UGA professor Cas Mudde's progress toward a better definition of "populist"

Uri Friedman posted a really good piece, " What Is a Populist?" at The Atlantic today, based on his interviews with Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia and the co-author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Also included in the article were statements from Jan-Werner Müller, a professor at Princeton University and the author of What Is Populism?, and Pippa Norris, a professor at Harvard University who is working on a book on the rise of “populist-authoritarian” politicians around the world.

What I like about this article is that it does a good job of moving toward a better working definition of "populism." I often throw around the term myself without really knowing how precisely to describe it. On one level, you could say that any successful politician that wins over 50.0% of the vote must necessarily be populist by simple math. But that doesn't really describe the phenomenon.

In Friedman's article, Mudde's definition (along with contributions from Müller & Norris) seems sufficiently detached and objective to give the term real meaning outside of the single personality of President Trump. It's not completely neutral. I would say that overall the article comes across as slightly-to-moderately negative about the political phenomenon of populism. However, even for those who are pro-Trump and pro-populist, I think there is a lot of good explanation here as to what best describes populist occurrences, both within the USA, and across the world.

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An ideology like fascism involves a holistic view of how politics, the economy, and society as a whole should be ordered. Populism doesn’t; it calls for kicking out the political establishment, but it doesn’t specify what should replace it. So it’s usually paired with “thicker” left- or right-wing ideologies like socialism or nationalism.

Populists are dividers, not uniters, Mudde told me. They split society into “two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other,” and say they’re guided by the “will of the people.”

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This conception of legitimacy stems from the fact that populists view their mission as “essentially moral,” Mudde noted. The “distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have. It’s based on your values.”

Given their moral framing, populists conclude that they alone represent “the people.” They may not win 100 percent of the vote, but they lay claim to 100 percent of the support of good, hardworking folks who have been exploited by the establishment. ...

... “Hence the frequent invocation of conspiracy theories by populists: something going on behind the scenes has to account for the fact that corrupt elites are still keeping the people down. ... [I]f the people’s politician doesn’t win, there must be something wrong with the system.”

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One might expect this argument to fail once populists enter government and become the establishment. But no: Populists--ranging from the revolutionary socialist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the religious conservative Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey--have managed to portray themselves as victims even at the height of their power, blaming their shortcomings on sabotage by shadowy domestic or foreign elites.

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Trump’s initial political vocabulary included the corrupt elite but not the pure people. Instead, in rambling speeches, he focused on just one person: himself. “Our country needs a truly great leader ... that wrote The Art of the Deal,” Trump declared in announcing his candidacy. Gradually, however, his speeches grew more coherent and populist. His remarks at the Republican National Convention—which were written by aide Stephen Miller, who developed a taste for “nation-state populism” while working for Senator Jeff Sessions—marked a transitional moment. “I alone can fix” the broken system in Washington, Trump said, promising to serve as the “voice” of the “forgotten men and women of our country.” By Inauguration Day, the transformation was complete: Trump’s rhetoric was thoroughly populist. ...

In his presidential-announcement speech, Trump used versions of the word “I” 256 times. In his Inaugural address, he used those words three times.

Trump shifted from exclusively “selling himself” to presenting “himself as a vehicle of the people,” Mudde observed, and this allowed his supporters to feel part of something bigger than Trump. “You couldn’t be part of Trump, and that was what he sold before,” Mudde said. “That was where the genius came in. Before it was just one man standing against everyone. Now it was a movement that had him as its leader. That energized [people] much more.”

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(One recent study of European Union countries found that as the percentage of immigrants in a nation increases, so does support for right-wing populist parties; the journalist John Judis has observed that while left-wing populists typically defend the lower and middle classes against the upper class, right-wing populists defend the people against elites who they accuse of being insufficiently tough on a third group: outsiders like immigrants or radical Islamists.)

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There’s been little comparative study of whether populists deliver better or worse results for their people than other types of politicians, according to Norris. Not much can be said definitively, for example, about the effect of populist governance on a country’s GDP growth, though a number of prominent populists, particularly in Latin America, have pursued disastrous economic policies.

But what does often happen is that populists, when they come to power and “actually have to deal with things on a daily basis, they often become more moderate as they gradually learn that bomb-throwing doesn’t work when they’re trying to get things done,” Norris said. “And then they often lose their popularity over time as a result because they no longer have that appeal” of political outsiders.

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Populists are certainly not alone in seeking to consolidate political power. But unlike other power-hungry politicians, they can do so openly, Müller notes: “[W]hy, populists can ask indignantly, should the people not take possession of their state through their only rightful representatives? Why should those who obstruct the genuine popular will in the name of civil service neutrality not be purged?”

While marginalizing opponents, populists also tend to openly dole out favors to their supporters. “In a sense,” Müller writes, “they try to make the unified people in whose name they had been speaking all along a reality on the ground. ... [P]opulism becomes something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

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“Trump is so unique in so many different ways that it’s very hard to [draw lessons] from other countries,” Mudde said.

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The irony, Müller writes, is that populists, after coming to power, tend to commit the same sins they ascribe to elites: “excluding citizens and usurping the state. What the establishment supposedly has always done, populists will also end up doing. Only with a clear justification and, perhaps, even a clear conscience.”

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