Are smart people deliberately acting stupid? The Rise of the Anti-Intellectual

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn
 


Across the 20th century, intellectuals played an important role in political parties and governments, both democratic and authoritarian. According to Richmond University’s Professor of Politics Eunice Goes, intellectuals perform several roles in the policy-making process.

They help politicians make sense of the world. They offer cause-effect explanations of political and economic phenomena, and diagnoses and prescriptions to policy puzzles. They also help political actors develop ideas and narratives that are consistent with their ideological traditions and political goals.

But in this century, politics has often witnessed a backlash against the presence of intellectuals in political parties and in governments. This is likely due to the strengthening of the parallel tradition of anti-intellectualism, which was always (and still is) active in various polities.

This tradition has been more active in right-wing groups. It was especially strengthened by the rise of populist politics in many countries in the 2010s. But mainstream political outfits in Europe and the US still induct the services of intellectuals, even though this ploy has greatly been eroded in the Republican Party in the US after it wholeheartedly embraced populism in 2016, and still seems to be engulfed by it. 

Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party in the US has always had the largest presence of intellectuals in it. This policy was initiated during the four presidential terms of the Democratic Party’s Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45), during which time a large number of intellectuals were inducted. Their role was to aid the government in bailing the US out of a tumultuous economic crisis, and to develop a narrative to neutralise the increasing appeal of organisations on the far right and the far left. This tradition of inducting intellectuals continued to be employed by the Democrats for decades.

Interestingly, even though the Republican Party has had an anti-intellectual dimension ever since the early 20th century, it carried with it intellectuals to counter intellectuals active in the Democratic Party. This was specifically true during the presidencies of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981-88) who was, in fact, propelled to power by an intellectual movement led by conservatives and some former liberals. This movement evolved into becoming ‘neo-conservatism’ during the Reagan presidencies. Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party have carried with them intellectuals as well, especially the Labour Party.

Some totalitarian regimes too employed the services of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The Soviet dictator Stalin was not very kind to intellectuals, though. But intellectuals played a major role in shaping Soviet communism. Hitler’s Nazi regime had the services of some of the period’s finest minds in Germany, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the logician Rudolf Carnap, and a host of others.

They helped Hitler mould Nazism into an all-encompassing ideology. Just how could some extremely intelligent men start to both romance as well as rationalise a brutal ideology is a topic that has often been investigated, but it is beyond the scope of this column.

In Pakistan, three governments banked heavily on intellectuals to formulate their respective ideologies, narratives and economics. The Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) carried scholars who specialised in providing ‘modernist’ interpretations to various traditional aspects of Islam. This they did to aid Ayub’s modernisation project. The intellectuals included the rationalist Islamic scholars Fazalur Rahman Malik and Ghulam Ahmad Parwez, and, to a certain extent, the progressive novelist Mumtaz Mufti and Justice Javed Iqbal, the son of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. The writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab was Ayub’s Principal Secretary.

Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was studded with intellectuals who remained active in the party during at least the first few years of Bhutto’s regime (1971-77). These included the Marxist theorist JA Rahim who (with Bhutto) wrote the party’s ‘Foundation Papers’ and then its first manifesto. He also served as a minister in the Bhutto regime till his acrimonious ouster in 1975.

Then there was Dr Mubashir Hassan, who was the main theorist behind PPP’s concept of a ‘planned economy’. He served as the Bhutto regime’s finance minister. The intellectuals Hanif Ramay and Safdar Mir wrote treatises to counter the ideologies of the Islamists. Ramay also formulated the party’s core ideology of ‘Islamic socialism’. The lawyer and constitutional expert Hafeez Pirzada too was a founding member of the party. He was one of the main authors of the 1973 Constitution.

The Ziaul Haq dictatorship adopted the Islamist theorist Abul Ala Maududi as the regime’s main ideologue. Maududi was also the chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Zia, when he was a lieutenant general in the early 1970s, used to distribute books written by Maududi to his officers and soldiers. Maududi passed away in 1979, just two years after Zia overthrew the Bhutto regime. But Zia continued to apply Maududi’s ideas to his dictatorship’s ‘Islamisation’ project.

Zia also had the services of the prominent lawyers AK Brohi and Sharifuddin Pirzada. Brohi and Pirzada were instrumental in formulating the murder charges against Bhutto. In his book, Betrayals of Another Kind, Gen Faiz Ali Chisti wrote that Brohi and Pirzada encouraged Zia to hang Bhutto, which he did. Pirzada also wrote oaths for judges sworn in by Zia that omitted the commitment to protect the Constitution. He would go on to do the same for the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008). In fact, Sharifuddin Pirzada had also served the Ayub regime.

The rise of populist politics in the second decade of the 21st century has greatly diminished the role of intellectuals in political parties and governments. This is because populism is inherently anti-intellectual. It perceives intellectuals as being part of a detested elite. Therefore, for example, one never expected intellectuals of any kind in Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). This is why the nature of this party’s narrative is ridiculously contradictory and even chaotic.

However, in a January 2022 essay for The Atlantic, David A. Graham wrote that it’s not that intellectuals have vanished from political parties. Rather, due to populism’s anti-intellectual disposition, they have purposely dumbed down their ideas.

According to Graham, “This is the age of smart politicians pretending to be stupid.” If stupidity can now attract votes and save the jobs of intellectuals in parties and governments, then smart folks can act stupid in the most convincing manner. Even more than those who are actually stupid.

Other democracies should beware taking pleasure in the UK’s travails

Voters in most developed countries feel that their contract with the state is fraying writes Bronwen Maddox in the FT 

I can barely think of a meeting I’ve had since September that didn’t begin with jokes about Britain’s newfound instability. I started a job a few days before Liz Truss became prime minister, and the “lasted longer than the lettuce” one has been inescapable. “Three prime ministers in a year!” (Ambassadors from European countries still incredulous at Brexit particularly like this one.) Now, there are the strikes — although the meltdown of the NHS’s emergency services is no joke at all. 

But these are rash quips if coming from other democracies. The joke may be on them, too. Older democratic countries share many of the same problems and are struggling to show that they have a system that can solve them. “If you don’t have a political system that can make short-term sacrifices for the long-term good of the country, how can you expect your system of government to survive?” asked one senior Chinese official of a distinguished British former minister. 

It’s a good question. In Britain, the NHS is a symbol of these problems above all others. The stand-off with the government by nurses and ambulance workers is of course about worker pay, but is also about how much the government wants to pay for the health service at all. 

Much of the problem stems from the demands of an ageing population, and that is something that many older democracies share. Even if other countries may no longer envy the NHS, they share some of the same troubles. On many fronts, the contract that voters thought they had with their governments — over them paying for healthcare, education, pensions — is being rewritten, and not in their favour. Perhaps the best-known saying of Jean Claude Juncker, when prime minister of Luxembourg, was: “We know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” 

Those sceptical of democracy have prophesied that this is how it consumes itself. It is easier to make promises than to keep them, so the temptation is for politicians to make extravagant commitments to get into office, and then try somehow to stay there. Following this recipe, democracy decays into populism and then autocracy. 

To some degree, yes. Boris Johnson and the unfulfillable Brexit promises were a symptom of the need to assemble an expansive coalition, built on impossibilities. The antidote — the “grown-up conversation with the nation” that politicians sometimes desperately invoke — seems pitifully weak. 

All the same, that is what is needed. The pandemic does offer some encouragement, showing that people are prepared to give up an extraordinary amount if persuaded it is necessary. But there are also more practical things that governments could do to help. 

