Abstract
Populism contrasts clearly with pluralist democracy. By treating the result of elections as representing ‘the will of the people’, populism misrepresents the enumerative face of society as the organic face and defines all opposition to the elected government as traitorous. Minorities, and the institutions and experts upon which the checks and balance of pluralist democracy depend, are, therefore, attacked by populist leaders. Populist leaders claim that their actions, however dictatorial, and however much they favour a specific group in society, are democratic—they represent the will of the people. Because populism, in its championing of the people, is anti-elitist, some commentators consider it can enliven democracy. In today’s world, however, the dangers are obvious: attacks on minorities and the control of what counts as expertise.
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Notes
- 1.
See Müller (2017).
- 2.
- 3.
An ideal type is a sociological concept used to refer to an imagined composite version of something that contains all the characteristics one might hope to find in a real case. Other analysts of populism such as Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), might emphasise different contrasts—for example that populism is essentially anti-elitist. We are stressing that it is essentially anti-pluralist, though it might be anti-elitist too in some incarnations. There are also differences between left-wing and right-wing populists (Judis 2016). Mouffe (2018) is an example of the kind of left-wing populist who, nevertheless, sustains a commitment to pluralism but she fails to explain the role of expert knowledge. Laclau (2005) too claims there are such an immense variety of populisms that it pays to focus on populism conceptually rather than chase each variant so as to list all the divergent content of populisms in any given instance. Our ideal type is taken from Müller (2017) but additional points are developed based on that book’s basic logic.
- 4.
- 5.
‘Majority’ is in scare-quotes because under certain electoral systems the winners might not actually have the major share of the popular vote, as they did not in the case of the election of President Trump in the USA. Weale (2018), points out that what ‘majority’ means is very unclear: first we have to take into account who is allowed to vote; second we have to take into account that not everybody who can vote does vote. This means that the proportion of the people who make up a ‘majority’ in an election and are taken to be expressing the ‘will of the people’ with their votes can be quite small. Weale points out that the number of voters who actually vote in Swiss referendums is about 50% of those entitled from which it follows that in a close run decision the number of people making the decision will be less than a quarter of the Swiss people. Weale also points out that people are often asked to vote for coalitions that stand for all manner of cross-cutting policies so under these circumstances what even this minority of people really want cannot be expressed by their voting.
- 6.
As Hitler put it in a speech of 1935: ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’ [One People, One Empire, One Leader]. Or, a still clearer expression in a speech by Goebbels: “The nation and the government in Germany are one thing. The Will of the people is the Will of the government and vice versa. The modern structure of the German State is a higher form of democracy in which, by virtue of the people’s mandate, the government is exercised authoritatively while there is no possibility for parliamentary interference, to obliterate and render ineffective the execution of the nation’s Will.” Josef Goebbels “On National-Socialist Germany And Her Contribution Towards Peace.” Speech to the representatives of the international press at Geneva on September 28, 1933. German League of Nations Union News Service, PRO, FO 371/16728.
- 7.
For a different kind of criticism of the meaning of ‘the will of the people’, see Weale (2018) and note 35.
- 8.
- 9.
Chantal Mouffe (2000) refers to this incompatibility as the democratic paradox.
- 10.
- 11.
See Howard Jacobson’s (2017) critique of Tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg who has invoked the will of the people in the populist sense on numerous occasions. Note that the Brexit choice is one of those cases, like vaccination (first discussed in the Introduction), where one cannot allow a subset of the population not to Brexit while everyone else does, however pluralist one would like to be. But, also like vaccination, it is a case where consideration for the minority would allow for the possibility of reversal of the decision if deeper understanding develops; exactly what the will of the people rhetoric as the Brexit argument unfolded was designed to avoid.
- 12.
Freedland (2018).
- 13.
See Collins et al. (2001). The problem was given special salience in this election because votes in some states were counted by machines reading punch cards. Unfortunately, the machines in the voting booths did not always punch a clean hole, which meant that these votes were not included in the count. As the margin of victory was so small, this lead to a controversy about what to do with cards in which the ‘hanging chad’ meant they were not counted automatically but from which some indication of the voter’s intention could be derived.
- 14.
Müller does mention it several times in his opening chapters but does not include it among his final summary of characteristics.
- 15.
Temelkuran (2019), explicitly draws connections between the normalisation of shamelessness, alternative facts, and the democratic peril detaching specialist knowledge from democratic institutions. These are all parts of the ‘steps’, he says, from democracy to dictatorship. As the year 2017 unfolded, it became clear that lying was an integral part of ‘Trumpism’. See Leonard and Thompson (2017) for an extensive list of Trump’s lies in 2017 and the Washington Post archive https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/category/donald-trump/.
- 16.
‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue’ (François de La Rochefoucauld); nowadays, even hypocrisy is being abandoned. On the way the politics of political correctness has evolved, see Sparrow (2018).
- 17.
See for example, the recent series of articles on the relationship between STS and what has been called ‘post-truth’ which are referenced in note 16 in Chap. 5. For an example of how to admit lying and bullshit and fabricated silences have always been part of politics including the politics of science, but not suggest what we are seeing is more of the same, see Keane (2018). Keane notes, among other things, the way digital media penetrate the public/private boundary so easily, effectively colonizing daily life.
- 18.
For an example of political scientists who see the relationship between today’s events and the 1930s, see Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018).
- 19.
Pitkin (2004, 231). For the notion of ‘filter bubble’ see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble and for recent changes and trends in media consumption, including observations concerning filter bubbles and echo chambers, see Newman et al. (2017).
- 20.
Müller (2017) lists ‘seven theses on Populism’ in his Conclusion; there are overlaps but our list is rather different.
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Collins, H., Evans, R., Durant, D., Weinel, M. (2020). What Is Populism?. In: Experts and the Will of the People. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26983-8_4
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