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On Populism
What’s your definition of “Populism?”
As Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, editors of Twenty-First Century Populism, suggest, “Much like Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic as ‘someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you’, the epithet ‘populist’ is often used in public debate to denigrate statements and measures by parties and politicians which commentators or other politicians oppose.”
But they go on to try to formulate a more rigorous definition. Their research focuses on Europe. It was conducted well before anyone could have dreamt of the rise of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders; it even antedates Obama’s rise to power:
We define populism as: an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.
Populism, they suggest,”proposes an analysis designed to respond to a number of essential questions: ‘what went wrong; who is to blame; and what is to be done to reverse the situation?’ Put simply, the answers are:
- The government and democracy, which should reflect the will of the people, have been occupied, distorted and exploited by corrupt elites;
- The elites and ‘others’ (i.e. not of ‘the people’) are to blame for the current undesirable situation in which the people find themselves;
- The people must be given back their voice and power through the populist leader and party.
‘The people,” they continue,
constitute a community, a place where … there is mutual trust. Moreover, the community is a place where “it is crystal-clear who is ‘one of us’ and who is not, there is no muddle and no cause for confusion.” By contrast, the enemies of the people — the elites and ‘others’ — are neither homogeneous nor virtuous. Rather, they are accused of conspiring together against the people, who are depicted as being under siege from above by the elites and from below by a range of dangerous others.
Populists, therefore,
invoke a sense of crisis and the idea that ‘soon it will be too late.’ … This journey is usually led by a charismatic leader who is portrayed as knowing instinctively what the people want. As Canovan says, ‘populist politics is not ordinary, routine politics. It has the revivalist flavour of a movement’ and ‘associated with this mood is the tendency for heightened emotions to be framed on a charismatic leader.’ … Of course, the greatest sacrifice is made by the populist leaders themselves who are forced to put to one side their normal (and preferred) profession and instead enter the dirty arcane world of politics in order to save democracy. Seeing the normal procedures of parliamentary politics as frustrating the popular will, the populist advocates a direct relationship between ‘the people’ and their government. …
“The rise of populism in Western Europe,” they write — and remember, this was in 2004,
is in large part, a reaction to the failure of traditional parties to respond adequately in the eyes of the electorate to a series of phenomena such as economic and cultural globalization, the speed and direction of European integration, immigration, the decline of ideologies and class politics, exposure of elite corruption, etc. It is also the product of a much-cited, but rarely defined, ‘political malaise,’ manifested in steadily falling turnouts across Western Europe, declining party memberships, and ever-greater numbers of citizens in surveys citing a lack of interest and distrust in politics and politicians. Fostered by the media, an antipolitical climate is said to have grown throughout Western European societies in which people perceive politics to be more convoluted, distant and irrelevant to people’s lives and politicians to be more incapable, impotent, self-serving and similar to one another than in the past. … In particular, these alternatives have emerged in the shape of populists who offer straightforward, ‘common sense’ solutions to society’s complex problems and adopt forceful ‘man in the street’ communication styles which are able to galvanize at least some of those who have lost faith in traditional politics and its representatives. They offer a ‘politics of redemption’ in contrast to the Establishment’s ‘politics of pragmatism.’ They claim that radical changes for the better are possible and that they can make them happen. In short, they promise to make democracy work.
So assuming we use this definition — and I think it’s a good working definition — what happened since 2004 to give us such a stunning rise in populism — first in Obama, now even more in Trump and to a lesser extent Sanders, but also, interestingly, far more widely across the world, in Putin, Orbàn, Le Pen, Erdoğan, etc.?
It’s now a platitude that the Western democracy’s élites are out of touch with their voters. But why exactly would these elites be so out of touch with their voters? It’s the voters who elected them, after all.
It makes me wonder whether we’re really discussing “out-of-touch elites.” Or might the phrase be a stand-in for the more Marxist notion of class? Would we find, do you think, that we could substitute “elites” for “those who own the means of production and purchase the labor power of others,” and “disaffected voters” for “those who do not own any means of production or the ability to purchase the labor power of others, but rather sell their own labor power?” It’s not quite exact, but perhaps something closer to that is going on.
