Abstract
Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal and conservative arguments against populism, and proposes that the principles of solidarity and procedure provide good grounds for a sustainable critique of populism.
Populist movements have become a driving force of change in European politics in the last two decades. 1 These movements typically claim to represent ‘the people’ and express ‘the people’s will’ in times where political elites seem decoupled from the citizenry. And ever since populism came into full public view, it has been a lead item of political and intellectual complaint. Perhaps because populism challenges some of the political configurations we have grown accustomed to, it is often criticized or dismissed. Some commentators adjudicate populism to be founded on ‘unacceptable mechanisms of exclusion’ that violate basic democratic principles. 2 Others deplore that ‘the “populist contamination” of mainstream political discourse’ has brought with it a ‘tabloidization’ of politics. 3 Still others scorn the seductive appeal of populists’ ‘simple answers’, suggesting that simple answers blind one to the complexity of today’s political challenges. 4
Diagnoses of this kind are typically heavy on political rhetoric and light on theory and sustained analysis. Populism is readily condemned on moral grounds, with little attention given to the substantive challenges it poses to pluralist democracy. 5 Perhaps for this reason, blaming and dismissing successful populist parties and/or their voters rarely meet with success. The standard strategy of condemnation in fact seems to fan the flames and reinforce populism’s appeal. For example, the ‘sanctions’ that 14 EU member states imposed against the Austrian government in 2000, when it involved the radical right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ), did not arrest the party’s further electoral success. These measures seemed to have the opposite effect: they increased the FPÖ’s popularity among those who resented the EU’s interference in national affairs. 6 Much as one may sympathize with the moral judgement behind such reactions to populism, one might ask how a more sustainable critique of populism might look. Should one hold democratic ideals of pluralism and equality against populism’s tendency to exclude those considered not belonging to ‘the people’? Or might one point towards the dangers inherent in populism’s endorsement of the unconstrained will of the masses? What, in other words, can we hold against populism?
Studies of populism tend to approach it as an empirical phenomenon and eschew normative questions of this kind. 7 Most existing treatments of populism are concerned with explaining the electoral success of specific populist parties. In this article, I want to offer a distinctively theoretical and normative perspective and consider the question of how a sustainable critique of populism may look. My goal is not to develop a definitive rationale for a critique of populism; rather I want to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from existing lines of argumentation and offer possible alternatives. The targets of my argument are ‘supply side’ political actors (individual politicians, parties, social movements, etc.) who fail to foster trust in their capacity to offer a persuasive and sustainable alternative to populism. Drawing on normative political theory, with an eye to political practice, I first discuss a prototypical liberal and conservative critique of populism. I argue that these standard objections to populism are misleading and eventually run the risk of strengthening populism. I then propose an alternative critique, centred on the principles of solidarity and procedure, and go on to show how these principles could be successfully held against populism.
Before proceeding, a note on terminology is in order. I choose to define populism as a distinctive political ‘practice’, or ‘style’ of politics, rather than treating it as a substantive ideology. 8 This has perhaps become the dominant perspective in political science scholarship today. On this view, populism is conceived as a ‘frame’ to package all sorts of issue in. 9 Thus, an actor, as Ernesto Laclau phrases it, ‘is not populist because in its politics or ideology it presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are’. 10 At the core of this logic of articulation is a ‘Manichean outlook, in which there are only friends and foes’ –: populism considers society to be ‘separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups’, namely us, the people, versus them, the elite. 11 On the one hand, populism always refers to the people; it appeals to the will of the people and claims to speak in the name of the people. 12 Populism treats the people as a homogenous group with one unitary will and without internal differences – a community shaped by common ethnicity, culture, or class. 13 On the other hand, populism antagonizes the elite, understood as the economic, political and often also cultural establishment. It typically portrays the elite as corrupted by power, self-serving and ignoring the people’s demands. There are, of course, various ways in which populists may characterize the people and the elite. Populists on the political right tend to view the people as sharing a common ethno-cultural background, and pit them against a liberal and multiculturalist elite that supposedly undercuts the community’s values and promotes the inflow of immigrants from hostile cultures. Left-wing populists, by contrast, often advance an understanding of the people that accentuates the predicament of the lower classes who are exploited by a reckless capitalist elite.
