Populism, Self-Government, and Liberty.

• Author: Munger, Michael C.

Piopulist and neoliberal are epithets: anyone who uses one of these terms as a description doesn't belong to the group being described. The more extreme stand-ins--socialist for the Left and fascist for the Right--are hyperbolic and hackneyed, so populist and neoliberal have become go-to descriptors for ideological smears. On the one hand, progressives have taken increasing umbrage at being called populist, with demands for the term to be excised from the media lexicon: "The word 'populist' has no widely agreed-upon definition, but plenty of negative associations.... [B]ig media needs [sic] to stop using the word 'populist' to describe Democrats' economic programs and their appeals to voters" (Starkman 2008).

On the other hand, some people on the right cop to being "populists"; (1) clearly, the word's meaning is in contest (Mudde 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019). As Cas Mudde put it more than fifteen years ago in a prediction that can only be called prescient, "[Because of] structural changes, and the consequent move away from legal authority and toward charismatic authority, as well as the demystification of politics in Western liberal democracies, populism will be a more regular feature of future democratic politics, erupting whenever significant sections of 'the silent majority' feels that 'the elite' no longer represents them" (2004, 563).

This issue of The Independent Review includes nine essays written in response to a call for papers on "populism, self-government, and liberty (economic and civil)." (2) In selecting among the many submissions, we have tried to give a fair, conceptually grounded account of the history and current status of populism. Much of our focus is on the United States, but we have provided some accounts of populism more broadly. These nine articles give a snapshot of populism that crosses standard political boundaries and tries to make some forecasts about the future.

Some preliminaries are in order. First, as far as I can tell, democracy means "a government that does what I want, which is the right thing to do." That's not really very helpful; although such democracy is nearly unanimously popular, it is also meaningless: anyone who opposes me is thwarting democracy. This is precisely the definition that some of my academic colleagues appear to have in mind (as noted in Munger 2017): any restriction on informed majority action is tyranny. Of course, the qualification "informed" is important in that definition because actual empirical majorities might favor restrictions on individual rights such as abortion access or same-sex marriage. These majorities are apparently not to be taken seriously, however, because they disagree with the informed opinions of elites who know what majorities should want. (3)

The origin of the notion of democracy, or rule by the many, as self-evidently good is recent, to say the least. The more standard view of democracy for many centuries was something closer to "mob rule," as Plato makes clear in book VIII of the Republic:

When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs.

[But] loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects.... Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit? (Plato 1908)

The point of liberty in a society of free and responsible citizens is to reward the responsible component of citizenship. As Montesquieu argues in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), "It is true that, in democracies, the people seem to act as they please; but political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom. In governments, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will" (1989,150). This view is reflected in the work of David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Friedrich Hayek: the will of the people is the law, which emerges over time as the set of shared principles of propriety and right action that make behavior self-governing. The law can be instantiated, at least in a just and prudent system of government, by legislation that writes down what is already recognized as being the law. liberty is then the lull power of doing what "we ought to will"; laws that prevent right action or compel wrong action are unjust.

The point is that there is very little reason to expect the evanescent impulses of majorities to correspond to the law. The law is certainly not legislation that robotically encodes the "will of the people," measured by an election or a vote of the legislature or taken without reference to the principles of the law or the principles of propriety that have been culturally vetted and tested over decades.

Populism, at least in the negative sense in which that term is understood by many (including those on the left who object to the label), is legislation that is based on the unmediated majority of the moment. Republican institutions, which interpose a deliberative legislature, an executive, and a judiciary between majorities and state action, are inherently (and often, to populists, frustratingly)...