The debate they have produced is, like many academic debates, knotty and self-referential – and will always live in the shadow of the muddled media and political discourse. But long before populism became an object of transatlantic media fascination – before it became a zeitgeisty one-word explanation for everything – a small group of academics was studying it, trying to figure out exactly what it is and what lessons it holds for democratic politics. It is hard to deny that much talk of populism obscures more than it illuminates, and tells us more about anti-populist crusaders than any real live populist parties or voters. Worse, it’s freighted with contempt, applied to all voters who have decided that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.” “It’s become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger. “Let’s do away with the word ‘populist,’” wrote the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in July. This argument has even made its way to the centrist mainstream. Populism, in this framing, is a bogeyman: a nonentity invoked for the purpose of stirring up fear. It is now relatively common to encounter the idea that, just as there were no real witches in Salem, there are no real populists in politics – just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears, and wants you, reader, to fear too, although without the burden of having to explain exactly why. “By fighting off the current infection,” writes Yascha Mounk, until recently executive director of Blair’s IGC and a prominent anti-populist writer, “we might just build up the necessary antibodies to remain immune against new bouts of the populist disease for decades to come.”īut as breathless op-eds and thinktank reports about the populist menace keep piling up, they have provoked a sceptical backlash from critics who wonder aloud if populism even exists. All responsible citizens have a responsibility to do their part in the battle – to know populism when they see it, understand its appeal (but not fall for it), and support politics that stop populism in its tracks, thereby saving democracy as we know it. When populism is framed this way, the implication is clear.
The rise of “populist movements”, Barack Obama said in a speech last summer, had helped spark a global boom for the “politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment” that pave a path to authoritarianism.
In its 2018 world report, Human Rights Watch warned democracies of the world against “capitulation” to the “populist challenge”. Tony Blair spends his days running the Institute for Global Change (IGC), an organisation founded, per its website, “to push back against the destructive approach of populism”. There is no shortage of prominent voices warning how dangerous populism is, and that we must take immediate steps to fight it.
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