The populist threat to pluralism

The basis of political pluralism

In its most general sense, I take pluralism to be the belief that there is no one, single, complete and unified true perspective. There is more than one legitimate way of seeing and no one perspective can maximally accommodate all that is good. That is not to say that there are no wrong perspectives or that there are never good reasons for preferring one perspective over another. It does mean, however, that we will expect there to be times when we cannot objectively decide which perspective is superior and there are losses as well as gains in adopting one perspective over another.

Pluralism need not be global. One can be a pluralist in some domains but not others. One might be a moral pluralist, for instance, but a scientific ‘monist’, believing that where two scientific theories are in contradiction, only one is correct.

I would call the pluralism I endorse ethico-political. It is a pluralism that states that because there is more than one legitimate conception of the good life for human beings, and because one of the main functions of politics is to enable people to live good lives, there can be no one way of ordering society so as to completely satisfy all legitimate aspirations for the good life. Therefore the role of politics is to balance and negotiate between competing claims and demands so as to enable as many compatible goods from different incompatible positions as is possible.

So, where different moral outlooks lead to different but potentially coexistent goods, then coexistence should be facilitated. Where different moral outlooks lead to incompatible values or goods, such as a woman’s right to an abortion versus a foetus’ right to come to term, society has to come to a decision that cannot satisfy all sides. However, it can do so in a way that does not simply entail picking one position and setting aside the others. Agreement has only to be about how the decision is made.

That this is workable is shown by the fact that there is often great scope for agreement or compromise in the absence of agreement on fundamental moral theory. Ethics committees and commissions around the world have been able to come to a surprising amount of agreement, given the different moral and religious convictions of their members.

Ethico-political pluralism is a liberal position, but not all liberal positions are pluralist. One could, for example, have a liberal policy of toleration on the basis that people have the fundamental freedom to pursue misguided visions of the good life, just as long as they do not impinge on the ability of others to live according to the correct one. Something like this has underpinned the liberalism of various nations which have nonetheless been deeply rooted in a religious tradition. The relative openness of the Islamic golden age, for example, was not premised on the belief that Islam did not represent the one true path, merely on a tolerance for those who for reasons of conscience or culture refused to follow it.

Liberals who believe that liberalism is the one, true theory and that all others are simply mistaken can accommodate difference only on the basis of tolerance. In contrast, liberal pluralists who accept that there is no conclusive case that liberalism is the sole justifiable principle by which to run society are committed to acknowledging the claims of all credible alternatives and negotiating how they should live together.

There is, however, a problem. Since many people are not pluralists and cannot be persuaded to change their minds, many people with competing values do not believe that it is right simply to accept the existence of these differences and negotiate their coexistence. In order to run a society on pluralist lines, it would therefore seem necessary first to create a society of pluralists, and this is not realistic.

But this need not be so. Strip away the ethical premises about a plurality of conceptions of the good life, and you are left with pure political pluralism: there can be no one way of ordering society so as to completely satisfy all aspirations for the good life. Therefore the role of politics is to balance and negotiate between competing claims and demands so as to enable as many compatible goods from different incompatible positions as is possible.

If one cannot adopt such a political pluralism without first adopting ethical pluralism, then political pluralism is unlikely to command wide assent. Fortunately, political pluralism does not require ethical pluralism. The justification for a pluralist polis is normative, but it is epistemological, not ethical.

The normative nature of rationality

I have argued elsewhere that rationality is essentially normative, in that it entails that there are things we ought to believe or assent to. ¹ The most general statement of this is what I shall call the Normative Principle of Rationality (NPR), which could be stated in various ways, for instance:

We ought to follow the argument wherever it leads.

or

We should believe what it is most rational to believe.

