Does populism have a place in a healthy democracy?

I’m all in favour of popular protest as part of a democracy, but that’s not populism. If it were, then Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have been populist.

Populist politics, which comes in our resolution, is a style of politics that we have seen from U. S. President Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Boris Johnson in Britain, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary. The remarkable thing is that, different though these people and countries are, in the last five years they’ve had a style of politics that has distinct features in common.

First of all, they all counterpose a supposedly pure “the people” to allegedly corrupt liberal metropolitan and cosmopolitan elites. Although, by the way, the leaders of these movements are seldom actually men or women of the people. Donald Trump is a millionaire son of a millionaire, and Boris Johnson is hardly a horny-handed son of toil.

Secondly, when you look more closely, “the people” they talk about in the abstract, rather revolutionary style, turn out to be only a part of the people. There’s always an “us” and “them.” The “us” is very often defined in ethnic terms. It’s often nativist — it’s a native population. The “them,” immigrants, be it Hispanics in the United States or east Europeans in the United Kingdom during the Brexit debate.

Thirdly, populist politics abhors pluralism. All these politicians go after all the pluralist, anti- majoritarian institutions that define a liberal democracy. Independent law courts, for example, have been emasculated in Poland and Hungary, and even British judges were denounced as enemies of the people, a phrase that descends from Maximilien Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler to the Daily Mail. They go after independent media. They go after independent civil society.

Fourthly, their definition of democracy is a purely majoritarian, winner- takes- all definition. It gets very close to Alexis de Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority. So, for example, in the case of the Brexit debate, it was 52 per cent to 48 per cent. But in the rhetoric of the populist, the 52 per cent are “the people” entire, and the rest of us who voted to remain in the European Union don’t count.

Finally, a final common feature of populist politics is a contempt for facts, evidence and experts that’s often expressed by these people, and the ultimate expression of populist politics is what Donald Trump is doing with the U. S. election: simply denying the fact that he has lost the election. No, what matters is the idealized people have in this mendacious imagined world of populist politics won the election that they’ve clearly lost. So that is a huge danger to democracy.

Populists are political entrepreneurs, it’s almost a political technique, what the Russians call political technology, which aggregates these diffuse popular discontents, mobilizes them behind simplistic nationalist, emotionally appealing slogans and that way it gets to 50 plus one per cent of the vote. And then once you’ve got 50 plus one per cent of the vote, you try and change the rules of the game so you remain in power.

So I don’t think it should be confused with genuine bottom- up social movements. I agree that populist politics reveal many things that have gone wrong in liberal political systems and societies. But COVID-19 reveals many things that were wrong with our health- care systems. We should no more embrace populist politics than we should embrace COVID-19. We should fear and fight these populist politics.