Accomplishments and limitations of the ‘new’ mainstream in contemporary populism studies

Abstract

Two recent books on populism represent more than any other the new mainstream in populism studies. Through a reconstruction of the main arguments advanced by Jan-Werner Müller, on the one hand, and Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, on the other, this article aims to highlight both the significant accomplishments as well as the main limitations of this orientation. Special attention is given to the way in which the two projects deal with the relationship between populism and democracy. In this respect, substantial differences emerge between them, largely due to the different scope of each intervention: Müller articulates a polemical argument, while Mudde and Kaltwasser seem to encompass a more nuanced research agenda. And yet, despite all their differences, the two books share a common definitional basis when they identify moralization and moralism as the kernel of populist ideology. It is here, however, that the shaky basis of the new mainstream is revealed. Apart from betraying substantive continuities with a discredited Cold War pluralism, this moralistic stress seems ultimately inadequate to function as the central criterion for the differential identification of populism.

Keywords

democracy liberalism moralization pluralism populism

In the past twelve months, two significant academic interventions on a subject dubbed nothing less than politically and economically unnerving (Marriage and Thompson, 2017) have been added to a rapidly expanding literature on populism: Jan-Werner Müller’s What Is Populism? – the English translation of an essay originally published in German as Was ist Populismus? – and Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s Populism: A Very Short Introduction, part of the well-established Oxford University Press introductory series. This synchronicity is, of course, far from conspicuous. Both treatises deal with a subject that could hardly exert more contemporary appeal. Few words offer a more apt – yet often also tantalizingly vague – summary of our political predicament than the word ‘populist’: today, there are hardly any parties, movements, discourses and politicians that do not seem to solicit themselves for the epithet. Unsurprisingly, given the range of actors included in these taxonomies, populism remains as polysemous a category as it was in 1967, when Ernest Gellner complained about the indefinability of the concept in a famous conference held at the London School of Economics (Gellner and Ionescu, 1969).

Keeping in mind the historic difficulties in arriving at an acceptable definition of populism – difficulties which have led many analysts to dispute the very usefulness of the concept itself or, at least, to doubt the possibility of ever theorizing it adequately – one needs to acknowledge and welcome the fact that both projects under review seek to seriously engage with this conceptual minefield. Both Müller and Mudde and Kaltwasser are determined to seek out clear-cut clarification, avoiding what would amount to ‘conceptual defeatism’. And they, no doubt, seem eminently qualified to engage in such an endeavour. Indeed, all three writers are themselves well-known specialists in their respective fields of inquiry: the former – Müller – has published extensively in the area of German intellectual history and politics (see Müller, 2003, 2011), while the latter – Mudde and Kaltwasser – are often credited with having established the first operational definition of a concept which seemed to elude classification for at least 40 years (see, for example, Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012). The result is two books that tread on similar territory in terms of theoretico-political positioning and concept-building, but differ substantially in their methodological and analytical ramifications, thus also showcasing, in rather exemplary fashion, both the accomplishments and the shortcomings of the emerging mainstream in contemporary populism studies.

Müller’s axiomatic approach and its polemical side-effects

The aforementioned ambition to clarify once and for all debates around populism is abundantly clear in the first book under scrutiny, Jan-Werner Müller’s What Is Populism? (2016). Especially since Müller seems to ignore or downplay the importance of previous theorizations of the phenomenon: ‘We simply do not have anything like a theory of populism, and we seem to lack coherent criteria for deciding when political actors turn populist in some meaningful sense’, he argues (Müller, 2016: 2). Taking upon himself to remedy this lacuna, his first aim is to answer the question: Who qualifies as populist? (pp. 1–2). Yet, in this attempt, Müller remains unabashedly deductive throughout. The move renders the ensuing inquiry peculiarly circular:¹ moving from the universal to the particular and back, he seems to offer little reflection on how the word ‘populist’ itself historically became an analytical tool, or why particular criteria should be prioritized over others in qualifying who is populist.

In a more or less axiomatic fashion, Müller then swiftly singles out three crucial aspects of populism as a ‘political logic’: (1) it is monist, in that it only values one segment of the population as worthy of taking part in democratic decision-making; (2) it is moralistic, to the extent that it proclaims the moral superiority of this segment over the rest of the electorate; and (3) it is, finally, anti-pluralist, in that it seeks to deny the validity of competing interests within the political boundaries set by liberal institutions. What thus emerges is a set of arguably clear-cut, distinct criteria for identifying the phenomenon known as populism: populists are ‘always anti-pluralist’ (p. 3); their representative claims are ‘always distinctly moral’, purporting to represent righteous and morally pure people and thus posing a ‘danger to democracy’ (p. 3).