If ‘rationality’ is understood in a sufficiently broad sense, then this principle should be relatively uncontroversial. This broad sense of rationality centres on the necessity to provide reasons for belief: an account is rational to the extent that it offers good reasons to accept its conclusions. These reasons are not confined to ones that can be proved by formal deductive methods or established as empirical fact. Indeed, on my view of rationality, it can sometimes be rational to reject the conclusion of a deductive argument, even if you cannot locate the fault in it. For example, were I to present you with a deductive argument proving that 1 = 0 and you are unable to identify what is invalid in it, or which of its premises was false, it would still be rational for you to assume there is something wrong with the reasoning since you have many more good reasons to assume 1 ≠ 0 than to think 1 = 0. Good reasons cohere with other good reasons and can collectively defeat a solitary, apparently sound, contradictory argument.

This normative principle of rationality is the basic precondition of peaceful coexistence. To reject the idea that we ought to have reasons for what we believe is to say that we can believe what we like without reason. That takes away any requirement to justify our own beliefs or criticize those of others. Dialogue is impossible and conflicts become matters of will.

NPR should then seem to be reasonably uncontroversial, in theory at least. In practice, there is a major problem, namely that NPR is not the same as:

We ought to follow the argument wherever it seems to us to lead.

or

We should believe what it seems to us is most rational to believe.

There is clearly a difference between what is most rational and what might seem to us to be most rational. But although it seems impossible for any individual to transcend her or his own sense of what is rational, it would be sheer arrogance to equate the rational with what seems rational to me. How then can one distinguish between the two?

What is needed here is a way of deciding when we ought not to take something as seeming to be rational as sufficient evidence that it is rational. Fortunately, such a method is suggested by the very nature of rationality itself.

Rationality is interest- and agent-neutral. That is to say, what is most rational should not depend on who the reasoner is and what his or her interests are. Of course, that does not mean that what is rational for one person to do in one situation has also to be rational for another person to do in a similar situation. What is rational to do is of course often situation-specific. But, for any specific situation, if one were being fully rational, two agents with different needs, values and purposes should agree about what it is most rational to believe about that situation.

This convergence of rationality can be summed up in a simple principle, which I shall call the Principle of Rational Impartiality (PRI):

What is most rational to one should be most rational to all.

If this is true, then it is rational to doubt the rationality of something that does not seem rational to many competent, rational judges. If rationality entails convergence, and convergence does not occur, then there is prima facie evidence of an absence of sufficient rationality to conclusively form a judgement on the matter.

Mere disagreement by itself is not enough to give up the belief that what seems rational to you really is rational. You may, for instance, have a convincing error theory: an explanation as to why apparently rational people disagree. They may lack vital evidence you have, for instance, or not have had the opportunity to test your argument. Or they might be deeply wedded to a belief that makes them resistant to counter-evidence or -argument.

However, one needs to be careful to adopt a principle of sufficient charity. It is too easy to dismiss those we disagree with as having judgements distorted by prejudice, as though we were immune from such things.

In any case, the main upshot of seeing that rational judges dissent is not to suspend judgement. It is simply to accept a greater defeasibility for our beliefs than we otherwise would and so to insist on them less forcefully. So, one can accept that there is a sufficiently strong case to believe that x is true, but it is not strong enough to insist that anyone who does not accept that x is true is simply being irrational. This distinction seems both familiar and straightforward. Without having ever formalized it, people routinely find themselves ‘agreeing to disagree’ because they can see there is no way of settling the issue to everyone’s satisfaction.

This can be summed up in what I will call the Principle of Epistemological Pluralism (PEP):

In the absence of an overwhelmingly strong error theory, the impartiality of rationality entails that where competent rational judges disagree, we should accept that we have insufficient grounds to insist on the truth of one conclusion and accommodate different ones, even if we believe only one of them to be the sole truth.

Of course, in this broad form, certain key notions are left under-specified, most notably the idea of competent rational judges. Nonetheless, it is sufficient to identify what is important for the purposes of my argument here.