Might the wave of populist politics we’re now seeing across the globe be some mutant expression of the class conflict Marx predicted? And if so, what’s causing it?
Published in General, Politics
You’re counting increases in GDP as some type of budget cutting victory for the GOP???
Please clarify, I am afraid I do not see your reasoning.
I think that’s an excessively American view of a phenomenon you suggest is not all-American. Most other places in the world, the few & the many were distinguished by classes & nations in a way you might not see in your own country. So that in most places, there is only one possible ‘vast chunk.’ It’s useful to remember that lots of people in lots of places were killed for notions about nation not all of which have to do with politics. But I wouldn’t say nationalism is quite populism. Maybe you think so, too. Nationalism not infrequently promises war, which is not painless or anything like it-
When I hear anyone label someone as ‘populist’, my first thought is that they are tuned in to popular opinion, rather than the opinion the elites would have us tuned in to. In other words, someone who has the audacity to appeal to the majority when the majority opinion is looked upon by the ruling class as the ‘ignorance of the masses’.
I understand the dangers of mob rule, but on some level representative democracy is dependent upon electing representatives who understand and support popular opinion? Why is that assumed to be a negative?
2009 was a “spike” year for spending due to the temporary spending programs implemented to offset the severe economic downturn that began in mid 2008. Both Bush and Obama added programs to the budget, including the so-called “Stimulus” and cash for clunkers, etc. (FY09, which actually begins in late 2008, included both the end of the Bush term as well as Obama’s first year.)
For this reason, when looking for trends, this year needs to be treated as an outlier. However, Obama supporters love to use this year for comparison to current budgets – because it makes it look like he’s reigned in spending, which is really not true.
No one – and I mean no one – has ever campaigned for a long, protracted and devastating war. Every populist of every stripe that pushes war assures the populace that it will be short and sweet.
Again, it’s just what’s popular. Nationalism can be popular. Racial or religious purity can be popular. You want to assign principles to something that’s not principled, just convenient.
You’re overthinking a very simple English word.
And William Jennings Bryan. And Andrew Jackson. And, to a lesser degree, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was too principled. He was labled a populist because the Democrats said his ideas of foreign policy was impractical and pie in the sky. But it wasn’t.
This is a follow up to anonymous’s #36.
The top pane is tax revenue (confiscation) the middle pane is spending, and the bottom is the deficit.
The monthly data is the bars and very volatile. The Shaded areas are 12 month moving averages to smooth the data.
The 12 month average of spending in 2009 was $291B and today it is $309B. A 6% increase in 6 years.
Before we get all hot and bothered about real vs. nominal spending please define inflation and what calculation we are going to use in the comparison.
You’re proving too much now: No one ever of any politics promised a long, protracted, & devastating war. Did your Washington? Did Lincoln advertise a slaughter worse than any in your history & worse than the the worst others combined?
The closest thing may be something like Churchill–but the war has started not on his watch, so he could afford it…
To deal with the 2009 “spike” year that I used in my analysis above: I did so to avoid a lengthy and, I thought, unnecessary explanation of the major increases in federal spending enacted by Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress.
It is true that there was a spike in 2009 to 24.4% of GDP, due to the “bailouts” (TARP and other programs). It declined to “only” 23.4% of GDP in 2010 and 2011. The bailout cost about $290 billion in 2009, which was about 2% of GDP. So it could be argued that I should have reported 2009 spending of “only” 22.4% of GDP.
But in 2010, the return of bailout funds actually reduced reported federal spending by about $82 billion, which is about 0.5% of GDP. So “adjusted” 2010 spending is 23.9% of GDP.
The endpoint of my analysis was 2014, in which spending was 20.3% of GDP, and in which the return of bailout funds reduced this figure by about $95 billion (0.6% of GDP). So perhaps I should have used 20.9% of GDP for 2014.