First, they need to make the case for growth and the steps required to bring it about. Truss was not wrong in her ambition, just in recklessly ignoring the constraints on any country seeking to borrow money. For Britain, that means closer relations with Europe. A US trade deal is not coming any time soon; the only alternative of a large market is China, and Rishi Sunak’s government has chosen not to lean that way. It also means telling people that more legal immigration is needed. It means championing the creativity in science and culture that are themselves the product of the intellectual freedom at the heart of democracies. 

The second thing to do is change voting systems and improve legislatures. In the UK, the House of Lords is indefensible, as former prime minister Gordon Brown has pointed out. He is right that regions need more representation, too. And first past the post is increasingly hard to defend in a country of many different kinds of people and views. 

Third, is to stand up for the values that underpin liberal democracy but not try to couple them with all the other deals on the world stage. Insisting on a human rights agenda in every diplomatic relationship can jeopardise the pursuit of environmental and security accords that are desperately needed on their own account. It can lead to accusations of double standards — as shown by the controversy over Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup despite its treatment of LGBTQ people. 

It is right, though, to pursue those liberal principles, while acknowledging that not all countries share them. They are, along with economic prospects, one of the reasons people risk their lives in small boats trying to come to the UK — one of the best arguments that liberal democracy has a future.

THE PERFORMATIVE POLITICIAN

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Illustration by Abro



Populism is a way of framing political ideas that can be filled with a verity of ideologies (C. Mudde in Current History, 2014). These ideologies can come from the left or the right. Populism in itself is not a distinct ideology. It is a performative political style.

No matter where it’s coming from, it is manifested through a particular set of animated gestures, images, tones and symbols (B. Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism, 2016). At the core of it is a narrative containing two main ‘villains’: The ‘elites’ and ‘the other’. Elites are described as being corrupt. And ‘the other’ is demonised as being a threat to the beliefs and values of the ‘majority’.

Populists begin by glorifying the ‘besieged’ polity as noble. They then begin to frame the polity’s civilisation as ‘sacred’. Therefore, the mission to eradicate threats, in this context, becomes a sacred cause. The far-right parties in Europe want to protect Europe’s Christian identity from Muslim intruders. They see Muslim immigration to European countries as an invasion.

Yet, these far-right groups are largely secular. They do not propose the creation of a Christian theocracy. Instead, they understand modern European civilisation as the outcome of its illustrious Christian past. They frame the Muslim immigrant as ‘the other’ who has arrived from a lesser civilisation. So, according to far-right populists in Europe, the Muslim other — tolerated and facilitated by a political elite — starts to undermine the Christian values that aided European civilisations to become ‘great’.

Ironically, most far-right outfits in Europe that espouse such notions are largely critical of conventional Christian institutions. They see them as being too conservative towards modern European values. Far-right outfits are not overtly religious at all — even though their fiery populist rhetoric frames their cause as a sacred undertaking to protect the civilisational role of Christianity in shaping European societies.

Thus, European far-right populists adopt Christianity not as a theocratic-political doctrine, but as an identity marker to differentiate themselves from Muslims (Saving The People, ed. O. Roy, 2016). It is therefore naive to understand issues such as Islamophobia as a tussle between Christianity and Islam. Neither is it a clash between modernity and anti-modernity, as such.

The actions of some Islamist extremists, and the manner in which these were framed by popular media, made Muslim migrants in the West a community that could be easily moulded into a feared ‘other’ by populists. If one takes out the Muslim migrants from the equation, the core narrative of far-right populists will lose its sting.

Muslims in this regard have become ‘the other’ in India as well. Hindu nationalism is challenging the old, ‘secular’ political elite by claiming that this elite was serving Muslim interests to maintain its political hegemony, and that it was repressing values, beliefs and memories of a Hindu civilisation that was thriving before being invaded and dismantled by Muslim invaders.

Here too, the populist Hindu nationalists are not necessarily devout and pious. And when they are, then the actions in this respect are largely performative rather than doctrinal. That’s why, today, a harmless Hindu ritual and the act of emotionally or physically assaulting a Muslim, may carry similar performative connotations. For example, a militant Hindu nationalist mob attacking a Muslim can be conceived by the attackers as a sacred ritual.

Same is the case in Pakistan. The researcher Muhammad Amir Rana has conducted several interviews of young Islamist militants who were arrested and put in rehabilitation programmes. Almost all of them were told by their ‘handlers’ that self-sacrifice was a means to create an Islamic state/caliphate that would wipe out poverty, corruption and immorality, and provide justice. This idea was programmed into them to create a ‘self’ in relation to an opposite or ‘the other’. The other in this respect were heretics and infidels who were conspiring to destroy Islam.

When an Islamist suicide bomber explodes him/herself in public, or when extremists desecrate Ahmadiyya graves, or a mob attacks an alleged blasphemer, each one of these believe they are undertaking a sacred ritual that is not that different from the harmless ones. But Islamist militants are not populists. They have dogmatic doctrines or are deeply indoctrinated.

Not so, the populists. Populists are great hijackers of ideas. There’s nothing original or deep about them. Everything remains on the surface. Take, for instance, the recently ousted Pakistani PM Imran Khan. He unabashedly steals ideas from the left and the right. His core constituency, which is not so attuned to history, perceives these ideas as being entirely new. Everything he says or claims to have done, becomes ‘for the first time in the history of Pakistan.’

But being a populist, it wasn’t enough for Khan to frame his ‘struggle’ (against ‘corrupt elites’) as a noble cause. It needed to be manifested as a sacred conviction. So, from 2014 onwards, he increasingly began to lace his speeches with allusions of him fighting for justice and morality by treading a path laid out by Islam’s sacred texts and personalities. He then began to explain this undertaking as a ‘jihad’.

These were/are pure populist manoeuvres and entirely performative. Once the cause transformed into becoming a ‘jihad’, it not only required rhetoric culled from Islamist evangelists and then put in the context of a ‘political struggle’, but it also needed performed piety — carrying prayer beads, being constantly photographed while saying obligatory Muslim prayers, embracing famous preachers, etc.

And since ‘jihad’ in the popular imagination is often perceived to be something aggressive and manly, Khan poses as an outspoken and fearless saviour of not only the people of Pakistan, but also of the ‘ummah’.

Yet, by all accounts, he is not very religious. He’s not secular either. But this is how populists are. They are basically nothing. They are great performers who can draw devotion from a great many people — especially those who are struggling to formulate a political identity for themselves. There are no shortcuts to this. But populists provide them shortcuts.

Khan is a curious mixture of an Islamist and a brawler. But both of these attributes mainly reside on the surface and in his rhetoric. The only aim one can say that is lingering underneath the surface is an inexhaustible ambition to be constantly admired and, of course, rule as a North Korean premier does. Conjuring lots of adulation, but zero opposition.

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

 Thomas Frank in The Guardian

‘My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month.’ Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
 

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

*

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties. 

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

*

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Understanding Populism

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn


In a March 7, 2010 essay for the New York Times, the American linguist and author Ben Zimmer writes, “When politicians fret about the public perception of a decision more than the substance of the decision itself, we’re living in a world of optics.”

On the other hand, according to Deborah Johnson in the June 2017 issue of Attorney at Law, a politician may have the best interests of his constituents in mind, but he or she doesn’t come across smoothly because optics are bad, even though the substance is good. Johnson writes that things have increasingly slid from substance to optics.

Optics in this context have always played a prominent role in politics. Yet, it is also true that their usage has grown manifold with the proliferation of electronic and social media, and, especially, of ‘populism.’ Populists often travel with personal photographers so that they can be snapped and proliferate images that are positively relevant to their core audience.

