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Elites cannot reform themselves, as seen throughout much of American history. We do see occasions where established parties undertake reform. But serious reform often necessitates the mobilization of people. So in the end, we shall welcome and not denounce populist politics.
Donald Critchlow is a Katzin family professor at Arizona State University’s faculty of history. He is the author of “In Defense of Populism: Protest and American Democracy.”
By Timothy Garton Ash
I’m all in favour of popular protest as part of a democracy, but that’s not populism. If it were, then Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have been populist.
Populist politics, which comes in our resolution, is a style of politics that we have seen from U.S. President Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Boris Johnson in Britain, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary. The remarkable thing is that, different though these people and countries are, in the last five years they’ve had a style of politics that has distinct features in common.
First of all, they all counterpose a supposedly pure “the people” to allegedly corrupt liberal metropolitan and cosmopolitan elites. Although, by the way, the leaders of these movements are seldom actually men or women of the people. Donald Trump is a millionaire son of a millionaire, and Boris Johnson is hardly a horny-handed son of toil.
Secondly, when you look more closely, “the people” they talk about in the abstract, rather revolutionary style, turn out to be only a part of the people. There’s always an “us” and “them.” The “us” is very often defined in ethnic terms. It’s often nativist — it’s a native population. The “them,” immigrants, be it Hispanics in the United States or east Europeans in the United Kingdom during the Brexit debate.