Where do we go from this definition? In Chapter 2 of his book, Müller offers us a survey of how his own ‘populists’ fare in governmental positions; this is important and relatively original to the extent that conventional politico-scientific wisdom has it that populists can act as populists only when residing in opposition. Müller begs to differ – and rightly so. ‘Populists,’ he claims ‘can [also] govern as populists’ (p. 4). The outcomes are, of course, fairly predictable. While in power, be it in Budapest, Washington, or Latin America, Müller’s ‘populists’ engage in the intimidation of political opponents, show disregard for constitutional regulations, indulge in moralistic phraseology, and constantly resort to self-righteous rhetoric. Strong language is rarely avoided in describing this trend. To Müller, the rise of ‘populism’ is more than a danger or a threat; it represents a truly alarming development, which European and American societies need to rid themselves of as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly, then, Chapter 3 of Müller’s book offers didactic advice on how clear-headed individuals might go about ‘dealing with populists’ in order to remedy the populist pestilence. Indeed, throughout these passages, one often feels that the author has written his tract in the persona of a polemicist rather than a reflexively inclined academic. Above all, Müller’s musings seem to situate themselves within specific German media and theory debates, in which the word ‘populism’ is consistently cast as the synecdoche of all kinds of political evil. This, in turn, endows Müller’s work with a certain ‘Germanocentric’ quality: although it is often debated as one of the most challenging interventions on the topic in global academia, What Is Populism? reads more like a polemical pamphlet in the tradition of militant democracy (wehrhafte or streitbare Demokratie) than a critical investigation.²

Yet, what has been gained in argumentative clarity and polemical certainty in What Is Populism? involves a rather steep price to be paid – a price which, in turn, seriously affects the analytical scope of the argument. Following Müller’s deductive logic, his axiomatic definition and the one-directional criteria on which it relies, his preciously ‘definitive’ definition can only be sustained by way of excluding a significant group of phenomena that are usually – and not without good reasons – also classified and debated as ‘populist’, but fail to qualify as clear and present dangers for democracy. This polemical side-effect swiftly leads Müller into a (self-confessed) quandary: ‘a plausible understanding of populism will in fact, end up excluding historical movements and actors who explicitly called themselves populist’ (p. 19). One really wonders regarding this plausibility upon learning that even ‘the one party in US history that explicitly called itself “populist” [the People’s Party of the 1890s] was in fact not populist’ (p. 85).³ In a similar vein, the whole egalitarian populist tradition, including figures such as Bernie Sanders and South European left-wing populism, is aprioristically disqualified from Müller’s camp. They simply cannot, in any meaningful way, be called ‘populists’ – despite the fact that a significant section of them have adopted the moniker without reservation (for example, Podemos), while the designation is also supported by substantive political research. This genealogical and analytical/operational deficit is the price to be paid in sticking with such a polemical definition of populism, devoid of plasticity and reflexive awareness of the global picture on the ground:

Populism, I suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and unified – but, I shall argue, ultimately fictional – people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior…In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist…The core claim of populism is thus a moralized form of antipluralism. (pp. 19–20)

In a rather predictable way, having painted such a one-sided rendering of the phenomenon, Müller spends a fair chunk of his book orchestrating the liberal defences against its onslaught.

Mudde and Kaltwasser’s compendium: towards a research-oriented account

Despite it being perfectly contiguous with the orientation offered by Müller, Mudde and Kaltwasser’s (2017) compendium on the subject, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, manages to avoid the danger of reducing itself to a moral condemnation of the populist evil. Rather than axiomatically adopting a polemical definition, Mudde and Kaltwasser opt for a different method when attempting to capture the astonishingly diverse phenomenon. After enumerating a long series of possible approaches to ‘populism’ (discursive, ideological, strategic, etc.), they seek to ‘distil’ one coherent tactic from this methodological pot pourri. This in a bid ‘to create a definition that is able to accurately capture the core of all major past and present manifestations of populism, while still precise enough to exclude clearly non-populist phenomena’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017: 5). To them, this method can be detected in a so-called ‘ideational’ approach to populism, which defines populism as ‘a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’ (p. 6).

Starting with a more flexible and less polemical definition than the one employed by Müller, Mudde and Kaltwasser then engage in a systematic presentation of historical examples from the United States, Latin America, Europe and beyond to furnish their own analyses. In opposition to Müller’s largely ahistorical and excessively normative – if not normalizing – desire to castigate and unmask the unequivocal populist danger, what predominantly drives this endeavour is rather a research aspiration to register the complexity of the phenomenon under discussion, and, in turn, to understand its genuine appeal: ‘We shouldn’t be surprised,’ they claim, ‘that many Latin American citizens support populist parties and leaders who promise to establish a government in which the people rule themselves instead of being ruled by an oligarchy’ (p. 28). This attention to historical detail and to the complexities of political antagonism characterizes the book throughout and results in a more nuanced account of populism on many fronts: thus, Chapter 3, for example, deals with the different types of populist mobilization: ‘personalist leadership, social movement, and political party’ (p. 42); Chapter 4, in its turn, discusses the crucial issue of leadership, ultimately refuting the stereotypical identification of the populist leader with a charismatic strongman (‘In fact, only a minority of strongmen are populists and only a minority of populists is [sic] a strongman’ (p. 63)); finally, the book advances a sophisticated account regarding the relationship between nation, ethnicity and populism, which is worth quoting at some length:

The relationship between ethnicity and populism is much more complex than many accounts portray. Particularly in Europe the two are often conflated, a direct consequence of the predominance of populist radical right parties that combine authoritarianism, nativism, and populism. In Latin America the term ethnopopulism denotes a particular type of populism, most notably related to mobilization by indigenous peoples. While both types of populism use ethnicity to establish their authenticity, they do it in fundamentally different ways. For the European populist radical right ethnicity is not part of the populist distinction between the people and the elite, who are part of the same ethnic group, but rather of the nativist distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘aliens,’ in which the latter are considered to be part of neither the people nor the elite. In the case of Latin American ethnopopulism, on the other hand, the nation is defined as a multicultural unit, within which the people and elite are divided by both morality and ethnicity. (p. 72)⁴