Liberal and conservative arguments against populism
The liberal argument: Exclusion is unacceptable
One consequence of populism’s disposition to treat ‘the people’ as a homogenous group is that it excludes those who are not considered as belonging to the people. Populism thus not only excludes the elite – its main antagonist – but also tends to exclude other groups such as religious minorities, immigrants, and so on. Populists often propose to deprive these groups of material and/or political rights they deem exclusive to the people. 14 As to material rights, a standard example would be the ‘welfare chauvinism’ of many European right-wing populist parties. Welfare chauvinism refers to the view that access to the Welfare State should be restricted to a nation’s ‘own people’ in order to ‘safeguard the social gains of the past’. 15 On such a perspective, immigrants who demand free healthcare or asylum-seekers who require shelter, for example, are seen as abusively exploiting resources that are reserved for the people. The elite, in turn, is said to neglect the people’s interests by failing to prevent this abuse of resources. As to political rights, populists often oppose the extension of voting rights to those considered as aliens 16 or seek to suppress political opposition in the name of the people. 17
The first objection to populism I want to sketch and discuss here, which one may call the standard liberal argument, takes issue with populism’s tendency to exclude. It states that exclusion is unacceptable since to claim prerogatives for one homogeneous group – the people – within a pluralistic polity is to discount the liberty and equality of all other members of this polity, regardless of whether this homogenous group constitutes a majority or not.
The argument works with several propositions. First, liberals take it for granted that all human beings are fundamentally free and equal. Second, liberals believe that all members of a given polity should be treated as free equals, and that political considerations that exclude some but not others – for instance, by serving sectarian interests instead of the public at large – compromise this ideal. Third, for this reason most liberals hold that all political considerations require public justification, that is, seeking, developing and offering reasons addressed to those affected, which treat those affected as free and equal, and which those affected can accept. 18 This is intended by the idea of public reason: political considerations must be justifiable vis-à-vis those affected; they must be sufficiently inclusive to be endorsed by all. 19 I am of course aware that liberal political theory is much richer and more subtle than what is presented here. However, I claim that the argument outlined here captures the basic underlying logic of contemporary political liberalism.
To illustrate the liberal perspective, let us turn again to the example of welfare chauvinism. A liberal would probably argue against welfare chauvinism that political actors as a matter of principle ‘have to justify restrictions … when they deprive people from access to sufficient resources and opportunities for leading an autonomous life’. 20 Therefore, reasons would have to be offered to the affected groups for why they should be deprived from access to these resources. To fulfil the requirement of treating them as free equals, these reasons would have to be articulated in a preferably respectful and comprehensible fashion, and they ought not to refer to group-specific values or discriminatory views. 21 Reasons would have to be, in other words, ‘freestanding from our comprehensive views to the extent that we could imagine people who do not share our particular comprehensive view possible [sic] endorsing them’. 22
Clearly, the liberal would go on to say, these requirements cannot be fulfilled when populists propose to exclude immigrants from welfare on the grounds of ethnicity and belonging. Reasons for doing so could not be freestanding from comprehensive and discriminatory views since ‘giving preference to those of a particular ethno-cultural background’ is ‘unavoidably’ to ‘declare that the culture in question is superior’. 23 Moreover, if access to welfare is restricted on the grounds of belonging, it is unlikely that those affected will endorse these grounds and so affirm being deprived of welfare resources. The upshot is, then, that welfare chauvinism is not justifiable in consonance with liberal principles. This is why for liberals, welfare chauvinism in particular, and exclusion on the grounds of not belonging to a specific people in general, is unacceptable. Public reason rules out welfare chauvinism. Some liberals might indeed hold against welfare chauvinism the idea of ‘welfare universalism’, a view that suggests that ‘the whole logic of the democratic welfare state points towards inclusiveness’, 24 and that there exist no grounds to exclude anyone from social welfare. In this sense, inclusiveness is a corollary of the fundamental liberty and equality of all.