The politics of PEP

PEP grounds political pluralism. No matter how convinced we as individuals might be that certain conceptions of the good life are misguided, or that certain principles for ordering society are wrong, we cannot but accept the fact that competent rational agents disagree, sometimes considerably, as to what the good is, for individuals and for society. If, as we should, we accept the political corollary of NPR – namely, society ought to do what it is most rational to do – we are led to the political corollary of PEP, formed by the addition of one phrase which identifies the specific context for the general principle (which I have italicized):

In the absence of an overwhelmingly strong error theory, the impartiality of rationality entails that where competent rational judges disagree about how society should be run, we should accept that we have insufficient grounds to insist on the truth of one conclusion and accommodate different ones, even if we believe only one of them to be the sole truth.

It is important to note that political PEP is not infinitely accommodating and does not imply an anything-goes, laissez-faire relativism. First of all, not every political claim is underpinned by a sufficient number of competent, rational judges. Second, we may at times have an error theory that we judge strong enough to dismiss dissent, even from a large number. For instance, where we can see that a position is held on the basis of an ideology, zealously upheld by appeal to authority, we have good reason to dismiss the claims to rationality of that position.

In such cases, that does not necessarily mean intolerance. As we have seen, there are reasons for being tolerant that do not require any acceptance of uncertainty as to the falsity of that which we tolerate. What it does mean is that tolerance is not automatically demanded. This is important, because it provides a justification for the kind of robust liberalism that does not allow pernicious ideologies to thrive in its midst, under the protection of just that which it threatens.

By this route, it should now be clear that we have arrived at political pluralism. What we have added to our earlier formulation of it is its normative epistemological basis, italicized below.

There can be no one way of ordering society so as to completely satisfy all aspirations for the good life because competent rational judges disagree about how society should be run, and the impartiality of rationality entails that in such cases we should accept that we have insufficient grounds to insist on the truth of one conclusion and accommodate different ones, even if we believe only one of them to be the sole truth. Therefore the role of politics is to balance and negotiate between competing claims and demands so as to enable as many compatible goods from different incompatible positions as is possible.

We could call this kind of political pluralism de facto pluralism. What makes this so powerful is that it does not require any commitment to any particular ethical principle. The normative power comes purely from the normative nature of rationality itself. Nor, as we have seen in the ethical case, does it entail permitting everything and preventing nothing.

Of course, there is no such thing as a normative principle which everyone will or must assent to. It is always possible for someone to merely assert: ‘I will not be bound by reason.’ This is, however, harder to do with honest conviction than it sounds. Since the fundamental nature of rationality is that it is reason-driven, the person who really rejects reason must offer no good reason for that rejection, and few are so hard-headed in their arationality.

Pluralism and democracy

Political pluralism is not the same as democracy, and it is democracy, not pluralism, which is held as sacred in much of the world today. However, it should take only a little reflection to see that although democracy is necessary, it is far from sufficient, for a fair and decent society.

Political theorists have for a long time distinguished between democracy-proper and mere majoritarianism. However, this distinction cannot be made purely by appeal to the nature of democracy itself. Democracy needs to be combined with some kind of embrace of pluralism, so that it becomes a means of negotiating between different interests and visions of the good life and not merely a way of deciding collectively which one path to follow. In some ways pluralism is therefore a higher value than democracy. However, it depends on democracy, not simply because it is in practice foolish to trust judgements of how to govern society to a small unelected elite. PRI (what is most rational to one should be most rational to all) entails that we need not and ought not to trust society’s judgement of rationality to one person, or even a small number of people, but should canvass a wide range of competent opinion.

So we can see that without pluralism, democracy is the tyranny of the majority; without democracy, pluralism is benign dictatorship which always risks descending into something more malign.

The threat to political pluralism

When considering the threat to political pluralism, it is easy to think only of authoritarian regimes, be they secular dictatorships or theocratic regimes, elected or otherwise. But pluralism can also be threatened by majoritarian democracy. That is why populism represents a very real threat to pluralism.

