THE TERRIFYING RISE OF AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM
GOVERNMENTS DESCRIBED AS populist are now in power in Poland, Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey. Italy and Greece are governed by multiparty populist coalitions, while populists of the left or right are partners in coalition governments in seven other European Union countries. Venezuela is in free fall thanks to the confiscationist policies of a populist government. Brazil has an outspoken populist president. And the ongoing Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party isn’t just a populist spectacle in itself; it has also helped fuel a surge of left-wing populism among the Democrats. Those movements espouse a variety of programs across a wide range of political landscapes. What do they have in common?
Historians and political scientists have argued for decades about what exactly populism is, and they haven’t always come to the same conclusions. The political theorist Isaiah Berlin warned in 1967 that “a single formula to cover all populisms everywhere will not be very helpful. The more embracing the formula, the less descriptive. The more richly descriptive the formula, the more it will exclude.” Nonetheless, Berlin identified a core populist idea: the notion that an authentic “true people” have been “damaged by an elite, whether economic, political, or racial, some kind of secret or open enemy.”
The exact nature of that enemy—“foreign or native, ethnic or social”—doesn’t matter, Berlin adds. What fuels populist politics is that concept of the people battling the elite.
The Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller proposes another characteristic: “In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist,” he argues in 2016’s (University of Pennsylvania Press). “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.” In that formulation, the key to understanding populism is that “the people” does not include the people. It excludes “the enemies of the people,” who may be specified in various ways: foreigners, the press, minorities, financiers, the “1 percent,”