So far, the liberal line of reasoning seems to provide us with a powerful principled critique of populism. But upon reflection, it holds some problems that have to do with the relationship between liberal ideals and real political struggle. To recall: liberals usually hold that political considerations ought to be regulated by public reason. 25 When it comes to political contestation most theorists phrase this in the language of the ‘common good’ and stipulate that political actors should seek to serve society as a whole rather than particular subgroups. 26 In practice, however, the actors engaged in political contestation – most relevantly political parties – do not reflect fully developed conceptions of the common good any more than they express articulations of collective identities, social cleavages and different interests. 27 Now, of course, public reason rules out political considerations that appeal to particular interests or identity aims of groups. But it is from these interests and identities that both the content of politics – the ‘aims, issues, and materials of political rivalry’ – and the desire to participate in political life initially arise. 28 The problem with the ideal of public reason is, then, that it requires us to separate the considerations we offer to others from the motivations that undergird our political activity. This does not seem promising: the liberal tendency to ‘emancipate normative issues from structural constraints’, as one sympathetic critic puts it, results in the impracticable demand to shelter politics from its constitutive conflicts. 29 In this regard it has been argued that there is something ‘anti-political’ to political liberalism, and that this in fact creates an opening for populism. 30 The success of populist parties in Europe, for example, can be plausibly linked to their capacity to mobilize the collective identities mainstream left and right no longer speak to due to their ideological convergence in the context of so-called ‘third way’ politics. 31 On this reading, misguided attempts to serve the common good ‘beyond left and right’ – that is, neglecting actually existing conflicts in European societies – have decoupled mainstream parties from the politics on the ground and created the void of collective identification populists fill by appealing to a particularist constituency. 32
To be sure, part of the story is that liberalism’s normative demands are intended as regulative ideals which naturally cannot be reached in their full state. They necessarily stand in critical distance from political reality, and this abstraction is sometimes useful. 33 But they risk being politically irrelevant and eventually counterproductive as a result. This is why political liberalism is an unreliable guide for a critique of populism.
The conservative argument: The people cannot be right
Another characteristic of populism is, as we have seen, that it constantly refers to ‘the people’. Populism, as noted before, is fundamentally an ‘appeal to “the people” against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of society’. 34 Contra a political, economic and cultural elite, populists typically claim to speak in the name of the people. They claim to ‘give power back to the people and restore popular sovereignty’. 35
This arguably invites a conservative reaction, concerned with holding on to the established power structure populists challenge. Along these lines, the next argument against populism I want to consider states that the collective subject populists refer to, ‘the people’, is incapable of forming political judgements of sufficient quality. Instead those who are better equipped to judge – ‘experts’ of politics, economics, etc. – ought to judge and decide, and thus ought to be in power. This argument is at home in Schumpeterian models of elite democracy which characterize the ‘typical citizen’ as ‘infantile’ when it comes to politics. 36
How might such a perspective be vindicated? Whereas conservatism encompasses a less unified set of principles than liberalism, and comes in a broad range of different forms, it might be said to feature at least two foundational characteristics. 37 First, conservatism may be characterized by a ‘bias in favour of the status quo’. 38 Being conservative, as one prominent author put it, is ‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried … the actual to the possible’. 39 And historically speaking, conservatives have indeed been committed to preserving the existing order. (Consider, for example, Hobbes’ taking sides with the Royalists in the English Civil War by ferociously opposing the republican conception of liberty through collective self-government. 40 ) This may be so because, second, conservatism rests on ‘the position of principle … that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others’. 41 From this perspective, claiming to give power to the people, as populists do, is to undermine a natural hierarchy or even advocate a ‘tyranny of the masses’. Hence conservatives tend to seek to restrain, and in some extreme cases bypass or abolish, majority rule and democratic opposition.
