Democracy and disrespect

What is populism anyway?

What is populism anyway? Both inside and outside the academy, there is much lamentation that, allegedly, nobody can really tell what it is, or that its characteristics are a matter of endless, fruitless disagreement. Following Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, I would say that, by now, there is not obviously more disagreement about populism than many other concepts in political theory and social science; going further, one might even reasonably claim that many scholars have converged on what Mudde has famously called an ‘ideational approach’. ⁶ Put in plain language, populism is about ideas; it is about the way politicians talk; it is not about particular material interests or about the psychology of voters.

Here is my own suggestion as to how best to understand populism: Contrary to conventional wisdom today, not everybody who criticizes elites or ‘the establishment’ is necessarily a populist (who might somehow pose a danger for democracy). Of course, when populists are in opposition, they tend to criticize sitting governments. So, in that sense, they do criticize elites. But, above all, they tend to say that they – and only they – represent what they often call the ‘real people’ or also, very frequently, ‘the silent majority’. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. ⁷ Populists immediately make it personal and moral: the problem is ultimately always that the other contenders for power are corrupt, ‘crooked’ characters. ⁸

Less obviously, populists also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists morally exclude others at two levels: first, at an elite level, or, put differently, party politics. But, secondly, they also exclude others among ‘the people themselves’, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish and so on. So anti-elitism is not crucial. What is crucial – and dangerous – about populism is anti-pluralism. For democracy, as Jürgen Habermas at one point wrote succinctly can only appear in the plural. ⁹

While they often promise to ‘unify the people’, de facto populists divide societies; they seek out and thrive on conflict; their political business model, so to speak, is culture war. In a way, they reduce all political questions to questions of belonging: whoever disagrees with them is likely to be labelled a ‘traitor’, ‘enemy of the people’ or, at least, as ‘un-American’ and so on (or, if they are outside the polity, a threat to the nation). This is all another way of saying that disrespect – in the sense of denying some citizens full standing in the polity – is part of populism.

Note that what I have said so far in no way explains why there is populism; the ambition has only been to answer the what-question and to delineate populism from other phenomena – and also to grasp the specific normative problem with populism as a form of anti-pluralism. ¹⁰ As hopefully has become clear, I take populism not to be a doctrine or a distinct set of policy choices; instead, it is a claim to a moral monopoly of representation – in that sense, my approach is purely formal. However, this does not mean that there could be ‘populism without qualities’; all populists require ‘content’ for their moral and symbolic construction of the people. That content can be drawn from nationalism or even racism, as is typical of right-wing and far-right forms of populism, but it can also be derived from, broadly speaking, Marxist traditions of political thought, as has been the case with Venezuela’s ‘socialism for the twenty-first century’.

A fateful populism-liberalism dynamic – or even symmetry?

Let me now outline three typical responses to populism and explain what is problematic about them, at a strategic and instrumental level but also at a normative level informed by considerations drawn from democratic theory.

First, some liberals (again, in the broadest sense) have tended to opt for a strategy of total exclusion. They refuse to debate populists on television or on other public platforms; when populist parties have gained seats in parliament, they reject any engagement with their deputies (by, for instance, not answering their questions, walking out or also not voting for candidates put forward by populist parties for positions such as vice president of parliament).

Such an approach is bound to fail at a strategic level. For it is likely to confirm the very narrative which populists always offer up to their supporters: see, they will say, as we always told you, the elites do not respect you ‘ordinary people’ (because they don’t respect us, your representatives); see, there are all these taboo topics which only we dare to address and which the elites are afraid to tackle and so on. Less obviously, the strategy of all non-populist parties uniting – all against one, one against all – also tends to validate populists’ claim that the ideological differences among ‘establishment’ parties do not really matter, since they will all combine to protect their privileges against the self-declared ‘insurgents’. For instance, it seemed clear confirmation of all the accusations put forward by Beppe Grillo against la casta of professional (and corrupt) politicians, when, in the end, Matteo Renzi and Silvio Berlusconi could work together on a set of proposed changes to the Italian political system; distinctions between left and right appeared not to matter; what mattered was a cartel of establishment parties defending themselves against the only authentic representatives of the people.

There are also two normative concerns here. Liberals entirely refusing to engage with populists end up in a position where they effectively claim: ‘because you exclude, we exclude you’. This can indeed look like the symmetry of moralizing liberals and moralizing populists that some critics of liberalism have identified as particularly problematic; the two sides appear to just calling each other names (and bad characters in particular).

