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What Is Populism, and Why Is It Important?

Populist parties and candidates are on the move in the United States and Europe. Donald Trump has won the Republican nomination; Bernie Sanders came in a very strong second to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. And these candidacies came on the heels of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In Europe, populist parties in France, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland are contending for power or are already part of the government.

In France, the National Front (FN) came in first in the regional elections in December 2015 with 27.73 percent of the vote, but was denied a victory in the regional presidencies because the Republican and Socialist parties joined forces against it in the runoff. In Denmark, the People’s Party (DF) came in second in the June 2015 parliamentary elections. In Austria, Freedom Party (FPÖ) candidate Norbert Hofer came in first in the first round of the presidential election in April 2016.

In Switzerland, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) came in first in the parliamentary elections with 29.4 percent of the vote, almost twice the total of the Social Democrats and the Liberals. In Norway, the Progress Party (FrP) has been part of the ruling government coalition since 2013. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV), currently the country’s third largest party, is well ahead in polls for the 2017 parliamentary elections. Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), after disappointing results in the 2015 parliamentary elections, bounced back in local elections, ousting the Labour Party in Wales and was at the forefront of the British campaign to exit the European Union.

In Europe, populist parties have also arisen on the left and center-left. In Italy, comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement won the most seats in the 2013 election to the Chamber of Deputies. In the June 2016 municipal elections, Five Star candidate Virginia Raggi was elected Rome’s mayor with 67 percent of the vote. In Spain, the Podemos Party, founded in 2014, came in third in the December 2015 and June 2016 parliamentary elections. In Greece, the decade-old Syriza Party came in first in two parliamentary elections in 2015, and took charge of the government. This book is about how these populist candidates and movements have come about, and why in the wake of the Great Recession, they have proven so successful in mobilizing support.

Defining Populism

When political scientists write about populism, they often begin by trying to define it, as if it were a scientific term like entropy or photosynthesis. That’s a mistake. There is no set of features that exclusively defines movements, parties, and people that are called populist—from the Russian Narodniks to Huey Long, and from France’s Marine Le Pen to the late congressman Jack Kemp. As with ordinary language, even more so with ordinary political language, the different people and parties called “populist” enjoy family resemblances of one to the other, but not a set of traits can be found exclusively in all of them.

There is, however, a kind of populist politics that originated in the United States in the nineteenth century, has recurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in the 1970s began to appear in Western Europe. Whereas populist parties and movements in Latin America have sometimes tried to subvert the democratic competition for power, the populist campaigns and parties in the United States and Western Europe have embraced it. In the last decades, these campaigns and parties have converged in their concerns, and in the wake of the Great Recession, they have surged. That’s the subject of this book: I want to say a little about what this kind of populist politics is, and why it includes both Trump and Sanders and both France’s National Front and Spain’s Podemos.

First of all, the kind of populism that runs through American history, and is transplanted to Europe, cannot be defined in terms of right, left, or center. There are rightwing, leftwing and centrist populist parties. It is not an ideology, but a political logic—a way of thinking about politics. In his book on American populism, The Populist Persuasion, historian Michael Kazin gets part of this logic. Populism, he writes, is “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”

That’s a good start. It doesn’t describe someone like Ronald Reagan or Vladimir Putin, both of whom have sometimes been called “populist,” but it does describe the logic of the parties, movements, and candidates from America’s People’s Party of 1892 to Marine Le Pen’s National Front of 2016. I would, however, take Kazin’s characterization one step further and distinguish between leftwing populists like Sanders or Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias and rightwing populists like Trump and the National Front’s Le Pen. Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Leftwing populism is dyadic. Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group.

Leftwing populism is historically different from socialist or social democratic movements. It is not a politics of class conflict, and it doesn’t necessarily seek the abolition of capitalism. It is also different from a progressive or liberal politics that seeks to reconcile the interests of opposing classes and groups. It assumes a basic antagonism between the people and an elite at the heart of its politics. Rightwing populism, on the other hand, is different from a conservatism that primarily identifies with the business classes against their critics and antagonists below. In its American and Western European versions, it is also different from an authoritarian conservatism that aims to subvert democracy. It operates within a democratic context.

Just as there is no common ideology that defines populism, there is no one constituency that comprises “the people.” It can be blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, or students burdened by debt; it can be the poor or the middle class. Equally, there is no common identification of “the establishment.” It can vary from the “money power” that the old populists decried to George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” to the “casta” that Podemos assails. The exact referents of “the people” and “the elite” don’t define populism; what defines it is the conflictual relationship between the two—or in the case of rightwing populism the three.

The conflict itself turns on a set of demands that the populists make of the elite. These are not ordinary demands that populists believe will be subject to immediate negotiation. The populists believe the demands are worthy and justified, but they don’t believe the establishment will be willing to grant them. Sanders wants “Medicare for all” and a $15 minimum wage. If he wanted the Affordable Care Act to cover hearing aids, or to raise the minimum wage to $7.75, that wouldn’t define a clash between the people and the establishment. If Trump were to demand an increase in guards along the Mexican border, or if Denmark’s People’s Party campaigned on a reduction in asylum-seekers, these would not open up a gulf between the people and the elite. But promising a wall that the Mexican government will pay for or the total cessation of immigration—that does establish a frontier.

These kinds of demands define the clash between the people and the establishment. If they are granted in whole or even in part, as when the Democrats in 1896 adopted the People’s Party’s demand for free silver, or if they abandon them as too ambitious, as Syriza did its demands for renegotiation of Greece’s debt, then the populist movement is likely to dissipate or to morph into a normal political party or candidacy. In this sense, American and Western European populist movements have flourished when they are in opposition, but have sometimes suffered identity crises when they have entered government.

The Significance of Populism

The second important feature of the populist campaigns and parties I am describing is that they often function as warning signs of a political crisis. American populist movements have arisen only under very special circumstances. In Europe, populist parties have endured on the fringes at times, because the European multi-party systems tolerate smaller players. But like American populists, they have won success only under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are times when people see the prevailing political norms—put forward, preserved and defended by the leading segments in the country—as being at odds with their own hopes, fears, and concerns. The populists express these neglected concerns and frame them in a politics that pits the people against an intransigent elite. By doing so, they become catalysts for political change.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the major parties favored increased immigration, only to find that in the United States voters were up in arms about illegal immigration and in Europe about immigrant communities that became seedbeds of crime and later terror. The populist candidates and parties gave voice to these concerns. In Europe, the major parties on the continent embraced the idea of a common currency only to find it fall into disfavor during the Great Recession. In the United States, both parties’ leaders embraced “free trade” deals only to discover that much of the public did not support these treaties.

The movements themselves don’t often achieve their own objectives. They don’t necessarily succeed in providing Medicare for all or protecting workers against global capitalism or the European Union. Their demands may be co-opted by the major parties or they may be thoroughly rejected. But the populists roil the waters. They signal that the prevailing political ideology isn’t working and needs repair, and the standard worldview is breaking down. That’s why Trump and Sanders are important in America, and why the populist left and right are important in Europe. In what follows, I will describe how the logic of populism has worked and why at this particular moment similar kinds of populist protests are erupting across both sides of the north Atlantic.