Power to which people?

A monograph on the nature of populism.

In this, the season of Festivus, let us air our grievances about the politics of grievance. Let us consider how a movement of the people, by the people, and for the people can somehow omit all the people who disagree with them, or just look different. Let us discuss how left and right don’t seem to matter nearly as much as democracy and its alternative. But, first, let us begin at the beginning:

The core principle of representative democracy is that our government rules with the consent of the people. It is not an outside entity that imposes its will upon us. Rather, it is created and legitimized by our will.

Even when the government is chosen by the narrowest majority, or a mere plurality, it must serve the good of all. Given this, it should be no surprise that politicians describe themselves as representing the people. That is literally their job, so emphasizing it is an obvious bit of campaign rhetoric.

In small doses, this appeal to populism is just that: rhetoric. Everyone does it and it doesn’t mean much. In heavy doses, it becomes something else. It is no longer a flavoring added to spice up boring politics as usual but instead turns into a tongue-searing dish of its own, where the main ingredient is grievance, and serving the good of all is no longer on the menu.

Populism is the ideological framework that contrasts The People, who are inherently good, against the corrupt elite. The central conceit is of a Manichean battle that the righteous are destined to win yet are unjustly, albeit temporarily, deprived of their due sovereignty by the crooked establishment and their “rigged” system. They deserve to be in charge because their hearts are pure and their cause is just, so anything that stands in their way isn’t merely political opposition, it is evil.

When populists speak of The People, they never mean all the people, just the clean ones, the pure ones, the Herrenvolk. They’re the extraordinarily ordinary folks who actually matter. They’re the salt of the earth from the heartland, not coastal elites: neither overwashed nor overeducated. They aren’t pretentious; they work for their money and just know what’s right without overthinking it.

You’ll recognize them easily because they look just like you, not like the others; the outsiders who need hyphens to distinguish them from the norm, such as African-Americans. No, they’re the Unhyphenated-Americans; the real Americans. They’re the default that Central Casting provides when you don’t specify an ethnic.

Populism favors this dominant group, believing that it’s not quite dominant enough, not like it should be, not like in the good old days, when “those people” knew their place and life was easy if you were lucky enough to be born into the right station. In America, this means that it is invariably white-centered, if not necessarily white supremacist. It is anti-anti-racist, if not always racist. Except when it’s just plain white supremacist and racist, which is often.

Populism is white grievance politics with an anti-establishment bent, so The People they mean are white people, particularly the ones whose whiteness is unimpaired by the lack of a penis or the presence of an uncommon sexual orientation or identity. No matter what their rhetoric says, no matter how loudly or frequently they say otherwise, no matter what their spokesmodels look like, the actions of populists do not oppose systemic bigotry.

(More precisely, populism supports the locally-dominant identity group. In places like America and Europe, this means white people. In other places, it means other groups, but never the ones on the receiving end of systemic bigotry. For example, Erdoğan’s right-populist regime in Turkey is centered on ethnic Turks while while oppressing groups like the Kurds and gays.)

Populist leaders portray themselves as no ordinary politicians, but rather the authentic outsiders who speak with the Voice of The People, unlike everyone else. Strangely enough, they are typically from a rather different background than The People they claim to represent: one more privileged and elite.

This is immediately forgiven because a cult of personality forms around them, fueled by their willingness to promise (albeit not actually deliver) what nobody else can. And promise they do: they pander like any other demagogue, catering to the desires of their followers without feeling constrained by honesty.

They promise revolution, not evolution, rejecting incrementalism as insufficient. They represent only the interests of their loyal supporters, not their entire constituency, much less society at large. After all, The People matter more than everyone else does and they deserve to be (back) on top. What’s good for them is what’s good for America, or at least the part that’s real.

Rather than attempting to serve the common good, policy is seen as purely transactional: a bribe. Populists don’t ask what’s right for all concerned but what’s in it for them and how it hurts the enemy. Debates are viewed as auctions held by the citizens: a bidding war in which their votes are won by the politician who can offer the largest payment. When populists say policy, they mean pandering, and nobody can out-pander a populist.

