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Standard contemporary theories of populism associate it with social movements that emphasize the struggle of homogeneous “people” versus perfidious “elites.” (Canovan 2005; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Populism in the United States resulted partly from resentment against elite and expert blunders in initiating and conducting the Iraq War and in bringing about, not preempting, and failing to quickly end the 2008–2009 Great Recession to restore the prior trajectory of the economy. Subsidizing the managerial class, and bailing out the banks that caused the mess in the first place, added insult to injury. In this respect, it may be argued that George W. Bush’s administration successfully achieved a regime change, though not the one intended and not in the country targeted.

This standard characterization is too broad. It would consider populist too many political episodes that are clearly not populist. It would also leave out much of contemporary populism. Representations of political struggles as those of the “people” in the depths of subterranean society against stratospheric elites have been characteristic of rebels, religious reform movements, socialists, anti-colonialists, and nationalist struggles in multi-national empires. Anti-intellectuals who resent better educated, artistically sensitive, and abstract-minded elites include human resources departments of major corporations and investment bankers, who resent academic “experimentation.” Since elites are by definition fewer than “ordinary people,” and their privileges or perceived privileges often generate some resentment, it usually makes good democratic politics to attack them. Parties that represented the interests of the poor, the rural, or the more religious, attempted to harness resentments against the wealthy, urban, and secular, without being “populist.” Socialist, small holders, and Christian parties are often not populist. Mere anti-elitist rhetoric is insufficiently distinctive of populism.

Anti-elitist concepts of populism are also too narrow because they exclude obviously populist movements that adore elite plutocrats (or apparent plutocrats) such as Berlusconi in Italy, Babiš in the Czech Republic, and Trump in the United States. Most ancient populist demagogues in Greece and Rome were scions of famous and old political families. Some contemporary populists respect and even admire wealthy elites and celebrities like the Italian populist leader Pepe Grillo and, of course, Trump. Trump’s fear of divulging his tax returns probably reflects status anxiety. He fears losing the respect and adoration of his followers should they realize that he is not much richer than they are. Contemporary populists do not necessarily resent professional politicians. Some populist leaders had been professional mainstream center-right or center-left politicians before adopting populist style and politics; for example, Hungary’s prime minister Orbán, the Czech president Zeman, and Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu. Though India’s Modi had modest caste origins, he was also a professional politician, the chief minister of Gujarat for over a decade, and his policies have been distinctly favorable to the upper castes. Brazil’s Bolsonaro was a professional politician for decades after being a military officer in a country with a traditionally political and authoritarian military. The Polish populist leader Kaczyński was both a celebrity actor and a professional politician. By contrast, virtually all the totalitarian leaders, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their close associates, had no elite background of any kind.

The political etymology of the term “populist” goes back to the late Roman Republic (133–27 BCE), when conflicts between the Optimates and Populares tore it apart in civil wars. Both groups were of elite Roman families, but the weaker clique sought popular support in its struggle with the stronger party that controlled the Roman Senate. The struggle was not so much between the people and the elites as between factions within the elite, some of whom did not shy away from attempting to use common people to support them. In response, the Optimates accused the Populares of demagoguery, the emotional manipulation of the political passions of the masses.

At least since Plato, upper-class authors and orators have attempted to associate the passions exclusively with the lower classes. Conversely, they associated self-control and reason with the upper classes. The oligarchic conclusion is obvious and fully developed in Plato’s political philosophy: An elite moved by reason rather than passion should rule, if not enslave, people who cannot rule their own passions. Democracy, the rule of common people who cannot control their passions and subdue them to reason leads to the politics of the passions, demagoguery, and eventually self-destruction.

Elite propaganda aside, the ancient Greek and Roman elites were just as likely as the lower classes to succumb to passions, both political and personal. Passions for social domination, economic rapaciousness, and arrogant condescension begot resentment and class warfare. The difference between the ancient classes was not marked by reason versus passion, but by different kinds of passions, different tastes for self-destructiveness, like the difference between single malt whiskey thrice distilled and industrial alcohol: consumed in sufficient quantities, they both kill, though at different price ranges and levels of smoothness. Elite and popular populisms fed on each other and led to mutual destruction in civil wars, the end of the republic.

I adopt the core of the ancient concept of populism as the politics of passions, while rejecting its class bias, the exclusive association of the passions with lower classes. I propose to interpret populism, ancient and contemporary, as the rule of political passions. I maintain the ancient association of populism with passions and their manipulation by demagogues, but drop the class bias that associated populism exclusively with the politics of bread and circuses in Rome or beer and sausages in Marx’s view of the politics of the undisciplined poor, the Lumpenproletariat.

