Reflections on the nature of populism and the problem of stability

I. Introduction

In a previous paper, ‘Rawls, Religion, and the Crisis of Civilization’, ¹ I presented two concepts of the political, one that entailed a clash of civilizations associated with the Schmittian critique of liberalism and a second notion of the political that envisioned the political as an emerging domain eventually grounded on (an) overlapping consensus. I argued that Rawls, among other things, kept the liberal project alive through the construction of a model that was able to accommodate pluralism, in contrast to the more restrictive perspective of classical liberalism, a phenomenon that is very much alive today, ² which from his perspective could be characterized as a comprehensive doctrine.

What Rawls discovered in the aftermath of writing his A Theory of Justice ³ was that the congruence between the right and the good, the model constructed in the third part of that book, could not accommodate the fact of pluralism that he came to recognize characterized the modern democratic condition. I argued that in contrast to the Schmittian ⁴ narrative which dramatically postulated the political that would be characterized as originating in a life and death struggle of friend versus enemy, the Rawlsian narrative, beginning with the peaceful confrontation suggested by a modus vivendi, would step by step ascend to an overlapping consensus. What we know now is that when Rawls departed from epistemology, as he did in Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical, ⁵ he developed a more or less historical argument, a political sociology, regarding how it happened that democratic society was able to move beyond a mere modus vivendi. In order to frame the argument, he would develop a two-stage model where the question of stability would be deferred to the second stage where overlapping consensus would be addressed. ⁶ At this second stage, Rawls acknowledges that ‘a reasonable comprehensive doctrine cannot secure the basis of social unity nor can it provide the content of public reason on fundamental political questions’. ⁷ The reason for this is that a modern democratic political culture is constituted by ‘a reasonable plurality of conflicting and incommensurable doctrines…seen as the characteristic work of practical reason over time under existing free institutions’. ⁸ To follow the argument, our association with political culture and society is not voluntary, that is, we enter political society by birth and we exit political society by death. Beyond that it must be acknowledged that ‘political power is always coercive power backed by the government’s use of sanctions, for government alone has the authority to use force in upholding its laws’. ⁹ The importance of these two points is the following: if one’s participation in political society is involuntary, and if the constraints required by political power which is essentially governmental power are legitimate, then we must have a basis for justification of those constraints which is both rational and acceptable to all. If there is no rational justification, then political legitimacy is not possible. Hence, before one can talk about consensus, it is necessary to develop ‘the principles of justice that specify the fair terms of cooperation among citizens and specify when a society’s basic institutions are just’. ¹⁰ Rawls’ argument is that only after those issues have been addressed can the question of political stability be addressed. At that point, Rawls introduces the idea of ‘overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive views’. ¹¹

Defence of Rawls’ project developed in Political Liberalism will highlight the question of conflict and how to deal with it from the differing perspectives of political liberalism and populism. Populism thrives on conflict and purports to deal with the immediacy of conflict eschewing the normative or to put it in Schmittian terms it is fundamentally decisionistic. ¹² The Rawlsian position also begins the argument for political liberalism by addressing the centrality of conflict with a question: ‘how is it possible that there can be a stable and just society whose free and equal citizens are deeply divided by conflicting and even incommensurable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’ ¹³ Clearly, this question puts the issue of conflict at the centre of the interpretation of the political. However, in order to answer that question in the context of political liberalism, it requires a first-stage consideration of the normative structure of the political in order to proceed to the second-stage consideration of actual conflict under the rubric of overlapping consensus. Populism seeks to overstep this normative move claiming to deal more directly with conflict as we shall show. In doing so, it fails to deal resolve the stability problem ¹⁴ that is fundamental to a political society characterized by the fact of pluralism.

As the political realm emerged in modernity, it was characterized by conflict as S.N. Eisenstadt of the school of multiple modernities has claimed. The issue is not that populism avoids conflict. Rather, the problem is that it avoids a moral solution ¹⁵ to the problems of the contested domain of the political because everyone should be able in a democratic political context to consent to the coercion implicit in the exercise of political power. To the extent that populism is unable to give a reasonable account of stability, which should provide all participants in a democratic context a rational justification for political action, its claim for legitimacy relies on mere ideology. This is the issue I want to turn to in the final section of the article. In what follows I will consider populism from two perspectives, one historical and one normative, and then conclude by returning to the problem just raised.

II. What is populism? An historical perspective

Populism strikes at the heart of democracy. Its power is to take over the claims of democracy. Some maintain that it masks itself as a moral theory and it does have moral claims regarding immigrants and immigration, nationalism and the state of the nation, the distribution of power, race and ethnicity and many other things. Populism claims to listen to the cries of the oppressed people, the forgotten men and women, the silent majority and the unrepresented. At its heart populism is a claim about the authority of a people. Or to put it another way, populism is a claim about the legitimacy of politics seen to lie in the authority of a people.

