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This essay takes some work (there are footnotes and things are said that may rub wrong, but there is real value in the piece.) Philip Manow writes at Eurozine, Then let’s dissolve the people ... The lede: Populists vs the elite, the elite vs populists. Apologies for the lengthy quote, but I think it's needed for the proper introduction to the essay.
Following current debates on ‘populism’, one sometimes gets the impression that it is primarily a case of upper-class individuals expressing their disgust for the lower classes. These have been ignoring advice – offered of course, with the best of intentions and for many good reasons – and voting differently: for the economically ruinous and completely irrational Leave, instead of the sensible Remain; for a troll as president instead of an experienced, serious career politician; and for a relapse into atavisms such as isolation, nationalism and xenophobia, instead of cosmopolitanism, the United States of Europe and ‘humanity’. But what to do if people don’t vote how they should? Abolish elections to save democracy – as was recently proposed by David van Reybrouck? Or simply exclude the idiots – as Jason Brennan has suggested?
For the Democrats in America, Trump’s links to Russia ought to pave the way for his impeachment, as a way of correcting the American people’s historic mistake of not electing Hillary Clinton. One sometimes wonders who is going mad here – the populists or a milieu that calls itself liberal but flirts with fantasies of tyrannicide? Maybe it is both?
Given the present debate, there is much to say for Ralf Dahrendorf’s definition of ‘populist’ as a popular term for a politician with a different opinion. If it is correct, it would essentially bring the debate to an immediate halt. Yet an alternative definition has been suggested some time ago by Jan-Werner Müller, one that almost everyone seems to be able agree on. It claims not to use the term populism as political polemic, and instead to understand it in a purely formal sense, without any substantive orientation. It focuses on populists’ claim to be the sole arbiters of truth, on their overt anti-pluralism – as when they contrast the ‘true people’ in whose name they profess to speak with the corrupt and out-of-touch elite.
For Müller, ‘populism isn’t about policy content’ but ‘always a form of identity politics’ – ‘us against them’. More precisely, it is a form of identity politics that denies its opponents’ all legitimacy. . . .
Hope everyone has a wonderful day, no matter the weather, no matter the news. Take care.