{"id":20180,"date":"2018-07-02T13:51:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T17:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=20180"},"modified":"2018-07-02T13:51:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T17:51:00","slug":"how-not-to-talk-about-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=20180","title":{"rendered":"how not to talk about The People"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria Bartiromo (Fox News): As the commander-in-chief, as the president of this great country, what can you do to bring us together?<\/p>\n

Donald Trump: Our people are so incredible. …\u00a0 Do you know, there\u2019s probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base. I hope the other side realizes that they better just take it easy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Jonathan Chait notes<\/a>, Trump equates “us,” the people of America, with “the people who voted for him.”<\/p>\n

This is the rhetorical move that Jan-Werner M\u00fcller, in his globally influential book (2016), uses as the definition of “populism.” Populists \u201cclaim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. … Elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogeneous entity whose will cannot err.\u201d<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller has previously\u00a0quoted<\/a> Trump–\u201cthe only important thing is the unification of the people \u2013 because the other people don\u2019t mean anything\u201d–as evidence that the current president is a populist, in this bad sense of the word.<\/p>\n

I agree that the slippage between Trump’s supporters and “the people” is a very bad sign. However, it is not straightforward to define populism (meaning a problematic phenomenon) in this way. Trump says many things and is inconsistent in his appeal to “the people.” Meanwhile,\u00a0a wide variety of political actors also depict the public as a homogeneous entity that is on their side.<\/p>\n

Some of them define \u201cthe people\u201d in racial or ethno-national terms. That tendency seems more accurately described as racism or xenophobia than as populism, especially if anti-racists like Venezuela\u2019s Hugo Ch\u00e1vez count as populists (as M\u00fcller would suggest).<\/p>\n

And sometimes it is the strongest champions of democratic institutions who use rhetoric that looks populist according to M\u00fcller\u2019s definition. For instance, Jimmy Carter presented himself as an ordinary American (a peanut farmer and a Christian, not a Washington politician) who could best reflect the values shared by all Americans (Johnstone 1978). Carter\u00a0invoked a unitary public and promised to connect directly to the people, unmediated by interests and organizations. His Inaugural Address<\/a> could be coded as populist rhetoric, in M\u00fcller\u2019s sense of the word.\u00a0Yet Carter was committed to constitutional limits, respected his critics and the opposition, and made the promotion of democratic freedoms a centerpiece of his agenda.<\/p>\n

Thus it is not clear that searching for M\u00fcller-style populist language will identify actors who are hostile to democratic institutions and processes. There is an upsurge of repression around the world\u2014and it is not limited to racists and xenophobes\u2014but there is a better word for it than \u201cpopulism.\u201d That word is “authoritarianism.”<\/p>\n

For the purposes of empirical research, I would dispense with “populism” in the\u00a0M\u00fcller sense and look instead for authoritarianism and racism as distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomena that are ascendant in our time.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller is, however, right that there are pitfalls to invoking a unitary public that is on one’s side–or defining one’s side as “the people.” This is an excuse for trampling on rights, whether your opponents are demographic minorities and immigrants (the right-wing variant), or corporations and the rich (the left-wing version), or extremists (the centrist version). It’s always better to recognize the legitimacy of the actual human beings who disagree with you and who vote for the other side.<\/p>\n

Citations:\u00a0Jan-Werner M\u00fcller, What Is Populism?<\/em> (Philadelphia; Universoty of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 101;\u00a0Christopher Lyle Johnstone, \u201cElecting Ourselves in 1976: Jimmy Carter and The American Faith,\u201d Western Journal of Speech Communication, vol. 42 \u00a0Issue 4, *Fall 1978), p. 241-249. See also\u00a0Trump at the confluence of populism, chauvinism, and celebrity<\/a>;\u00a0fighting Trump\u2019s populism with pluralist populism<\/a>;\u00a0separating populism from anti-intellectualism<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0two kinds of populism<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maria Bartiromo (Fox News): As the commander-in-chief, as the president of this great country, what can you do to bring us together? Donald Trump: Our people are so incredible. …\u00a0 Do you know, there\u2019s probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base. I hope the other side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-populism","category-trump","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20180"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20185,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20180\/revisions\/20185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}