Similarities and differences: on populism and democracy

This is not say that on all these fronts the two arguments stand at the antipodes of each other. For example, Müller also seems to agree with this crucial disentangling of populism from nationalism: ‘It is a mistake to think that populism will always turn out to be a form of nationalism or ethnic chauvinism’ (Müller, 2016: 24–5). The difference in scope between the two works, however, soon becomes abundantly clear. Nowhere is the distance between them so visibly registered than in the implications they draw regarding the relationship between populism and democracy. It is clear that, for Müller, populist politics is ‘blatantly antidemocratic’ (p. 6). In fact, he does articulate this view on the basis of a critique of Mudde’s previous work (quoting the latter’s rendering of populism as an ‘illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’ (Müller, 2016: 8; see also p. 49). Reifying liberal pluralism and essentializing liberal democracy, Müller advances a strict opposition between populism and democracy, once more opposing Mudde and Kaltwasser’s previous theorization of populism as both a threat and a corrective:

Populism is not a useful corrective for a democracy that somehow has come to be too ‘elite-driven’, as many observers hold. The image according to which liberal democracy involves a balance where we can choose to have a little bit more liberalism or a little bit more democracy is fundamentally misleading. (Müller, 2016: 10–11)

Once more, such essentialist rigidity, ultimately reducing democracy to liberalism, may be fitting for a polemical pamphlet; yet one quickly realizes that what is at stake here is not the defence and deepening of democracy per se, the creation of a strong democracy. Populism may or may not be thin-centred; what seems certain is that Müller’s militant democracy can only be a ‘thin’ democracy (Barber, 2003: 4), in effect, camouflaging a militant liberalism. Needless to mention here the extensive and diverse body of scholarship, including figures like C. B. MacPherson and Chantal Mouffe (MacPherson, 1977; Mouffe, 2000; see also Beetham, 1992; Canovan, 1999: 7), which insists on the contingent character of the twinning of ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’, highlighting the paradoxical – though productive – effects of their blending. Arguably, liberal democracy involves a constitutive contradiction to the extent that ‘liberalism denies the logic of democracy and democracy denies the logic of liberalism’ (Wolfe, 1977: 7). Hence the liberal-democratic state is continuously struggling to balance (capitalist) accumulation and legitimacy, with this tension operating as the driving force behind its various historical mutations. What is also never adequately thematized is the ways in which an ‘elite-driven’ dynamic – a revolt of the elites, to quote the title of the well-known Christopher Lasch book (Lasch, 1995) – is currently, in our post-democratic age of widening inequality and technocratic rule (Crouch, 2004; Habermas, 2013; Piketty, 2014), increasingly disarticulating liberalism from democracy, returning the former to its oligarchic roots and annulling the dynamic of their mutual cross-fertilization. Even from a militant democracy perspective, it must seem obvious that it is precisely this post-democratic trend that might best be identified as the prime threat to liberal democracy – both in genealogical terms, and in terms of the damage it can cause to democratic rights and culture as a whole. And this is not something entirely new. Already from the time of de Tocqueville, it was feared that an excess of democracy can undo liberal institutions. What if, however, it is ‘an excess of liberalism [that] has undone democratic institutions[?]: for what little democracy we have had in the West has been repeatedly compromised by the liberal institutions with which it has been undergirded’ (Barber, 2003: xxxi).

In opposition to Müller, Mudde and Kaltwasser are rather careful to register populism’s complex and ambivalent relationship to democracy. ‘Populism,’ they claim, ‘is both a friend and a foe of (liberal) democracy, depending on the stage of the process of democratization’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017: 20). In doing so, they also register its emancipatory potential. ‘Populism can be seen as a democratizing force, since it defends the principle of popular sovereignty with the aim of empowering groups that do not feel represented by the political establishment’, they argue – while simultaneously castigating its authoritarian aberrations (p. 18). Indeed, Mudde and Kaltwasser here exhibit a clear understanding of the differences between the liberal and the democratic tradition, which allows them to avoid the largely a-historical equation between democracy and liberalism so ubiquitous in Müller: ‘Democracy (sans adjectives) is best defined as the combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule; nothing more, nothing less. Hence, democracy can be direct or indirect, liberal or illiberal’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017: 80). This understanding of democracy has direct implications for the way populism is linked to it. ‘Populism is essentially democratic,’ they argue,

but at odds with liberal democracy, the dominant model in the contemporary world. Populism holds that nothing should constrain ‘the will of the (pure) people’ and fundamentally rejects the notions of pluralism and, therefore, minority rights as well as the ‘institutional guarantees’ that should protect them. (p. 81)

In contrast to Müller’s case, this approach therefore allows for a more nuanced perspective on the dialectical entanglement between both entities:

Depending on its electoral power and the context in which it arises, populism can work as either a threat to or a corrective for democracy. This means that populism per se is neither good nor bad for the democratic system. Just as other ideologies, such as liberalism, nationalism, or socialism, can have a positive and negative impact on democracy, so can populism. (p. 79)

Even if, in the two works under review, populism is presented as anti-democratic or, at best, as anti-liberal or illiberal, it is clear that these are ideal types that are often falsified when one deals with concrete phenomena. In stark contradiction to his previous analytical self-certainty, Müller will concede that ‘whether a particular claim is democratic or populist will not always be a clear-cut, obvious matter’ (2016: 74). Mudde and Kaltwasser equally acknowledge the complexity of the relationship between populism and liberal democracy: ‘But even its relationship with liberal democracy is not one-sided’ (2017: 95). There seem to be, generally speaking, two intimately linked reasons for this imbrication.

