Populism

Populism is hard to define. It can be associated with both the political left and right, and, although it doesn’t sound like a pejorative term (what’s wrong with being popular?), it’s one of those terms people only used to describe others (negatively). I used to think of it as meaning “anti-elitist”, or basically something which is popular but most educated people think is stupid. But I’ve come up with something a bit clearer.

The word “democracy” can mean two somewhat contradictory things:

1. the will of the majority
2. a system of checks and balances

So ignoring the will of the people is certainly anti-democratic, but following them too freely, without letting other aspects of government put the brakes on it, is also a bad outcome. This is Plato’s critique of democracy in the Republic, and also why the authors of the Federalist Papers reject democracy in favour of “republicanism”. But when people use the term today they refer more or less to “representative” or “liberal” democracy, which attempts to mitigate these critiques in two ways: by weakening centralised power and distributing more of it to individuals, and by adding institutional roadblocks which slow down hasty decision making and encourage broader consensus.

Thus the contradiction. As an example, imagine Ruritania has elected a new president by a small but clear majority. His first act in power is to outlaw the main opposition newspaper. The Ruritanian high court tries to block this, on the basis of a general precedent allowing free speech.

Foreign media outlets accuse the Ruritanian president of “assaulting democracy” by trying to restrict free speech, which we associate with the kind of liberal environment necessary for true democracy. However, the president’s supporters argue that they, in fact, are standing up for democracy, since the will of the majority of the people is to ban this newspaper, while some latte-sipping, unelected, out-of-touch eggheads from the high court are trying to obstruct them.

This kind of conflict plays out all the time, and while this example is a clear case of liberal left vs populist right, it can easily go both ways. To take a real life example, the United States has a majority of “liberal” voters (Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once in the last thirty years), and so major areas of conflict - voter registration laws, the structure of the Senate/Electoral College/Supreme Court - tend to be expressed in terms of liberals (Democrats) arguing for the majority to be heard, and Republicans arguing for the importance of the other aspects of democracy, such as checks and balances, maintaining precedents, constitutionality, etc.

This leads to a slightly more charitable definition of populism: that there is an inherent tension in the two contradictory definitions of democracy, and that the ideal is probably a dynamic synthesis that changes over time, honouring institutional checks and balances while also being attentive to the voice of the people; and that “populism” is our term for someone who leans too far towards the latter.