The other concern here is about situations where populist parties have gained representation in parliament. Refusing any engagement with them means denying representation (and, by implication, standing) to all citizens who voted for these parties. And – this is crucial – while populist leaders tell us that they are populists (for they will affirm their anti-pluralism in one way or another in the way they talk – so, discursively), we can never assume that everyone who cast a ballot for a populist party is therefore herself a committed anti-pluralist. Citizens of course vote for all kinds of reasons (and tend to have a range of policy preferences). The example might be a bit strained, but it is not that hard to imagine a French voter who does not care for what Marine Le Pen says about other parties and about some citizens not being quite real (that is to say, not de souche), but who strongly favours her industrial policies or her (onetime) suggestion to withdraw from the Eurozone. If one rejects any debate with populists on these preferences, one effectively communicates that the preferences of that citizen simply do not count. One also assumes that one could not possibly persuade that citizen to stick with their preferences, but also to reject the specifically populist elements of the parties for which they voted (or, put differently, try indirectly to put pressure on such parties to become less populist).

Hillary Clinton has been much criticized for her ‘deplorables’ speech. Yet what was so problematic about her pronouncements was not the term ‘deplorable’; after all, a lot of what Donald J. Trump has said (and done) is deplorable, and some of his followers have made it clear that they precisely want to affirm these deplorable claims and forms of conduct. Rather, it was her writing off a whole range of citizens as ‘irredeemable’ – the thought, in other words, that some citizens are simply lost for democracy and should be condemned and kept out ideally in perpetuity.

Of course, members of democratic polities do not often fundamentally change their affiliations and political self-conceptions. But the whole point of democracy is that we assume that at least some of them do – for, else, why have elections, if, with the help of big data and micro-targeting, one could just ascertain everyone’s political identity perfectly and feed the results into a machine that determines the best government fitting the majority political identity? Democracy, as Adam Przeworski has put it, is a form of institutionalized uncertainty: The outcomes of the game (within broadly agreed rules of the game) are uncertain. ¹¹ By the same logic, no-one can, let alone should, be written off as ‘irredeemable’. The point of the game is that one has to keep trying – for instance by attempting to persuade even those attracted to truly deplorable rhetoric and conduct to change their minds. One can criticize what is deplorable without expressing the kind of fundamental disrespect that is communicated by the term ‘irredeemable’.

A second approach to populism is prima facie the opposite of the first: here politicians bet on a strategy that might be summed up with the paradoxical-sounding maxim ‘destruction through imitation’. One effectively starts to copy the populists or, put differently, run after them. Again, this approach is flawed both on an instrumental and on a normative level. As for the strategic level, no matter how fast one runs after populists, one will probably never catch them. It is unlikely that outfits like the Danish People’s Party or Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands will ever be satisfied with proposals on immigration by supposed ‘mainstream parties’, no matter how restrictive. And it is also unlikely that what we might call ‘the opportunism of the mainstream’ will actually win votes: If presented with the copy, citizens may well prefer the original.

Apart from these strategic considerations, there are again also two normative concerns. It is striking how some politicians in this context tend to switch from one extreme to the other: they start out decrying populists as demagogues trading in lies – and then, all of a sudden, they begin to suggest that perhaps populists intuit, or even firmly know, something about people’s real ‘concerns and anxieties’ that others don’t. From a position of what we might call complete epistemic disrespect – whatever populists say we can discount as false – one changes to a stance that effectively accords them something like a sociological monopoly of knowledge of what is truly happening at the core of our societies.

What is wrong with this move? It presupposes a particular, flawed understanding of how democratic representation functions. It takes it to be something like a process of mechanically reproducing existing interests, ideas and even identities. In other words, some of the latter are not currently represented; the savvy populist political entrepreneur discovers them and translates them into the political system, thereby filling what some social scientists refer to as a ‘gap in representation’. However, this view of representation is misguided. It fails to see that representation is a dynamic process, in which citizens’ self-perceptions, down to their very identities, are also formed by what we might call the ‘representational offerings’ they receive from politicians, from the media, from civil society, down to friends and family. In other words, representation must be comprehended as creative or, as some political theorists have put, as ‘constructive’. ¹²

To be sure, this does not mean that a political landscape can be remade at will. But this understanding of representation effectively counters the mistaken belief that populists have somehow revealed the ultimate, objective truth about our societies. Whoever holds that view may well make the populists’ claims about people’s ‘real concerns and anxieties’ into something like a self-fulfilling prophecy: If citizens are addressed long enough from multiple sides with an agenda and a frame which reflect the populists’ account of their interests and identities, they are likely eventually to see themselves in just the way populists have portrayed them all along. Such a dynamic is all the more likely in an age when the logic of social media platforms mandates that we always get more of the same (once we have revealed anything at all about how we might see ourselves and the world). ¹³