[Continued]
[Continued]
I agree that this 23.9% of GDP figure from 2010 is a better metric to evaluate the Republican Congress, elected at the end of that year. So, in this more sophisticated analysis, the Republican Congress reduced spending from (adjusted) 23.9% of GDP in 2010 to (adjusted) 20.9% of GDP in 2014.
I used the simpler figures of 24.4% of GDP for 2009 and 20.3% of GDP for 2014.
Whether the Republican Congress reduced spending by 4.1% of GDP between 2009 and 2014, or by (adjusted) 3% of GDP between 2010 and 2014, the fact remains that this is a significant reduction in spending!
Which was my point, as there is an incorrect impression that the Republicans in Congress did nothing.
Can y’all see why I used the simpler figures to avoid a long, boring explanation of how to adjust the figures for the bailout?
Here’s another way to look at my federal budget analysis. The following figures are adjusted to remove “bailout” effects. I’ll compare 2005 with 2014. 2005 was a representative year for the Bush administration with control of both houses of Congress, with spending of 19.2% of GDP (the figures for 2004, 2006, and 2007 were 19.0%, 19.4%, and 19.1%, respectively).
Federal spending in 2005 was 19.2% of GDP, of which 6.4% was for Social Security and Medicare.
Federal spending in 2014, adjusted for the return of bailout funds, was 20.9% of GDP, of which 7.9% was for Social Security and Medicare.
This is an increase of 1.7% of GDP, almost all of which — 1.5% of GDP — is the result of increased Social Security and Medicare spending. The increase in all other federal spending is just 0.2% of GDP.
Thus, the Republicans in Congress succeeded in rolling back almost all of the controllable spending increases of: (1) six years of Obama (2009-2014); (2) four years of Pelosi (2007-2010); and (3) eight years of Reid (2007-2014).
Please stop accusing our Republican Congressmen of doing nothing. It is not true. I agree, I wish that they had been able to do more. But they deserve quite a bit of credit.
But what you haven’t explained to us is how much of the spending that went on under democrats was due to onetime bank bailouts, etc..
The government is no less corrupt, intrusive, and abusive than it was before. Quite the contrary. The level of abuse tends to be correlated with the level of spending, but it’s not a correlation of 1.0.
A thought I have never shared.
I think you’re very much on to something — at least in Europe and the US, it has something to do with a sense that “the elites” are the graduates of these schools. (“I didn’t go to Yale. I’m you.”) But it is, in fact, the voters who keep putting these politicians in office — who else do they think is going into the voting booths and doing it?
Populism is what happens when people discover that they don’t live in a Democracy, they live in a Republic, with people who purport to represent them. The reality has been, and remains largely that a political class is quite happy to stay forever in politics, because that’s where the power and the money are most easily attained by those incapable of working for a living.
So Trump’s appeal, and largely Barry’s, is “Hulk smash”, and what’s get smashed is essentially just a “pick your poison”, and go smash it through a vote for one of these chuckleheads.
Voting different people into office is not going to change the relationship of the people with power.
During the days of agrarian populism in the U.S. a lot of cooperative associations arose, intended to take power away from the financial and industrial elites, to cut out the middleman keep the profits among the people. Some of these were not very successful; others are still in operation. Some, like creamery cooperatives, were at first very local in their operation due to the perishable nature of their product, and fairly successful in living up to their original ideals. But most of the successful ones became giant businesses themselves. They needed management, and the managers became the new elite and ran the co-ops with an eye to always protecting their own positions. The leaders might rail against capitalism to keep the
peasantsshareholder members in line, but other than their tax preferences these organizations became hard to distinguish from ordinary capitalist enterprises. Profits would be returned to the shareholder members, but there wasn’t that much to be returned, and it was necessary to plow a lot back into the enterprise. As in any large enterprise, the managers hijacked the organizations and put their own interests foremost. Nobody has figured out how to change that.What choice do they have?