The eighteenth-century “moralists” introduced a useful Greek-inspired tripartite division of motivations between passions, interests, and reason. Contemporary political theorists like Jon Elster used this terminology to explain politics and liberal constitutions. Framers of such constitutions foresaw circumstances when politicians and voters would be compelled by passions to act against their interests. They enacted constitutions that constrain passionate choices, much as a sober recovering alcoholic may give the keys to the liquor cabinet to a trusted friend, with the instruction not to open it, irrespective of what the alcoholic may say in the future. Liberal institutions like the independent judiciary and central bank act as that trusted friend, to constrain political passions. Neo-illiberalism lifts such constraints to permit the politics of passions, populism.

The distinctions between passions, interests, and reason do not have to presume value judgments about which motivations are “legitimate” or “rational” and which are not. When the realization of passions comes at the expense of most other life projects, the passions are clearly and distinctly self-destructive. For example, irrespective of which life projects and goals jealous spouses may have, if they commit murder in jealous rage, whatever else they may have wished for, the rest of their lives will become impossible. Similarly, some economic policies give precedence to economic growth and social mobility, while others prefer economic equality and social cohesion. But populist policies, as in Venezuela, destroy the economy to an extent that growth and equality, mobility and cohesion, all become impossible.

Not all passions are sufficiently extreme to be assuredly self-destructive. Some passions lead the people they motivate to take extreme risks, thereby increasing the probability, rather than certainty, of self-destruction. Political passionate recklessness may pay off when the populists who lead it are lucky. They may come to believe themselves invincible, smart, or empowered by their passions, until luck runs out.

Other passions come at the expense of interests that, upon reflection and consideration, people would give precedence to. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999, 337) put it: “Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man’s own interest.” For example, anger has led people in history to burn down their own neighborhoods. They lived another day, but made themselves homeless. States have overreacted to provocations, built lavish dysfunctional buildings, and paid for the rescue of whales caught in ice, when the same resources could have been allocated for other purposes (hospitals, orphanages etc.) that both government and people, upon reflection, would have recognized as more important. Populists find challenging postponement of gratification to maximize satisfaction, giving precedence to some motivations over others, and recognizing that scarcity of resources forces choices between motivations.

Populists tend to miss what Harry Frankfurte (1988, 11–25) called second-order volitions, a will to determine their own passions. Populists accept all their passions and do not recognize contradictions between the passions; the constraints that satisfying some imposes on satisfying others. Demagogue may enflame and manipulate passions, but cannot control them and would not try. Populist leaders must promise immediate gratification in the form of simple policy solutions that they may misrepresent as having no undesirable consequences. They cannot acknowledge the complexity of the world (Mounk 2018, 36–39). When populist leaders cannot gratify, they divert attention to something else. Populist passions demand policies that are incompatible and undermine each other. They necessitate more policies to correct those contradictions, and so on. This is most obvious in macro-economic policies that want to improve public services, reduce taxes, and keep inflation and the national debt down; or keep high levels of transfer payments from the young to the old, with low birth rates, and strict restrictions on immigration of young workers, as in Japan. Populist policies, as distinct from populist rhetoric or expressions of passion, eventually consume themselves in self-destructive bonfire of passions.

Populist passions can be powerful enough to affect the beliefs of their adherents. Beliefs become narrative representations of passions, rather than probable results of reliable processes of inference from evidence. For example, if populists hate or fear somebody, they come to believe that they must have committed horrible crimes. Since the passions precede the stories told to represent them, evidence cannot convince or dissuade the passions. For example, fear and hate may cause populists to believe that immigrants commit higher rates of crimes than natives; while continuously ignoring the glaring evidence to the contrary. Vice versa, American populists ignore the fact that almost all the mass shootings in the United States have been committed by native white males because there is no corresponding passion to this belief.

Whether or not populist leaders actually possess the passions they manipulate or rather use the passions of others to further their own interests, is neither clear nor important. “Great orators are those who somehow manage to have it both ways, to enjoy the benefits of sincerity and those of misrepresentation. Their emotions belong to … the gray area between transmutation and misrepresentation; they are neither fully genuine nor entirely feigned” (Elster 1999, 390). For example, plutocrats whose businesses are becoming uncompetitive have an interest in protectionism and overregulation as well as in misrepresenting their protectionist interests as xenophobic passions shared with many others with no such interests. Likewise, employers who rely on cheap immigrant labor have an interest in presenting themselves as xenophobes who promote immigration restrictions because it strengthens their bargaining position with the undocumented workers they employ, while presenting themselves as ideologically above suspicions of employing illegal immigrants.

No person or state can always be entirely in control of their passions. There are degrees of populism, as the politics of the passions, just as there are degrees of democracy and liberalism. The exact borderline between populist and not so populist systems that have some populist aspects can be disputed, just like the borderline between democracy and authoritarianism and liberalism and absolutism. The extreme cases are obvious, while the exact classification of intermediate cases may be ambiguous. Moderate levels of populism can be sustainable. For example, some expensive penal policies are neither in the interest of victims nor of reforming perpetrators, but satisfy passions for revenge and retribution. Passionate politics have costs and unintended consequences, but the political system may be able to pay them without becoming insolvent. The transition from systems that have some populist aspects to populism proper is gradual, resembling a live frog slowly and gradually boiling into a soup.

