Populism #1, n+1 Topic: Democracy Without the People

Left populism vs. insipid pluralism

Morsels:

SINCE DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY, a steady stream of concern pieces has appeared across the national press: “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” “An Erosion of Democratic Norms in America.” “Will Democracy Survive Trump’s Populism? Latin America May Tell Us.” “Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy.” “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’”

The worry is obvious: democracy is under threat. Moving from headline to text, however, one perceives a shift. The basic meaning of democracy — the rule of the people, or popular sovereignty — is nowhere to be found. Instead, democracy appears to refer to a series of institutions and norms, not all of them obviously democratic.

In the New York Times, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write that Trump’s flagrant rejection of “partisan self-restraint and fair play” poses an existential threat to “our system of constitutional checks and balances.” In an interview with the Atlantic, the political scientist Brendan Nyhan says he expects Trump to be unconstrained by “bipartisan political norms.” Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg slides from describing democratic institutions as anchored in elite bipartisan bonhomie to equating democracy with deference to the national-security state. “Trump has signaled clearly that he will deal with powerful democratic institutions as he dealt with his Republican rivals,” Wilkinson writes. “Look at Trump’s approach to US intelligence agencies.” Venerating the CIA as exemplary of democracy is symptomatic of a more general tendency — one in which even the most brazenly antidemocratic US political institutions are taken to embody democracy.

Among the confounded political analysts, what followed Trump’s victory was an epidemic of self-castigation. “We” had failed to “listen” to “white working-class” voters. Since the inauguration, however, elitism in the guise of centrism is once again on the move. Democracy, they say, is under threat from populism, and only a defense of norms and institutions can exorcise the specter of a reckless citizenry. But what if the truth is the opposite, and populism is not the problem but the solution? 

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In a New York Times article, Amanda Taub draws on recent research by political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, putting Trump in the same category as both right and left “antisystem populist parties in Europe, such as the National Front in France, Syriza in Greece and the Five-Star Movement in Italy.” De la Torre suggests that “Americans should take a look at Latin America, where, starting in the 1940s, elected populists undermined democracy” — flattening the distinction between such ideologically opposed presidents as Argentina’s Perón and Ecuador’s Velasco Ibarra, Venezuela’s Chávez and Peru’s Fujimori, Bolivia’s Morales and Argentina’s Menem. The concern over pan-ideological “extremism” recycles post-Brexit commentary as distilled in the tinny voice of the wounded establishment, Tony Blair, who in his op-ed for the New York Times (“Brexit’s Stunning Coup”) warned of a growing “convergence of the far left and far right.” Blair sees this “insurgency” in entirely communicational terms: the center’s failure to “persuade” voters unmoored from political common sense was due to “polarized and fragmented news coverage” and “the social media revolution.”

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What is there to fear? A study published in the latest issue of Latin American Research Review shows that countries governed by left-populist administrations have witnessed significant increases in the political participation of the poor. The study also demonstrates that redistributive policies cannot undo structural inequality in the political and economic spheres on their own. Without a populist mobilizing strategy — specifically, the “us” (the poor) versus “them” (the rich) framing used by decades of anti-neoliberal social movements — left policies are unsustainable and substantive democracy is impossible.


Political analysts are undermined by their faith in the limited democracy they prize. The center they cling to has been sustained thus far by abysmal voter turnout, mass disenfranchisement, feckless politicians and strategists, and the overwhelming influence of financial elites in politics amid staggering levels of inequality that rival the Gilded Age. A left populism holds the potential to revitalize democracy, and to defend it from the dual threats of technocracy and revanchism. 

Read in whole: Democracy Without the People | Issue 28 | n+1