Fever warning or democracy’s inner enemy?

Along with the empirical sociologist, the liberal theorist identifies the ‘empty heart’ of populism that acquires its significance only externally (Taggart, 2002, p. 3). However, for the liberal critics, ideological significances are not distributed by contingent political purposes that co-opt populism as mobilizing means and lay claim to specific renderings of populism’s ‘we the people’. Instead, liberal critics assign a generalized significance to populism as the breach of an idealized balance between the constitutional and the republican poles of liberal democratic normativity. Liberalism’s anxious assessment has invaded the very meaning of ‘populism’. Noting that people don’t usually apply the term to themselves, liberal commentators observe that ‘populism’ is frequently encountered as a term of abuse that registers a democratic disorder (Plattner, 2010, p. 87; Comaroff, 2011, p. 99).

Liberalism relieves populism of major agency in the redefinition of democratic politics and only admits it as a symptom of the failed balance between the two complementary pillars of liberal democracy. The democratic state is called upon to ‘ensure the ultimate sovereignty of the people, at the same time as it limits the day-to-day rule of the majority so that it does not infringe upon the rights of individuals or minorities’ (Plattner, 2010, p. 83). A surge of populist movements is a ‘fever warning’ that the democratic architecture is out of balance and that social ‘problems are not being dealt with effectively’ (Meny and Surel, 2002, p. 8). Populism exposes a disorder in the delicate balance between majority rule and liberal constitutionalism favouring ‘its democratic side to the point where it excessively weakens the protections offered for the individual and minority rights’ and so finally threatens to undermine ‘popular self-government and social cohesion’. Persuaded that new populist movements are sparked by the failure to rationally arbitrate specific social and economic problems, normative political theory weighs their significance as eruptions across a fault line that ‘is always latent to some degree in modern democracies’ (Planner, 2010, p. 86). Deploying ‘populism’ to register the disordering of the liberal democratic polity, the liberal critic typically concedes a vital authenticity to populist movements. Confronted by the failures of institutional politics in handling social problems, populist movements find another route channelling frustrations up as demands that seek to bypass the discredited expectations placed upon constitutional and institutional avenues.

This critique of a disfiguring imbalance in the idealized double dimensions of democratic politics cannot suggest any systemic grounds that might distinguish the peculiar illiberality of right-wing populism. Difficulties mapping a Right/Left divide onto its critique are sometimes registered as an analytic tension within the liberal framework. Mabel Berezin observes that ‘[a]n uncomfortable feature of populism is that it has a leftwing and a rightwing variant’. She goes on to distinguish rightist European populists, who ‘articulate their claims against perceived enemies—immigrants, Eurocrats’ and ‘tend to identify with the nation’, from left-wing populists who ‘focus on the threat of global capital to national security’ and ‘articulate their claims in terms of social justice’ (2009, pp. 27-28). In the end, the liberal critique, like the empiricist reconstruction, sometimes finds itself calling upon distinct political goals to provide the grounds upon which Left/ Right populisms might be distinguished. This conclusion is ‘uncomfortable’ for the liberal critic who contemplates that illiberal populist political mobilizations might seek to reclaim libertarianism by their selection of putatively liberal ends. Making the point more strongly, I argue that a bid to graft liberal values (plurality and personal freedoms) onto a populist republicanism that attacks liberal democratic institutions and social democratic normativities is incoherent. ‘Left populism’ assumes the health of institutions and the reproduction of norms that populism proposes to dismantle.

Wendy Brown has commented that the Left ‘never loved' liberal precepts and institutions (2005). Rejecting their main purpose as the protection of private right underpinned by the ideology of the self-sustaining individual, an ambivalent Left has at times opted for radical alternatives. Lining up with progressive populism, Simon Tortney welcomes the ‘end of representative politics’ as a new landscape for progressive, democratic agendas that would advocate from the margins. Impatient with ‘the politics of the politicians’, democratic politics has taken to the streets to protest ‘safe “consolidated democracies” where normal politics is supposed to work’ (2015, p. 6). Tormey does not anticipate the end of democracy as he contemplates widespread disaffection with the theatrics of consultation and actual disengagement of representative politics. Instead, he looks to its reconfiguration into ‘other kinds of politics’, into a radical ‘unofficial, non-mainstream, street politics’ that is very much alive (pp. 6-7). The hope is that other ways of doing politics will assert themselves to replace a co-opted and ‘disfigured’ liberal constitutionality.

While we can concede Tormey’s observations about disappointing histories of liberal representative politics, we might remain unconvinced by his alternatives. Political liberalism always supposed that liberal democratic institutions would play a vital role in defending and reproducing the legal and political necessity of the libertarian ideals that are assumed by Tormey’s leftist investment in ‘other kind of politics’. Cut adrift from the protections of institutionalized representative politics and its supporting legal establishment, the libertarian ideals that are supposed to distinguish a democratic leftist politics could enter political life only as unreliable, volatile iterations of public goodwill. If a leftist populism is to distinguish itself by its affirmation of liberal values that are freed from the sanction of the principles of a liberal constitutionalism, these cannot provide the grounds for critique of illiberal rightist iterations.