Put more concretely, a voter may well initially cast a ballot for a populist party as a matter of protest – which is to say: as a matter of disaffection, or ‘negative identification’, with ‘establishment parties’. But especially if he or she is then continuously portrayed as, let’s say, an ‘AfD person’ (referring to the German radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland) or as a member of a supposed ‘Trumpist movement’, that identity may well solidify into something like a more permanent identification with a populist party (or a populist figure like Trump and his future epigones). ¹⁴ And then the temptation might be all the greater for some politicians to write off a person like this as simply ‘irredeemable’.

The criticism here concerns not just the failure of supposed ‘mainstream’ politicians to see (and use) the creative aspects of democratic representation. It is specifically about the scenario where, as result of the opportunistic adaptations of the mainstream, a whole political spectrum shifts, let’s say, rightward. For many voters of ‘established parties’ will not vote for them because of – let’s again say for the sake of the argument – tighter restrictions on asylum law and immigration, but because they have a long-term identification with such a party. They are not necessarily endorsing a policy agenda initially put forward by populists – and yet, in the end, a whole political culture might have changed, possibly in an irreversible manner, because of the successive adaptations of non-populist parties. That change will arguably not have been the result of anything like a comprehensive democratic authorization.

Democracy is unpredictable, and in fact, it should be unpredictable; it depends on people being able to change their minds. Obviously, it also requires a certain stability of representations – through political parties, above all. Its dynamic character also depends ultimately on a certain distrust of representations: things could be different; interests, ideas and identities could appear in novel ways to citizens. Concretely, for our discussion here, this means that certain representations of those allegedly ‘left behind’ or ‘disrespected’ need to be treated with extreme caution; they are not so self-evidently reflections of people’s lived experience. True, one can frame the French government’s introduction of further speed limits in the countryside and of fuel taxes as ‘disrespect’ for a way of life’ – but one might also see it as sheer inattention to the effects of particular policies on particular parts of the population – a matter of distributive justice, as opposed to lack of ‘cultural recognition’.

It cannot be just assumed that a dynamics of demands for recognition and respect are quasi-natural constants of political life, as does, for instance, Francis Fukuyama in his recent writings on ‘identity politics’: he simply posits that what he calls isothymia – a ‘demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people’ – and what he terms megalothymia – a ‘desire to be recognized a superior’ – will always be with us. ¹⁵ By the same token, one cannot simply from on high attribute an attitude of ‘cultural essentialism’ to large population groups without any firm empirical basis. ¹⁶ I venture that many citizens who are said to ‘feed disrespected’ in fact do not really directly experience any such thing – but they are told virtually day and night on talk radio and television stations like Fox News in the United States that they are being disrespected. It is not even so obvious that citizens are necessarily ‘angry’ (most of them just vote for a particular party; they don’t set fire to palaces). It can seem self-evident that we’re witnessing ‘vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites and shadowy enemies’, as James Miller writes – only then to dignify these phenomena with the label of ‘democracy as furious dissent’. ¹⁷ But none of this is self-evident; it’s a matter of interpretation, and, on closer inspection, some primarily materialist interpretations are much more plausible than cultural ones.

There is a third and final approach to populism that is prominent and yet deeply misguided. I would call it technocracy. Here one essentially rests content with the position that populists are all liars or at least the purveyors of irresponsible policies and misleading promises. The tendency is to say that ‘our’ liberal (broadly speaking) side uniquely possesses truth and rationality. Such a stance is of course highly plausible in an age when a populist president really does lie virtually non-stop. But it comes with one might call a temptation of technocracy. Technocrats, to put it crudely, claim that there is only one rational solution for every major policy challenge. Whoever disagrees thereby reveals themselves as essentially irrational (and therefore undeserving of standing in policy debates, even if their status as members of the polity as such is not necessarily disrespected, i.e. openly questioned, as is the case with populism). Such a technocratic attitude is problematic – yet again – both at a strategic and at a normative level. On the instrumental level, technocracy paves the way for populists to claim (not without good reasons) that democracy without choices is a contradiction in terms. Populists will ask ‘Where are the people in all this?’ This does not mean that, all of a sudden, populists have become the good-faith defenders of democratic values. But technocratic decision-making is bound to make their criticism of ‘elites disrespecting the people’ all the more plausible.

