Politicians, populists and demagogues (oh my!)

Suppose for a moment that you were an ambitious politician who wanted to gather a large political following quickly, and as effortlessly as possible.  Suppose further that you were sufficiently cynical to think that a majority of your fellow citizens were lazy, self-interested and just a little bit ignorant (excluding, of course, your own friends and family).  What would be the most reliable means of persuading the largest number of those lazy, ignorant and selfish people to vote for you?  It turns out it’s not that hard.  Start by flattering them.  Tell them they are the salt of the earth—the true, honest, hard-working, virtuous folk, the kind who made your country great to begin with.  Better yet, tell them that they are The People.  Now you have their attention.  So tell them a story about your own past.  Keep it vague.  Talk about your honest upbringing, hard work, striving.  Mention your struggles.  Show them you’re just like them, only a wee bit more articulate.  Now they’re beginning to nod along.  Your voice quavers a moment and turns quieter as your message takes a serious turn.  You inform them that they have been ignored too long.  They, like you, struggle against a system that doesn’t listen, refuses to see their virtues and their needs.  The system is run by out-of-touch elites unjustly put into power by others like themselves to serve their own narrow interests.  The whole thing is rigged in their favor.  But mostly against us!  Isn’t that right?  Now your voice rises with righteous indignation.  Isn’t it time the country was given back to the decent folk, the true patriots who know what it means to cherish it?  Oh, now they like you!  The crowd roars with approval.  They’re yours.

Whatever the true condition of the majority of the people in any particular country, this is the universal strategy of populism.  And considering the embarrassing track-records of populist politicians who actually get into office, it continues to work surprisingly well.  After all, the kind of voters attracted to populism are the ones least likely to have bothered investigating the actual record of populism or learned from the mistakes of history.  Nor will they have found any evidence beyond their present feelings for their sense of present discontent.  Since they tend to form a considerable minority, or even a majority, of potential voters at any particular time, the strategy will likely remain viable as long as voters continue to be as they have been in the past.

All successful politicians understand a few basic rules of democracy: Don’t tell your constituents what is true—they already think they know and have no interest in changing their minds.  Tell them the things they want to be true.  Tell them they deserve to have those things, those that have been unjustly taken away.  Then tell them they can have those things again.  They only need to stay true to their convictions, hold fast to their instinctive loyalties, vote for the one who is able to stand up against the corrupt powers-that-be!  But who might that champion be?  What’s that?  Well, yes … if you’re willing to have me, I am ready to serve!

#

A demagogue is a kind of populist.  The word demagogue is a mashup of Greek words meaning the tongue of the commons.  A demagogue claims to be the singular voice of the downtrodden members of a political society—the many ordinary folk who have been overlooked by arrogant, self-serving elites and an overbearing, unresponsive state.  But is not this hero of the people merely usurping the role of democracy itself—to empower the people to choose those who represent and speak for them?  Not usurpation, fulfillment!  Surely the people must have a voice—better yet, the voice—in a democratic society?  The successful demagogue will convince a large number of voters that the people and the singular voice are one and the same.  And he will make his listeners believe that they are the very same as the people themselves, and that the righteous will of the people has been abused, ignored or denied by its enemies—whether by perfidious outsiders or arrogant insiders—and that he will finally overthrow these enemies by embodying the true voice (that is, the will) of the people, restoring it to power and ensuring its rightful triumph without further constraint.  It is an intoxicating vision of democracy.  And it will convince a great many voters that it is the only legitimate way of doing democracy.

But any enduring democracy must eventually come to realize that such a fantasy cannot be realized.  The voice of the people—the unified will of the righteous majority of citizens—is an illusion.  No large and diverse group of people will agree on everything, or even most things.  If they did, politics would be ridiculously simple.  But large groups of people, even those of similar background, do not share all the same values or aspirations.  At best they will agree on the rules for managing their differences.  A majority might temporarily agree to focus attention on a specific public problem, perhaps settle on a reasonable remedy.  But these are the rare cases.

Politics exists precisely because any large group of people will inevitably disagree about important public matters.  So its members have little choice but to negotiate—patiently, painfully, ceaselessly.  And even when a majority manages to coalesce around a single view, even when this opinion seems overwhelming, this majority cannot have everything it demands, without limits.  There are always some members outside of the majority.  That is why a stable civil democracy will have a rule-book called a constitution.  A constitution is, by its very nature, a set of restraints on the will of the people.  Though such a document is often venerated by popular politicians—as if its very purpose is to embody their righteous identity and will—it is fundamentally at odds with the ambitions and rhetoric of an aspiring populist.  In reality, it will contain some very unpopular provisions, such as freedom of dissent (for those who disagree with the righteous majority), and freedom of speech (for those who might point out when the majority is mistaken) and due process (which slows down the impatient popular will).  Popular sovereignty, if it is to endure more than one administration, must be subject to limits, and restrained by law and by robust, independent courts.  An unconstrained majority, doing whatever it pleased, would be a species of tyranny, arbitrary in its judgements and vindictive in its actions.  The very purpose of constitutional law is to constrain the actions and the will of the many.