To illustrate the conservative line of reasoning, let us look at one of conservatism’s contemporary manifestations: technocratic rule. Technocracy might be defined as ‘the idea of abolishing politics through establishing the rule of factual necessities with their technical imperatives’. 42 Grounded in the (undeniably intuitive) claim that experts are better equipped than citizens to make informed judgements concerning complex political problems, technocracy lends knowledge and ‘evidence’ the last and leading word in politics. In technocracy, majority decisions and democratic procedures are widely ‘replaced by a willingness to do what experts had singled out as the correct course of action’. 43 Its legitimization, writes the conservative sociologist Helmut Schelsky, is that ‘modern technology is not in need of legitimacy; one “governs” with it because it functions’. 44 Its officials, here is Schelsky again, perform the role of ‘analyst, designer, planner’. 45 Technocratic decisions usually serve the function of preserving the status quo and planning ahead to prevent future deviations from it.
With its circumvention of majority rule and endorsement of expertise, the conservative argument in general and technocracy in particular may be seen as ‘populism reversed’. While populism claims to speak in the name of the people against an (however defined) elite, conservatism tends to speak in the name of the ruling elite and looks with a good deal of scepticism at the majority of the people. This points towards two problems which render also the conservative argument ill-suited to credibly oppose populism.
First, the conservative argument has questionable democratic credentials. One’s initial inclination might be to object that equating competence with authority undermines political contestation, and this seems indeed a strong point. 46 Rationalizing political rule as the rule of the most competent can de-legitimize opposition, for any dissent may consequently be dismissed as arising from a lack of understanding of the problems at stake. 47 Yet the legitimacy of political authority depends on the extent to which it can be openly disputed, and this necessitates democratic procedures in which a plurality of views is included. Democratic rule involves collectively deciding on political ends as well as the means to achieve them instead of relying on the competence of a small elite to lead the way in this regard. 48 After all, while any one decision – even the most expertly crafted – has not only advantages but also disadvantages, its legitimacy hinges upon whether a collective agreement can be found on what disadvantages can be accepted and what advantages should be brought out.
Another argument, one that takes conservatism’s core claim on its own terms, is simply that collectives of ordinary citizens can indeed arrive at factually correct judgements and do so rather often. Consider the ‘ask the audience’ lifeline in the TV quiz Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? where participants place great trust in the lay audience to arrive at factually correct judgements. There, the audience seems rarely to be wrong at the aggregate level. This epistemic argument in favour of majority judgements finds its most formal and robust expression in Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, which works as follows. Suppose there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ answer to a political problem. The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that if N people choose between two options, each person has a probability p > ½ of being right, and their probabilities are independent of each other, then the probability of a majority’s being right approaches 1 as N grows. 49 In fact, even a very small group of citizens may be capable of reaching factually correct conclusions if its members deliberate together and so gain new information concerning the issues at hand. 50 Epistemic arguments of this kind are of course problematic in that they presuppose that there exist ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ in political questions. Yet it is precisely because they share this contestable assumption with the conservative argument that they are apt rejoinders to the Schumpeterian defeatism that calls citizens’ epistemic competence into question.
Second, if the conservative rejection of majority judgements is questionable from a democratic perspective, its defence of political elitism – for example, in the form of technocratic decision-making – clearly seems imprudent as a political strategy. Since populism thrives on presenting political elites as ‘selfish, insincere and incompetent’ and essentially suggests that ‘the political system must be profoundly corrupt’, arguing in favour of the elite, and the system this elite seeks to preserve, is to nourish populism’s appeal. 51 Advocating ‘more of the same’, in other words, might increase the public resonance of populism’s call for change from below. Thus it seems that arguments against populism would do better not to rely on a conservative ‘populism reversed’.
Interim conclusion
We have seen that the liberal and conservative perspectives do not provide us with promising grounds on which to critique populism. Both perspectives, it seems, suffer from shortcomings. What lessons may one take from the problems the liberal and conservative reasonings hold?