Here’s a thought experiment. Take any major industrialised democracy; take the CV’s of (the equivalents of) the cabinet, shadow cabinet, and senior civil servants; pick 10 at random. After the names and party affiliations had been removed could you tell who was who? Would these CV’s look more similar to one another than to CV’s of those who do not exercise power?
How about taking the actual lived experience of a voter in one of these countries over a random 12-month period, noting their numerous interactions with government agencies and the rules governing their every-day activities: could you tell which party was in power?
When the political class gets an idee fixe – say, ever closer European union, or the immorality of the death penalty, or multiculturalism, or the necessity to suspend democracy in the face of ‘global warming’ – then there is as close to nothing as makes no difference a persistent majority of the population (against a Europe without nations, for capital punishment, etc. etc.) can do. There Is, as was said in other circumstances, No Alternative.
From Britannica (emphasis added):
Iow, a populist policy is popular without regard for what is true, or what actually works, or actual consequences. How it is perceived is more important than what it will actually do.
Populism plays the populace for fools.
Because of that “however” I went to read the entire Britannica article. It gives a fuller picture of the history of populism in the United States, telling how it related to the era of agrarian protest and also how the modern Progressive movement came out of it.
I got interested in this story on my bicycle rides 4 years ago. I wanted to see if I could still do 100 mile rides, but I also was looking for some roadside history. That led me to learning of some violence and a killing that took place at an 1890s 4th of July celebration in the town where I later graduated from high school. It involved Charles Brandborg, who ran for Governor of MN on the Socialist ticket a couple of times. A creek is named for him, and runs from about where our old high school baseball field was located, to his farm and beyond. That in turn led me to more bicycle rides, to his family archives at the Minnesota Historical Society, and to newspaper archives of the period. One of my blog articles on the topic is titled That Unsavory Sheet. But I haven’t done as much with that topic as I had hoped to. I rode 120 miles the day I got into this topic, and haven’t topped 100 miles in a day since.
Immigration as an issue has been gathering strength for several years, long before Trump arrived.
Throughout the entire 2008 amnesty debate, tempers were flaring.
But it has seemed to me that the elected officials and politicians were ignoring people, brushing them off.
Then there were all of those kids on trains headed to our southern border last summer and the summer before last.
Never in my lifetime have I seen politicians and elected officials be so completely out of touch with the staff in our emergency rooms across the country, with our town managers and city mayors, with our governors.
When this political season started to warm up, I was genuinely surprised that the candidates were not talking more about immigration. All immigration–the student visas, the H1B workers, the state department placements, and legal immigration.
People have been upset about a situation they have felt was out of control. Any candidate who had addressed immigration as the number 1 concern of the American people would have risen to the top. It would have been a slam dunk for any politician.
Conservatives are all about being well organized, planning for the future, and paying their bills on time. This has felt like chaos.
If little me knew how upset people were about immigration policies, how come none of the candidates realized it?
She graduated from Oxford, and many aspects of her CV would have been indistinguishable from those of her Labour counterparts. She was certainly a populist, too, in many ways.
But it seems to me this is a more complex problem. Take the examples you cited individually: 1) In Europe, “ever closer European union.” Huge majorities of the populations have mostly supported both until recently. The initial Treaty of Lisbon was shot down by the public in France and the Netherlands in the most directly-democratic way possible: by referendum. The reform treaty faced the same fate in Ireland — which then reversed its opinion in the next referendum after the treaty had been rewritten. The treaty that was finally ratified was a substantially different thing precisely because the voters had, indeed, registered their dissatisfaction with the original one. Every country in which it was finally ratified is a democracy. It was precisely this fact that made it impossible to push through the initial two versions of the treaty. The voters are not impotent in Europe. It was only after the financial crisis that popular support for the EU really began to flag.
2) Poll after poll shows that vast majorities of European citizens oppose the death penalty. Support for it is ranges between 15 and 30 percent of the public. The elites are reflecting a public view, not vice-versa. (NB: It has only be abolished for “peacetime” crimes, so God knows what its legal status will be at this rate.)