Pakistan’s PM Imran Khan relies heavily on such optics. He is also considered to be a populist. But then why did he so stubbornly refuse to meet the mourning families of the 11 Hazara Shia miners who were brutally murdered in Quetta? Instead, the optics space in this case was filled by opposition leaders, Maryam Nawaz and Bilawal Bhutto.

Nevertheless, this piece is not about why an optics-obsessed PM such as Khan didn’t immediately occupy the space that was eventually filled by his opponents. It is more about exploring whether Khan really is a populist? For this we will have to first figure out what populism is.

According to the American sociologist, Bart Bonikowski, in the 2019 anthology When Democracy Trumps Populism, populism poses to be ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-elite.’ It can emerge from the right as well as the left, but during its most recent rise in the last decade, it has mostly come up from the right.  

According to Bonikowski, populism of the right has stark ethnic or religious nationalist tendencies. It draws and popularises a certain paradigm of ‘authentic’ racial or religious nationalism and claims that those who do not have the required features to fit in this paradigm are outsiders and, therefore, a threat to the ‘national body.’ It also lashes out against established political forces and state institutions for being ‘elitist,’ ‘corrupt’ and facilitators of pluralism that is usurping the interests of the authentic members of the national body in a bid to undermine the ‘silent majority.’ Populism aspires to represent this silent majority, claiming to empower it.

Simply put, all this, in varying degrees, is at the core of populist regimes that, in the last decade or so, began to take shape in various countries — especially in the US, UK, India, Brazil, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic and Pakistan. Yet, if anti-establishmentarian action and rhetoric is a prominent feature of populism, then what about populist regimes that are not only close to certain powerful state institutions, but were or are actually propped up by them? Opposition parties in Pakistan insist that Imran Khan’s party is propped up by the country’s military establishment, which is aiding it to remain afloat despite it failing on many fronts. The same is the case with the populist regime in Brazil.

Does this mean such regimes are not really populist? No. According to the economist Pranab Bardhan (University of California, Berkeley), even though populists share many similarities, populism’s shape can shift from region to region. Bardhan writes that characteristics of populism are qualitatively different in developed countries from those in developing countries. For example, whereas globalisation is seen in a negative light by populists in Europe and the US, a November 2016 survey published in The Economist shows that the people of 18 developing countries saw it positively, believing it gave their countries’ economies the opportunity to assert themselves.

Secondly, according to Bardhan, survey evidence suggests that much of the support for populist politics in developed countries is coming from less-educated, blue-collar workers, and from the rural backwaters. Populists in developing countries, by contrast, are deriving support mainly from the rising middle classes and the aspirational youth in urban areas. To Bardhan, in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Poland and Russia, symbols of ‘illiberal religious resurgence’ have been used by populist leaders to energise the upwardly-mobile or arriviste social groups.

He also writes that, in developed countries, populism is at loggerheads with the centralising state and political institutions, because it sees them as elitist, detached and a threat to local communities. But in developing countries, the populists have tried to centralise power and weaken local communities. To populists in developing countries, the main villains are not the so-called cold and detached state institutions, but ‘corrupt’ civilian parties. Ironically, while populism in the US is against welfare programmes, such programmes remain important to populists in developing countries.

Keeping this in mind, one can conclude that PM Khan is a populist, quite like his populist contemporaries in other developing countries. Despite nationalist rhetoric and his condemnatory understanding of colonialism, globalisation that promises foreign investment in the country is welcomed. His main base of support remains aspirational and upwardly-mobile urban middle-class segments. He often uses religious symbology and exhibitions of piety to energise this segment, providing religious context to what are actually Western ideas of state, governance, economics and nationalism. For example, the Scandinavian idea of the welfare state that he admires is defined as Riyasat-i-Madina (State of Madina).

Unlike populism in Europe and the US, populism in developing countries embraces the ‘establishment’ and, instead, turns its guns towards established political parties which it describes as being ‘corrupt.’ Khan is no different. He admires the Chinese system of central planning and economy and dreams of a centralised system that would seamlessly merge the military, the bureaucracy and his government into a single ruling whole. His urban middle-class supporters often applaud this ‘vision.’

Why we must not let Europe break apart

The European project is in big trouble – but it’s worth defending. By Timothy Garton Ash  in The Guardian



It’s time to sound the alarm. Seven decades after the end of the second world war on European soil, the Europe we have built since then is under attack. As the cathedral of Notre Dame burned, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National was polling neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron’s movement for what he calls a “European renaissance”. In Spain, a far-right party called Vox, promoting the kind of reactionary nationalist ideas against which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was supposedly immunised, has won the favour of one in 10 voters in a national election. Nationalist populists rule Italy, where a great-grandson of Benito Mussolini is running for the European parliament on the list of the so-called Brothers of Italy. A rightwing populist party called The Finns, formerly the True Finns (to distinguish them from “false” Finns of different colour or religion), garnered almost as many votes as Finland’s Social Democrats in last month’s general election. In Britain, the European elections on 23 May can be seen as another referendum on Brexit, but the underlying struggle is the same as that of our fellow Europeans. Nigel Farage is a Le Pen in Wellington boots, a True Finn in a Barbour jacket.

Meanwhile, to mark the 30th anniversary of the velvet revolutions of 1989, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has denounced a charter of LGBT+ rights as an attack on children. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland successfully deploys a völkisch rhetoric we thought vanquished for good, although now it scapegoats Muslims instead of Jews. Remember Bertolt Brecht’s warning: “The womb is fertile still/ from which that crawled.” Viktor Orbán, the young revolutionary hero of 1989 turned bulldog-jowled neo-authoritarian, has effectively demolished liberal democracy in Hungary, using antisemitic attacks on the billionaire George Soros and generous subsidies from the EU. He has also enjoyed political protection from Manfred Weber, the Bavarian politician whom the European People’s party, Europe’s powerful centre-right grouping, suggests should be the next president of the European commission. Orbán has summed the situation up like this: “Thirty years ago, we thought Europe was our future. Today, we believe we are Europe’s future.”

Italy’s Matteo Salvini agrees, so much so that he is hosting an election rally of Europe’s rightwing populist parties, an international of nationalists, in Milan later this month. To be sure, the spectacle of a once-great country reducing itself to a global laughing stock, in a tragic farce called Brexit, has silenced all talk of Hungexit, Polexit or Italexit. But what Orbán and co intend is actually more dangerous. Farage merely wants to leave the EU; they propose to dismantle it from within, returning to an ill-defined but obviously much looser “Europe of nations”.

Wherever one looks, old and new rifts appear, between northern and southern Europe, catalysed by the Eurozone crisis, between west and east, reviving the old stereotypes of intra-European orientalism (civilised west, barbaric east), between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, between two halves of each European society, and even between France and Germany.

For anyone who takes a longer view, these mounting signs of European disintegration should not be a surprise. Isn’t this a pattern familiar from European history? In the 17th century, the horrendously destructive thirty years war was concluded by the peace of Westphalia. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th, the continent was torn apart by two decades of Napoleonic wars, then stitched together in another pattern by the Congress of Vienna. The first world war was followed by the Versailles peace. Each time, the new post-war European order lasts a while – sometimes shorter, sometimes longer – but gradually frays at the edges, with tectonic tensions building up under the surface, until it finally breaks apart in a new time of troubles. No European settlement, order, empire, commonwealth, res publica, Reich, concert, entente, axis, alliance, coalition or union lasts for ever.