First, since populism thrives on its capacity to mobilize popular support, a sustainable critique of populism would need to have sufficient resonance with citizens. In order to be understood and considered meaningful by a wider citizen body, it should then probably not be expressed at a level of abstraction that fails to correspond to real-world experiences and practices. 52 Rather, it would need to connect normative objectives with shared perceptions of the social world and existing schemes of understanding. Therefore it would also have to take seriously the feelings of dissatisfaction that make citizens endorse populist alternatives, rather than dismissing these motivational factors as a mere outburst of ‘popular passions’. 53 For example, if one sees populism as essentially a reaction to the dire state of contemporary party democracy, as some students of European politics do, 54 then one likewise needs to acknowledge that many populist complaints indeed point to actual dysfunctions of representative democracies that have often been described in terms of party ‘cartelization’ and ‘collusion’ – tendencies that become manifest in a blurring of the left–right distinction and the decoupling of party elites both from party memberships and citizens’ demands. 55 Yet one may also want to highlight those kinds of problems that are perhaps exaggerated and instrumentalized by populists (such as problems concerning immigration and multiculturalism 56 ) and promote a different perspective.
Second, one might want to turn to those elements of populism that the liberal and conservative objections do not seem to address thoroughly enough and scrutinize them on normative grounds. What I have in mind is primarily populism’s monolithic conception of ‘the people’ which assumes that the people stand naturally as one, without internal differences or disagreements. This ‘holism’, as Nancy Rosenblum calls it, is ultimately anti-political insofar as it claims that there exists a pre-politically given unitary will of the people. On this view, difference and disagreement are seen as undermining a natural unity. Against this, one might want to hold that preferences, perspectives and positions are not statically ‘out there’ but result from open-ended procedures of will-formation in which preferences and values are principally open to revision and reassessment. 57 Furthermore, since holism is ‘less prescriptive than cautionary: meant not as an aspiration for revolutionary transformation but rather as a demonstration in thought of how far we always are from the community we can imagine’, 58 it tends to invoke an idealized conception of community that is often nourished by myths, symbols of identity, and so on. 59 Against this, then, one might want to look for alternative narratives of collective identification and reinterpret the populist understanding of social bonds.
These tentative conclusions allow us to imagine alternative grounds on which to critique populism. The subsequent section offers two alternative principles one may hold against populism, which I shall call the principles of solidarity and procedure. The first suggests an inclusive interpretation of political solidarity contra populism’s exclusionary view of social bonds. The second holds that procedures of public deliberation exhibit the changeability of individual perspectives and in so doing render the populist idea of a homogenous will of the people untenable. These principles, as will become clear, share some of liberalism’s normative intuitions, particularly the commitment to inclusion. Yet they are formulated such that they avoid the pitfalls the liberal argumentation brings with it. This is a matter of abjuring liberalism’s theoretical universality and the corresponding high level of abstraction at which its ideals are framed. Rather than falling back on the kind of normative theorizing that is out of touch with the politics on the ground, the aim is to formulate principles with heightened sensitivity to the empirical circumstances of politics. Thus I identify the principles of solidarity and procedure by means of reflecting on actually existing social relations and practices that seem to harbour possibilities for an inclusive counter-narrative to populism. 60 The result is not a fully integrated theory, but a set of propositions intended to contribute to a critical understanding of populism that is both theoretically informed and politically relevant.
Alternative grounds: The principles of solidarity and procedure
Reinterpreting solidarity
Populism, as we have seen, treats ‘the people’ as a homogenous community defined by common ethnicity, culture, or class. This implies that social bonds are seen as sustained by shared origin and belonging. In this sense, populism can be classed as based on a type of solidarity as fidelity to a group. 61 On such a perspective, membership of the community brings with it a range of duties, including the commitment to stand together, act in accordance with the values that are shared in common, and be ready to defend these values when under threat. 62 These duties are typically understood as ‘natural’ and not presupposing any antecedent social relations or interactions: one is born with duties towards the community. 63 In contrast, virtually no duties exist towards individuals or groups who do not belong to the community; rather, they are likely to be treated as antagonists that pose a threat to the community and its core values. 64
However, it may be possible to conceive solidarity in different ways. Rather than casting solidarity as implying duties towards the members of a homogenous ethnic, cultural, etc., community, I understand solidarity in terms of obligations towards the members of a heterogeneous and pluralist polity. 65 This is meant by the principle of solidarity. Importantly, I speak of obligations, rather than duties, because obligations are – unlike duties – not naturally given but generated through social relations; one ‘incurs’ obligations through interaction with others. 66 We shall see below how this works in practice. For the moment, let us turn to the conceptual features of this understanding of solidarity.
