It is correct that in Europe and the United States (at least in the case of Trump) less educated males are the main constituency of what is commonly referred to as populism; it is true that in surveys many voters register their sense that the country as a whole is declining (an assessment that does not necessarily depend on their personal economic situation; it is simply not true that every supporter of what can plausibly be classified as a populist party is an objective “loser in globalisation”). But all this is like saying that we best understand the intellectual content of social democracy if we keep redescribing its voters as workers envious of rich people. The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronising to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents. [...]
When in opposition, populists for sure criticise elites. But there is also always something else they do that is the tell-tale sign of populism: they claim that they, and only they, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing his critics in the country: “We are the people. Who are you?” Of course, he knew that they were Turks, too.
The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. Populists’ political competitors and critics are inevitably condemned as part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say when running for office; once in government, they will not recognise anything such as a legitimate opposition. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people at all: there are American citizens, and then there are what George C Wallace, an arch-populist of the 1960s often viewed as a precursor of Trump, always called “real Americans” (white, God-fearing, hard-working, gun-owning and so on). Thus, populists do not just claim: we are the 99%. According to their own logic, they actually have to say: we are the 100%. [...]
More worryingly still: when populists have sufficiently large majorities in parliament, they try to build regimes that might still look like democracies, but are actually designed to perpetuate the power of the populists (as supposedly the only authentic representatives of the people). To start with, populists colonise or “occupy” the state. Think of Hungary and Poland as recent examples. One of the first changes Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz sought after coming to power in Hungary in 2010 was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable them to place loyalists in what should have been non-partisan bureaucratic positions. Both Fidesz and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland also immediately moved against the independence of courts. Media authorities were captured; the signal went out that journalists should not report in ways that violate the interests of the nation (which were equated with the interests of the governing party). Whoever criticised any of these measures was vilified as doing the bidding of the old elites, or as being outright traitors (Kaczyński spoke of “Poles of the worst sort” who supposedly have “treason in their genes”).
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