In order to frame my approach to populism, I want to use part of Margret Canovan’s argument in her delightful book, The People. ¹⁶ Her reading of the history of the concept goes back to the Romans and their use of the term, populous, which has a double meaning. On the one hand, it could refer to the plebian populous, and on the other, given Cicero’s use of the term, it could refer to the Roman population as such. ¹⁷ Lex Regia, the oldest form of Roman law, was a royal law that found its legitimacy in the people. The rather vague idea contained in this doctrine was that the people were the ground of legitimacy for any form of political action: an institutional idea that can be traced to the numinous past beginning with the reign of Romulus.

This vague idea of a people who existed as the passive source of legitimacy, designated the ‘people in reserve’ by Canovan, would reappear in by the 12th century ¹⁸ to ground the legitimacy of monarchical rule which became more substantial particularly as a consequence of the Protestant reformation. ¹⁹ With the publication of Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, the idea of people in reserve came to be ever more radical as the source of legitimacy when it was formulated in the famous phrase ‘consent of the governed’. However, according to Canovan, it was the American Revolution that transformed the idea of the people, ‘from people in reserve to constituent sovereign’. ²⁰ She writes:

The Declaration of Independence can in a sense be read as the culmination of traditional resistance theory…In their state constitutions and in the US Constitution itself, a mobilized people apparently exercised sovereignty by establishing entirely new institutions, replacing the authority of antiquity with the authority of present popular consent. ²¹

III. What is populism? A normative perspective ²³

From a normative perspective, populism can be defined as a certain kind of parasitic pathology that can attack representative democracy. As much of the literature suggests, we do not have a clear concept of populism. Certainly, a reason for this is that populism is defined by the context in which it occurs. A more substantial reason for the obscurity of the term is because populism functions negatively as implied by my choice of the term ‘parasite’ which can be defined as an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host’s expense.

There are more positive definitions of populism associated with various political movements, most notably movements like one of the original forms of the so-called populism associated with the founding of the American populist party in 1892. ²⁴ However, to be realized populism has to become a form of governing and not simply a social movement. In accord with this definition, although populism claims to be the product of people’s sovereignty, it is derived from their sovereignty that has already been established. In other words, populism arrives after the revolution is over and democratic sovereignty of the people has been established. To understand populism, therefore, it is necessary to understand liberal democracy from which it is derived as a negative form. ²⁵ The idea of a people here is associated with the emergence of the realm of the public from which sovereignty would emanate.

Populism thrives on dividing the democratic population into a binary opposition, generally between elites and non-elites, the authentic and the inauthentic, the good and the bad. Populism believes that this is an original insight but its very ability to impose this duality presupposes the given diversity of a democratic culture. Clearly, politics is constituted by conflict although it is not necessarily binary, the conflict can be characterized by diversity. As we shall see for a normative understanding of representative democracy, it will be necessary to accommodate all the participants in the process. ‘In populism the people are not really what prima facie appear as the people in its empirical entirety; rather, as Claude Lefort put it, first ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’. ²⁶

In order to generate this division between the authentic and the so-called inauthentic members of the democratic order, populism generates a legitimation crisis ²⁷ continuing to delegitimize legitimate members of the democratic order as well as the institutions they represent. In order to do this, populism depends on continuous acts of polarization. ²⁸ In this sense, populism raises the problem of the legitimacy in a new way by attempting to undercut in the name of its own ideology the various institutions that would constrain it. In order to reduce the political order to the elites versus the authentic people, it will be necessary to simplify it. Hence, the richness associated with a diverse democratic order must be undercut in order to achieve the opposition between those who presumably represent the constituent democratic order and those whom it claims do not. ²⁹ Here I disagree with those who would claim an affirmative perspective for populism by legitimating a group that heretofore had no legitimate representation. ³⁰ Instead, by an act of simplification, populism undercuts the legitimate diversity of democratic society by claiming to represent only those who fit within its narrow ideological perspective.

As such, populism chooses unity over equality, hence departing from a core ingredient of modern democracy. By granting membership rights only to the majority of the chosen, it undercuts a universal commitment to equality that must be the basis of any democratic order. As such, it materializes the collective into a single actor much in the way Lefort thought about totalitarianism. ³¹ In a similar way, populism effectively undercuts public opinion by trying to reduce it to a single expression or voice and in our current media culture that means it can dismiss the best of public opinion as fake news. In the same vein, populism sacrifices equality for unity collapsing the distinction between leader and subject. In this sense, populism reverts to its historical origins reaffirming what some have called Caesarism, the citizen being reduced to the subject who participates by acclamation, as did the participants in the old Roma forum.