Nadia Urbanti advances another distinction within populist politics that a leftist populism might exploit in order to bypass the liberal critique. Demarcating progressive populism is not only a matter of isolating libertarian goals from xenophobic, narrow-minded ones, leftism also challenges a rightist disfigurement of democracy that rests on the ‘vertical and unified’ structures that cling to activist politics when it constitutes itself as a ‘project of power’ (2014, p. 130). Posturing that ‘someone is in charge at last’, Trump operates in heartland right-wing populism while Urbanti is persuaded that a leaderless ‘Occupy Now’ had embraced a horizontal, democratic leftist populism. Does this division into rightist (vertical, paranoid) and leftist (horizontal, egalitarian) organizations free the latter from the essential illiberality of populism as a genre of democratic politics? It appears that this attempt to release a progressive populism from the liberal critique of populist demagoguery misconstrues the reach and substance of the liberal challenge.

Urbanti limits the liberal diagnosis of populism’s ‘disfigurement of democracy’ to the influence of the charismatic demagogue. She takes us back to Aristotle’s fears about the rise of the tyrants who would exploit free speech ‘by putting it at the service of unanimity, rather than the free and frank expression of ideas’. Demagoguery, she continues, ‘could not exist without a leader because it was not simply horizontal mobilization of ordinary citizens’ (p. 138). However, an important distinction needs to be drawn here between demagoguery as a political style or technique and demagoguery as a reformatting of democratic legitimacy. The liberal critique targets both and while the former certainly also makes inroads into a progressive (egalitarian/pluralist) politics, the latter meaning of demagoguery is inconsistent with what these libertarian commitments entail for an understanding of democratic normativity.

Tzvetan Todorov (2014) remarks that, as a political style, demagoguery is not just limited to a dictatorial charismatic leader who galvanizes his/her base through a politics of fear. He describes a demagogic political style in terms that is at least compatible with fluid, leaderless organizational forms. Impatient with a consensus-building proceduralism that is caught up in endless planning, compromises and deference to expertise, demagogic rhetoric that addresses the immediate with ‘solutions that are easy to understand but impossible to apply' is entirely compatible with the leaderless forum (2014, p. 92). Fleeing from ‘abstractions, distances, favouring instead the concrete, the near and the immediate’ (p. 144), demagoguery is well suited to galvanizing paranoid, rightist illiberal agendas. However, this short-circuiting of reasoned debate, discounting of inconvenient facts and appeals to the easy fix, is recognizable across the spectrum of political life. Illustrating the point, Todorov reminisces about the demagogic pragmatism of the militant leftist politics of his student days in late 1960s France (p. 244). Naomi Klein also has worries about the inroads that a demagogic impatience with thoughtful discussion, scepticism about planning and conciliation and attraction to the ‘media friendly’ demand has made into leftist ‘Occupy’ movements (2011, p. 4). As political style, demagoguery does not help us to demarcate leftist from rightist political forms.

There is more scope for demarcation though when demagogy is brought into view as a reconstitution of democratic legitimacy. When Urbanti offers to delineate a leftist populism by its horizontal organizational forms, she confirms the centrality of pluralistic and egalitarian commitments to contemporary progressive politics. However, the significant point to be drawn out here is that these commitments idealize and require procedures of building political solidarities through reasoned consensus. Some form of the ideal of public reason, which either enjoins consensus around the shared liberal ideal of tolerance or radicalizes public reason as an ongoing commitment to building consensus about the reasonableness of claims about needs, must be in place if a political community is to uphold plurality as the grounds of its solidarity. ‘Public reason’ has no purchase in populism’s demagogic reformatting of democracy as the appeal to the already settled consensus of ‘the people’. Populism grounds democratic legitimacy in a republican opposition to the legitimacy that a pluralist democracy must invest in procedures of public reason. The discomfort registered by Todorov and Klein with reminders of the inroads demagoguery as political style might make into the progressive political movement indicates that this political solidarity holds itself to contrary grounds of political legitimation.

Unable to make sense of itself in opposition to core liberal ideals, a leftist attempt to make itself over to populist energies consistently finds itself caught in the crossfire: attempting to engineer the marriage of two competing political normativities that liberalism always said could only hope to strike a precarious balance. The point is not that the liberals turned out to be right. As I see it, a progressive politics is not to withdraw into an idealization of public reason as the domain of the political citizen invested only in the protection of private right. A radicalized social democratic politics that invests in public reason as the civic and institutional processes through which needs as well as rights can seek justification might still offer the best option for a progressive politics in search of post-liberal political solidarities.