Set against that historical measuring rod, our Europe has done pretty well: it is 74 years old this week, if we date its birth to the end of the second world war in Europe. It owes this longevity to the miraculously non-violent collapse in 1989-91 of a nuclear-armed Russian empire that had occupied half the continent. Only in former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Ukraine, have we witnessed what more normally follows the fall of empires: bloody strife. Otherwise, what happened after the end of the cold war was a peaceful enlargement and deepening of the existing, post-1945 west European order. Yet maybe now the muse of history is shouting, like some grim boatman from the shore, “come in Number 45, your time is up!”

 

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, a far-right party in Spain. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty

In one respect, however, this time is different. For centuries, Europe kept tearing itself apart, then putting itself together again, but all the while exploiting, colonising and bossing around other parts of the world. With the European civil war that raged on and off from 1914 to 1945, once described by Winston Churchill as a second thirty years war, Europe deposed itself from its global throne. In act five of Europe’s self-destruction, the US and the Soviet Union strode on to the stage like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Yet, Europe was at least still the central stage of world politics throughout the cold war that followed. Europeans made history once again for a brief shining moment in 1989, but then Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “world spirit”, moved rapidly on from Berlin to Beijing.

Today, Europe struggles to remain a subject rather than becoming merely an object of world politics – with Beijing hungry to shape a Chinese century, a revanchist Russia, Donald Trump’s unilateralist US, and climate change threatening to overwhelm us all. Both Russia and China merrily divide and rule across our continent, using economic power to pick off weaker European states and disinformation to set nation against nation. In the 19th century, European powers engaged in what was called the scramble for Africa; in the 21st, outside powers engage in a scramble for Europe.

Of course, Europe means many different things. It is a continent with ill-defined borders, a shared culture and history, a contested set of values, a complex web of institutions and, not least, hundreds of millions of people, all with their own individual Europes. Nationalists like Le Pen and Orbán insist they just want a different kind of Europe. Tell me your Europe and I will tell you who you are. But the central institution of the post-1945 project of Europeans working closely together is the European Union, and its future is now in question.

None of this radicalisation and disintegration is inevitable, but to avert it, we have to understand how we got here, and why this Europe, with all its faults, is still worth defending.

It is 1942. In a tram rattling through Nazi-occupied Warsaw sits an emaciated, half-starved 10-year-old boy. His name is Bronek. He is wearing four sweaters, yet still he shivers despite the August heat. Everyone looks at him curiously. Everyone, he is sure, sees that he is a Jewish kid who has slipped out of the ghetto through a hole in the wall. Luckily, no one denounces him, and one Polish passenger warns him to watch out for a German sitting in the section marked “Nur für Deutsche”. And so Bronek survives, while his father is murdered in a Nazi extermination camp and his brother sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Sixty years on, I was walking with Bronek down one of the long corridors of the parliament of a now-independent Poland. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, turned to me, stroked his beard and said with quiet passion: “You know, for me, Europe is something like a Platonic essence.”

In the life of Prof Bronisław Geremek, you have the essential story of how, and why, Europe came to be what it is today. Having escaped the horrors of the ghetto (“the world burned before my eyes”), along with his mother, he was brought up by a Polish Catholic stepfather, served as an altar boy and was taught by an inspiring priest in the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he had also, in his bones, Europe’s deep and defining Christian heritage. Then, at the age of 18, he joined the communist party, believing it would build a better world. Eighteen years later, stripped of his last illusions by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he resigned from that same party in protest and returned to his professional life as a medieval historian. But politics somehow would not let him go.

I first encountered him during a historic occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, when the leader of the striking workers, Lech Wałęsa, asked Geremek to become an adviser to the protest movement that would soon be christened Solidarity. Over the subsequent decade I would visit him, whenever I got the chance, in his small apartment in Warsaw’s Old Town, which had been razed to the ground by the Nazis, then rebuilt stone upon stone by the Poles. As he puffed away at his professorial pipe, he shared with me his pellucid analysis of the decline of the Soviet empire, even as he and his comrades in Solidarity helped turn that decline into fall. For in 1989, he was the intellectual architect of the round table talks that were the key to Poland’s negotiated transition from communism to democracy, and Poland was the icebreaker for the rest of central Europe.

Ten years on, he was the foreign minister who signed the treaty by which Poland became a member of Nato. When I visited him in the foreign ministry, I spotted on his mantelpiece a bottle of a Czech vodka called Stalin’s Tears. “You must have it!” he exclaimed. “A Polish foreign minister cannot keep Stalin in his office!” And so that bottle of Stalin’s Tears stands on my mantelpiece in Oxford as I write. In memory of Bronek, I will never drink it.

 

Lech Wałęsa speaks to workers during a strike at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. Photograph: Erazm Ciołek/Forum/Reuters

Having been instrumental in steering his beloved country into the European Union, he subsequently became a member of the European parliament, that same parliament to which we are electing new representatives this month. Tragically, but in a way symbolically, he died in a car accident on the way to Brussels.

Geremek’s story is unique, but the basic form of his Europeanism is typical of three generations of Europe-builders who made our continent what it is today. When you look at how the argument for European integration was advanced in various countries, from the 1940s to the 1990s, each national story seems at first glance very different. But dig a bit deeper and you find the same underlying thought: “We have been in a bad place, we want to be in a better one, and that better place is called Europe.” Many and diverse were the nightmares from which these countries were trying to awake. For Germany, it was the shame and disgrace of the criminal regime that murdered Bronek’s father. For France, it was the humiliation of defeat and occupation; for Britain, relative political and economic decline; for Spain, a fascist dictatorship; for Poland, a communist one. Europe had no shortage of nightmares. But in all these countries, the shape of the pro-European argument was the same. It was an elongated, exuberant pencilled tick: a steep descent, a turn and then an upward line ascending to a better future. A future called Europe.

Personal memories of bad times were a driving force for three distinctive generations. Many of the founding fathers of what is now the European Union were what one might call 14ers, still vividly recalling the horrors of the first world war. (The 14ers included the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who would talk with a breaking voice of the “lost generation” of his contemporaries). Then came the 39ers like Geremek, indelibly shaped by traumas of war, gulag, occupation and Holocaust. Finally, there was a third cohort, the 68ers, revolting against the war-scarred generation of their parents, yet many of them also having experience of dictatorship in southern and eastern Europe.

The trouble starts when you have arrived in the promised land. Now, for the first time, we have a generation of Europeans – let’s call them the 89ers – who have known nothing but a Europe of closely connected liberal democracies. Call it a European empire or commonwealth, if you will. To be sure, “Europe whole and free” remains an ideal, not a reality, for millions who live here, especially those who are poor, belong to a discriminated minority or seek refuge from across the Mediterranean. But we are closer to that ideal than ever before.

It would be a parody of middle-aged condescension to say “these young people don’t know how lucky they are!”. After all, younger voters are often more pro-European than older ones. But it would not be wrong to say that many 89ers who have grown up in this relatively whole and free continent do not see Europe as a great cause, the way 39ers and 68ers did. Why be passionate about something that already exists? Unless they have grown up in the former Yugoslavia or Ukraine, they are unlikely to have much direct personal experience of just how quickly things can all unravel, back to European barbarism. By contrast, many of them do know from bitter experience how life got worse after the financial crisis of 2008.

On the walls of Al-Andalus, a tapas bar in Oxford, depictions of flamenco dancers and bullfights embrace cliche without shame. Here, when I first met him in 2015, Julio – dark-haired, lean and intense – worked as a waiter. But serving tourists in a tapas bar in England was not what he expected to be doing with his life. He had just finished a master’s degree in European studies at Computense University in Madrid. It was the Eurozone crisis – which at its height made one in every two young Spaniards unemployed – that reduced him to this. Looking back, Julio describes his feelings when he had to make this move abroad: “Sadness, impotence, solitude.”