So how do we recognize populism when we see it?  How do we distinguish it from democracy—the kind that legitimately represents the temporary majorities and is properly guarded by a constitution?  Let’s consider a few distinguishing characteristics of populism, recognizing that these features will be different from democracy mostly in degree, not in kind.

#

Populism is the politics of feeling together, though to an extreme.  Emotion is of course essential to all human reasoning and decision making.  Without emotions, human beings would have no desires or preferences, no reason to choose one course of action over another or any at all.  Emotions are the foundation of every form of wanting and striving, and thus also the foundation of conflict, which is essential to any sort of politics—an organized species of conflict.  Thus democratic politicians will always have to appeal to emotions if they want to reach office.  But populism gives special status to certain kinds of emotion.

Populism begins with grievance.  It understands the political uses of popular anger.  It cultivates the language of resentment.  Successful populists will launch their careers bemoaning the current state of their beloved country, lamenting that the best parts of their nation have been lost or stolen.  The tongue of the people is skilled at fanning this tiny spark of dread, giving urgency to a sense of impending doom, then drawing out anger.  Populists are manipulators of emotion, knowing that fear and anger are powerful motivators to action—more powerful than love of countrymen or compassion for the vulnerable and suffering.  Without fear and anger to provide fuel to the fire of resentment, would-be demagogues would have little to inspire their soldiers.  Without urgency, they would not get them out on the streets.  The message of loss appeals to those who already feel ignored and victimized.  Yet, strangely, it is not those who have been consistently marginalized over generations who feel the most victimized, but those who were once favored and have come to fear that they have lost (by illegitimate means) their rightful status.  It is not the traditional outcasts, those at the bottom of the hierarchy, who are most drawn to populism.  It is the recently aggrieved, the newly angry.

Successful populists dwell incessantly on loss—the things that voters think they once had or ought to have by right, and that have been unjustly taken from them.  This depends on a quirk in human psychology that puts greater value on losses than gains.  Recent research has discovered that the losing side in an election feels more pain than the winning side feels pleasure.  Losing something feels more displeasing than winning something of equal value feels pleasing.  Grievance is a perfectly familiar and understandable human emotion.  And some grievances are rooted in genuine neglect.  Feelings of injustice, though not always well founded, are deserving of sympathy.  But populism does not attempt to assess the validity of its audience’s sense of injustice, nor examine the many possible causes of feelings of neglect and oversight.  The purpose of raising grievance is to incite indignation, then action, with the ultimate purpose of propelling the populist into office.  Populist speakers love exceptional narratives—stories of exceptionally deserving folk, tales of unprecedented loss and betrayal, and exceptional promises.  Everyone else has betrayed you.  I alone understand you and can make it right.

Populist movements give priority to the unexamined feelings and resentments of a large body, usually a substantial minority, of the citizenry—a body that, if sufficiently motivated, will outmaneuver and outvote the numerical majority.  They will exploit the most incendiary emotions of their aggrieved supporters but will never ask them to reflect critically upon those emotions.  How did they arise?  How well-grounded in fact?  Are they fair to the perceptions and interests of other people not among the crowd today?  Populist voters are never encouraged to interrogate their own feelings, to restrain their own fury, to moderate their demands.  They are encouraged to believe that anything less than granting the full measure of their righteous grievance is a betrayal of the nation’s true patriots.  As such, they are not prepared to think carefully, to listen, to negotiate.  Rather, these necessary practices of an enduring democracy are condemned as the craven symptoms of elite manipulation and business-as-usual.

Successful populist politicians are adept at selecting triggering and reactive words to rally their followers.  Insults and put-downs are de rigueur.  Welfare recipients become bums and cheats.  (Populists are always confident their own benefits and privileges are justly earned.)  Minorities have become undeservedly favored, honest citizens forgotten and put upon.  Immigrants are transformed into invaders or criminals.  Foreigners become job-stealers, even terrorists.  External enemies are then aligned with internal traitors in a sinister conspiracy.  Such sweeping labels are bound up in moralistic language to give a gloss of justice to the seething outrage.  Then the populists invoke emotive symbols and displays—flags, anthems, pledges, sacred texts, memorial events, stances, salutes, processions, marches.  With such fervent evidence of patriotic virtue, how could their resentments be wrong?  How could their cause be maligned or dismissed without insult to the nation itself?  To disagree becomes the same as treason.  But their own righteous feelings will not stand to be questioned.

Populists draw crowds by decrying what has gone wrong with their country, though they tend to sneer at the things that have gone right.  They overlook the functioning roads, courts, embassies, social security checks.  They forget to mention that the power of the vote is itself a sign of a vigorous democracy, evidence that the rule of law is generally (if imperfectly) respected and enforced.  They suggest that imperfection means that their familiar system is broken, that a failing is indication of irredeemable corruption.  And a broken system, they hastily conclude, is worse than no system at all.  Better anything else in its place.  And so there can be no real cost in bringing down such a rotten structure—better to break it and start again than to tolerate such devious shortcomings.  Smash it to the ground and take out the corrupt insiders—whatever comes out of that must be better than what its overlooked citizens have to put up with now.