Us v Them: the birth of populism by John B Judis
It’s
not about left or right: populism is a style of politics that pits ‘the people’
against ‘the establishment’. Its rise is a warning sign that the status quo is
failing
When political
scientists write about populism, they often begin by trying to define it, as if
it were a scientific term, like entropy or photosynthesis. To do so is a mistake.
There is no set of features that exclusively defines movements, parties, and
people that are called “populist”: the different people and parties that are
placed in this category enjoy family resemblances of one to the other, but
there is not a universal set of traits that is common to all of them.
There is, however, a
particular kind of populist politics that originated in the United States in
the 19th century, which has recurred there in the 20th and 21st centuries – and
which began to appear in western Europe in the 1970s. In the past few decades,
these campaigns and parties have converged in their concerns, and in the wake
of the Great Recession, they have surged.
The kind of populism
that runs through American history, and has been transplanted to Europe, cannot
be defined exclusively in terms of right, left or centre: it includes both Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders, the Front National in France and Podemos in Spain. There are
rightwing, leftwing and centrist populist parties. It is not an ideology, but a
political logic – a way of thinking about politics. In his book on American
populism, The Populist Persuasion, the historian Michael Kazin describes
populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble
assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as
self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilise the former against the
latter.”
That’s a good start.
It doesn’t describe people like Ronald Reagan or Vladimir Putin, both of whom
have sometimes been called “populist”, but it does describe the logic of the
parties, movements, and candidates, from the US’s People’s Party of 1892 to Marine
Le Pen’s Front National of 2016. I would, however, take Kazin’s
characterisation one step further and distinguish between leftwing populists
such as Bernie Sanders and Podemos’s Pablo
Iglesias, and rightwing populists such as Trump and Le Pen.
Leftwing populists
champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical
politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists
champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favouring a third
group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African
American militants. Rightwing populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also
down upon an out group.
Leftwing populism is
historically different to socialist or social democratic movements. It is not a
politics of class conflict, and it does not necessarily seek the abolition of
capitalism. It is also different to a progressive or liberal politics that
seeks to reconcile the interests of opposing classes and groups. It assumes a
basic antagonism between the people and an elite at the heart of its politics.
Rightwing populism, meanwhile,
is different to a conservatism that primarily identifies with the business
classes against their critics and antagonists below. In its American and
western European versions, it is also different to an authoritarian
conservatism that aims to subvert democracy. It operates within a democratic
context.
Just as there is no common ideology that
defines populism, there is no one constituency that comprises “the people”.
They can be blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, or students burdened by debt;
they can be the poor or the middle class. Equally, there is no common
identification of “the establishment”. The exact referents of “the people” and
“the elite” do not define populism, what defines it is the conflict between the
two (or, in the case of rightwing populism, the three)…
