Everyone gets called a populist. So what is populism?

Five terms to hold

Müller’s argument relies on five concepts. Each is defined here before it is used.

Act 1 · The confusion

Is there a “there” there?

In 1967, a large conference at the London School of Economics set out to define populism. Its participants could not agree — and, Müller notes, we still cannot.

Observers disagree, too, about the danger. Liberals fear voters with illiberal views; some democratic theorists fear government by experts who answer to no one. For them populism may even be a corrective: Cas Mudde calls it an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.

Benjamin Arditi compares populism to a drunken guest at a dinner party: rude, but perhaps blurting out an awkward truth — that liberal democracy has forgotten its founding ideal, the sovereignty of the people.

The word also changes meaning across the Atlantic. In the United States, populist mostly describes an egalitarian, left-wing politics. In Europe, populism is understood as the opposite of liberalism.

Act 2 · Four dead ends

Four ways not to define populism.

Before defining populism himself, Müller tests four common definitions. Each leads nowhere.

Dead end 1: bad policy

One approach equates populism with irresponsible policy. Some policies are hard to defend: Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro fought inflation by sending soldiers to put lower price stickers on goods. But irresponsible by which values? The label can replace debate.

Dead end 2: social class

A second approach looks at voters. In Europe, right-wing populist voters do tend to earn less and to have less education. But successful citizens vote for these parties too (I made it — why can’t they?), and in France and Austria they have become catch-all parties.

Dead end 3: psychology

A third approach explains populism by voters’ emotions: fear, anger, resentment. Müller replies that this refuses to engage with their arguments — echoing nineteenth-century elites who thought the masses too emotional to be given the vote.

Dead end 4: self-labels

A fourth approach starts from movements that called themselves populist, such as the Russian narodniki or the American People’s Party. But a name is not a definition: nobody defines socialism by the Nazis’ use of the word.

Act 3 · The logic

The core claim: only we represent the people.

Now Müller’s own definition. Populism is a moralistic way of imagining politics: a morally pure, united — but fictional — people set against elites who are corrupt. Two criteria follow.

First criterion: populists are anti-elitist. This is necessary but not sufficient — otherwise everyone who criticised the powerful would be a populist.

Second criterion, the decisive one: populists are anti-pluralist. In Müller’s words, they claim that they, and only they, represent the people.

It follows that rivals must be corrupt and that opposition cannot be legitimate. Citizens who do not support the populists may not belong to the true people at all: as Claude Lefort put it, the real people must first be extracted from the actual citizens.

Only some of the people are the people.

At his 1963 inauguration as governor of Alabama, the segregationist George Wallace claimed to speak for the greatest people — as if the white South were the real America. Müller calls this racism; what made it populist was the claim to speak for the true people alone.

In 2016, Nigel Farage hailed the Brexit vote as a victory for real people — implying that the 48 percent who voted to remain were less real, and less fully members of the community.

Donald Trump made the same move at a 2016 rally: the people should unite, he said, because the other people don’t mean anything.

Ancient Rome shows where the line falls. Fighting for the common people, the plebs, is not populism. Claiming that only the plebs are the Roman people is.

The people can mean everyone in the political community, the common people, or the nation. Populism takes one part and presents it as the whole.

How the line gets drawn.

Who counts as the real people? Often, those who work: the hardworking people against an elite that does no real work.

Right-wing populists add a target at the bottom, and claim the elite above and marginal groups below are allies against the people in the middle. Andrew Jackson’s followers opposed both aristocrats and Native Americans; American birthers cast Barack Obama as both elite and outsider; Hungary’s Jobbik party likens politician crime to crime it attributes to the Roma.

The line need not be ethnic. And not every anti-pluralist is a populist: Leninists reject pluralism but never saw the people as morally pure.

Act 4 · The consequences

The “real people” versus the actual vote.

Populists are not against representation — only against other representatives. And if the common good is obvious, there is nothing to debate: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán refused to debate before the 2010 and 2014 elections.

If populists alone represent the people, defeat means the institutions failed. After losing in 2002, Orbán declared that the nation cannot be in opposition; after losing in 2006, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the right’s victory morally impossible. Geert Wilders called the Dutch parliament a fake parliament; Donald Trump called the system rigged.

Conspiracy theories follow: if a result contradicts the people’s true will, something must have happened behind the scenes.

Between the world wars, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt imagined a people beyond all political forms. His opponent Hans Kelsen replied that no single popular will can be known: we can only verify election results.

Referendums, contracts, mandates.

Unlike Rousseau’s general will, which requires citizens to take part, the populist deduces the people’s will from who the real people supposedly are.

So a populist referendum is not meant to start a debate. It ratifies what the leader has already decided — populism without participation.

Populists also sign contracts with the people, as Silvio Berlusconi did, treating the people’s will as an imperative mandate. But the politicians wrote the terms themselves — and when things go wrong, they can say: We did exactly what you wanted.

Cutting out the middlemen.

A populist leader need not be charismatic or an outsider: Wilders and Orbán have spent their whole adult lives in parliament. What matters is a sense of direct connection with supporters.

Parties, journalists and institutions are bypassed as distorting middlemen. Nadia Urbinati calls this direct representation: Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement grew out of his blog; Trump spoke to supporters on Twitter.

Such parties are run by one leader. Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV) has exactly two members: Wilders, and a foundation whose only member is Wilders.

Finale

Isn’t everyone a populist, then?

Don’t all politicians claim to speak for the people? Yes — but democrats offer such claims as fallible hypotheses that election results can disprove. A populist’s claim is moral, not empirical, so nothing can disprove it, and institutions that disagree become enemies.

Democrats accept, in Jürgen Habermas’s phrase, that the people appears only in the plural.

Populism, then, is not a psychology, a class, a policy or a style, but a specific claim in recognisable language — which can be measured, so a politician can be more or less populist.