Putting Populism in Its Place.

• Author: Thrasher, John J.

On November 8, 2016, the world was stunned by the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. The fact that roughly 63 million Americans had voted for the host of The Apprentice, a political outsider who vowed to "drain the swamp" in Washington and who rose to political prominence by promulgating a conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, came as a shock to many Americans.

The election of Donald Trump was surprising, but it wasn't an outlier. Tramp was just one more example of populist leaders and parties upsetting the political order in countries all over the world, including Marine LePen and Front National (FN) in France, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and, arguably, the Corbynite Labour Party in Britain. All of these populist movements have seen surprising electoral success over the past decade.

Although the reactions to the growing populism have been varied, they can be roughly divided into two distinct camps. The first sees populism as a threat to democracy and a danger to liberty, while the second sees populism as democracy's true form and as a necessary revolt against elites who have become out of touch and indifferent to the people around them. Although it is a simplification to focus on these two extreme ways of interpreting populism, doing so is useful since it will allow us to clarify the important issues at stake.

To know who is right, we need to know what populism is. My aim here is to get clearer on the nature of populism and then to assess its dangers and possible benefits to liberty and democracy. My central claim is that there are three distinct but interrelated notions or forms of populism. The first is a theoretical claim about the nature of democratic legitimacy, which sees the most--or perhaps the only--legitimate political order as one that directly represents the will of the people through legislation and political leadership. If the first form of populism links democratic legitimacy to the popular will, the second form animates that will to attack political elites or insiders in support of political outsiders. Both the first and second forms of populism are explicitly political, whereas the third concerns culture. Populism in the cultural realm privileges accessibility and mass appeal over sophistication and refinement. Of the three, the third is the most benign, but all forms of populism are potentially dangerous and should be kept in their place lest they threaten liberty and undermine democracy.

The Will of the People: Formal Populism and Legitimacy

The first aspect of populism is what we might think of as theoretical or formal conception of populism that links the direct representation of general will with the idea of democratic legitimacy. To get clear on this idea and its challenges, though, we need to think more carefully about the idea of democracy and its conditions for sovereignty and legitimacy.

Democracy is one of the thorniest ideas in politics. We live in a democratic age, and most of us are in some sense in favor of democracy, though we often differ dramatically on what we mean by the term. Democracy involves voting and elections, but elections alone do not a democracy make. The Soviet Union had elections, but no one would suggest with a straight face that it was a democracy. Democracy requires disagreement, and public disagreement requires protection for those who disagree. This usually means robust protection for freedom of speech, assembly, and the press as well as the presence of a variety of different political parties and points of view. In democracies, the paradoxical idea of a "loyal opposition" is not so paradoxical; indeed, it is essential to the very idea of democracy. What the opposition is loyal to is the democratic system itself. This loyalty and the norms and rules that govern it allow for opposition to the government to be the rule rather than the exception. The expectation is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power rather than a civil war after an election.

Democracy, in this sense, includes a range of different institutional structures--for example, parliamentary versus presidential, unicameral versus bicameral, federalist versus nonfederalist. Whatever democracy's specific form, we can think of a society as being more or less democratic depending on how well the background rights, rules, and norms that protect democratic contestation are protected. The Center for Systemic Peace maintains the Polity Project data set that measure regimes on several dimensions to determine a "Polity Score" from -10 to 10. Within this range, regimes are classified as autocracies, anocracies, or democracies. Anocracies have elements of democratic governance mixed with authoritarianism. Russia, for instance, holds elections but severely limits the press and opposition parties. The core idea of a full democracy, in this sense, comprises both the openness of the political process and the second-order protection of that openness. Winners do not try and are not able to exclude losers from participating in the political process and from potentially winning in the future.

The core idea here is that democracy is not primarily--despite what the name ("rule of the people") might suggests--a theory of sovereignty. A theory of sovereignty answers the question "Who should rule?" If we think of this question as Aristotle did, then we are left with a limited set of possible options in response to it: one, the few, or the many. The first is monarchy of some sort, the second is oligarchy, and the third is democracy. Each of these answers proposes to locate sovereignty--the right to rule--in a person or group. In this sense, democracy is an answer to the question of sovereign authority, but it does not answer the question directly because we need a more basic justification for why it is the many who should rule rather than the few or the one.

To see why, we need to distinguish between sovereignty simpliciter and legitimate sovereignty, where the sovereign power is the de facto political authority in a territory, which may or may not correspond to the legitimately authorized sovereign. To make this distinction, though, we need some theory of legitimacy that distinguishes those who hold political power from those who are rightfully authorized to hold political power. Any number of theories have been suggested, but it was Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 2012) in the seventeenth century who made the crucial innovation of locating sovereignty in the will of all. For Hobbes, the authority of the sovereign is absolute, but that authority is ultimately derived from the rational choice among the entire population, who give up their natural liberty to one another in order to authorize a sovereign that will bring them out of the violent and unstable state of nature. Hobbes was not much of a democrat, but one of his contemporaries, Baruch Spinoza, saw more clearly that democracy embodied this Hobbesian idea of contractual sovereignty better than any other system would.

The idea they developed became the germ of what we now think of as "popular sovereignty," the claim that the only legitimate form of government is democracy because it is the only form of government compatible with the authority of government coming from the will of the people directly. (1) As Abraham Lincoln argued in his first Inaugural Address, "A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people" (Lincoln 1861). Call...