Across the continent there are many thousands of Julios. For them, the tick line has been inverted: it started by going steadily up, but then turned sharply downwards after 2008. Ten years ago, you and your country were in a better place. Now you are in a worse one, and that is because Europe has not delivered on its promises.

Here is the cunning of history: the seeds of triumph are sown in the moment of greatest disaster, in 1939, but the seeds of crisis are sown in the moment of triumph, in 1989. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that many of the problems haunting Europe today have their origins in the apparently triumphant transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few far-sighted people warned at the time. The French political philosopher Pierre Hassner wrote in 1991 that, even as we celebrated the triumph of freedom, we should remember that “humankind does not live by liberty and universality alone, that the aspirations that led to nationalism and socialism, the yearning for community and identity, and the yearning for solidarity and equality, will reappear as they always do”. And so they have.

The events of 1989 opened the door to an unprecedented era of globalised, financialised capitalism. While this facilitated great material progress for a new middle class in Asia, in the west it generated levels of economic inequality not seen since the early 20th century. A divide also opened up between those with higher education and international experience, and those in the less fortunate other halves of European societies. The latter felt an inequality of attention and respect from the former. Barriers to freedom of movement between European countries were eliminated while little thought was given to what Europe would do if large numbers of people wanted to enter through the outer frontier of the Schengen zone. What followed was problems of large-scale emigration, for the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, and of immigration for the richer ones of northern Europe – be it the internal movement of more than 2 million east Europeans to Britain or the influx of more than 1 million refugees from outside the EU to Germany.

When the global financial crisis hit, it exposed all the inherent flaws of a halfway-house Eurozone. Hastened into life as a political response to German unification, the Eurozone that we have today, a common currency without a common treasury, hitching together such diverse economies as those of Greece and Germany, had been warned against in vain by numerous economists. Absent a decisive, far-sighted response from northern Europe, and especially from Germany, the impact on southern Europe was traumatic. Not only did the Eurozone crisis drive Julio to that dreary tapas bar and people in Greece to desperate hardship; it kick-started a new wave of radical and populist politics, on both left and right, and with mixtures of left and right that don’t easily fit into that old dichotomy.

Populists blame the sufferings of “the people” on remote, technocratic, liberal elites. Europe, or more accurately “Europe”, is particularly vulnerable to this attack. For most officials in Brussels are quite remote, quite technocratic and quite liberal. Although members of the European parliament are directly elected, that parliament can at times seem like a bubble within the Brussels bubble. Although their remuneration is peanuts compared to that of the bankers who nearly crashed the globalised capitalist system, EU leaders, parliamentarians and officials are very well paid. Watching them jump out of a chauffeur-driven BMW to deliver another smooth, visionary speech about the future of Europe, before jumping back into the BMW to be swept off to another nice lunch, it is not surprising that many less privileged Europeans say: “Well, they would praise Europe, wouldn’t they?”

Earlier this year, in a shabby office in Westminster, I was talking to someone who, like me, passionately wants a second referendum on Brexit, in which the majority votes to remain in the EU. What should be our campaign slogan? Among others, he suggested “Europe is great!” I winced. Why? Because this calls to mind the toe-curling British government national promotion campaign built around the motto “Britain is GREAT”. Countries that feel the need to proclaim in capital letters that they are great probably no longer are. But also because of all these problems that have accumulated across Europe during the 30 years of peace since 1989. Europe is great for us, the educated, privileged, mobile and gainfully employed, but do you really feel like saying “Europe is great!” with a straight face to the unemployed, unskilled worker in the post-industrial north of England, the southern European graduate who can’t find a job, or the Roma child or the refugee stuck in a camp?

We are only credible if we acknowledge that the European Union is now passing through an existential crisis, under attack from inside and out. It is paying the price both for past successes, which result in its achievements being taken for granted, and past mistakes, many of them having the shared characteristic of liberal over-reach.

The case for Europe today is very different from that of a half-century ago. In the 1970s, people in Britain, Spain or Poland looked at countries like France and West Germany, just coming to the end of the trente glorieuses – the three postwar decades of economic growth – in the then much smaller European Community, and said “we want what they’re having”. Today, the case starts with the defence of a Europe that already exists, but is now threatened with disintegration. If the construction were so strong that we could without hesitation say “Europe is great!”, it would not need our support so badly.

Since its inception, the European project has had a future-oriented, teleological rhetoric, all about what will come to pass one fine day, as we reach some ideal finalité européenne. These habits die hard. Driving through Hannover recently, I saw a Green party poster for the European elections that declared “Europe is not perfect – but it’s a damned good start”. Pause to think for a moment, and you realise how odd this is. After all, we don’t say “Britain is not perfect, but it’s a damned good start”. Nor do most 74-year-olds say “my life is not perfect, but it’s a good start”. The European Union today, like Germany or France or Britain, is a mature political entity, which does not need to derive its legitimacy from some utopian future. There is now a realistic, even conservative (with a small c) argument for maintaining what has already been built – which, of course, necessarily also means reforming it. If we merely preserved for the next 30 years today’s EU, at its current levels of freedom, prosperity, security and cooperation, that would already be an astonishing achievement.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Photograph: Alamy

In a long historical perspective, this is the best Europe we have ever had. I challenge you to point to a better one, for the majority of the continent’s countries and individual people. Most Europeans live in liberal democracies that are committed to resolving their differences by all-night meetings in Brussels, not unilateral action, let alone armed force. This European Union is not a country, and will not become one any time soon, but it is much more than just an international organisation. The former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato describes it as an unidentified flying object. It may be short on mystique, on emotional appeal, but it is not lacking that entirely. The heart can lift to see European flags fluttering beside national ones, and certainly to the strains of the European anthem, Beethoven’s setting of the Ode to Joy.

For everyone who is a citizen of an EU member state, this is a continent where you can wake up on a Friday morning, decide to take a budget airline flight to the other end of the continent, meet someone you like, settle down to study, work and live there, all the time enjoying the rights of a European citizen in one and the same legal, economic and political community. All this you appreciate most, like health, when you are about to lose it. Small wonder that marchers at the huge pro-European demonstration in London on 23 March this year wore T-shirts proclaiming “I am a citizen of Europe”.

So here’s the deepest challenge of this moment: do we really need to lose it all in order to find it again? Born in the depths of European barbarism more than 70 years ago, tipped towards crisis by a hubris born of that liberal triumph 30 years ago, does this project of a better Europe really need to descend all the way down to barbarism again before people mobilise to bring it back up? As personal memories like those that inspired the European passion of Bronisław Geremek fade away, the question is whether collective memory, cultivated by historians, journalists, novelists, statespeople and film-makers, can enable us to learn the lessons of the past without going through it all again ourselves.

Julio thinks we can learn. That is why, having resumed his academic career in Spain, he is now standing in the European elections for a radical, transnational pro-European party called Volt. “The generation that I represent,” he wrote to me in a recent email, “has observed the beginning of the disintegration of the EU, because of the triumph of the Brexit referendum. Imagine exit referendums across the EU in the next 10 or 20 years; the EU could easily be dismantled … So nothing will stand if we don’t defend what we have achieved after so many generations of sacrifice.”

You don’t have to subscribe to the electric radicalism of Volt’s pan-European federalist programme to appreciate the force of Julio’s appeal. I myself think more gradualist recipes for EU reform are more realistic. There are multiple variants of pro-Europeanism on offer from different parties in this month’s European elections, most of them acknowledging the need for reform. In Britain, five parties (not including Labour) are unambiguously in favour of the country staying in the EU. What is clear is that for once, and at last, these European elections really are about the future of Europe. Across 28 countries, new parties and old ghosts compete for the hearts of voters, with close to 100 million of them still undecided how they will vote. What is called for now, in every corner of our continent, is the defence of our common European home, not with arms but through the ballot box. Your continent needs you.