Finally, populism requires at its base, in the words of Carl Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction. What Schmitt has argued for in The Concept of the Political is the ontological priority of the friend/enemy distinction. To the extent that populism follows this fundamental distinction, it prioritizes instability rather than stability.

My argument sees that distinction as derivative, in the sense that populism is parasitical on liberal democracy, which has a certain normative foundation. In order to do a complete analysis from the point of view of political liberalism, it would be necessary to make the following comparisons. First, it would be necessary to consider populism’s desire for unity in relationship to overlapping consensus. Second populism’s obsession with simplification would be examined in relationship to the recognition of diversity within a representative democratic community. Third, it would be necessary to examine populism’s strategy of polarization in relationship to the need for integration within a democratic populous. Forth, it would be imperative to consider populism’s concentration on the rights of the majority in relationship to the claims of rights for minorities and the notion of universality for human rights. Fifth, in relationship to populism’s desire to reduce public opinion to a singular view dismissing all other opinion as false, it would be necessary find ways to support the diversity of public opinion as well as the burdens of judgment. Finally, it would be necessary to counter the claims of populism regarding its representative subject with the claims of democratic citizenship as affirmed by political liberalism. In the end, it would be necessary to have stability for the right reasons.

IV. Stability for the right reasons

I want to return to the original problem, namely, the appeal of Political Liberalism to the two-stage model and the claim that such a move would make the normative claims of democracy suspect. In my view, what stands between the immediacy of an appeal to populism and the abstraction of a normative theory of democracy is the fact of pluralism. It is this fact that in the shape of political liberalism normative theory has attempted to address, the fact that shaped the work of the later Rawls in particular and normative democratic theory generally. In the process, the face of normative theory itself has changed from being based on strict forms of epistemology to, in Rawls case, a kind of political sociology, which sought for the new normative political values in what he has called in one of his articles, and I have adopted as a kind of orienting position, namely, ‘the emerging domain of the political’. I do believe this model is in continuous need of expansion as did the latest Rawls in his article, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’. ³²

However, if appropriately de-westernized and expanded, the model of political liberalism is most appropriate for our emerging pluralistic democratic world. But of course, to attempt to confront the fact of pluralism is in some ways to confront the future and yet the curious dilemma that populism a remnant from the past is that it is part of our current future. The paradox of populism is that even though its form is pre-democratic, it is part of the current political paradigm. ³³

The model I propose has the following components: first, there must be an accommodation to pluralism even if the claims of the culture are comprehensive. By comprehensive here I mean that the culture has been shaped by a particular ethos that will inform the building of a democratic orientation. Second, there must be some account of the relationship between the moral, the religious (if the culture claims to be religious as in the case of certain Islamic societies) and the political. Third, there must be an account of unity within a society that shares a democratic point of view, an account that, like Rawls’ liberal principle of legitimacy, anchors public unity in belief in a constitution. Fourth, there must be some way to account for a public political discourse, which could be characterized as public reason.

Finally, allow me to return to the stability problem which I raised in the first section of the article. When democracy began to develop in modernity, the authority of tradition was slowly replaced by the authority of the public. In the context of this essay, I have presented a rough sketch of the emergence of the concept of a people. In retrospect, we can now see that there were fundamental moments in that process. First, the people (populous) were affirmed in relationship to the political activity of Roman Form; second, the people as the justification for Roman law (Cicero); third, the people defined through theories of representation through the reappropriation of Roman law in the 11th century; forth, the realm attributed to the people was expanded by the Protestant Reformation; fifth, the people came to be defined as the sovereign source of legitimacy as democracy developed from the 17th to the 19th centuries in the West; and finally, concept of the people was legitimated through the development of constitutional law. The phenomenon we have only discussed peripherally is the phenomenon of representation. In late modernity, representation was manifest through reason as expressed in public opinion. Given the consensus model, which allows for radical dissensus, political liberalism succeeds or fails on the basis of the construction of a model which allows everyone to participate in the political process. The term that emerges to characterize this mode of communication is the reason of the public codified as public reason. The assumption behind public reason is that there is a public mode of communication which is available to all and should be used in public political contexts.

The problem with populism is that it is based on a binary opposition between the elites and the people that as Schmitt pointed out is refers to an originary act of violence. In my view, this basic opposition undercuts the validity of public opinion placing a basic scepticism at the heart of the domain of the political. Populism claims to have a moral basis or foundation but when pressed that foundation is one based on a form of discrimination. In my view, it is a kind of political theology which when secularized functions as an ideology. In any case, populism thrives on instability having to address the problem of stability each day anew. Earlier I mentioned that populism arrives only after the revolution is over meaning that only after democracy has been established can populism arrive on the scene. As such, it is parasitic on democracy in the sense that it thrives transforming a pluralistic society into a dualistic opposition which gives legitimacy only to its constituent members which restricts rather than expands the domain of the political.