I'm sure you can look up the dictionary definition like everyone else, and it won't mention anything similar to "democracy", but if you want one from a random internet person: it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
> it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.
What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
the important part of populism isn't the fear and discontent, it's the pandering. some fear and discontent is valid, some isn't, that's not relevant to whether something is populist or not.
populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.
> You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews.
I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...
> many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power
Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.
The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.
Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
This is true for other areas as well. Our healthcare, education, and tax systems for example aren't what anyone proposed or ever would propose. They ended up that way for a variety of reasons and now we're stuck with them because the only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch.
> only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch
The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.
Not sure why you've chosen to go off on a tangent about immigration to the United States in response to my post about populists of all stripes typically trying to remove all sorts of checks on their power, including the democratic ones in the guise of "protecting" the people from the enemy du jour.
But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason without else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...
No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...
But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error.
It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves unelected government bureaucrats doing arbitrary things, and the president insisting that he's so far above the law bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it.
> Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t.
I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.
Having evidence that the fears are based in reality and proposed policies that would help said people is a point for the latter, obvious contradictions in those one for the former.
Proposed policies being realistic vs vague broad strokes that are unlikely to be legal to implement would be another indicative axis.
I suspect that having "obvious contradictions" in policies is an extremely high bar for modern political groupings generally - ie all political parties and their leaders are populist now.
I think that populism has an element of "tear the system down", which is something that goes considerably further than the usual "throw those bums out".
When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.
How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
> Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
At least on the GOP side, it’s because they care only about cheap labor. Free trade to harness cheap labor abroad, and mass immigration to harness cheap labor for what can’t be outsourced.
If by "tear the system down" you mean anti-establishment and anti-elite, I agree. That's an essential component of populism.
I don't think many people would say Biden was anti-establishment. In 2020, Trump hadn't been in office long enough to change the establishment very much.
as I understand it, populism is when you exploit 'popular' causes to get a mass backing to bring yourself into, and to stay in, power.
It is opportunistic, 'goal justifies means' philosophy.
So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'.
It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.
In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
This has an obvious aside of letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried, for example scaling back globalization in at attempt to prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens. This could well backfire and voters would then want something else, which turncoats will happily endorse. The alternative is that we can't get to something else because it has no popular support yet.
Populism and democracy are orthogonal. Usually populists just ride democracy as a vehicle to where they really want to go.
If The People selected you as their Chosen Leader, who needs pesky Elites in the courts and the Corrupt bureaucrats holding you back, the Chosen One? All opposition to what The People want is elitist gatekeeping and needs to be violently eradicated.
Suppose a political candidate runs on a platform of mass deportations of illegal aliens. If he wins the election and then makes good on this campaign promise, is that populism or democracy?
There's a couple of aspects to it that, in my opinion, need to come together. Bypassing and/or undermining democratic institutions (media, courts, bureaucracy) and claiming exclusive representation - "I alone represent The People" - come to mind.
Mass deportations, without more context, in and of themselves are more a policy and less a political style.
You can execute this policy in a democratic or populist fashion.
Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.
It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.
In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
It’s Schrödinger’s democracy. Roe voiding nearly every state’s abortion laws was “democracy,” but Dobbs returning the issue to the states was “judicial fiat.”
Depends on how you do it. Yes, they are here in violation of the law. But if that's what bothers you, then the process you use to deport them had better be in keeping with the law. If what bothers you about them being here is the "illegal" aspect, then you must not trample the legal process in order to remove them.
Populism refers to any movement that claims to represent the interests of the common people against the elite. It might be left, right, democratic, or authoritarian. It might really serve the people or just use anti-establishment sentiment for its own benefit.
It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.
Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
> Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.
That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
But it ought to be reported, maybe not negatively, but at least skeptically. Representing the people against the elites almost always means destroying (to at least some degree) the system that has elevated those elites.
That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
What you're describing is basically Conservativism. The root word is conserve.
Liberals are often about taking down (liberating) the current system. But for some reason they often don't want or don't get the populist labels. For example, I don't think anyone ever called BLM a populist movement.
It was just a slur against the People's Party. It was like how people now call whatever Trump said last "Trumpism."
Look at the People's Party's policies and that's what it stands for. The shorthand is that the policies prioritize wage laborers and small business over massive entrenched interests and insiders. The way the term has been used since then (always by people who disapprove) means "whatever the rabble are asking for now." Or "appealing to the lowest common denominator voter."
So the term is really meaningless, just a slur used against people whose ideas sometimes overlap with People's Party policies, used by people who would have hated the People's Party at the time.