Then, in all likelihood, a vicious circle starts. If populists succeed at the polls, technocrats will have all their fears confirmed that the irrational masses are always ready to be seduced by demagogues. And they will try to take more decision-making power away from seemingly incompetent ‘ordinary citizens’. That will make the populist criticism of ‘remote’ elites resonate even more. And so on. And while it can now look like two extremes – technocracy and populism – confront each other here, in fact technocracy and populism actually have something in common: they are both forms of anti-pluralism. For the technocrat, there is only one rational solution; disagreement signals epistemic deficiencies; and there certainly is no need for any debate. For the populist, there is only one authentic will of the people (and only the populist knows it); disagreement signals moral deficiencies, for one is likely a traitor to the people; and there certainly is no debate about ‘the real people’ required. Democracy as institutionalized uncertainty – where politicians and citizens disagree in more or less good faith and sometimes even change their minds – disappears between the two extremes. ¹⁸ Technocracy might give liberals a sense of certainty (‘we have the truth’). But it is incompatible with a proper understanding of democracy.

So what instead?

If complete exclusion and opportunistic imitation and technocratic self-satisfaction are all wrong – strategically and normatively – what then instead? I will not say much that is constructive about the strategic level here, but I do want to put forward some suggestions as to how professional politicians can effectively engage populists while observing the constraints generated by any plausible democratic theory.

As has hopefully become clear from the discussion above, I believe there is no alternative to engaging with populists. But talking with them does not mean talking like them. Of course, there is also no imperative to react to all their provocations. A figure like Trump has set up a political theatre (or perhaps, a real reality TV polit-show) where the opposition, the resistance and so on all play their parts – but always within his theatre. It is sometimes important to switch to another stage and talk past the president – even if, for obvious reasons, one cannot entirely ignore the president of the United States.

So, open argument and debate are necessary. Within such debates, there is room for many policy positions one can reject with good reasons, but which one cannot automatically disqualify as undemocratic: zero immigration, protectionist economic policies and a conservative approach to gender questions – there are many normative arguments one can (and should) advance against such stances. But one cannot say that they have no place in a democratic debate – a debate, that is, where prima facie all citizens have standing to advance their notion of how to come to fair terms of sharing political space.

Now, policy debates are one thing; it’s another thing if a politician clearly reveals themselves to be a populist. In other words, there are moments when the anti-pluralism at the core of populism becomes highly visible: for instance, when populists suggest that some citizens do not truly belong at all, or when a populist – to draw on an example from Germany – insinuates that there was a secret plan by Angela Merkel to replace the German Volk with Syrians. It is important that in such instances red lines be clearly drawn – and defended. Obviously, what originated in France as the conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’ is not a good-faith contribution to a policy debate on immigration. Non-populist politicians are under a duty to bring out this fact as clearly as possible. Obviously, the populists do not uniquely represent the people – and non-populist politicians are under a duty (quite apart from the fact that it is in their self-interest to do so) to contest populists’ claim to a moral monopoly of representation. True, populists are owed respect as participants in democratic debates; but they are not entitled to an understanding of ‘respect’ where ‘respect’ means that their utterances will not be countered and contested. What often is presented as a demand for free speech is in fact a demand for being able to declare something without retorts or rebuttals. But there is no right to contestation-free discourse in a democracy. If populists claim that someone pointing out that they do not represent the silent majority, but, if anything, a loud minority, constitutes disrespect, they are surely wrong.

Of course, a populist who is called out as a populist (in the sense of the term defended in this essay) or someone who can be shown to spread conspiracy theories might not exactly be impressed with the charge of being a populist or conspiracy theorist. Sometimes, their utterances are purely a performance for a particular audience; they are not meant to raise validity claims at all. But there is usually also another audience who are not already committed to supporting such populist performance artists. It is that audience which matters above all – and for whom it is important to underline the perils of populism and the usual attacks on ‘shadowy enemies’ in particular.

Drawing red lines is not always exactly straightforward – and neither is the exercise of separating supposed policy content from actual populism. The clichéd talk of ‘legitimate grievances’ hides the fact that grievances are not objectively given; more important, it hides the fact that the categorization as ‘legitimate’ is a matter of contestable interpretation – and also a question of power. Trump, of course, did not openly say that Hispanics cannot be real Americans; only ‘rapists’ and drug dealers from Mexico are the problem (and there might be ‘good people’, too). Here it is not hard to understand that, effectively, the point is incitement to hatred of minorities. ¹⁹ But it might still require some extra work to convince Trump supporters that, as a protestor’s placard put it, ‘all Americans are real Americans’.