The first reason is that populism thrives under conditions of democratic crisis, a crisis premised on the widening distance between the democratic ideals legitimizing a given (liberal democratic) status quo and the increasing inability of dominant political actors to guarantee a minimum implementation. Yet, if populists can benefit from such a crisis it must be – at least partly – because they are regarded as being able to restore the credibility of democracy. Müller touches upon this difficulty when, in the last chapter of his book, he refers to ‘the broken promises of democracy’ (2016: 75). Once more, this point is more fully elaborated by Mudde and Kaltwasser when they point out that

[a] key factor in the activation of populist attitudes is the general feeling that the political system is unresponsive. When citizens feel that the political parties and governments do not listen to them and ignore their demands, the possibility grows that populism becomes active, at least within the constituencies that feel abandoned by the establishment. (2017: 101)

This disjunction, they claim, has been especially flagrant in the case of the European South: ‘without the Great Recession and the corrupt behavior of the mainstream parties it is difficult to understand the sharp rise in public support for populist parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece’ (p. 100). As they postulate, a major triggering mechanism for populism is the oligarchic, post-democratic mutation of liberal democracy:

Because of the widespread implementation of neoliberal reforms and the adoption of programs such as New Public Management, national governments have become heavily constrained by private companies, transnational organizations, and the (in)visible hand of the market. Mainstream politicians have willingly implemented these policies but they have rarely tried to sell them to their citizens. Instead, they often present them as necessary, or even inevitable, forced upon the country by powerful foreign organizations (e.g., EU or IMF) and processes (e.g., globalization). As a consequence, little time is spent debating the extent to which at least some of these policies are wrong or can have unintended consequences, which might end up producing more harm than good. In fact, elites have used the growing influence of unelected bodies and technocratic institutions to depoliticize contested political issues, like austerity and immigration, and so minimize the risk of electoral defeat. (p. 117)

Even Müller seems to accept this point – although one is bound to question whether ‘evil authoritarian’ can be an apt description for Evo Morales, whose ‘populist’ project is here rather surprisingly equated with the authoritarian presidentialism of Erdoğan:

Figures like Evo Morales or Erdoğan are not just evil authoritarians who emerged out of nowhere; Morales was justified in advocating for the indigenous peoples of Bolivia who had been largely kept out of the political process, and Erdoğan was doing something democratic when he asserted the presence of what had often been dismissed as ‘black Turks’—that is to say, the poor and devout Anatolian masses—against the one-sided Westernized image of the Turkish Republic celebrated by the Kemalists. The quest for inclusion did not have to take the form of the pars pro toto populist claim; arguably, some of the damage to democracy might have been averted had existing elites been willing to take steps toward both practical and symbolic inclusion. (Müller, 2016: 85)

Yet, turning to such ‘evil’ figures could only mean that liberal (including social-democratic) elites have failed so miserably and that they must have left so little space for alternatives that people are desperately led to trust anyone promising such a course: ‘Those defending democracy against populism also have to be honest about the fact that all is not well with existing democracies’ (Müller, 2016: 59). But Müller warns us not to over-exaggerate – it is not that we are now living in façade democracies: we are not up against ‘single parties trying to remold the entire political system in their favor’ (p. 59). The intuition that it may have worked the other way round – that a hegemonic economic and institutional system has been trying to remould entire party systems in its favour – does not seem to cross his mind. At any rate, having pictured the populist alternative in such axiomatically negative colours, does Müller offer another way out? Given that liberal elites indeed seem to have failed to ‘keep the promises of democracy’, how could one envisage a different outcome?

This brings us to the second reason. Not only has the failure of liberal elites triggered populism; in addition, their intransigence on several different fronts (economic, political, intellectual) has short-circuited the development of plausible alternatives. To this question, Müller’s astonishing answer, which indirectly absolves these elites from any wrong-doing, seems to involve the camouflaging of inability as impossibility; after all, these are promises that ‘have not been fulfilled and that in a certain sense simply can’t be fulfilled in our societies’ (Müller, 2016: 76). Indeed, the crucial democratic promise that cannot be fulfilled is, put simply, that ‘the people can rule’ (p. 76). It is here that Müller’s argument entwines rather elegantly with the elitism of Joseph Schumpeter, who had famously argued that ‘democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule”. Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them’ (Schumpeter, 2003: 284–5). To the extent that the elite theory of democracy ‘was not so much a theory of democracy as a theory of aristocracy in the literal sense of that term’ (Gilman, 2003: 49), Müller’s proximity to it provides one more indication of the poverty of the militant liberalism implicit in his argument, of how ‘thin’ his understanding of democracy is.