‘We the people’: the battle to define populism

The noisy dispute over the meaning of populism is more than just an academic squabble – it’s a crucial argument about what we expect from democracy writes Peter C Baker in The Guardian


When populism appears in the media, which it does more and more often now, it is typically presented without explanation, as if everyone can already define it. And everyone can, sort of – at least as long as they’re allowed to simply cite the very developments that populism is supposed to explain: Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán’s takeover of Hungary, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The word evokes the long-simmering resentments of the everyman, brought to a boil by charismatic politicians hawking impossible promises. Often as not, populism sounds like something from a horror film: an alien bacteria that has somehow slipped through democracy’s defences – aided, perhaps, by Steve Bannon or some other wily agent of mass manipulation – and is now poisoning political life, creating new ranks of populist voters among “us”. (Tellingly, most writing about populism presumes an audience unsympathetic to populism.) 

There is no shortage of prominent voices warning how dangerous populism is, and that we must take immediate steps to fight it. 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”. In its 2018 world report, Human Rights Watch warned democracies of the world against “capitulation” to the “populist challenge”. 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. “I am not being alarmist. I am just stating facts,” Obama said.

When populism is framed this way, the implication is clear. 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. “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.”

But 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. 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. Populism, in this framing, is a bogeyman: a nonentity invoked for the purpose of stirring up fear. This argument has even made its way to the centrist mainstream. “Let’s do away with the word ‘populist,’” wrote the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in July. “It’s become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger. 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 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. 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. 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 it helps us see that the idea of populism is something more than just a centrist fairytale.

Thanks in large part to the persistent failure of governments across the west to enact anything resembling a credible vision of shared prosperity and security in the post-manufacturing era, we are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift. As a result, the question of populism is not going away. The coming years are likely to include all of the following: more movements being labelled as populist, more movements calling themselves populist, more movements defensively insisting that they are not populist, and more conversations about the extent to which populism represents the problem or the solution.

The academic debate on populism shows us that making sense of this landscape requires more than just a usable definition of the P-word. In short, it shows us that we can’t really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy – and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

It may be telling that very little of the public discussion of the alleged populist threat to democracy has been devoted to the workings of democracy itself. Perhaps we assume, without much thought, that democracy is such a self-explanatory idea that we already know all there is to know about the subject. Or perhaps we have come to regard democracy in its existing western form – basically liberal democracy – as the only possible endpoint for the evolution of politics. Populism, though it comes in many forms, always reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth.

In 2004 a young Dutch political scientist named Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, a paper that proposed a new and concise definition of populism – one that would become the backbone of academic populism studies, a field that hardly existed at the time. Mudde was convinced that populism was a useful concept, which meant something more specific than “democracy, but practised in a way that I find distasteful”. He was especially keen to challenge two common intuitions about populism: that it is uniquely defined by “highly emotional and simplistic” rhetoric, and that it primarily consists of “opportunistic policies” that aim to “buy” the support of voters.

Populism, Mudde argued, is more than just demagogy or opportunism. But it is not a fully formed political ideology like socialism or liberalism – it is instead a “thin” ideology, made up of just a few core beliefs. First: the most important division in society is an antagonistic one between “the people”, understood to be fundamentally good, and “the elite”, understood to be fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with everyday life. Second: all populists believe that politics should be an expression of the “general will” – a set of desires presumed to be shared as common sense by all “ordinary people”. (Implicit in this belief is another: that such a thing as this “general will” exists.)

A populist movement, then, is one that consistently promises to channel the unified will of the people, and by doing so undercut the self-serving schemes of the elite establishment. As the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen put it in 2007: “I will give voice to the people. Because in democracy only the people can be right, and none can be right against them.” (Note how, in this formulation, there is no disagreement among “the people”.) Or, in the more recent words of Donald Trump, speaking at his inauguration: “We are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the people … The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” (Note how members of “the establishment” are implicitly excluded from “the citizens”.)

For decades, attempts at clear-headed conversations about populism had been stymied by the question of how it could be attributed to parties and politicians that were so obviously different: how can Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for example, both be called populist? In what way are Occupy Wall Street and Brexit both possible examples of populist phenomena? Mudde’s simple definition caught on because it has no trouble answering this type of question. If populism is truly ideologically “thin”, then it has to attach itself to a more substantial host ideology in order to survive. But this ideology can lie anywhere along the left-right spectrum. Because, in Mudde’s definition, populism is always piggybacking on other ideologies, the wide variety of populisms isn’t a problem. It’s exactly what you would expect.

“The people” and “the elite”, Mudde wrote, are groupings with no static definition from one populist movement to another. These categories are, first and foremost, moral: people good, elites bad. The question of exactly who belongs in which group, though, depends on the character of the populist movement, and which “thick” ideology the populism ends up attached to. A populist “people” can define itself by an ethnic identity it feels is under threat, but just as easily by a shared sense of being victims of economic exploitation. What matters is that it blames a perceived class of corrupt elites; in the case of rightwing populisms, it may also heap scorn on some underclass, whether immigrants or racial minorities, whom the elites are accused of favouring with special treatment as part of their plot to keep power away from “real people”.

 

Bernie Sanders supporters in California in March 2016. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

When The Populist Zeitgeist was published, populism wasn’t a hot topic: in all of 2005, Mudde’s paper was cited only nine times. But as the field of populism studies has ballooned alongside mainstream interest in the subject, the paper has become widely recognised as a classic. By a wide margin, Mudde is now the populism scholar most likely to be cited or interviewed by journalists – as often as not, for articles in which his definition intermingles with the same old sloppy generalisations he set out to overturn.

Today, no academic disputes the dominance of Mudde’s definition, especially among the growing number of scholars hoping to be part of the conversation about populism as a global phenomenon. One major factor in its success, in fact, is the way that it anticipated events in world politics. The market crashes of 2008 led to the emergence of anti-austerity movements – such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Occupy worldwide – motivated by rage at financial institutions and the small class of people who benefited from their profits. These movements were obviously animated by a sense of opposition between “the people” and “the elite” – but old theories of populism that defined it specifically as rightwing, racist or anti-immigrant were insufficiently capacious to describe these new developments in populist politics.

The thin-ideology definition is also extremely congenial to the landscape of contemporary academic political science, which places a considerable premium on broad frameworks that enable young scholars to do empirical, quantitative work. Many new scholars of populism no longer feel the need to argue over definitions. Instead, they perform textual analyses designed to detect how often populism’s core ideas, as laid out in Mudde’s 2004 article, pop up in party platforms, political speeches, manifestos and tweets. Or they administer surveys designed to track the prevalence of the core tenets of populism in different populations, searching for profiles of archetypal populist voters.

Every time another paper relying on the ideological framework is published, it becomes a little more entrenched – a matter of some frustration to the minority of academics who still think it misses the point.

The rise of the thin-ideology definition, and its increasing influence in the still-ballooning public conversation about populism, has consistently provoked the objections of a small but persistent camp of dissenters within populism studies. These academics think defining populism in terms of core beliefs is a deep methodological error: many of them also think defining populism as an ideology runs the risk of making effective and worthwhile political strategies seem irresponsible, even dangerous.

These academics are likely to stress the extent to which mainstream political parties in the US and Europe have converged in recent decades, narrowing the range of opinions that find real purchase in national decision-making. They take as a given that this has swelled the ranks of people who feel that what gets called democracy responds to their concerns much less than it caters to the whims of a small, wealthy, self-dealing class of elites – elites who vigorously deny their own complicity in this state of affairs, often by insisting that there is no alternative.

