Populism, part II: The politics of mistrust

Populism begins with grievance but seldom ends there.  Grievance graduates to indignation, indignation to rage, finally to vengeance.  This is by design.  Populists understand the language of conspiracy.  The populist leader’s goal is to reach office, then to remain, which requires reliable and enduring popular support.  This might make him indistinguishable from any other politician, except that his ambition does not require him to demonstrate governing competence (usually an afterthought for populists), only to keep his followers at a simmering boil.  He needs outrage to boost him past his competitors.  This requires a continuous fueling of the defining narrative of justice thwarted.  He need not say exactly what his policies are or what he would do differently in office, except to knock out the perpetrators of injustice and represent the purified will of the righteous people.  (His supporters, of course, however many or few they may be.)  Populists know that popular politics is about character rather than competence.  And it is easier to sniff out the bad characters than the good.  So the task is to name the bad lot, hint that the glorious triumph of the good requires only the doing down of the bad.  Bad outcomes are the work of bad characters, good policies of the good kind.  Populists know to keep it simple.

Grievance is nourished by chauvinism, which is rooted in the instinctive human mistrust of strangers—foreigners, naturally, but also deviants and oddballs at home.  Such emotions are native to our species (whose continued existence suggests they had once been useful to our survival), and none of us can claim to be above such feelings.  But populism glorifies what reason and civilization would better check and suppress.  Populism revels in easy instincts and simple abstractions.  It supposes that as like-minded majorities are the vital essence of a democratic nation, minorities must be a disease.  It supposes that as loyalty is the highest of patriotic virtues, opposition and dissent must be the lowliest vices.  And it supposes that if good and honest folk are not getting all that they deserve, blame must fall on malevolent operators conspiring against them.  After all, evil is real and nothing happens by accident.

Populists seldom call themselves by that name.  They are just ordinary folk, the silent majority, the true patriots—better yet, The People.  They will strenuously deny that they are driven by grievance, let alone hatred.  They will say they are motivated by love.  Of what?  Their country, of course, their nation, the people!  What love could be nobler than love of The People?  The central article of faith of any populist is that nothing must stand in the way of the people’s will.  And who are the people?  Well, we are the people, the aspiring populist says to his faithful—you and me and those like us—suggesting that they must be the true and righteous majority.  (And those listening are quite sure that they really are the majority, whatever scheming opponents may claim.)  Our popular will has been suborned, they cry, our birthright stolen from us, by a treacherous invader or a selfish elite.  The media lies, the fat-cats get fatter, the insiders line their insider pockets.  And we will put all this to rights.  Nothing our righteous majority does can be wrong.  So there can be no lawful constraints upon it.  Patriotism justifies all.  But one cannot really love the people without at the same time despising the enemies of the people.  This is a conundrum as old as our species—that to generate loyalty, love and devotion to one’s tribe (and all the survival advantages that come with it), one must also hate those who are beyond.  You can only recognize your own kind by knowing your enemies.

To be a successful populist politician, you will have to persuade a substantial number of supporters that you (more than anyone else in sight) legitimately speak for the people.  And as a leading public figure, you will have to invoke The People—meaning those who are listening at the moment—and do it often.  And declare that your party is the true party of the people, unlike those other parties, which only represent corrupt interests, the advantaged or the insufferable minorities.  Populists make it easy to imagine that the people are too few, and yet also the true majority, the purely united alliance of virtuous folk.  Those who disagree with this claim—those who coddle the dissenters—cannot belong to the people, and should be righteously ignored.  Populists know who the real people are.  They are the people who think like they do, who need little convincing, who are sure that this is properly their country!

But though the populist claims to speak for the people, the patriotic citizens, he never means all of the country’s inhabitants—the mere residents.  He must give preference to some people, the right sort of people.  His own kind of people.  (They know who they are!)  The populists don’t quite claim to speak for the masses but for the ordinary decent folk, who helpfully self-identify by attending populist rallies.  In practice, the people they strive to attract are the substantial minority willing and able to shout down the more self-restrained and uncertain majority.  (And it is becoming increasingly clear in the digital age that politics is driven less by the moderate, wavering majority than by small groups of highly-motivated operators.)  But populists work hard to convince their select minority that they really are all of the people.  Successful populists are the ones that convince the largest minority.  This approach works well with those who already believe the proposition, and have only been waiting for an inspiring voice to tell it to them.  It works best with impatient thinkers (or those who don’t care for the habit), especially those who have an elevated (or unearned) opinion of themselves.  Let’s agree that most populist followers are among the former—and may even be well-meaning.  They’re just glad to find others saying aloud what they’ve secretly suspected.  And suddenly realize they really are the people who have been ignored all this time.  They feel vindicated, powerful.

