The politics of anti-populism.

Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, more than a few scholars warned that liberal democracies were threatened by the rise of populist movements. (1) Researchers' anxieties have been fuelled by data showing a world-wide deconsolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the rise of 'illiberal democracies', trends that have eroded the once stable telos of post'89 Western political science.

And it is not only scholars who have been anxious. In 2019, the Guardian ran a special series on populism which claimed to show its rapid growth across the globe. The newspaper found that the number of citizens of countries with leaders 'who are at least somewhat populist' had risen from twenty-three million in 2003 to 2.5 billion in 2019. The study ranked political leaders on a scale between 'not populist' (Tony Blair) and 'very populist' (Hugo Chavez) according to the type of political rhetoric that each leader employed; on this basis, Jair Bolsanaro and Narendra Modi both fell in between 'not populist' and 'somewhat populist'. Populism here is self-evidently taken to be a bad thing. Indeed, alongside its report, the newspaper cited comments from Barack Obama blaming populist rhetoric for a contemporary 'politics of fear and resentment' that, he claimed, would ultimately lead to authoritarianism. 'I am not being alarmist', Obama said. 'I am just stating facts'. (2)

It is common among political scientists to view an actor's use of populist language as indicative of their illiberalism. In Cas Mudde's oft-cited definition, populism refers to the expression of a general will, that of a 'pure people', which appears in contrast to a 'corrupt elite', the former of which is 'inherently hostile to the idea and institutions of liberal democracy or constitutional democracy'. (3) Yascha Mounk warns similarly that 'when populists invoke the people, they are positing an in-group... against an out-group whose interests can rightfully be disregarded. In other words, they are demarcating the boundaries of the demos, implicitly arguing that political consideration is owed to some citizens but not to others'. (4) Jan-Werner Muller makes a similar move: in his account populism is defined by its rejection of pluralism, which one can judge according to a movement's rhetoric. (5)

In this way, populism is understood as a type of political speech, one which summons the masses, or 'the people', and pits them against an elite. This, these theorists tell us, excludes minorities and thus undermines the liberal concern with pluralism as the fundamental basis of modern societies. (6) For Muller, the idea of the 'people' and the 'elite' is 'a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world' that is 'ultimately fictional'. (7) Mudde, likewise, draws a distinction between real and invalid identities when he claims that 'essential to the discourse of the populist is the normative distinction between "the elite" and "the people", not the empirical difference in behaviour or attitudes'. Mudde contends that for populists 'perceptions seem to be more important than facts'. (8) Yet there is a paradox here insofar as these scholars reject populist categories as 'ultimately fictional' or empirically inaccurate, while at the same time the very purpose of their work is to alert us to the threatening reality of such categories.

The consequences of this approach are not merely academic. Rather, the concept of populism has provided something of its own Manichean binary, in which political movements are to be judged as good or evil, liberal or authoritarian, on the basis of their rhetoric. Yet like so many concepts in our everyday social science lexicon, this idea obscures more than it reveals. Above all, understood in this way, the concept of populism has been used to designate distinctly left-wing movements as opponents of liberalism, even where the broader case for such an argument is empirically thin.

Left-wing populism

The commentary on populism has largely been concerned with its right-wing variant. Yet here a major conceptual issue arises from the extent to which we are able to distinguish right-wing populism from fascism. As Anton Jager argues, the re-encoding of fascist movements as populist by political scientists and by right-wing actors like Marine Le Pen can detract from the qualitative nature of these movements. (9) Designating left-wing parties as simply populist has the same effect. How helpful is it to lump...