As you might expect, these scholars tend to be most interested in challenges to the status quo that come from the left – from “the 99%” of Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign, to the “many not the few” of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party – and foreground an insistence that politics is not yet serving the correct constituency. They are also instinctively alert to the possibility that the self-preserving centre will try to defang outsider challenges by making anyone who endorses them appear unreasonable, frightening and constitutionally unequipped for the sober task of governance.

This makes them suspicious of any suggestion that there is an identifiable ideology called populism that has fundamental similarities no matter where on the political spectrum it appears. For this crowd, talk of an essence of populism – however thin – shades too easily into a charge of guilt by association, which inevitably has the effect of saddling leftwing populist movements (or even populist-looking movements) with the baggage of their xenophobic and racist rightwing counterparts. More specifically, they are likely to worry that the emphasis on exaggerated moralism as a defining feature of populism makes it too easy to depict legitimate opposition to elite power as irrational mobs.

Most objections to the thin-ideology definition owe a substantial debt to a duo of leftist political theorists: Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian who teaches at the University of Westminster, and her late husband, the Argentine Ernesto Laclau. Both thinkers have directly informed the new European left populist movements, including Syriza, Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise.

Mouffe and Laclau’s writings on Marxism and populism – some of which they produced together, and some separately – are famously dense and sometimes resistant to summary. But at their core is the idea that conflict is an inescapable and defining feature of political life. In other words, the realm of politics is one where antagonism is natural and unavoidable, in which consensus cannot ever be permanent, and there is always a “we” and a “they”.

“Political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts,” Mouffe insists. “Properly political questions always involve decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives.” This emphasis on conflict produces a vision of democratic life that looks more radical than typical mainstream accounts of liberal democracy – but, Laclau and Mouffe would argue, one that more accurately describes the actual logic of politics.

In this view, any existing socio-political order (or “hegemony” in Mouffe and Laclau’s preferred formation, borrowed from the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci) is subject to challenge. Every status quo – however sturdy – is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new. Political change, in other words, is the result of demands against the existing order, which must be fused together in a movement to change it – a movement that may look a lot like populism.

When my demands and your demands and our neighbours’ demands are brought together in such a movement, they can become the basis for a new political “we”: a “people” insisting that the current arrangement of power be altered in their name. To the extent that such a movement succeeds, it creates a new hegemony – a new baseline – which itself becomes open to challenge over time.

From this perspective, populism is just another word for real politics: for people (“us”) creating together, live on the ground, a sense of how our dissatisfactions relate, who is to blame (“them”), and how to force a change.

But those who benefit from the status quo don’t want it to change; to this end, they might champion toothless approaches to collective decision-making: bipartisan consensus as an end in itself; the elevation of “rational” experts over hot-headed partisans; “Third Way” centrism that shuns ideological conflict in favour of “what works” or mediation by liberal institutions. These approaches (Mouffe calls them “non-politics”) may for a time become dominant, as they did in the Anglo-American 1990s and early 2000s. But nothing lasts for ever, especially when the number of people who feel politicians are making their lives more precarious is rising. And then politics – real politics, which is to say populist politics – make a return.

 

Pablo Iglesias, leader of Spain’s Podemos coalition, in June 2016. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

According to Mouffe and Laclau, the only inherent connection between rightwing and leftwing populist movements is that both embrace the same fundamental truth about democracy: that it is an ever-shifting contest over how the default “we” of politics is defined and redefined, in which no one definition can be guaranteed to last. The goal, they argue, should not be placid consensus but “agonistic pluralism”: a state in which opposition and disagreement are accepted as the norm, and in which people maintain the capacity to disagree intensely without demonising each other, or descending into war.

Mouffe, in particular, has in recent years argued that the political question of the immediate future is not how to fight populism, but rather which type of populist you want to be. It’s about who you’re with (who belongs in your “chain of equivalence”), who you’re against (who is causing the problem, and how), and where to take your stand. Populism isn’t the problem: instead, leftwing populism is the solution.

Not all the academics who take inspiration from Mouffe and Laclau go quite this far, especially in the sober pages of peer-reviewed political science journals. But their work is palpably motivated by a sense that the real threat of “populism” is that our panic over the word will foreclose the possibility of new kinds of politics and new challenges to the status quo – and that fear of populism on the left could enable the victory of populism of the right.

These scholars’ preference is for definitions in which it has no ideological essence – not even the “thin” one posited by Cas Mudde. For them, even though the thin definition readily recognises populism’s ideological portability, it is still irrevocably tainted by pejorative overtones that push participants in debates about populism to take a position “for” or “against” all populisms. With no internal essence, populism is harder to categorise as inherently good or bad. Paris Aslanidis, a Yale political scientist, calls populism a “discourse” – a mode of talking about politics, rather than a set of beliefs – one that frames politics in terms of the “supremacy of popular sovereignty”.

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University, refers to populism as a “political style”, the presence of which “tells us very little about the substantive democratic content of any political project”. Under definitions of this type, the central question is not whether a given political actor or group is or isn’t populist. It is instead whether, from moment to moment, they are “doing populism”, and how, and with what impact.

Of course, these disputes aren’t really about the difference between a “thin ideology” and a “discourse.” They are about whether “populist” is always an insult, and if the project of defining populism can ever be disentangled from the concept’s pejorative baggage. Ultimately, they are disputes about which types of politics make us suspicious, and why.

The current discussion of populism in the west is strongly coloured by the populist far-right parties that emerged in Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s, such as the Austrian Freedom party, the Danish People’s party and the French National Front. What most people knew about these parties, at first, was that they were openly nativist and racist. They talked about “real” citizens of their countries, and fixated on the issue of national and ethnic “purity,” demonising immigrants and minorities. Many of their party leaders flirted winkingly with antisemitism, and their electoral victories coincided with a resurgence of extreme right-wing violence in Europe, such as the 1991 attack on immigrant workers and asylum seekers in the east German town of Hoyerswerda.

When journalists and politicians started calling these parties and their supporters populist, the term was an expression of alarm at a problem and, simultaneously, a euphemism that made it possible to gloss over that problem’s exact qualities. This was especially useful for journalists who feared being viewed as anything less than politically neutral. Populist was obviously not a compliment, but it sounded less alarming than “extreme right” or “radical right”. What the term seemed to communicate more than anything else was backwardness: a juvenile incapacity to bring your preferences to the political arena and engage in the complex give-and-take of rational compromise. The populist combination of immaturity, emotional resentment and intolerance was widely held to constitute a threat to postwar European democracy.

In one respect, the thin-ideology definition popularised by Cas Mudde dismantled this view of things, freeing populism from its exclusively far-right connotations, and cautioning against the conflation of populism with the other -isms it was often paired to.

Mudde and many other scholars who use the ideological definition have in fact repeatedly argued that neither Trump nor Brexit should be regarded primarily as populist phenomena. Of course both Trump and Brexiters used ample populist rhetoric; but in both cases, they argue, the majority of support was motivated not by passion for populism’s core ideas, but by other ideological factors. After the Cambridge Dictionary declared populism 2017’s “word of the year”, Mudde wrote a Guardian column criticising the decision. (“It has become the buzzword of the year,” he noted acidly, “mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used.”) For the radical-right parties whose electoral campaigns in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria raised alarms across Europe, “populism comes secondary to nativism, and within contemporary European and US politics, populism functions at best as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage the nastier nativism”, Mudde concluded.