For one thing, mutual recognition is likely to be a core component of it. Mutual recognition might be defined, at a general level, as ‘the reciprocal limitation of one’s own, egocentric desires for the benefit of the other’. 67 Applied to contexts in which political life is organized, it can be approached as a matter of respect. 68 An obligation to respect difference within a democratic polity, for instance, would rule out treating rival political actors or specific groups of people as enemies who threaten the community. Rather than excluding or even stigmatizing those who endorse different views and values – as solidarity as fidelity to a group would have it – solidarity as recognition aims at a basic level of mutual esteem. 69 This is what supports and sustains the awareness that one’s political adversaries are not one’s enemies, and so facilitates acting with others across lines of difference. 70 The ‘essential condition of solidarity’ is, therefore, ‘acting with others, even if one disagrees with the group’s chosen ends or means’. 71
One finds this expressed, for example, in the ideal of ‘ethical partisanship’. Ethical partisans, as Russell Muirhead puts it, ‘stand, and yet know that this is not the only reasonable place one can take a stand’; they hope that ‘their side wins, yet know that victory should never be total’. 72 They affirm both their own goals and the legitimacy of multiple competing perspectives. Such a commitment to pluralism is nourished by continuous engagement with the other side – without opposition, partisanship would after all be meaningless – and the capacity to reflect on one’s standpoint with some detachment. In this sense, solidarity is also distinct from the mere toleration of difference, understood as the passive acceptance of what one disapproves of. 73
Having established the conceptual foundations of the principle of solidarity, it still seems that this is susceptible to objections arising from the problem of insufficient resonance with citizens. The ideal of mutual recognition, it might be objected, discounts the persisting force of divisions and antagonisms generated by sentiments of dissatisfaction with the social and political world and resentment against difference. The worry is that the principle of solidarity, just as the liberal argument, falls prey to idealization and abstractness.
But this concern seems to overlook that disagreements and social conflicts do not cast a deterministic force on groups of people that puts the possibility of mutual respect permanently out of reach. People are indeed capable of cooperating across lines of difference in order to promote a specific goal they hold in common; they may exhibit empathic mutual understanding despite competing views, or simply treat rivals with a good dose of sympathy. Indeed there is little reason to assume that solidarity among conflicting groups is impossible, and there is plenty of reason to expect that existing tensions can be softened under certain circumstances.
This naturally raises the question of how solidarity may be reliably fostered and sustained, and I want to suggest at least two ways of thinking about it. Above I have argued that obligations of the kind the principle of solidarity intends are generated through interaction. One incurs, as it were, some such obligations by entering political relations with others within a democratic polity – even in an adversarial relation. But at a much more basic level, it can also be the mere exposure to acts of solidarity that cultivates a sense of obligation. Phenomenologically, any one instance of people acting together across lines of difference may increase the extent to which solidarity is considered worthwhile and meaningful. This is because, as one author phrases it, norms can be promoted through ‘exemplary instances of authentic congruency’ between ideals and reality that are ‘capable of educating our discernment’ insofar as they correspond with widely shared intuitions concerning ‘the flourishing of human life and what favours it’ (e.g. being esteemed as a person by others); Kant famously called this sensus communis or Gemeinsinn. 74
For example, in spring 2013, members of the English Defence League (EDL) – a radical right-wing movement which describes itself as ‘dedicated to peacefully protesting against Islamic extremism’ 75 – gathered outside a mosque in York (UK) to protest against the local Islamic community. The members of the mosque, in turn, invited the protesters inside, offering them tea and biscuits. A local councillor eventually told the public media that this marked a ‘proud moment for York’, a day he ‘will never forget’; and the Father of the local parish went as far as claiming that ‘the world can learn from what happened outside that little mosque’. 76 In this case, the worshippers in the mosque have extended recognition to the radical right-wing protesters and treated them with great respect despite their clearly hostile views and values. The local community acknowledged this as an exemplary act of kindness, adjudicating the instance’s normative relevance beyond its particular context.