In social science, populism is almost always understood as entailing a malign kind of simplification in which the virtuous and the wicked are neatly divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Hence the editors of a recent academic book on populism define it as pitting ‘a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous “others” who were together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice’. Here, it is the phrase ‘virtuous and homogeneous’ which invites us to assume that populism inevitably results in simplistic fallacies. ²

Populist discourse undermines all the key underpinnings of political pluralism. Take, first of all, NPR. Populists would agree that ‘We should believe what it is most rational to believe’ but they do not appreciate the difference between this and ‘We should believe what it seems to us is most rational to believe’. The reason for this is that populism rejects the idea that what appears as plain truth to the plain person in the street can be anything other than what it is. What seems true is true, and only obfuscating, dissembling elites could pretend otherwise.

In a similar way, populism distorts the Principle of Rational Impartiality (PRI). It accepts that ‘What is most rational to one should be most rational to all’, but this premise, when conjoined with the fact that some do not agree about what is rational, is taken simply as evidence that the dissenters are not rational. When it is believed that what is most rational is just self-evident, there is no cause for self-doubt when others take a different view.

What follows from this is that in place of the Principle of Epistemological Pluralism (PEP) we have a principle of epistemological populism (pep), which, since it has the same acronym, I will distinguish by not dignifying it with upper case:

Where apparently competent rational judges disagree, we should accept the verdict of ordinary people.

The logic of populism is therefore toxic to political pluralism, because it simply denies the possibility of meaningful disagreement about issues of major political significance. Populism is diametrically opposed to pluralism: it promotes a single set of values instead of a plurality, offers simplistic solutions instead of complex compromises, and represents the people as a uniform whole rather than a community of diverse communities.

Given its generally nationalistic nature, the only concession made to difference by populism is generally a culturally relative one: people of different cultures may disagree, but people within one culture will all share the same basic values. Cultural relativism is usually thought of as a driver for tolerance and diversity. In this case we can see it as a driver for division. In the absence of any absolute standard to judge between different value systems, the solution is simply to keep them separate.

Why the threat is real

While the logic of the threat from populism might appear clear, it might appear to be weak and distant in reality. It may be acknowledged that populism has been on the rise in Europe, most evidently in nationalist, populist parties (such as Golden Dawn in Greece and True Finns in Finland). However, it appears to be the case both that the more extreme parties have already peaked in their popularity and that those that have greater electoral success, such as Progress in Norway, become softer and more benign as they do so.

However, the threat of populism does not now come directly from populist parties themselves. The threat comes from the way in which mainstream politics is increasingly being conducted in the populist mode. The rise of populist parties has exacerbated this problem, by encouraging mainstream parties to adopt their rhetoric. But the roots of the problem lie deeper than this.

The root is a shift from real politics – which involves messy compromises between competing interests – to what I call political consumerism. Consumerism is about giving people what they want, without the mediation of politicians or experts. Political parties have adapted to this accordingly. Rather than reflecting the settled will of the party membership, from whose ranks he or she is drawn, today’s career politician is a kind of executive manager. In true consumerist style, this manager’s job is to deliver to the public what it wants, or to make it want what he or she is able to deliver. The mathematics of elections means that it seems obvious that it is more important to listen to public opinion than that of the party membership. From this it follows that parties must appeal to the centre, and that their policies must be driven by opinion polls.

What this erodes is any real sense of representation. The politician represents neither the electorate nor her party. No matter how hard she strives to give people what they want, she belongs to the ‘them’ whose job it is to serve ‘us’, and inevitably she does not fully succeed. The irony is that precisely by trying to pander to the will of the majority, the mainstream political parties have created a dislocation between political elites and the public, creating the conditions for populism.

I would therefore conclude that we are living in a dangerous time for genuine democracy. The populist mode of politics – which is in essence an anti-politics – has become part of ordinary politics. This insidiously undermines the very foundations of a democratic, pluralist state, replacing any sense of the need for dialogue, compromise and accommodation with a simplistic idea that the government’s role is to reflect the clear, unified will of the people.