3) Multiculturalism is an Anglo-American idea; France has never embraced it: The official state philosophy is Republicanism.,
4) The necessity to suspend democracy in the face of ‘global warming.’ Again, I don’t see a huge elite/popular split on this, either in the US or Europe. The Société de Calcul Mathématique is sitting on the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré in the eighth and about as elite as it gets; they’re screaming their heads off against the “absurd, costly and pointless crusade against global warming.” And Le Pen is positioning herself now as the only “truly green” party in France. Why? Because polling data told her that “being green” is really popular. Mind you, she’s opposed to “cosmopolitan” environmentalism, and in favor of “nationalist” environmentalism. (And yes, the word “cosmopolitan” has exactly the resonance it always has.)
– then there is as close to nothing as makes no difference a persistent majority of the population
and huge majorities still support the latter.
or multiculturalism, or the necessity to suspend democracy in the face of ‘global warming’ – then there is as close to nothing as makes no difference a persistent majority of the population
Hmm. From here, just to take one example:
It’s always been much higher in Britain and to a lesser extent France than in other Western European countries. I haven’t been tracking the polling data on this closely over time, so I’m not sure how it’s changed or how the question has been phrased or whether the responses change in response to recent news events. It’s certainly possible that the drive for abolition was initially elite-led, but has become a more widespread public opinion. I don’t know, to be honest.
My own view on the value of “elite-led campaigns against the death penalty” was certainly changed by living in Turkey, which abolished it (before the AKP) in response to EU pressure. I have no doubt that this saved many innocent lives over the past decade.
Claire, I have a slightly more cynical definition of populism. I define as the elite manipulating the masses into a righteously indignant attitude such that the masses are then willing to deprive others of liberty in pursuit of punishing them, which in turn leaves no one with liberty except the elite. I’ll give you a good case in point. During the Occupy Wall Street days, the one man who had virtually single handedly shoveled over a fair amount of the US Treasury to the financial sector, Obama, was praising those who viewed the financial sector as crooks and evil and subject to the guillotine. Never mind the fact that Obama was a large part of what the Occupy Movement was complaining about (that is if you take them at their word). He managed to whip them into a frenzy all the while portraying himself to be “one of them” when in reality he was more in line with the financial execs.
Another good example is how Warren Buffet complains that the income tax structure in the US unfairly favors him over his secretary even though he is most likely only filing via the capital gains structure. He is able to seem virtuous to the Green With Envy crowd while obfuscating the fact that he isn’t even operating under the same tax structure that most American are.
Populism is a “how can we fool them today” concept and sadly it works.
Here’s a poll from 2007 asking about the death penalty for murder – not cop-killing or terrorism or offences against children, just murder. It has support in the UK at 50%, France 45%, Germany 35%, Italy 31%, Spain 28%. Granted they are not majorities, but they are not really clustered around 15-30%, either.
A fair point. But.
If the people of France, say, held a referendum and voted to re-institute the death penalty for <insert heinous offence here>, what would the appropriate liberal (in the good sense), democratic (in the good sense) response be? You can’t because European treaties prohibit it? You can’t because it’s not right? What?
Not sure I understand the question. Did you miss a word after “for?” Because my answer would depend on that.
Looking at the Albertazzi and McDonnell analysis:
1 and 3 seem the common currency of any modern political campaign, and 1 seems a fair description of reality. 2, if one omits the words “and ‘others’ (i.e. not of ‘the people’)” also seems an accurate diagnosis.
So Albertazzi/McDonnell ‘populism’ comes down to scapegoating some ‘others’. Which I certainly don’t see Trump doing, for example. He’s not blaming the ills of America on Mexicans or Muslims – he’s blaming it on ‘the elites’. Obama, perhaps – certainly his ‘othering’ of Republicans could be made to fit with enough effort. And more likely Erdogan. Orban? I don’t know enough about him. Putin? Quite possibly. Le Pen the younger? I’m not sure – are there non-elite others the ‘modern’ FN targets?