[P2P-F] Fwd: [Authoritarian-working-group] Populism Isn't The Problem | Boston Review

Tue Sep 4 08:48:26 CEST 2018

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From: Nick Buxton <nick at tni.org>
Date: Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 11:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Authoritarian-working-group] Populism Isn't The Problem |
Boston Review
To: authoritarian-working-group at lists.tni.org <
authoritarian-working-group at lists.tni.org>

Thanks for forwarding Firoze. Am forwarding to others who were involved in
some of TNI's discussions on this last year. Very good piece and
interesting on the US history of the term (Farmers Alliance)

On 02/09/18 04:12, Firoze Manji wrote:

http://bostonreview.net/politics/jason-frank-populism-not-the-problem

Populism Isn't The Problem
August 15, 2018

Aug 15, 2018

*Image: A 1896 cartoon shows William Jennings Bryan as a populist snake
swallowing the Democratic party mule/Wikimedia Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bryan,_Judge_magazine,_1896.jpg>.*

The concepts we use to frame our understanding of the political world are
always implicated in the politics they purport to describe. They bring
certain aspects of a political context into clear view while obscuring or
concealing others entirely. For example, when advocates of the U.S.
Constitution proclaimed themselves “Federalists” and labelled their
opponents “Antifederalists,” they not only understated their own commitment
to the consolidation of national power, they shifted the frame of the
political debate towards appropriate institutional forms and away from
post-revolutionary social conflicts between commercial elites and the newly
enfranchised popular classes.

This is a recurring theme in politics, but the nature of language and its
relation to politics becomes particularly vivid—and urgent—in periods of
crisis, when newly emergent political forms challenge “politics as usual”
as well as the concepts we use to navigate that familiar terrain. These are
periods that require us to be more reflective about the political
categories we rely on: what they reveal and what they conceal.

The charge of populism does not just muddy our understanding of critiques
of the establishment. It inhibits our engagement with the deeper causes of
democratic decline.

So it is with “populism,” the go-to term for scholars and journalists alike
to describe the emergent authoritarianisms of our time and the dangers they
pose to liberal democracy. It is hard to keep track of the growing raft of
conferences, symposia, books, and op-eds dedicated to explaining populism’s
role in hastening democratic decline. The consonant titles—Steven Levitsky
and Daniel Ziblatt’s *How Democracies Die* (2018), Yascha Mounk’s *The
People vs. Democracy* (2018), William Galston’s *Anti-Pluralism: The
Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy*
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228922/anti-pluralism> (2018), and
so on—reveal a widely shared thesis. As Jan-Werner Müller, one of the most
eloquent advocates
<http://bostonreview.net/politics/jan-werner-muller-populism> of the
populist thesis, wrote in *What is Populism? *(2000), “The danger to
democracies today is not some comprehensive ideology that systematically
denies democratic ideals. The danger is populism—a degraded form of
democracy that promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals.”

For Müller and other prominent advocates of the populist thesis (we can add
David Frum and Cas Mudde to the above list), populism brings into focus the
common danger posed to democracy by such disparate leaders as Trump and
Chavez, Orbán and Morales, Erdoğan and López Obrador, and such disparate
political movements and parties as Podemos and the Tea Party, Syriza and
Alternative for Germany, the Five Star Movement and the National Front. But
what do we make of a concept that can unite such ideologically polarized
leaders, movements, and parties?

As Roger Cohen argued in a recent *New York Times* op-ed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/opinion/populism-language-meaning.html>,
not much. He urged fellow commentators to drop the term because it has
“become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for
multiple manifestations of political anger.” The problem, however, is not
simply ambiguity or the dismissive laziness of metropolitan elites who
can’t seem to work up the energy to find more precise terms “to describe
current political phenomenon.” The problem is not just conceptual
imprecision so much as it is political obfuscation. The charge of populism
does not just muddy our understanding of the particular claims made by
antiestablishment leaders and movements, it inhibits our engagement with
the more longstanding and persistent causes of democratic decline.

The blanket accusation of populism polices the boundaries of ‘politics as
usual’ and the parameters of legitimate and reasonable political speech.

The charge of populism tells us at least as much about those making the
charge as it does about their opponents, and in contemporary political
contexts the inherent ambiguity of populism assumes clear polemical meaning
when articulated from the embattled position of a once-hegemonic
liberalism. The blanket accusation of populism polices the boundaries of
“politics as usual” and the parameters of legitimate and reasonable
political speech. Advocates of the populist thesis emphasize its
authoritarian dangers while quietly pushing off stage the more enduring and
structural sources of democratic decline such as the dramatic and growing
inequalities of wealth and power that have defined the era of global
neoliberalism, the marketization of once public goods and steady erosion of
procedures of democratic accountability, and the unfettered role of money
in political life that further guarantees the ongoing intensification of
these processes. These more enduring sources of democratic decline—and the
resulting dynamic devolution Antonio Gramsci elegantly termed,
“catastrophic equilibrium”—have arguably led to the emergence of these
authoritarian movements in the first place. The term populism conveniently
facilitates this evasion.

