This tweet caught my attention awhile back and really made me stop and think. Something I feel like I haven’t done enough of lately, at least in a different way than I normally think about things I read.
Gérard Araud is a former French Ambassador to the US, the UN, and Israel.
It would be a mistake to consider that populism is just rhetoric to win elections. It is indeed a different way of doing politics. It is, in particular, the aggressive negation of everything that founds liberal democracy.
The part of the quote that really made me ponder is the last sentence — “the aggressive negation of everything that founds liberal democracy.”
I’ve always thought of populism as relatively benign; it’s about supporting people, and I’m for that.
Definition of populist
(Entry 1 of 2)
1: a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people
especially, often capitalized : a member of a U.S. political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies
2: a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people
Well, wouldn’t you know it, I really didn’t know that much about it and it’s not as benign as it seems. Then again, maybe I did without recognizing the link between a populist campaign and the possible danger to democracy.
Sen. Sanders is a populist candidate who has campaigned the last 5 years in the classic definition highlighted above. One of my frustrations with his stump speeches, rhetoric, and language is that I feared it would create a big group of voters who became cynical with democracy when they didn’t get what he’s telling them they can have simply by electing him. I thought it was a problem with him, not a populism problem.
Here are some better definitions that are more in line with what Amb. Araud was saying.
In its contemporary understanding, however, populism is most often associated with an authoritarian form of politics. Populist politics, following this definition, revolves around a charismatic leader who appeals to and claims to embody the will of the people in order to consolidate his own power. In this personalized form of politics, political parties lose their importance, and elections serve to confirm the leader’s authority rather than to reflect the different allegiances of the people. In the second half of the 20th century, populism came to be identified with the political style and program of Latin American leaders such as Juan Perón, Getúlio Vargas, and Hugo Chávez. Populist is often used pejoratively to criticize a politician for pandering to a people’s fear and enthusiasm. Depending on one’s view of populism, a populist economic program can therefore signify either a platform that promotes the interest of common citizens and the country as a whole or a platform that seeks to redistribute wealth to gain popularity, without regard to the consequences for the country such as inflation or debt.
www.britannica.com/...
Populism is a style of politics used to mobilize mass movements against ruling powers. Populists claim to speak for ordinary people, taking an "us versus them" stance. Its leaders have used rhetoric that stirs up anger, floated conspiracy theories, pushed the distrust of experts, promoted nationalism and demonized outsiders. Populism has become a recurring political theme in American politics and has inspired political reform, but has also been used to direct the hostilities of angry citizens to straw men.
www.history.com/...
The History.com article lists some American populists, which is helpful to understanding what a populist campaign looks like. They include William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Bernie Sanders, and the traitor.
To be clear, I don’t think that Sen. Sanders would lead our country in as damaging a way as the current occupant. However, by running a campaign short on details, a history of not willing to accept compromise, and setting high expectations, his imagined administration could be a disaster and lead to all sorts of problems.
To learn more about the risks of populism based on the past few decades, then this article from The Atlantic is well worth the read. It’s even one of their shorter articles. They gathered data from 66 peer reviewed political journals to analyze the impact of populist leaders on their democracies. The information they gathered is helpful to understand the risks of populists and populism for a mainstream audience versus an academic audience.
Ultimately, we identified 46 populist leaders or political parties that have been in power across 33 democratic countries between 1990 and today, giving us the ability to settle the theoretical debate about the tension between populism and democracy in a rigorous, empirical way, on a global scale, for the first time. The results were alarming: Populists are highly skilled at staying in power and pose an acute danger to democratic institutions.
www.theatlantic.com/...
Draining the swamp? Think again.
But far from draining the swamp, most populists have, as the economist Barry Eichengreen put it, simply replaced the mainstream’s alligators with even more deadly ones of their own. In fact, we found that 40 percent of populist heads of government are ultimately indicted for corruption. Since many populists amass sufficient power to hamper independent investigations into their conduct, it is likely that this figure actually underestimates the full extent of their malfeasance.
The article was written in December 2018, and I’m not sure if the authors would write such an encouraging closing now, based on the events of even the past 6 months.
...it is as yet unclear how easily the experience of past populist governments, which have mostly been concentrated in middle-income countries with some recent experience of authoritarian rule, will translate to rich countries with long democratic traditions. Thanks to the strength of its civil society and the widespread commitment to constitutional order, the United States, for example, may prove better able to withstand a populist president.
Finally, averages say little about individual cases. Citizens of countries that are governed by authoritarian populists should certainly be concerned that similar governments have eroded checks and balances in a large number of cases. But that is a reason to fight rather than a reason to grow fatalistic.
There you have it, I may have now given you something to think about; sorry, and/or you’re welcome!