 

A pro-Brexit campaign bus in London, January 2019. Photograph: Matthew Chattle/Rex/Shutterstock

And yet, despite these caveats, the thin definition nonetheless positions populism as always posing at least something of a majoritarian threat to liberal democracy. It is this judgment, more than any other, that keeps the fight going between scholars who adopt the ideological definition, on one hand, and their Mouffe- and Laclau-inspired critics, on the other.

Liberal democracy, in this context, has almost nothing to do with contemporary distinctions between left and right. It refers, instead, to the idea that government should facilitate pluralistic coexistence by balancing the never fully attainable ideal of popular sovereignty with institutions that enshrine the rule of law and civil rights, which cannot easily be overturned by a political majority. (In this regard, as Mudde writes in his original paper, liberal democracy is “therefore only partly democratic”.) Today, liberal democracy is what most people mean when they talk about democracy – and therefore, to be deemed a threat to liberal democracy is, in the context of most political discussions, a devastatingly negative judgment.

Because populism, as described by the ideological definition, involves a moralised conception of an absolutely sovereign “people” – whose verdicts are regarded as practically unanimous – it is inevitable that populist movements will come into conflict with the liberal aspects of liberal democracy.

If all “real” people think the same way about the things that matter most in politics, then the idea of institutional protections for a dissenting minority are are at best superfluous and at worst nefarious. For the populists, they are just another wall that the corrupt elite has built to keep real power away from the people. The same is true for the independence of judges or regulators, or checks and balances between branches of government – especially when they appear to stymie the plans of a populist leader. In this account, the most basic elements of liberal democracy become both kindling and fuel for the populist fire.

No one who studies populism seriously – and not even the most opportunistic participants in the cottage industry of anti-populist alarmism – denies that populist movements can raise valid critiques of the status quo, and of the very real anti-democratic power of elites. Many take a viewpoint similar to that of the Mexican political theorist Benjamin Arditi, who described populism as a drunken guest at democracy’s dinner party, one who disrespects the rules of sociability and, along the way, brings up the failure and hypocrisies that everyone else in the room has agreed to ignore. In Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Mudde and his frequent co-author, the Chilean political scientist Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describe contemporary populism as an “illiberal democratic response to an undemocratic liberalism” – one that “asks the right questions but provides the wrong answers”.

Reading critics from the left, however, one often gets the sense that for them this adds up to so much lipstick on a pig: a sprinkling of nuance and restraint that still leaves populism, no matter its ideological stripe, with an undeserved taint of inherent danger. The unhappiness of these critics is magnified by the fact that populism rarely appears in mainstream discussion as anything but an insult – often in the mouth of pundits and politicians who regard the left and the right as an equal threat.

The fear in these circles is that saying anything negative about “populism” – however qualified and analytical – simply hands more ammunition to the very people who helped make politics such a hollow, undemocratic mess in the first place. Positioning any populism as fundamentally antithetical to liberal democracy, in this view, simply reinforces the association between populism and mob psychology, and stokes fears that individual rights will always be trampled by group identities.

Some scholars in this camp now argue that we should be talking less about populism and more about the centrist “anti-populism” that fears and demonises it. “Just as the adulterous spouse is always the one most suspicious of their own partner,” wrote the Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo in New Left Review in 2013, “so those who eviscerate democracy are the most inclined to see threats to it everywhere. Hence all the to-do about populism betrays a sense of uneasiness, smacks of overkill.”

For each side in this debate, the obvious temptation is to simply dismiss the other – or to insist that what the other side calls “populism” isn’t really populism at all, but just something populist-ish. But to conclude that the two camps are simply talking past each other would be to miss the extent to which they are in agreement –and what, taken together, they tell us about the current political moment.

In 1967, when political theorists from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics for the first ever academic conference on populism, they had a hard time figuring out exactly what they were supposed to be talking about. The word came from the “prairie populists”, an 1890s movement of US farmers who supported more robust regulation of capitalism. But in the intervening decades it had been used for a wide and varied grab bag of phenomena from around the world, from McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts in the US to charismatic Latin American leaders.

In the end, the conference proceedings failed to clarify the matter at hand. “There can at present be no doubt about the importance of populism,” read a summary report. “But no one is clear what it is.”

Over half a century later, there has been some progress. Populism, specialists now agree, is an ideologically portable way of looking at politics as a forum for opposition between “people” and “elites”. This definition creates more questions: is the conceptual “people” of populism inherently defined in a way that spells danger to pluralistic coexistence? Or, less menacingly, is the idea of “the people” a necessary but always malleable concept – simply part of what it means to do politics?

But populism, whatever it is, is not a chemical: no scientist will ever come along and reveal its exact, objective composition. Populism is a lens for looking at our politics, including – down a long hall of mirrors – the politics of what gets called populist, and with what implications.

The questions of populism would have little urgency were it not for the widespread agreement about the shortcomings of the political status quo: about the abyss between the shining ideals of equality and responsive government implied by our talk about democracy and the tarnished reality of life on the ground. The notion that “the people” are being poorly served by politics has vast resonance across the political spectrum, and for good reason.

But what is the remedy? Among the proponents of the ideological definition, some decline to provide an answer, claiming that they are looking only to define and measure populism, not take a stance on it. Others admit that, in the case of populism, the options for producing a description without forming a judgment are basically nonexistent. The order of the day, in their view, is to convince citizens to recommit to liberal democracy and its institutions.

There is, however, widespread recognition in this camp – more than they are credited with by their critics on the left – that it will no longer suffice to insist that there is no acceptable alternative to existing liberal democracy. Writing in the Guardian in 2017, Mudde argued that responding to populism required more than “purely anti-populist campaigns”; it would take, he claimed, “a return to ideological politics”. Even liberals who want some issues to be “depoliticised” – to be removed from the realm of democracy and handed over to experts – will have to, at a minimum, remake the case for those decisions. Nothing can stay depoliticised for ever; that’s politics.

If you squint just a little, this looks more than a bit like what you would expect from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, with their insistence that there is no space “beyond left and right” and no way to put political decisions – decisions about our collective fate – outside the reach of politics. Arguably, you might say that the defenders of liberal democracy are being suddenly reacquainted with the need to construct a democratic “we” – a people – around their demand to protect liberal institutions and procedures, in opposition to radical rightwing parties who are happy to see them discarded.

The corresponding challenge for anyone further on the left is to figure out the relationship between their long-term goals and the ideals of liberal democracy. There have always been critics for whom liberal democracy is sham democracy: a nice-sounding set of universal principles that, in practice, end up functioning as smokescreens that normalise the exploitations and inequities of capitalism.

Other theorists, Mouffe included, view something like the European social democracy of the 60s and 70s as the precondition for whatever comes next – for “radical democracy” that forces liberal democracy to make good on its promises of equality. But even Mouffe is no longer optimistic about our ability to revive our democratic prospects. Two years ago she wrote: “In 1985 we said ‘we need to radicalise democracy’; now we first need to restore democracy, so we can then radicalise it; the task is far more difficult.” What that task will look like on the ground is an open question.

The media framing of populism almost always sounds like a discussion about the margins: about forces from outside “normal” or “rational” politics threatening to throw off the balance of the status quo. But the scholarly discourse makes clear that this is backward: that populism is inherent to democracy, and especially to democracy as we know it in the contemporary west. It finds life in the cracks – or more lately, the chasms – between democracy’s promises and the impossibility of their full, permanent realisation.

The question of populism, then, is always the question of what kind of democracy we want, and the fact that we will never stop arguing about this. Anxiety about populism can be a smokescreen for people who don’t want the world as they know it to be disturbed. But it also flows from the core insight that we can never know exactly where democracy is going to take us – not this time, nor the next, nor the time after that.