The idealization of public reason that is essential to libertarian, pluralistic political solidarities has not just been set upon by a resurgent populism. It has also fallen prey to the dismembering and blocking of political liberalism by neoliberal ideologies. Friedrich Hayek was clear that neoliberalism was to be no ideological innocent committed only to clearing away all political rationalities that might obstruct a pragmatic intent to model society after the market. It was to advocate for the market as ‘the best' defence of modern freedoms. This early militancy is no longer entirely plausible and today crisis-ridden neoliberalism has settled for ideological closures, using strategic misrepresentations and reappropriations against competing ways of thinking about our modernity. Deeply hostile to liberal public/private divisions, neoliberalism intends to shut down the idealized and constitutional framework of a liberal public reason that was designed to secure the legal conditions of private right. The idea of the citizen equipped with impartial judgement and committed to a consensual determination of the public interest (in protecting private interest) was to give way to a neoliberal homo economics. Market thinking was to be the model for and protection of modem freedoms.

Robbed of its universalizing, principled status and severed from the idealization of public reason, liberalism is to be depoliticized and reconstituted as a cultural idiom that celebrates pluralism and affirms diversity. In keeping with the market logic, liberal values of personal freedoms and pluralism are to be reinvented as the cultural sites of initiative and flexible self-reinvention, losing any critical power as sanction for modes of behaviour and forms of interaction. Sheldon Wolin confirms this diagnosis of the depoliticization of liberalism in post-liberal capitalism. He writes:

[discrimination is assumed, whether rightly or wrongly, to be a limited phenomenon, referring to discrete practices and specific groups (identified by race, gender, religion, etc) and hence requiring only pragmatic adjustments such as equal pay for equal work. Equality on the other hand, implies a general condition and hence is more thr eatening. In a competitive society with a volatile economy, members do not typically strive for equality but for differential rewards.

(2016, p. 55)

Libertarianism and pluralism are affirmed as lifestyle challenges for the modern self, no longer as formal principles designed to take the measure of modern social and political life.

Jan Werner Müller doesn’t make good sense of his own observations about the style of cultural paranoia that typifies populism today when he insists on populism’s essential hostility to pluralism in all its manifestations (2016). Rather than merely decrying cultural pluralism from the standpoint of a volkish idea of the nation state, populist politics frequently draws upon an outraged pluralist rhetoric to galvanize defensive reactions to perceived thr eats. So, for example, as Mtiller observes, populist governments in Hungary and Poland have represented themselves as ‘a minority in the EU who believe in traditional morals and do not submit to the one-size-must-fit-all liberal universalism promoted by Western liberal elites’ (p. 56). Federico Finchelstein makes the point that a defensive, paranoid reconstitution of pluralism is no accidental feature of modem populism that emerged ‘as a form of authoritarian democracy for the post-war world’. A rising populism has contributed to the reinvention of a political authoritarianism that marries an attack on the ideals of civil society with the observance of cultural pluralism, a seeming endorsement of civic virtues, and support for electoral politics (2014, p. 467). Central features of such populist movements, no matter if they identify as either Left or Right, include an ‘extremely sacralizing understanding of the political’ (p. 458). Andreas Pantazopoulos describes as ‘alarming’ the fusing of rightist and ‘leftist-patriotic’ Greek ‘Indignants’ around an ethnocentric defence of Greece against the ‘foreign menace’ that had signed the Memorandum of austerity measures (2019, pp. 162-7). Populism’s repudiation of principled universalism and the normativity of rational consensus can recognize no internal political demarcations.

The point was made earlier that neoliberalism is not merely intent on blocking the critical potentials of political liberalism. Also, in its sights is the social democratic politicization of needs, a new understanding of social justice that enables needs to justify themselves as claims. Social justice founded on the democratic rationalization of needs entailed a radical post-liberal reconstruction of the ideal of public reason. No longer the province of the impartial citizen drawn to a formal proceduralist public rationality, the social democratic invention embraced public reason as a mode of interaction that traverses an active, agenda-setting civil society that facilitates new needs making a case for their justice and reaches out to claim the procedural legitimacy of a formal, decisionmaking public sphere. We remain witness to the occasional exploitation of a not yet vanquished liberal democratic architecture to support the radical potentials of social democratic reformism. Advocates of ‘single payer’ health schemes, the decriminalizing of illegal border crossings and the virtual elimination of college debts, progressive Democratic candidates for the 2020 United States elections, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don’t appear to seek legitimacy from an already self-asserting ‘will of the people’. Instead, a many-sided program of substantive reform offers itself as act of faith in, and as a bid to rescue, a social democratic public sphere, so holding back the united ideological front of neoliberalism and populism.

The next section will assess recent attempts to champion the project of a left populism. The aim here is partly to demonstrate that these advocates reproduce major problems of coherence that I have identified in attempts to isolate a leftist populism within the terms set by populism studies.