolic language and actions to construct a significant following who see themselves as the authentic people in whom sovereignty is vested, to distance themselves from other elites to disrespect establishment norms that offend "the people," to transform institutional failures into crises and to convey threats of action that will follow if establishment leaders do not meet "the people's" demands.

Pappas names four fundamental claims populist movements make about those they denote as "the people": their ability to act as a political majority, their putatively homogeneous and native character, their shared oppression by "impersonal institutions," and their superior moral authority. These claims are not incompatible with democracy (etymologically, demokratia means the demos (people) kraiten (rule). However, these claims contradict fundamental principles of modern liberal democracy learned through reflection on the tragedies of World War II: averting what James Madison called "the tyranny of the majority," encouraging fruitful coexistence of multiple peoples within a polis, safeguarding institutional checks and balances by prioritizing them above self-interests; and pursuing the common welfare peacefully rather than resolving conflict by violent assertion of group or individual rights (Pappas 2019:33).

How to Recognize Populist Discourse 

Rogers Brubaker suggests we conceive common populist forms with the metaphor of repertoire (Brubaker 2017b:7-10). He names six elements that characterize populist politics, emphasizing that their populist aspect may be recognizable due to general or granular similarities. Not all movements exhibit all features; the blend of multiple elements makes such political styles populist. 

The populism repertoire features recurring elements that elaborate the vertical opposition between "the people" and the elite and the horizontal opposition between inside and outside. Brubaker names five elements. 

The first is "antagonistic re-politicization," in which the movement re-asserts the people's control over matters seen to be controlled by elites (Brubaker 2017b:14). For example, claims that the Supreme Court controls women's health through judicial regulation of abortion or unaccountable administrative agencies create unbearable regulatory burdens have triggered movements on the Left and Right to re-politicize those matters by returning them to legislative branches of the state and federal governments, respectively. 

The second is "majoritarianism," enforcing the majority's will against minorities, challenging benefits, practices, and recognition of minority, marginalized, and elite groups (Brubaker 2017b:15). Examples include populist movements against affirmative action programs, the failure to reduce the flow of immigrants, and the bailouts of central banks. 

The third characteristic feature is "Anti-institutionalism." Populist movements commonly doubt and discredit established institutions that serve mediating functions (Brubaker 2017b:16). Sometimes, their skepticism targets their own party's established order, as happened with Trump's takeover of the Republican party and with Progressive's efforts to control the Democrat party's platform. In recent years, we have witnessed populist efforts to discredit the Justice Department, the FBI, and the press. 

Fourth, populists practice "protectionism." They promise to protect "the people" from all enemies, foreign and domestic, which translates into policy commitments that seek to insulate "the people" from economic, security, and cultural threats to their ways of life (Brubaker 2017b:17). Examples include promises to impose retaliatory tariffs on China, to stop all immigration flows from the U.S. southern borders, and to halt federal critical race theory training. 

The fifth element of populist politics is the strategic use of a "low" communication style that deliberately transgresses the "high" rhetorical and behavioral norms of the established order to convey the populist's proximity to the people, provoke elites, and attract attention (Brubaker 2017b:18). Trump's performative vulgarity, rejection of political correctness, and conspicuous crudity epitomize the populist politics of contrast through a "low" communications style. 

Why Populism Ebbs and Flows

Brubaker notes three elements of populist discourse that render it "self-limiting." He dubs the first "poaching." Other political agents readily and commonly appropriate populist styles and substance. Sometimes, this is by allies, and the movement carries on. However, sometimes, it is done by opponents who combat populist politics by co-opting its themes and prescriptions, effectively robbing the populist movement of oxygen.

Second, other political agents can successfully oppose populist crises with "non-crisis." That is, they declare that the issue populists describe as a crisis is not a crisis at all and can be addressed within established institutions and ways of being. Since populist movements depend on sustained crisis psychology for their political energy, they are self-limited by their capacity to persuade the public that the sky is falling. 

Third, populist leaders depend on the public's "enchantment," their capacity to sustain the trust that they represent the people exceptionally better than elites even after being entrusted with the power to fulfill their promises (Brubaker 2017b:41-44). 

Populism ebbs and flows because, as with any discourse, people respond. Opponents co-opt, establishment leaders defuse crises, and empowered populists struggle to deliver once empowered. Populist moments pass. It’s crucial to take them seriously, but equally important to expect them to give way to moments of peace, stability, and prosperity once their stimuli have been addressed.

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References

Berman, Sheri. 2021. “The Causes of Populism in the West.” Annual Review of Political Science 24: 71–88.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2017a. “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (8): 1191–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700.

———. 2017b. “Why Populism?” Theory and Society 46 (5): 357–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7.

———. 2020. “Populism and Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 26 (1): 44–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12522.

Freeden, Michael. 2017. “After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2016.1260813.

Hawkins, Kirk, Madeleine Read, and Teun Pauwels. 2017. “Populism and Its Causes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, 267–86. Oxford University Press Oxford.

Margalit, Yotam. 2019. “Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33 (4): 152–70. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.4.152.

Przeworski, Adam. 2010. Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Rogers. 2017. “America’s Case of Forgotten Identity.” Boston Review (blog). June 12, 2017. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/rogers-m-smith-national-identity/.

Smith, Rogers M. 2015. Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities. Reprint edition. University of Chicago Press.

———. 2020. That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood. Yale University Press.

Walzer, Michael. 2023. The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective. Yale University Press.