What is Populism?

The Political Theologies of Populism: the Garveyites, the Klan, and the Wobblies, 1905-1930 will be out later this month. In celebration of its release I am sharing a few of the key concepts. The first one focuses on a definition of populism. The next three will examine the three primary varieties of populism in the United States: white supremacist, Pan-African, and pluralistic populism.

So, what is populism? Jan-Werner Müller has written a book of the same name.¹ As I argue below, I don’t really agree with his definition because “populism” is a contested term. Populist movements rarely self-identify as such. Instead, they are affixed with the label by journalists and scholars. This dynamic has generated a lack of scholarly consensus on what populism is, leading Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser to identify no fewer than six different “approaches” to defining it and claim it is a “thin-centered ideology” that “seldom exists in pure form” and instead overlays other “host ideologies.”

Which approach populism scholars align themselves with is closely related to their own ideological positions. Broadly, scholars divide into those fundamentally opposed to all forms of populism and those who find some form of it is desirable. Many self-identified progressives hold the view, as Müller argues, that populism represents the “danger for democracy.”

Counterposing this position are those, like Laura Grattan, who examine it from the perspective of “radical democratic theory” and argue that the threat to democracy is less from populism in general and more from particular kinds of populism.

There is significant disagreement between those who label populism “dangerous” and those who see it as having the potential to “play a crucial role in democratizing power and politics.” Both agree populists frame their movements as efforts to speak for or mobilize “the people” but little else. Müller, for example, sees populism as inherently “antielitist” and “antipluralist,” while Grattan argues populist rhetoric can be deployed by “elites and grassroots actors” and certain kinds of populism are oriented toward cultivating “people’s rebellious aspirations ... to share in power ... in pluralistic, egalitarian ways.”

Observing the differences between scholars like Grattan and Müller, Vedi Hadiz and Angelos Chryssogelos have persuasively argued that the division between scholars who have a “tendency to dismiss populist politics as a politics of irrationality” and those who cast populism “in a much more positive light” go back at least to the 1950s. Hadiz, writing with Richard Robinson, refuses to “normatively posit” a “role for populist politics” within particular countries, noting instead that their impact has more to do with their “alliances and interests” than the mere fact of their populism.

For my part, I am committed to the project of democratic renewal. My commitment stems from my faith as a Unitarian Universalist, a tradition that takes as part of one of its values “the use of inclusive democratic processes to make decisions.” This has prompted me to side with those scholars who argue a social movement is understood to be populist when its principal emphasis is on the formation of collective identity--the creation of a “people”—­rather than on specific policies. As Roger Brubaker has claimed, “‘The people,’ as a category of practice, may be ambiguous ... [b]ut populism, as a category of analysis, should be sharply delimited.” In my work, I narrow it to those social movements that engage in the constructive process Grattan names “peopling,” which she argues places particular focus on “the modes of being and becoming a people.”

Populist movements and peopling flourish most strongly in periods of crisis when stable economic, political, or social arrangements are disrupted; the stories individuals share about who they are, who belongs to their community, and what the future holds are fragmented; and a widespread need to reconsolidate old narratives and create new ones emerges. The early twentieth century was one such period. The years since the 2008 economic crisis have proven to be another.

1. Those interested in the citations for this post and the others related to The Political Theologies of Populism are encouraged to buy the book.