But a fundamental problem remains: even when they really are a majority—if only a local majority—they are still not all of the people.  They are at best a large number of people enjoying their moment, overwhelming and bullying the lesser (temporarily disadvantaged) part of the people.  Yet their claim to be the people or to speak for all the people or to make binding decisions for the whole nation (which is what majorities do when crafting laws) is really a tyranny of the majority, and no less tyrannical to its victims than the tyranny of the one or of the few.  They are not really all of the people, only a large number of the people.

So the very attraction of populism is its fundamental hazard.  It misunderstands the nature of democratic politics, of human society itself—which is that people don’t agree, even on the basic things.  Any group of people at all, of any size.  No collection of human beings is of precisely the same mind about everything, or even most things.  So they have to negotiate, compromise.  But voters who are attracted to populism tend to be convinced that they are right about the basic things.  (Rather like human beings in general.)  And yet find themselves to be unaccountably overlooked and ignored most of the time.  How can this be?  It’s not for failing to see the best way of running things.  So it must be something else.  Successful populist leaders have the answer!  And this answer doubles down on the illusion that they really are the people, while recognizing the uncomfortable truth that not everyone is with them.

Populist leaders quickly proceed from praising (lavishly) their virtuous supporters to pinning extravagant blame on others, both insiders and outsiders.  The insiders or elites—a general term for those who benefit from the existing (that is, broken or corrupt) state of things—are the establishment.  And for this reason successful populists must usually advertise themselves as outsiders or anti-establishment champions.  They may well name a few bad apples, but are seldom clear about who these elites are, except that the elites are not them.  So in this primal sense, populism is a protest against inequality.  In itself, this would be worthy of any democratic movement, drawing attention to a fundamental social issue that a just and stable democratic society must eventually address—the problem of inequality.  But in the case of populism, lazy thinking quickly grabs the reins and charges past the real problem.

The populist leader often finds a quick and satisfying answer in blaming a small minority, a few bad apples, for the problems of society in general.  Only a few sick individuals are responsible for gun violence.  Only a few bad drivers make the roads dangerous for everyone.  Only a few immoral elites closely connected to politicians on the other side are responsible for child trafficking.  This of course relieves the target audience of imagining that they are in any way responsible for the situation that they imagine is at the root of their ills.  Populist voters like to declare that they have been deliberately shut out of power, which permits them to think that they are the victims of the powerful.  Populist voters (though not necessarily their chosen leaders) are certainly not part of the elite, and yet these rally-goers are almost never of the political or economic underclass.  They are rather those who have done well in the past (especially the remembered past) but are in fear of losing their status, or of becoming an underclass. 

Populist leaders readily cast blame on others for their beloved nation’s ills, but never on the people themselves.  They blame foreigners, minorities, corrupt mainstream politicians—everyone but their favored supporters.  Even on the occasions when they get into office, they will complain bitterly about the forces ranged against them (and by extension against their patriotic supporters) and claim that failed and ill-considered policies are not the fault of haste and incompetence, but of the malicious machinations of the enemies of the people (often the masters of the deep state) or of previous regimes.  What populists never do is ask their supporters to reflect on themselves, to be critical of their own choices or reactions, or stop to reconsider their own assumptions and prejudices.  This may be the most dangerous element of populism to the well-being of a stable civil society—the tendency of successful populists to pander to their easiest-to-acquire audiences by appealing to their comfortable prejudices, igniting their negative emotions, feeding their grievances, assuring them that they do not have to spend any time rethinking their long-worn opinions.

Perhaps we should not blame politicians for doing what works so reliably well.  After all, it’s not their fault they get away with it.  They don’t make their supporters suspend their reason, merely encourage it.  A thoughtful and responsible voter ought to be suspicious of any politician who tried such tactics, regardless of their purported motives and declared policies.  Yet experience shows that it is the most brazen and loud-mouthed jostlers who are elevated entirely above the reach of suspicion in the minds of devoted followers.

Some populist leaders may be sincere in their rhetoric, believing in the superior wisdom and virtue of themselves and their devoted followers.  In this they are little different from other members of the human species.  And many of them, despite their habitual fearmongering and blamecasting, are optimists in their way.  They believe that their superior virtue will clear away the obstacles that have befuddled the ordinary unrighteous bumblers—obstacles placed deliberately by the perfidious elites who have ruled in secret until now.  Surely the true heroes will win in the end and the best sort of folk triumph.  Populists insist, loudly but not in so many words, that good government is a moral struggle, meaning that only those of the best character can perform it justly and successfully.  It’s the person that makes the leader—something indelible and unreproducible in his character.  (Yes, his.)  Not skills that anyone can learn, not knowledge that anyone can acquire, not patience and commitment that anyone might develop.  And so he downplays the value of institutions, of systems, of knowledge, of expertise, even of demonstrable facts that do not support his moralistic narrative.  How is it he can claim that good government has eluded so many previous leaders for so very long, yet accumulated knowledge and expertise is entirely unnecessary?  Here we will find one more element of populism that sets it apart from the humbler varieties of democracy.