Roger Cohen is not alone. Most discussions of populism begin by noting the
inherent ambiguity of the term, which led Richard Hofstadter, one of
American populism’s greatest historians and critics, to title a 1967
conference paper, “Everyone is talking about populism—but no one can define
it.” While most agree on populism’s ideological flexibility, the consensus
falls apart around what distinguishes populism from other forms of
politics. Is it a particular form of party organization and electoral
mobilization, or is it a social movement and example of contentious
politics? Is it a style of political rhetoric, or is it a coherent, albeit
“thin-centered,” ideology? With all of the disagreement, it is not
surprising that the most influential theorist of populism—the late Ernesto
Laclau—placed ambiguity at its very center and argued that populist reason
is equivalent to the logic of the “empty signifier.”

Populism entered the English language to describe a political movement born
of struggle against the oligarchic economic and political order of
the first Gilded Age.

Populism’s inherent ambiguity helps explain the often vague or catch-all
use of the term in contemporary discussions, but more reflective accounts
usually recognize that populism, while ideologically flexible, is not
completely open. Populism is a discourse organized around a clear set of
normative commitments. Most obviously, populism emerges from a commitment
to popular sovereignty, to the modern legitimating idea that the people are
the ultimate ground of public authority and that political appeal to that
authority can transcend the formal institutions of democratic
representation. Advocates of the populist thesis emphasize the populist
claim to speak on behalf of a morally pure and unitary people against the
ruling power of a corrupted and unrepresentative elite. The idea that the
popular will can be identified beyond the institutions of the
constitutional state sets the condition for populist leaders to claim the
sole mantle of popular authority against all competing political factions.
The central claim of populism, we are often told, is that only some of the
people really are “the People” and that it is the populist leader who acts
on their behalf.

This fundamental claim engenders the illiberal democracy associated with
populism and its rejection of basic elements of democratic pluralism. In
power, populist appeals to absolute popular authority leads to the
rejection of the separation of powers, judicial independence, legitimate
political opposition, and other informal and formal norms of liberal
constitutionalism. The personalization of politics, these commentators
often argue, is not an accident of populism but essential to it, because it
is only through the crusading populist leader that the people’s will can
wreak its vengeance on the corrupted ruling elite and restore power to the
people themselves.

When considering this familiar portrait of populism and the dangers it
poses to democracy, it is worth remembering that populism entered the
English language to describe a nineteenth-century political movement born
of struggle against the oligarchic economic and political order of the
United States’s first Gilded Age. Twenty years before the People’s Party
and William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896
Democratic National Convention, the Farmers’ Alliance served as the
egalitarian heart of U.S. populism. Throughout the 1880s, hundreds of
thousands of men and women participated in this interlacing and explicitly
non-hierarchical network of cooperative organizations, which were active in
forty-three states and territories. Far from a Caesarist politics of
authoritarian personalism, U.S. populism was, as Lawrence Goodwyn writes:

first and most centrally, a cooperative movement that imparted a sense of
self-worth to individual people and that provided them with the instruments
of self-education about the world they lived in. The movement gave them
hope—a shared hope—that they were not impersonal victims of a gigantic
industrial engine ruled by others but that they were, instead, people who
could perform specific acts of self-determination.

This populist experimentation with new democratic forms—and the sustained
effort to understand and collectively address the impoverished conditions
of their lives—defines U.S. populism’s radical democratic realism. The
struggle to generate democratic power outside the established institutions
of governance and to build a “cooperative commonwealth” gave birth to the
concept of populism—an origins story that is erased in our contemporary
preoccupations with “populism and democratic decline.” Indeed, in *What is
Populism?* Müller somewhat awkwardly concedes that the “one party in U.S.
history that explicitly called itself ‘populist’ was in fact not populist.”

The point, however, is not to resolve the semantic ambiguity of populism by
appealing to the authority of original meanings. Instead, while taking
orientation from that history, we should examine how the charge of populism
operates in contemporary political debates, especially the dangers to
democracy it brings to light and those it conceals.

Defenders of democracy cannot surrender the authority of the people without
undermining the very goal they claim to be fighting for.

By focusing on populism as the primary source of democratic decline, the
economic and political developments that have most profoundly undermined
democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic citizenship over the
past forty years are obscured. Worse, populism has become the name given
willy-nilly to all movements challenging these developments on behalf of a
recovered sense of collective authority and political control, whether
articulated from a racist and xenophobic right or a radically egalitarian
left. Authoritarian attempts to centralize and expand the state’s executive
power and wield it against “enemies of the people”—however defined by
Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others—should never be equated with the
radically democratic institutional experimentalism of Podemos or the
Farmers’ Alliance. More attention should be paid to how “the people” is
envisioned by these different movements, and how they propose popular power
to be democratically enacted.

Designating populism as the term that best encapsulates the political
dangers authoritarianism poses to democratic politics in so many parts of
the world today has the additional and unfortunate consequence of
suggesting that widespread resistance to these movements should not itself
be populist, should not claim the mantle of “we the people” and engage in
an antagonistic politics of who we are and what kind of collective power we
should wield. This political movement need not recover and rally around the
term populism—democratic socialism is also enjoying a new day in the
sun—but it should openly recognize that a return to “politics as usual” may
be insufficient to confront the full extent of the dangers democracies
currently face. Defenders of democracy cannot surrender the authority of
the people without undermining the very goal they claim to be fighting for.

-- 
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Futures Lab/Communications/Online Learning

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e: nick at tni.org
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skype: nickbuxton
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