The term could be useful because there is not necessarily a moral evaluation behind it: if they would use far right demagoguery, or fascist politics, it would show something dangerous, extreme. It would ring the bell to us all. Populism does not do so. Historically, populism was used to define political streams which tried to involve people in decision-making, instead of alienating them from their own national political systems, and attacking them because of their political opinion, or because of their race – however, this nuance is not interesting these days. If you check some of the prominent proponents of this populist hoax like Cas Mudde, you see what an artificial and unstable model they have applied to populism: it should be some kind of technique, containing anti-elitism, high level of emotions, mixed with nationalism and ethnicism, probably also racism, but it would not contain a core set of ideological values. What struck me even more is that some leading scholars like Jan-Werner Müller can refer to Carl Schmitt as a populist. Schmitt was a Nazi Scholar and ideologist, president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists, editor of the Nazi journal called Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung. His scientific activity, especially the division of society into enemies and friends (we-them), his anti-liberal (in fact: anti-pluralist) stance, his views on political power and emergency situations made him a prophet of Nazi ideology (the so called “crown jurist of the Third Reich”). And now we should call him simply populist?
I feel that science has almost completely lost track. That kind of populism which is in the head of scholars is simply demagoguery politics. When political parties are chauvinistic, racist, paranoid, anti-elitist, macho-ist, use emotions to attack minorities, create scapegoats, we cannot say that this is the normal course of democracy. In my home country, such parties destroyed democracy, created an electoral autocracy, a semi-dictatorship, where they abolished checks and balances and fair elections. Fidesz, the ruling party, uses the social-psychology of the communistic regime, which also used the social psychology of Nazis and the Horthy regime. Many of the similar parties use democratic mimicry to mask that they are deeply anti-democratic, and we see what many of them do should they receive power on their own, and have a chance to attack the democratic framework. They do not believe in democracy, in basic values like pluralism which underpin it, or the unity of one human race, where each and every human being is judged based on his or her own merits. Most of these parties are based on the same anti-enlightment attitude which served as the core of historical Fascism. [...]
My own view is that most the above-mentioned parties belong to the post-fascist camp. Roger Griffin wrote a foreword for Tamir Bar-on’s genius book called Where have all the Fascists Gone? In this foreword, he wrote, post-fascism is like an island in a river: it does not reach the banks of fascism, but it also does not belong to conservatism. My view, however, is that these parties are not like islands, but like boats: they move between proper fascism and conservatism, and they rest on both sides of the river. They use all the emotional manipulations their historical predecessors did, from both sides. We can only counter the rise of hate in Europe if we do not think our societies are completely different from old times, or hate-mongering parties completely different from old parties with similar ideologies.
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