Populism as the politics of the passions is important for understanding neo-illiberalism, the topic of this book, because liberal constitutions and institutions were designed and constructed often to constrain and even block the political expressions of passions and absolutist governments. Liberalism gets in the way of much of populism. Varieties of populism that find themselves in conflict with constitutions and institutions like the independent judiciary can make common cause with absolutists or illiberals who are not necessarily populist but want the liberal institutions out of their way so they can exercise absolute political power.

The contemporary alliance between illiberals (or absolutists) and populists is an alliance of convenience and not of conviction. To the extent that the illiberal leaders understand and act on their interests, they know they cannot enact policies that accord with populist passions or bring their own demise. Orbán cannot start a war with Romania to restore Hungary to its pre-Trianon Treaty size. Trump cannot block most trade with China and Mexico. Nobody can borrow to finance public services without eventually raising more money from taxes. The populist neo-illiberal trick then is to manipulate the passions; make symbolic gestures like building useless walls on the border of Mexico and sending soldiers to protect the country from migrants that do not exist in East Europe, while using bombastic language. For example, Poland has at once one of the most liberal non-populist immigration policies in Europe with millions of immigrants from outside the EU (mostly from Ukraine), while its leaders have some of the most anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric in Europe. When all else fails, the illiberals can distract passion with passion, like a new object of fear or hatred. Populist crowds have many passions that they do not fully understand and express, so the demagogue can trigger and manipulate them.

The populists and neo-illiberals have a common goal of dismantling liberal institutions. But they do not share common interests. Populist illiberal leaders have no interest in acting on the populist passions that would lead to their self-destruction. They have an interest in obtaining and maintaining absolute power. This interest in absolute power is shared by all the neo-illiberal politicians, though it is not exclusive to them. Once they have such power, many, though not all, will further use it for personal enrichment and corruption, which is against the interests of their populist supporters. The dilemma of populist illiberals in power is that the stronger they express the populist passions, the more support and legitimacy they receive in their confrontation with liberal institutions. Yet, the more they actually act on those passions, the greater is the risk that the regime would collapse under the pressure of its own passions. The populist illiberals are constrained by reality from acting on much of their rhetoric. Consequently they increase the volume of the rhetoric and provoke. Small populist policies can generate a lot of noise but little damage. For example, provoking liberals by being rude and trampling on norms of political respect, or making symbolic gestures such as building symbolic borders, putting poor immigrant children in cages (morally abhorrent but politically inconsequential), and prohibiting the migration of people from countries that send few high-net-worth immigrants, are populist policies that create much more noise than actual political damage. Should illiberal populists start acting on their rhetoric, as in classical ancient absolute democracies, populist self-destruction will follow.

The opposite political pole to populism is technocracy, the rule of experts. Experts should represent instrumental rationality in the service of interests. Since Plato, the technocratic ideal has been for the rulers to be knowledgeable experts. Plato had a non-specialized, holistic, concept of knowledge and political expertise. He “appointed” philosophers to run his utopian technocracy. Contemporary notions of expertise prefer applied specialists to theoreticians. Mounk (2018) documented the growth of technocracy since the 1930s, including liberal bureaucracies exempted from democratic elections, such as quasi-non-governmental organizations that are financed by the state but are not controlled by its representative bodies. Technocracies do not have to be liberal; they can serve absolutist states, as well as authoritarian or democratic governments. Indeed, all modern monarchies and dictatorship had to use at least some technocrats.

Plato identified in his Republic two related problems with technocracies. When self-proclaimed experts disagree, as they often do, there is no higher authority to decide who the real experts are, who has knowledge and who has mere opinion. Experts also have group and personal interests that may bias their judgments. A technocratic class may mistake its own self-interest or even, perish the thought, its passions, for expert analysis. Indeed, Plato’s own political philosophy may be interpreted in such terms. Technocrats are just as corruptible as everybody else both as individuals with interests, and as a class that has shared common interests in protecting its privileges.

Since experts as a class cannot be trusted to act more impartially than anybody else, liberal constitutions place them in institutions that should supervise and compete with each other. The increase in the power and complexity of the state has required a commensurable growth in technocratic liberal institutions that balance each other like the Central Bank, the BBC, and the Ombudsman, and so on, to check the power of the technocratic state. That mutual growth is not contradictory but necessary, the bigger the state is, the more necessary it is to curb its powers. It is impossible for modern states to function with no technocratic expertise and assistance. Even if policy ends are dictated by the passions, populist politicians need a technocratic bureaucracy to devise means to try to realize them. The horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism and authoritarianism resulted from the efficient use of technocrats to implement passionate politics.