Why does Donald Trump exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd, brag about his election win in conversations with world leaders, and claim without evidence that voter fraud may have cost him the popular vote?
Why does he dismiss protesters who oppose him as “paid professionals” and polls that reflect poorly on him as “fake news”? Why does he call much of the media the “enemy of the people”?
Populists are dividers, not uniters, Mudde told me. They split society into “two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other,” and say they’re guided by the “will of the people.”
The United States is what political scientists call a “liberal democracy,” a system “based on pluralism—on the idea that you have different groups with different interests and values, which are all legitimate,” Mudde explained. Populists, in contrast, are not pluralist. They consider just one group—whatever they mean by “the people”—legitimate.
This conception of legitimacy stems from the fact that populists view their mission as “essentially moral,” Mudde noted. The “distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have. It’s based on your values.”
Given their moral framing, populists conclude that they alone represent “the people.” They may not win 100 percent of the vote, but they lay claim to 100 percent of the support of good, hardworking folks who have been exploited by the establishment. They don’t assert that the neglected people who back them should be kept in mind by political leaders just like all other citizens; they claim that these neglected people are the only people that matter.
“[P]opulists only lose if ‘the silent majority’—shorthand for ‘the real people’—has not had a chance to speak, or worse, has been prevented from expressing itself,” explains Jan-Werner Müller, a professor at Princeton University and the author of What Is Populism? “Hence the frequent invocation of conspiracy theories by populists: something going on behind the scenes has to account for the fact that corrupt elites are still keeping the people down. … f the people’s politician doesn’t win, there must be something wrong with the system.”
One might expect this argument to fail once populists enter government and become the establishment.
But no: Populists—ranging from the revolutionary socialist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the religious conservative Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey—have managed to portray themselves as victims even at the height of their power, blaming their shortcomings on sabotage by shadowy domestic or foreign elites.
The notion of one virtuous people and one vile elite is a fiction, even if it does reflect real divisions and power dynamics in a given society. “There is no single political will, let alone a single political opinion, in a modern, complex, pluralist—in short, enormously messy—democracy,” writes Müller.
It’s not that populists have some special mind meld with the masses. Rather, “populists put words into the mouth of what is after all their own creation.”
As an example, Müller cites Nigel Farage, the former leader of the populist U.K. Independence Party, who called Britain’s vote to leave the European Union a “victory for real people,” as if the 48 percent of British people who voted to remain in the EU were “somehow less than real—or, rather, questioning their status as members of the political community.”
Populists “tend to define the people as those that are with them,” Mudde said. The mark of a populist isn’t which specific groups of people he or she includes in “the people” or “the establishment.” It’s the fact that he or she is separating the world into those warring camps in the first place.
Stylistically, populists often use short, simple slogans and direct language, and engage in “boorish behavior, which makes [them] appear like the real people,” said Pippa Norris, a professor at Harvard University who is working on a book on the rise of “populist-authoritarian” politicians around the world, especially in Europe. They are typically “transgressive on all the rules of the game.”
Is Donald Trump a populist?
Something fundamental in Trump’s approach to politics changed around the time that Steve Bannon, now the president’s chief strategist in the White House, joined the businessman’s campaign, according to Mudde. Trump had been condemning America’s allegedly incompetent political leaders for decades.
But when Trump launched his presidential bid, he was not, in Mudde’s mind, a populist. Over time, however, he’s come to style himself as one, in ways that help illuminate why Trump does what he does and says what he says.
continued
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/what-is-populist-trump/516525/
Why does he dismiss protesters who oppose him as “paid professionals” and polls that reflect poorly on him as “fake news”? Why does he call much of the media the “enemy of the people”?
Populists are dividers, not uniters, Mudde told me. They split society into “two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other,” and say they’re guided by the “will of the people.”
The United States is what political scientists call a “liberal democracy,” a system “based on pluralism—on the idea that you have different groups with different interests and values, which are all legitimate,” Mudde explained. Populists, in contrast, are not pluralist. They consider just one group—whatever they mean by “the people”—legitimate.
This conception of legitimacy stems from the fact that populists view their mission as “essentially moral,” Mudde noted. The “distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have. It’s based on your values.”
Given their moral framing, populists conclude that they alone represent “the people.” They may not win 100 percent of the vote, but they lay claim to 100 percent of the support of good, hardworking folks who have been exploited by the establishment. They don’t assert that the neglected people who back them should be kept in mind by political leaders just like all other citizens; they claim that these neglected people are the only people that matter.
“[P]opulists only lose if ‘the silent majority’—shorthand for ‘the real people’—has not had a chance to speak, or worse, has been prevented from expressing itself,” explains Jan-Werner Müller, a professor at Princeton University and the author of What Is Populism? “Hence the frequent invocation of conspiracy theories by populists: something going on behind the scenes has to account for the fact that corrupt elites are still keeping the people down. … f the people’s politician doesn’t win, there must be something wrong with the system.”
One might expect this argument to fail once populists enter government and become the establishment.
But no: Populists—ranging from the revolutionary socialist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the religious conservative Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey—have managed to portray themselves as victims even at the height of their power, blaming their shortcomings on sabotage by shadowy domestic or foreign elites.
The notion of one virtuous people and one vile elite is a fiction, even if it does reflect real divisions and power dynamics in a given society. “There is no single political will, let alone a single political opinion, in a modern, complex, pluralist—in short, enormously messy—democracy,” writes Müller.
It’s not that populists have some special mind meld with the masses. Rather, “populists put words into the mouth of what is after all their own creation.”
As an example, Müller cites Nigel Farage, the former leader of the populist U.K. Independence Party, who called Britain’s vote to leave the European Union a “victory for real people,” as if the 48 percent of British people who voted to remain in the EU were “somehow less than real—or, rather, questioning their status as members of the political community.”
Populists “tend to define the people as those that are with them,” Mudde said. The mark of a populist isn’t which specific groups of people he or she includes in “the people” or “the establishment.” It’s the fact that he or she is separating the world into those warring camps in the first place.
Stylistically, populists often use short, simple slogans and direct language, and engage in “boorish behavior, which makes [them] appear like the real people,” said Pippa Norris, a professor at Harvard University who is working on a book on the rise of “populist-authoritarian” politicians around the world, especially in Europe. They are typically “transgressive on all the rules of the game.”
Is Donald Trump a populist?
Something fundamental in Trump’s approach to politics changed around the time that Steve Bannon, now the president’s chief strategist in the White House, joined the businessman’s campaign, according to Mudde. Trump had been condemning America’s allegedly incompetent political leaders for decades.
But when Trump launched his presidential bid, he was not, in Mudde’s mind, a populist. Over time, however, he’s come to style himself as one, in ways that help illuminate why Trump does what he does and says what he says.
continued
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/what-is-populist-trump/516525/