However, what is truly perplexing is that Müller is not only doubting the epistemic basis of the syntagma ‘the people can rule’ – that is to say, its positive – or positivist? – truth value. Obviously, the unity and sovereignty of the people is not important because of its epistemic superiority, of its correspondence to an established political reality; it is a discursive construct which, within political modernity, has functioned as a crucial political call and a constitutional principle precisely because it incarnates a future-oriented emancipatory desire. Yet, it is, above all else, this symbolic aspect that Müller wants to banish from public life. His understanding of democracy allows only for ‘a people of individuals, so that in the end only numbers (in elections) count’ (Müller, 2016: 77–8). Unabashedly, he reduces the ‘people’ of democracy to a mere population. Throughout his tract, appeals to collective representation and identification are effectively denounced as relying on a ‘more or less mysterious “substance”’ (pp. 77–8), on ‘ultimately fictional’, ‘symbolic’ constructs (pp. 19–20, 27), on ‘fantasy’ (p. 31); and this is obviously something unacceptable in Müller’s passionless, numerically objective, liberal dystopia. There is no room for desire here, nor for the symbols representing it, especially if such symbols are abstract and ‘empty’ (p. 38) – perhaps an allusion to Laclau’s ‘empty signifiers’.

One need not rehearse the platitude that the problems with such an overtly puritan conception of politics are multiple. One might, for instance, marshal philosophical objections, claiming that it presents a rather impoverished repetition of Plato’s anti-democratic attack on fiction, poetry, desire and creative vision from The Republic. Alternatively, one could enlist anthropological and sociological queries, arguing that Müller seems to reduce human subjectivity to the most banal and rationalistic individualism, ignoring the symbolic and imaginary constitution of human reality as well as the crucial role affect, emotion, and passion play in socio-political life. One might additionally claim that his contention is simply strategically dubious, premised on a rather naïve and a-political – if not anti-political – understanding of social change. Because, apart from a defining and irreducible characteristic of human sociality,⁵ the need to develop passionate and salient political identifications around symbols of relative unity is also the answer to a strategic problem. And here fictional elements and symbolic invocations, one might retort, do produce tangible political results within democratic politics, as one anterior theorist of populism once put it:

It really is the case that people who can manage to believe in the possibility of collective action and to unite behind it can exercise more power than if they give up and concentrate on their private affairs. Popular movements have often demonstrated the truth of this…Unrealistic visions may be a condition of real achievements as well as being a recipe for disappointment. Democracy, it seems, is obliged to face in two opposite directions at the same time. (Canovan, 1999: 13)

Only those who a priori credit the elites with a benevolent desire favouring the deepening of democracy can fail to see that most advances on this front – from voting rights to social, racial and sexual inclusion – have been the result of political struggles in which excluded popular sectors have managed to transform their diversity into a unity (at least partial) – Laclau would speak about a process of equivalential chaining (Laclau, 2005) – enabling them to effectively challenge the power structure, influence decision-making, and win concessions. It is arguably impossible to achieve this without passing through the populist moment. Without, that is to say, political agents (movements, parties, leaders, etc.) claiming to express popular interests, to represent associated identities and demands (the true will of the ‘people’) against an establishment that frustrates their satisfaction. Without populist discursive representations typically articulating a dichotomous framing of the socio-political field in a bid to inspire and mobilize frustrated social groups. Instead of putting democracy in danger, such populist calls can often embody its constitutive idea, as Margaret Canovan once put it: ‘Their use of all these various forms of appeal to the people underlines the extent to which they rely upon a framework of legitimacy provided by notions of popular power: an idea of democracy, in other words’ (1999: 5).

Populism, elitism, pluralism

Müller seems to be more or less blind both to the role of power relations, social struggles and collective action and to their symbolic and fantasmic conditions of possibility (and impossibility). But does he really offer any alternative to this contentious scenario? To be fair, Müller seems to be troubled by this question, especially upon reflecting on the situation in the European South. Yet, his answer does little to escape the constraints that brought us here in the first place (lofty appeals, grand coalitions, etc.):

What is the alternative? An approach that seeks to bring in those currently excluded—what some sociologists sometimes call ‘the superfluous’—while also keeping the very wealthy and powerful from opting out of the system. This is really just another way of saying that some sort of new social contract is needed. Broad-based support is required for such a new social contract in Southern European countries, and that support can only be built through an appeal to fairness, not just fiscal rectitude. To be sure, lofty appeals are not enough; there has to be a mechanism to authorize such a new settlement. It might come in the shape of a grand coalition actually empowered at election time. (Müller, 2016: 99)

Who, one might ask, is the agent that will push forward this new social contract?⁶ In whose name might this new contract be covenanted? Especially if the ‘very wealthy and powerful’ prefer to opt out of the system or endorse undemocratic solutions instead of offering even minimal concessions? Mudde and Kaltwasser seem to be much more willing to register this dimension when they argue that ‘populist forces can trigger episodes of institutional change that might well lead to both democratization and de-democratization’ (2017: 86), although they seem to remain stuck within a more or less linear – even though two-directional – schema.