Although exemplary instances of this kind can arguably contribute to solidarity’s appeal, solidarity is perhaps most effectively fostered when joined together with the other principle I want to propose here, the principle of procedure. This is the second way in which solidarity can be promoted and it is here that interaction immediately engenders mutual obligations. Procedures of mutual engagement are typically thought to promote at least a basic understanding of differently situated knowledge. 77 For instance, ‘hearing the other side’ in public debates can contribute to empathic sensibility to similarities and differences, as well as recognition of the legitimacy of opposing viewpoints. 78 Thus it may reveal the common social origin of experiences of predicament by enabling participants to discover how individual disaffection ties into larger pictures of injustice, and so contribute to developing relationships of solidarity with groups outside the local, cultural, etc., environment. 79 The social bonds thus strengthened cannot be reduced to mere alliances of interest – such reductionism would blind one to the larger questions of justice that undergird political activity. It seems more likely that matters of interest, identity and public concerns blend when people act together across lines of division.
Consider, for example, the recent debate in Germany over the right to circumcise under-aged boys, which was framed in terms of novel scientific evidence and the state’s duty to protect its citizens’ physical integrity. What the debate revealed was that at stake was in fact the subordination of Jewish and Muslim group identity – both groups insisted on retaining the right to male circumcision for religious reasons – to the secular state. One crucial by-product of the debate was, indeed, solidarity among some Muslim and Jewish communities. In Berlin, for instance, Jews and Muslims jointly demonstrated for their freedom of religion. 80 Reacting to this debate, several Christian groups and church leaders likewise expressed their support and appealed to the principle of religious freedom. This dispute over how completely religious freedom should be rendered and the solidarity it fostered clearly cannot be adequately understood in terms of narrow interests. It involves more general justice claims concerning the degree to which pluralism should be restrained in a liberal polity.
However, the principle of solidarity will not exert its normative force solely through exemplary instances of solidarity or procedures of mutual engagement. It is also political actors, especially political parties, who must lead citizens in these matters. This is especially so if one wants to see promoted a rationale of solidarity within a pluralistic polity that is able to make sense of comparable experiences of ‘acting together’ throughout the polity; it is a question of articulating alternative narratives of collective identification and arguably depends on political will. Let us now turn fully to the principle of procedure.
Engaging democratic procedures
Populism, as I have argued, treats the people’s will as unanimous and claims an ‘unbounded supremacy of the “will of the people” over institutions and over the social strata that do not identify with the dominant group’. 81 It follows from such a view that there is – similar to the conservative argument, but for opposite reasons – no need for open and inclusive democratic procedures that include a plurality of perspectives and positions. The preponderance of the people’s will overrules any opposition. For this reason, populism also often ‘translates into a proposal for replacing representative institutions with more direct or plebiscitarian forms of participation’. 82 Populists readily call for referenda in order to transform the will of the people into an ‘immediate assertive power’ that bypasses democratic procedures. 83
What I propose under the heading of the principle of procedure, by contrast, is intended to safeguard pluralism. There are at least two ways to think about the principle of procedure, which are linked only to some extent. The first derives from the classic proceduralist view of democracy: the requirement to include the full plurality of perspectives that exist in a given polity into its democratic decision-making processes. This, it may be said, is a core characteristic of democracy more generally: all citizens should have the right to participate in the process of making the laws they obey. In this perspective, democracy is thought to be an arena where different political groupings compete for power. A second way of thinking about the principle of procedure draws on the deliberative understanding of democracy sketched in the previous section and foregrounds the requirement to recognize that individual perspectives undergo change. This view extends the classic procedural take on democracy in important ways, adding that people’s ‘preferences and values cannot be assumed to be fixed once and for all’ if one wants to respect them as concrete beings that are capable of reflection and agency. 84 Here, democracy is seen not so much as an arena in which relatively fixed interests clash than as a forum where, while democratic decisions may well be made at specific points in time, will-formation takes the form of a necessarily open-ended endeavour, and values and preferences are open to reappraisal since each new decision ‘creates itself a new historical reality which elicits new reactions and new preferences which can be used to question … the previous decision’. 85 My concern here is this second line of thinking.
