Populism, liberal democracy and the ethics of peoplehood
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Author | Fabio Wolkenstein |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116677901 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(3) 330–348
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116677901
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Article
Populism, liberal democracy
and the ethics of peoplehood
Fabio Wolkenstein
Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Abstract
Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies
what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and
goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and
less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in
toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy
can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to particular discursive
norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound
up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the
people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political
justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience
than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to
exercise power in the name of the people.
Keywords
Populism, the people, liberal democracy, justification, partisanship
It is almost a commonplace to say that populism is in tension, or even incompat-
ible, with liberal democracy. Liberal democrats routinely complain that populism is
anti-pluralist, the criticism being that it opposes an ostensibly unified people to
‘small minorities who are put outside the authentic people’ and denies that political
power must be responsive to the demands of those minorities in order to be exer-
cised legitimately (Mu
¨ller, 2014: 485). In a similar vein, they charge populism with
being anti-proceduralist, the objection being that it is ‘suspicious of electoral rep-
resentation and the multiparty system’, favouring instead direct democratic mech-
anisms and other strategies that allow an unmediated relationship between the
people and government (Saffon and Urbinati, 2013: 451). These properties of popu-
lism are said to be at odds with liberal democracy’s acceptance of reasonable
Corresponding author:
Fabio Wolkenstein, Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, Frankfurt am Main
60629, Germany.
Email: wolkenstein@em.uni-frankfurt.de
disagreement and its corresponding commitment to democratic procedures that
instantiate equal respect for persons.
1
Almost equally widespread is however the intuition that some forms of populism
are less harmful to a liberal–democratic order than others. It is often said, for
example, that an inclusionary left-wing populism which opposes the ‘99 per cent’
to a small minority of exploitative capitalist elites (think Bernie Sanders or
Podemos) is more consistent with basic liberal commitments than the more exclu-
sionary right-wing populism that identifies immigrants and ethnic minorities as the
enemies of the people (think Donald Trump or Viktor Orba
´n), since it does not
target the marginalised but the powerful (cf. Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013). What
kind of normative reasoning might motivate such judgements? Or, put in another
way, what shape must populism take in order to be compatible with liberal dem-
ocracy as we know it today?
My aim in this article is to offer an answer to these questions that is different
from those that have been given so far in the literature on the topic. More par-
ticularly, I want to ask what a liberal ethics of populism might look like. To that
end, I will discuss what is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic
point of view and go on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish
between more and less legitimate forms of populism – a distinction that appears
increasingly important in light of the many different shapes populism takes in the
contemporary world.
On the face of it, the framing of the question might seem peculiar. Instinctively
we ascribe to populism a certain unruliness, not least because these are the terms in
which it presents itself. More often than not, populists are loud and shrill and make
use of divisive rhetoric; clearly they defy the liberal–democratic ‘rules of the game’.
In light of this, one might reasonably wonder whether a liberal ‘ethics of populism’
could amount to anything more than a high-minded way of saying that populism
has no place in a liberal democracy? My objective in what follows is to show that it
can. I do not simply want to dismiss populism as a whole, however problematic I
find most of its real-world expressions, but strive for a more subtle result, showing
instead that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that it con-
forms to particular discursive norms. In short, populism can be compatible with
liberal democracy, and this article will show how.
The article divides into three sections. I begin by briefly outlining what I mean
by liberal democracy, arguing for a view that sees it as fundamentally about pol-
itical justification. In the second section, I turn to what I consider the main source
of the tension between liberal democracy and populism, namely the particular
conceptions of peoplehood populist political projects turn upon. I argue that
these are deeply problematic from a liberal–democratic point of view, either legit-
imating the suspension of political justification or lacking any normative founda-
tion that could guard against contraventions of liberal justificatory norms. In the
third section, I consider the question of how the people might be articulated in a
way that is compatible with the normative demands of liberal–democratic political
justification, offering norms of what I call ‘liberal populism’ and examples indicat-
ing how populists may conform to them. As we shall see, there are indeed
Wolkenstein 331
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