They win by bluffing, since you’ll never get to cash that check. Regular politicians, in their unwillingness to promise the moon, lose immediately and are portrayed as forever betraying The People to corrupt “special interests”, which is a blanket category that encompasses everyone who’s seen as not being on the side of The People. Only populism cares about you, only populism can fix what troubles you; everyone else is trash.

Populism is based on a greedy ingroup mentality, a foundation of short-sighted, unenlightened self-interest that views the world as a zero-sum game. The People, they believe, can only succeed at the expense of everyone else. This leads directly to nationalism, xenophobia, nativism, and isolationism. It likewise rejects patriotism, pluralism, internationalism, and globalism.

Populists don’t actually believe in foreign policy, as such, because they fundamentally don’t care about anyone but their own faction of their own nation, much less the rest of the world. Their motto: America First, and fuck everyone else!

War is to be avoided, not because of its inherent evils, but because nobody else is worth dying for and it’s not like we’re the ones being invaded. War would be ok if it served our interests, though. Populists are not pacifists, just isolationists, and they’re very, very selective about which wars matter.

Foreigners don’t matter either way, but they’re fine unless they become immigrants or—especially—refugees, in which case they’re corrupting our national character and must be blocked at the border. Naturally, free trade is bad, protectionism is good.

Fundamentally, populism is a purity cult, fixated on separating the clean from the unclean. Populist policies aren’t just empty promises, they’re litmus tests to trap the unwary. If you’re a sensible, honest politician who refuses to overpromise, you fail. If you’re a reasonable, moderate person who values making things better over making them perfect, you fail. If you fail, you’re the enemy; not just wrong, but less than human.

All opposition to populism is demonized and delegitimized. Because populism is rooted in the politics of exclusion and rejects compromise and cooperation as signs of impurity and weakness, it struggles to attain the sort of numerical majority that a democracy requires for victory. Populism, ironically, is not popular, even though it necessarily insists that it is.

When it loses, as it often does in a healthy democracy, instead of this being accepted as a not-so-subtle hint that they lack a mandate, it is written off as proof that the system is “rigged“. After all, how could they legitimately fail when they, and only they, speak for The People? Inconceivable! No, it must be democracy itself that is broken, unfairly allowing the votes of the “wrong people” to count.

In fact, democracy itself is “rigged” against populism in that voting favors broad alliances among people with common, or at least compatible, goals. Populism works by boiling a tea kettle instead of warming the bathtub. It overheats its captive audience by pandering to them relentlessly while leaving everyone else cold. So populism must reject the legitimacy of democracy and support anti-democratic and typically racist practices and policies in order to remain viable.

It is always extremist, regardless of which extreme, since it rejects compromise and demands massive, immediate change. Its motto here amounts to “go big or go home”, which translates to “fake it until you make it”. This not only includes the neverending triumphalism and pandering, but various forms of cheating. These are justified because the system is “unfair” anyhow and any action is acceptable in the service of The People because their cause is righteous.

The perceived enemies of populism, however varied, are characterized as a homogeneous elite establishment led by all those boring wonks who are so “corrupted” by experience, competence, and expertise that they can’t be trusted to put ideology above facts. What makes them so terrible is that they do not serve the interests of The People, the deserving ingroup, but instead favor outgroups comprised of those who are not first-class people.

The list varies somewhat, but targets typically include the educated and expert (and their unwanted facts), the government (especially the non-political careers that constitute the dreaded “Deep State”), corporations (the bigger the better), immigrants (who can’t pass as white), foreigners (ditto), the usual oppressed groups (with permanent tans), and especially the undeserving rich (but not the deserving rich, naturally). The only way to get out of the line of fire is to emphatically endorse the correct flavor of populism, in which case you get a free pass, no matter what.

Expertise itself is suspect; only loyalty matters. Valuing expertise is “elitist” and any politician qualified for the job is unworthy of it. The irony is that a populist who actually wins political office is at great risk of being rejected by the very people who put them there, because it’s hard to maintain the appearance of purity while being part of the system, especially if you want to actually get anything done. Yet when you don’t get anything done, that’s hard to reconcile with what you overpromised in the first place, which makes you a sellout. You just can’t win here, except by lying shamelessly.