On this second perspective, the principle of procedure brings with it the perhaps most powerful normative critique of populism, targeted at the populist conception of the people’s will. If one supposes that citizens’ preferences and values undergo change in deliberative procedures (such as public debates), then the populist ideal of a static and homogenous will of the people is untenable. Deliberative procedures may create new alliances (e.g. solidarity between Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities in Germany), lead to a better understanding of the depth and nature of disagreements, and indeed sometimes result in consensus on what is to be done to improve the circumstances for those affected. 86 This way, deliberative procedures show that the unity of the people’s will is much weaker than populists usually claim. This is why one should also be sceptical toward populist proposals for more plebiscitarian forms of participation. As Saffon and Urbinati note, although direct-democratic participation ‘may seem to empower the people and give it a more active political role, it actually gives the people the role of a passive and reactive audience’ with largely fixed preferences and positions. 87
Properly conceived, the principle of procedure concerns both political elites and citizens. It concerns, on the one hand, political actors on the supply side in that it highlights the need to level out the shortcomings of existing representative democratic institutions. As I have established earlier, there are good reasons to take seriously the critique of contemporary party democracy implicit in populist claims to give power back to the people, and this is a matter of democratic innovation. The principle of procedure would require political elites not just to be responsive to public opinion, but to provide citizens with inclusive channels of participation and deliberation. On the other hand, the principle of procedure bears on citizens insofar as deliberation can improve the quality of civic engagement and foster trust in institutions. 88 Indeed, deliberation across lines of difference may not only promote better mutual understanding. When people are given the opportunity to voice their concerns together with others, and be heard by those responsible for policy, they are also likely to view political institutions as more legitimate. This may help reverse the trends of dissatisfaction with politics that are typically thought to play into the hands of populists. 89
One objection this perspective faces is that it is incompatible with the collective identities that underpin political struggle. Strong feelings of belonging to a particular political grouping and its goals, it might be said, put people’s willingness to hear the other side at risk. This is why partisanship is usually disparaged in theories of public deliberation. 90 But there is little reason to expect that membership of such a collective necessarily implies ignorance toward other perspectives, or that strong normative commitments preclude understanding them as something partial. In the ideal, political struggle is ethical, yet this ideal is firmly grounded in empirical reality and draws inspiration from those partisans and activists that ‘are brave enough to stand up publicly for what they see, yet are capacious enough to know that what they see is not the whole of things’. 91 And oftentimes it is the continuous exposure to other views – and, more specifically, the reasons others give for why they hold these views, irrespective of whether these are good or bad reasons 92 – that helps induce such reflection on one’s own perspective and promote what Arendt called ‘enlarged mentality’.
In summary, we may note that the principle of procedure exposes some of the gravest tensions between populism and democracy, and that it allows us to hold a dynamic and pluralist understanding of democracy, based on deliberative practices, against the populist idea of an unanimous people’s will. The principle of procedure effectively undermines this core tenet of populism and likewise works against actual democratic deficits that form a crucial supporting condition for populism’s success. However, without adequate institutions that allow citizens to participate and deliberate, the principle of procedure may not exert appeal among a wider citizenry. Indeed, its resonance with citizens is likely to depend on the extent to which its propositions concerning inclusive democratic participation correspond to institutional realities. Absent efforts to create new participatory institutions, or reform old ones, populism’s electoral surge is unlikely to be stopped. So again, much depends on political will.