All this is not to say, of course, that the two books under review openly embrace an elitist position. Interestingly, even Müller, who comes closer to such a standpoint, deduces from populism’s anti-pluralist instinct a remarkable congruity with its elitist enemy. Both populism and elitism are to be avoided, he claims, since both doctrines consider society to be divided into two homogeneously opposed blocs – ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. While the one considers the ‘people’ epistemically incapable of ruling themselves in orderly fashion, the other considers them as the only entity worthy of political rule. Both positions, in Müller’s view, exert a remarkable complementarity in their mutual rejection of interest-based politics. In a different disciplinary field, EU scholar Vivien Schmidt arrived at a similar formulation. While elitism propagates a ‘policy without politics’, in which technocratic governance replaces deliberative decision-making, populism acclaims a ‘politics without policy’, in which democratic demands can only find their fullest expression in a charismatic personality cult (Schmidt, 2006; see also Bickerton and Invernizzi, 2015: 188–9). Once again, the possibility of a liberal-democratic via media is lamented by Müller, who sees the rise of the populism-elitism axis as the most defining trend of postmodern political culture.

As in Müller’s work, Mudde and Kaltwasser are careful to draw a line between ‘populism-elitism’ and ‘pluralism’ as differing political ontologies – the former being politically monolithic, the latter catering for legitimate forms of political multiplicity. ‘Our definition of populism,’ Mudde and Kaltwasser claim, ‘only makes sense if there is non-populism. And there are at least two direct opposites of populism: elitism and pluralism’ (2017: 7) – with elitism here involving either non-democracy or a limited model of democracy (cf. Schumpeter) (p. 7). Evidently, Müller and Mudde and Kaltwasser do not side with the elitists, and their favoured type of democracy is careful to distinguish itself from elitist conceptions. Instead, they invoke a pluralistic ideal of party-democracy in its place. Such an ideal would presumably differ from both elitist and populist conceptions of democracy in its emphasis on what Nadia Urbinati has called ‘intermediary bodies’ (Urbinati, 2015: 480–2): organs which are capable of communicating political demands from a party base to a party elite, without either the ‘direct embodiment’ put forward by populist demagogues or the unrestrained demophobia of elitist technocrats (Urbinati, 2015: 484–5).⁷ Yet, while Mudde and Kaltwasser highlight the limits a Schumpeterian orientation places on democracy, Müller’s argument comes dangerously close to endorsing them.

In the absence of a credible alternative of democratic agency, the question for Müller remains as to how different his liberal, pluralist conception of democracy truly is from the elitist version. Such a slippage, of course, has plagued anti-populist pluralism from its very inception in the 1950s. As Nils Gilman notes with regard to American modernization theory, which first stipulated, in the 1950s and 1960s, the populism versus pluralism dichotomy: ‘Constructed as the opposite of totalitarianism, pluralism meant that political decision making did not reside in the hands of a single elite group, such as a political party or the military.’ Pluralism, he notes, rather ‘meant that various elite groups would compete for and share political power’. At any rate, ‘what pluralism decidedly did not mean was that “the masses” were to participate in political decision making’ (Gilman, 2003: 49). Clearly Müller seems to be aware of the so-called ‘Hofstadter controversy’ and duly registers the ‘largely discredited set of assumptions from modernization theory’ (Müller, 2016: 14; see also his critique of modernization theorists on pp. 17–18). A paradoxical question thus emerges: how does he end up repeating them?

Populism as moralism: the shaky basis of the ‘new’ mainstream

Unfortunately, the family resemblances do not end here. The cornerstone itself upon which both books rely to define populism, the essentially moralistic profile of populist reasoning – the idea that ‘the key distinction in populism is moral’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017: 14), that it involves a predominantly ‘moralistic imagination’ (Müller, 2016: 19) – bears striking resemblances to the stereotypical treatments of populism first offered in the pluralist canon.⁸ Such resemblances are important for two reasons. First, by unearthing substantive continuities with Cold War pluralism, they put into perspective the novelty of the definition endorsed by the ‘new’ mainstream. Second, and most important given the discredited status of its original formulation (see, for a detailed analysis, Jäger, 2016; Stavrakakis, 2017), they place doubt on the plausibility of this criterion, which should be urgently reconsidered from scratch.

As far as intellectual genealogies go – conscious or unconscious, contextual or intertextual – already from his infamous 1955 text on ‘The Folklore of Populism’, Richard Hofstadter had highlighted populism’s ‘moral absolutism’ (Hofstadter, 1955: 16). In 1969, Hofstadter advanced on this basis a definition of populism that indeed seems to prefigure substantial elements of the arguments under review:

The basic scheme of populist thought resolved itself into a number of relatively simple propositions. First, the populist mind tended to posit an essentially innocent folk, victimized by economic catastrophes for which it shared no responsibility. For all practical political purposes, it was assumed that the people constituted a more or less homogeneous mass. This was not because the Populists could not see any difference between the farmer and the worker, and between those and, say, the honest small trader, but because they considered that occupational differences were not of consequence in politics and morals; what mattered was that society was divided between ‘the people’ who worked for a living and the vested interests who did not. In some populist literature the farmer, conceived as the honest yeoman, was considered to have a certain moral priority because of the ‘natural’ character of his labours, his closeness to the soil, and the fundamental character of agricultural production. (Hofstadter, 1969: 17, emphasis added)

Yet, the crucial problem with the criterion of moralization is not its origins and/or its dubious intellectual trajectory; it is its precise status as one of the minimal criteria for the differential identification of populism. Indeed, one is left wondering what such a criterion really means and how it could be effectively deployed. A series of interrelated questions seem pertinent here: How exactly is the moralistic stress of populism to be defined? Does moralization affect only populist discourse? Is it something unequivocally dangerous? Let us deal with these questions one by one. It is difficult to find a clear definition of moralization in the two books; however, it would be fair to assume that it refers to the supposed tendency of populism to simplify political antagonism: to idealize its own popular camp, which is described in terms of purity and homogeneity, and to vilify the enemy camp, that of the establishment, which is then denounced as corrupt and evil. And yet, isn’t such an idealization present in nearly all identifications, in all passionate attachments, from love to religion and from cultural taste (distinction) to football? How could power relations be exempt? Especially since identity and difference, love and hate, play such a significant role in all political identification?