Truth, being objective and therefore unmoved by political beliefs, can be inconvenient, so the populists avoid it. They reject the scientific community, academia, and mainstream media, and instead hold themselves firmly inside an ideological bubble, getting their information only from trusted sources. These sources are trusted because, like their populist leaders, they pander to their beliefs, telling them what they want to hear and engaging in conspiratorial thinking. They are politically correct, which is the only kind of correctness that counts.

Even better, these partisan propaganda mills encourage tribalism by ruthlessly attacking the enemy in bad faith while giving their own a free pass no matter what. When your leader makes a gaffe, they’re just blunt and honest and we need to understand it in its full context. When your enemy says something that sounds bad when taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted, repeat it endlessly.

In an amazing feat of projection, populism characterizes the enemy as self-interested and unscrupulous, and campaigns on rooting out this corruption. When it wins, it is always corrupt, even more so than what it replaces. It drains the messy but productive swamp only to fill it with raw sewage.

This hypocrisy is the inevitable result of raising the bar so high that nobody could possibly pass it, and then making exceptions for themselves. The rejection of expertise in itself permits corruption, because appointments are made on the basis of loyalty and ideological commitment, even when that ideology is incompatible with the requirements of the job.

Declaring all politicians (except for the pure outsiders of your populist faction) to be corrupt insiders means never having to invest in the time and effort of sorting the good from the mediocre from the bad. It takes no thought or research to extol unjustified distrust of our institutions. Declaring that only your wildest demands are acceptable for consideration as policy avoids the need to carefully analyze alternatives and consider compromises. It takes no thought or effort to make demands that cannot realistically be fulfilled. Being a populist means never having to think too hard.

This anti-intellectualism is not a defect, but a selling point. Populism offers lazy, simplistic solutions, painted with the broadest of brushes. It is high-concept politics for low-information voters, catering to the sort of apathetic cynicism of those who don’t want to put in the effort to learn the gritty details. Because The People who matter are supposedly uniform in their wholesome interests and goals, there is no need to consider how policies could hurt some while helping others, and especially not how oppressed groups are skipped over or stepped on.

The establishment and its experts can’t be trusted, but the common sense of The People is more powerful than all that ivory-tower nonsense, anyhow, they say. Non-populist politics are dismissed as slow-moving, out of touch, and unpopular with those who count. Reasons why change takes time are treated as excuses. Risks from rapid change are ignored.

Despite some interesting differences, all of the above applies to both left-wing and right-wing populists. They may be on opposite extremes of the left/right continuum, but they form a horseshoe by bending in the expert/populist dimension. When they meet there, what most unites them is their shared hatred of liberalism and democracy.

Whether it manifests as fascism or socialism, populism has no room for what actually makes America great. Its laser-focused dedication to The People is incompatible with the needs of the people, especially the ones who are already disadvantaged. It cannot sustain a stable, competent government, cannot maintain our nation’s place in the world, and ultimately leads to tragedy.

Populism arises in response to crises, whether real or perceived, and then proceeds to make things even worse. This engenders disaster politics, where you break things so that the voters cling to you in despair when you tell them that only you can fix it. The natural end of all populism is sadopopulism, a self-perpetuating positive-feedback loop that destroys what it touches and touches everything.

The solution begins with awareness. We have to recognize that the populist factions of the major parties are distinct. Left-populists are simply not liberals. Right-populists are simply not conservatives. We cannot allow them to hide in our midst and undermine us. Blocking these populist extremists politically allows us to restore prosperity, under which populism cannot thrive.

In the longer term, the fight for liberal democracy and against populism requires education and legislation, but it all starts with breaking the cycle of destruction. And that starts with understanding what populism is and why it must be stopped.

We can have a government that works, but only if we can keep it out of the hands of those who benefit from its failure: the vulture populists.

P.S.

Check out another take on this, which is distinct but compatible: JusticeDemWatch on Medium.