Guarding red lines is important; but in the end, it might be sorely insufficient in a struggle with populists. In a more constructive vein, politicians should also try to recast how conflicts are understood. As said above, a polity’s cleavages are not just objectively given and immutable. To be sure, one can’t reinterpret them unilaterally at will. But one can try to craft languages that reorient citizens away from the endless culture wars which are crucial for the political business model of populists. Plenty of what today is maligned as ‘identity politics’ actually is not really about ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ at all, but comes down to claiming basic human rights (and sometimes also specifically democratic rights in a polity). And what is often presented as a conflict between a supposedly authentic (usually rural) ‘heartland’ and the cosmopolitan, quasi-extraterritorial global cities comes down to how life chances are distributed through basic regulatory and infrastructure decisions – from the price of airline tickets for more rural areas to the status of community banks to the policies determining the costs of housing in urban conglomerates. ²⁰

The success of such attempts at ‘de-culturalizing’ conflicts (to coin an ugly phrase) will of course depend significantly on context. As a groundbreaking study by three Harvard scholars has shown, the US public sphere features an insular ‘right-wing media eco-system’ with a distinct ‘propaganda feedback loop’. ²¹ In that system, ‘news’ is invariably re-framed so as to confirm political–cultural identities (often in conjunction with conspiracy theories, which also flourish in a system disconnected even from centre-right media – because the latter might at least occasionally serve as a ‘reality check’). The existence of this ecosystem comes down to a particular political economy: From the 1980s onwards, a combination of regulatory decisions and economic incentives made it possible for culture war to become very big business. Plenty of self-described ‘opinion journalists’ and ‘advocacy journalists’ (the terms are Sean Hannity’s) not only fail to live up to professional standards of journalism – their business depends on failing to live up to such standards. ²² Yet not all public spheres in today’s democracies are as distorted (or even ‘polluted’) as the media landscape in the United States. Even if it is a difficult task, ‘de-culturalizing’ conflicts would help in preventing populists from translating disagreement into disrespect – thereby strengthening their master-frame of ‘homogeneous, pure people versus homogeneous, corrupt elite who fail to respect (and also usually betray) the people’.

Of course, it is an illusion to think that questions of culture and identity could all neatly be turned into negotiable ‘interests’ (preferably material interests over which one can bargain). ²³ It would also be wrong to assume that somehow questions of culture and identity are more ‘emotional’, and that other forms of conflict must automatically somehow be more ‘rational’. All politics is shot through with moral claims and conceptions of identity; all politics involves sentiments; and breaking disagreements down into questions of distribution (who has the right to access what kind of bathroom? Who gets what life chances in a supposed meritocracy that systematically disfavours rural dwellers?) does not guarantee that a debate gets less charged. But the actual normative disagreements – as opposed to an endless competition of who gets disrespected most – are likelier to come out and be subject to actual arguments about justice.

Sometimes, it might help to have concrete incentives in place: one can, for instance, communicate to voters clearly that a coalition with a populist party is not ruled out for all times – but that such a party demonstrably abandoning its anti-pluralism is a precondition of any cooperation. This would also make the political process more transparent for citizens. And it would make it more difficult for populists to present themselves as the eternal victims of elites who keep them down. After all, it is their decision whether to persist with their anti-pluralism or not.

Civilian engagements with populists: Civil and uncivil

I have focused on professional politicians so far. What role is there for what is often so patronizingly called ‘ordinary citizens’? For sure, they can try what full-time politicians can do: push populists away from their populism or at least signal to audiences what is so dangerous about anti-pluralism in a democracy. They can try to circumvent the barriers that have made the right-wing media sphere so isolated and engage other citizens directly, unmediated: on streets, squares, even in their homes. Obviously, one should not be starry-eyed about such encounters; social scientists have long been sceptical about the ‘contact hypothesis’ (according to which meeting people about whom one has prejudices is likely to change ones’ mind).