One need not wallow in post-structuralist trivialities and the affective turn to come to terms with this point. Are we surprised, for example, that purity and corruption often become political stakes? (There was a time in which it would be difficult to find social and political scientists unaware of the famous dictum by Lord Acton: ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’…). Obviously, morality as a discursive and affective resource can be put to very different uses. Let us provide two opposite examples. The first comes from Margaret Thatcher who had famously declared: ‘I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph’ (Thatcher in Robson, 2013). The second comes from the last words of Salvador Allende, the ousted leader of the Chilean Popular Unity government, a few minutes before he committed suicide in the bombarded presidential palace of Santiago in 11 September 1973:

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason. (Allende, 2006)

Clearly, such invocations, more or less unavoidable in any political conjuncture, and especially pronounced in crucial turning points, can be political or anti-political, democratic or anti-democratic, progressive or reactionary, heroic or even banal. That they are ubiquitous, rather than genre-specific, in political discourse per se should come as no surprise then. In effect, what they highlight is the many psycho-social links between moral economy, political economy and socio-political ordering.

A brief historical exegesis would perhaps prove enlightening here. These links have been already highlighted through the focus on ‘moral economy’ marking E. P. Thompson’s seminal study of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, arguably the populism of that day (Thompson, 1971). This ‘moral economy’ provided the missing link between supposedly ‘unpolitical’ spasmodic popular actions (rioting) and their politicized meanings, thus impinging ‘very generally upon eighteenth-century government and thought’ (Thompson, 1971: 79; for the contemporary relevance of this concept, see Gotz, 2015). Thompson’s theorizations, of course, still speak to us today. For example, as recent ethnographic research has shown, in the context of the recent European economic and political crisis (especially in the South), where inequality, precarization, unemployment, crypto-colonialism and political impotence have produced feelings of social abandonment, systematic humiliation and loss of dignity, ‘there is no clear-cut distinction between moral and politico-economic arguments’ (Narotzky, 2016: 75). In this specific context, the concept of dignity has operated as ‘a summary of grievances, both material and social, which addresses the breach of the democratic social contract as it was understood by citizen-workers’ (p. 82). Needless to say, this ‘dignity’ is connected, in the Spanish anti-austerity struggles, to very real stakes: ‘People name three aspects that are put forward as the material pillars of this moral endowment (that is, dignity): bread, work and a roof’ (p. 85). Indeed, morality and moral indignation seems to be the discursive and affective register par excellence through which popular sectors can assign meaning to the unjust consequences of ‘the structures of financial accumulation and the new enclosures’, that is, from the process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ they experience, from the ‘breakdown of the tacit agreement of liberal democracy’ (p. 86). Yet, there is no doubt that ‘[a]lthough moral outrage is a powerful motive for mobilization, it needs to be directed at what causes inequality of access to the means that enable a worthy livelihood’ (p. 87) – and which political force performed this task in the Spanish setting? Ironically, none other than the populist Podemos (Kioupkiolis, 2016). Instead of surrendering to moralization, it thus purported to provide its political representation.

Even if one is to reserve the designation of ‘moralization’ for excessive or manipulative versions of such invocations, once more, these cannot be limited to the populist camp. It is difficult, in other words, to substantiate an exclusive link of exaggerated or pathological types of moralization to populism. Attributions of purity and moralistic idealization are to be found in a plethora of discourses. Another scholar of (Latin American) populism is undoubtedly correct in his contention that such narratives of redemption can epitomize ‘the saga of the people, the proletariat, the indigenous, or the nation’ (De la Torre, 2015: 10). It is thus difficult to see how this criterion could help in the differential identification of populist discourses.⁹ Indeed, for many influential critical political theorists, the turn to moralistic discourse, ‘the displacement of politics by morality’, constitutes a defining characteristic of anti-populist consensual politics positioned beyond left and right; here moral condemnation is revealed as a neoliberal strategy of exorcising the populist challenge (Mouffe, 2000: 1, 14). Long ago, Michael Paul Rogin had demonstrated how pluralist and hegemonic rhetoric in general could be equally, if not more, moralistic and extremist than the discourse of reformers and populists it attacks, incorporating both an often apocalyptic outlook and relying on a conspiratorial background (Rogin, 1967: 53). As early as the 1950s and 1960s, pluralist prophets envisaged modernization as a truly ‘great American mission’, designed on the basis of ‘a gospel of liberalism’ (Ekbladh, 2010: 76, 91, 152). Undoubtedly, the concept of development constituted a form of modernist messianism (Gilman, 2003: 69). Exactly like populism then, ‘liberalism itself has both a redemptive and a pragmatic face’ (Canovan, 1999: 10). Even academic anti-populism cannot resist reoccupying the field of moral argumentation. In the words of Rooduijn, ‘we now have a moral obligation to protect liberal democracy’ from populism (Rooduijn, 2016, online). Despite the tensions between ‘the politics of faith’ and ‘the politics of scepticism’, ‘the two styles are inseparable in modern politics’ (Canovan, 1999: 9), especially in modern democratic politics:

[D]emocracy presents two faces, one redemptive, the other pragmatic;…although these are opposed, they are also interdependent…the two faces of democracy are a pair of squabbling Siamese twins, inescapably linked, so that it is an illusion to suppose that we can have one without the other. (pp. 9–10)

Although deeply marked by it, liberal anti-populism (both political and academic) is unable to register this paradox.

This points to a broader problem present mostly in Müller’s argument. He often finds himself in the (rather uncomfortable) position of accepting that the defining characteristics he has attributed to populism also mark anti-populist discourses. This is not always realized. For example, populists are accused of ‘distinguishing the moral from the immoral, the pure and the corrupt, the people who matter, in Trump’s parlance, and those “who don’t mean anything”’ (Müller, 2016: 24); yet, it was Hillary Clinton who had referred to ‘deplorables’ – although admittedly, it must have been impossible for Müller to include in this book something that was uttered in September 2016. On the next page, populists are seen as endorsing ‘a singular common good’ that needs to be unambiguously implemented (p. 25); yet, it is the post-democratic liberals who have relied on such over-simplifications, for example, the propagation and often brutal enforcement of the so-called TINA dogma (one of the contemporary mutations of the now discredited modernization thesis). Sometimes, however, Müller does register this problem: ‘Of course, it’s not just populists who talk about morality; all political discourse is shot through with moral claims, just as virtually all political actors make what Michael Saward has called “the representative claim”’ (Müller, 2016: 38–9). So how is one to distinguish bad populists from good pluralists after all?

It is here that Müller’s argument acquires its most bizarre twist. The answer he offers is first – and rather predictably – of an epistemic nature. Populists, he claims, ‘will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of a moral and symbolic – not an empirical – nature, it cannot be disproven’ (p. 39). In Müller’s world, it is mainly populists who engage in the politics of fantasy – all the others seem to stick to reality and evidence-based politics. Incidentally, this is an argument that has been very much circulating following the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. We have already dealt with its philosophical, anthropological and strategic limits. Let us, however, add to them what Bruno Latour (2016) has argued vis-à-vis their recent articulations in the context of the 2016 US presidential race:

We thus find ourselves with our countries split in two, each half becoming ever less capable of grasping its own reality, let alone the other side’s. The first half – let us call them the globalized – believe that the horizon of emancipation and modernity (often confused with the reign of finance) can still expand to embrace the whole planet. Meanwhile, the second half has decided to retreat to the Aventine Hill, dreaming of a return to a past world.

Thus, two utopias: a utopia of the future confronting a utopia of the past. The opposition between Clinton and Trump illustrated this rather well: both occupied their own bubbles of unrealism. For now, the utopia of the past has won out. But there is little reason to think that the situation would be much better and more sustainable had the utopia of the future triumphed instead (Latour, 2016, online).¹⁰

As if aware of the limits of his epistemic answer, Müller then offers a second one, paradoxically a moralistic one. Having accepted that populists and non-populists or anti-populists often engage in the same practices (colonization of the state, mass clientelism, etc.), he goes on to argue that what is distinctive about populists is that ‘they can do so quite openly’ (Müller, 2016: 44). Müller must think that this is such a persuasive argument, that he keeps repeating it ad nauseam in subsequent pages (see pp. 44, 45, 46, 47): ‘Once again’, he states, ‘state colonization, mass clientelism, and discriminatory legalism are phenomena that can be found in many historical situations. Yet in populist regimes they are practiced openly and, one might suspect, with a clean moral conscience’ (p. 47). One thus is left to conclude that what distinguishes an old-style oligarchic liberal or a post-democratic liberal of the present from a populist is, basically, a sense of guilt. Even if or when the populists end up repeating what the old-established elites have been doing, what justifies their inferiority is that they do it ‘without guilt and [with] a supposedly democratic justification’ (p. 49).

Such Socratic – or even deconstructionist – questioning, of course, does not seek to downplay the formidable challenges that both books have sought to address. In the absence of waterproof criteria, the reasoning advanced by Müller and Mudde and Kaltwasser is infinitely preferable over a mere ‘populist nihilism’, as lamented by Ernesto Laclau already in the early 1980s (Laclau, 1981). Indeed, readers of Mudde and Kaltwasser will learn a lot about global populism(s) and the current orientation of populism research; readers of Müller will probably learn more about anti-populism, but this is not to be underestimated either. The accomplishments of the new mainstream in populism research, signified by these two interventions, will undoubtedly help contemporary commentators get closer to a more adequate understanding of the complex creature currently lying under their microscope. At the same time, their limitations will highlight the fact that, as in Mary Shelley’s famed novella, this creature is very often constructed – at least partly – in line with the theoretico-political stereotypes of this last incarnation of the ‘modern Prometheus’, the populism researcher.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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