<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Nick Buxton</strong> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nick@tni.org">nick@tni.org</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 11:24 PM<br>Subject: Re: [Authoritarian-working-group] Populism Isn't The Problem | Boston Review<br>To: <a href="mailto:authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org">authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org</a> <<a href="mailto:authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org">authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org</a>><br></div><br><br>
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<p>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)<br>
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<div class="m_-1735375804825026966moz-cite-prefix">On 02/09/18 04:12, Firoze Manji wrote:<br>
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<a href="http://bostonreview.net/politics/jason-frank-populism-not-the-problem" target="_blank">http://bostonreview.net/politics/jason-frank-populism-not-the-problem</a><br>
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<h1 class="m_-1735375804825026966title" style="font-size:1.95552em;line-height:1.2141em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0.5em;max-width:100%">Populism
Isn't The Problem</h1>
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<div style="margin:0px;max-width:100%;font-size:1em!important;display:inline!important">August 15, 2018</div>
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<p style="max-width:100%">Aug 15,
2018</p>
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<p style="max-width:100%"> <em style="max-width:100%">Image: A 1896
cartoon shows William Jennings Bryan as a populist
snake swallowing the Democratic party mule/<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bryan,_Judge_magazine,_1896.jpg" style="color:rgb(65,110,210);max-width:100%" target="_blank">Wikimedia
Commons</a>.</em> </p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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. </p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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 <a style="color:rgb(65,110,210);max-width:100%"><em style="max-width:100%">How
Democracies Die</em></a> (2018), Yascha Mounk’s
<em style="max-width:100%">The People vs.
Democracy</em> (2018), William Galston’s <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228922/anti-pluralism" style="color:rgb(65,110,210);max-width:100%" target="_blank"><em style="max-width:100%">Anti-Pluralism:
The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy</em></a>
(2018), and so on—reveal a widely shared thesis. As
Jan-Werner Müller, one of the <a href="http://bostonreview.net/politics/jan-werner-muller-populism" style="color:rgb(65,110,210);max-width:100%" target="_blank">most eloquent
advocates</a> of the populist thesis, wrote in <em style="max-width:100%">What is
Populism? </em>(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.”</p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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?</p>
<p style="max-width:100%">As Roger Cohen
argued in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/opinion/populism-language-meaning.html" style="color:rgb(65,110,210);max-width:100%" target="_blank">recent <em style="max-width:100%">New York Times</em>
op-ed</a>, 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.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">The blanket
accusation of populism polices the boundaries of
‘politics as usual’ and the parameters of
legitimate and reasonable political speech.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
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<p style="max-width:100%">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.”</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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:</p>
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<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
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<p style="max-width:100%">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 <em style="max-width:100%">What is
Populism?</em> Müller somewhat awkwardly concedes
that the “one party in U.S. history that explicitly
called itself ‘populist’ was in fact not populist.”</p>
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<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">Defenders of
democracy cannot surrender the authority of the
people without undermining the very goal they
claim to be fighting for.</p>
<u></u>
<p style="max-width:100%">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. </p>
<p style="max-width:100%">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.</p>
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<pre class="m_-1735375804825026966moz-signature" cols="72">--
-----------------------------------------------------
NICK BUXTON
Futures Lab/Communications/Online Learning
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skype: nickbuxton
w: <a class="m_-1735375804825026966moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.tni.org" target="_blank">www.tni.org</a>
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Read my latest book, The Secure and the Dispossessed (November 2015)
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