What about less civil encounters between citizens and populist politicians? Or even civil disobedience – or, for that matter, uncivil disobedience? ²⁴ Despite the rich literature on the ethics of civil disobedience in the decades since John Rawls wrote his seminal pages on the topic, not much thought has been given specifically to lawbreaking in relation to populism. ²⁵ Prima facie, it would seem inapplicable in situations where populists have not acquired power, for by definition they cannot have passed laws that one should flag as particularly unjust through open, conscientious and well-publicized lawbreaking. Except that, as argued above, an opportunistic mainstream sometimes adopts precisely the laws that populists have been demanding. It might not always be evident that such laws then have a particularly anti-pluralist dimension – after all, as also suggested above, policies are not as such populist or non-populist. But one might still, in an indirect strategy of civil disobedience, break the laws in order to alert a majority to the ways that populists are gaining power through the opportunism of the supposed mainstream. Such an approach would point less at what has come, for better or worse, to be known as a primarily liberal understanding of civil disobedience (according to which, in ‘nearly just’ [Rawls] societies, only specific laws are unjust). Rather, it could be thought of as a distinctly democratic form of disobedience which seeks to highlight problems with the democratic process, not just individual laws. ²⁶ A system in which populists come to dominate the agenda, even if they speak at best for a loud minority, might legitimately be subject to such democratic disobedience.

What is not so straightforward, though, is an answer to the question why exactly laws have to be broken. If it is to generate publicity, surely there are other ways: think of recent demonstrations which as their motto simply featured ‘There are more of us’. ²⁷ If the point is to underline the credibility of one’s engagement and the urgency of rectifying the problems of the democratic process, it is not clear that a majority which might not agree with the substantive arguments being put forward by disobedients would be swayed by the fact that disobedients are prepared to go to jail as a result of their lawbreaking.

This leaves a somewhat grey area where no lawbreaking is involved, but where distinctly uncivil forms of confrontation aim at changing the minds of audiences witnessing an encounter between citizens and actors who in one way or another promote or sustain populism. Think of instances when pro-Trump Republicans have been refused service, or been yelled at, in restaurants. Or think of how a group of activists went to the home of Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson (who was not at home, in fact – though his family was), and then chanted: ‘we know where you sleep at night!’ ²⁸ Or think of someone stealing the clothes of AfD leader Alexander Gauland, generating images of the 77-year old having to walk home in his bathing trunks (commentary ran: ‘No bathing fun for Nazis!’).

It is certainly wrong to think that being confrontational automatically amounts to disrespect for the standing of others in a polity. Sanitized, sentimental versions of the history of the US civil rights movement suggest that even civil disobedience has to be based on decorum or politeness. But there is nothing wrong with being uncivil, as long as a number of conditions hold. First, the confrontation is directly with the person involved in the unjust practices to which one seeks to draw attention. That means no legitimacy for collateral damage in the form of scaring a family at home. Second, confrontations have to plausibly communicate the actual injustice or flaw with the democratic process. Someone yelling openly at a politician might not be the best way to appeal to majorities who do not yet agree with their view about an injustice – but the content of the speech here can clearly point to what is perceived as an injustice. Exposing someone to ridicule on social media, by cruelly forcing them to exhibit their naked body, has no discernible communicative content relating to an injustice. ²⁹

So the suggestions made earlier do not seek unduly to ‘tame’ conflicts with populists or pretend that they must be somehow made entirely ‘rational’. There is space for disruption, for trying to shake people out of complacency, when they assume that anti-pluralism cannot subvert a democracy slowly. But there are also clear normative constraints.

Conclusion

This essay has been engaged in a very limited exercise. I have sought to show that liberals can confront populists in ways that amount to more than the ‘mere moralizing’ with which critics have charged liberals. But of course there has been a very large lacuna. I have not made any attempt to explain why populism emerges under particular circumstances. But it is also the case that none of what I have said suggests that one somehow no longer has to address that question – as the critics of the liberal approach sometimes suggest (along the lines of ‘once liberals have excluded the populists and their voters as immoral actors, they rest content with that’). At the same time, no explanation will invalidate the critique of anti-pluralism. Populists may well be right in many of their criticisms of existing elites (and existing states and regimes), but that does not justify the kind of double exclusion I analysed further above.

It should also be clear that one should not expect professional politicians somehow being dei ex machina who, by confronting and occasionally ‘un-masking’ populists in clever ways, will deliver us from populism. But it is worth reflecting, in a Weberian vein, on what we should expect from politicians who, of course, want to be victorious in the short run – but who also, ideally, keep in mind the state of a political culture as a whole in the long term. This is obviously very demanding – but Weber precisely suggested that a real capacity for judgment was rare and might take much time to develop. It would include an ability to judge the timing and tone of interventions against populists and also the right moments for appealing to a larger audience that can still be swayed from populism. At least occasionally the capacity should be rewarded, even if one finds oneself not on the same partisan side.