One major problem with this is that if you are elected on the basis of a myth – that all ‘ills originate from outside “the people”, who are united in their interest’ and that ‘[t]here are no major contradictions or issues to be resolved within this homogeneous entity’, as Aristos Doxiadis and Manos Matsaganis put it – there is simply no way you can govern. ³ At best, you have a short-term disaster and a return to traditional parties to clean up the mess. At worst, you create an ongoing situation in which governance becomes impossible, since the only electable parties are irresponsible. This is arguably already the position in Italy, a country that has not really managed to create widespread faith in the legitimacy and efficacy of real politics for any sustained period in the postwar era. Cynicism about politicians is endemic. The only reason why so many were prepared to elect and re-elect Silvio Berlusconi is that they simply did not believe that principled politics was possible. If you think all criminals are crooks, you vote for the most effective crook.

Disenchantment with politics is therefore toxic, and populism can only increase such disenchantment, since it leads to the promise of simple solutions that cannot be delivered, while removing from the public square the more nuanced kind of discourse that is needed to explain why it cannot work.

Saving pluralism

What then can be done? Although the case for political pluralism can be clearly made, democracies do not secure the consent of their electorates by appeal to philosophical arguments, even if these are relatively straightforward. Furthermore, since populism is not rooted in rational arguments – there is simply no such thing as a rational case for populism – it seems unrealistic to suppose argument can uproot it. What is worse, once populism takes hold, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the case for pluralism, since to do so would appear to offer precisely the kind of elitist over-complication that populism rails against.

In order to defend pluralist politics, we need therefore to set aside the philosophical argument and think in more political terms about what will be effective.

First, there may be some rhetorical bridges between the complex arguments for de facto pluralism and the need for clear, simple political messages. Making the complex clear is difficult but rarely impossible. People need to be regularly made aware of the trade-offs, compromises and accommodations that society depends on. These should not be presented as problems, but achievements. People do not like the compulsory surrendering of personal wealth through taxation but they do like roads, schools and hospitals, and they should be grown-up enough to see that one requires the other.

Although many of these issues are not directly ones which concern pluralism, it is important that the whole tone of politics is one which acknowledges complexity and compromise. The more solutions are presented as cost-free and obvious, the less tolerant people become of the costs when they finally become clear, or of complexity when things do not turn out to be all that straightforward after all.

A further resetting of the everyday discourse of politics is one which rejects the simplistic rhetoric of ‘the people’ and other meaningless, bogusly homogeneous groups like ‘hard-working families’. The rhetoric should be: we are all different, we have different needs. The job of government is to meet as many of these needs as possible. Everyone is equally important, and equally unique.

A further potential rhetorical shift would be never to talk of minority rights without also talking of majority rights. Populism takes hold largely because people feel that the interests of others are being treated more seriously than their own. One way to diffuse this is to stress the quid pro quo of any concession to minorities. If, for example, a right is granted for people to educate their children in minority-religion schools, then it should also be guaranteed that other children will not be denied the right to go to a school of their parents’ choosing. If housing is being made available to immigrants or refugees, it should be made clear on what basis it is being allocated and that others are not going to suffer as a result. In most such cases, policies need not be changed at all, but it does no harm to make what they mean clearer. Populism feeds on irrational fears based on gossip and rumour. Once myths arise they can be hard to slay: far better to leave no room for them to grow in the first place.

A final strategy must be a willingness to face-down simplistic pseudo-solutions directly and to explain clearly why they are not possible and what the costs will be. Politicians must not be afraid to appear to be telling the population it is wrong if it is indeed wrong. Defying the popular will, when done with good reasons, is a sign of strength in a leader which will ultimately be rewarded.

What then is really needed to counter populism and protect pluralism is nothing less than a renewal of politics as an arena of difference, debate and diversity, where everyone’s interests and concerns are included. This requires rebuilding trust in the political system.

These tentative solutions seem in some ways modest, in others utopian. They are modest in that they appear to amount to little more than a change in the way we talk. But in some sense politics is simply a matter of how we talk: the ways in which we structure dialogue to reach compromise with minimal conflict. They are utopian, however, in that they require politicians to refuse to tell people what they most want to hear. It is a bitter pill but it can be sugared by celebrating the ability of already existing pluralist nations to accommodate different values, without losing those core values which allow for the rule of law and respect for the rights of all.