I assume that someone is not horrified by Putin. Or Erdogan [...]
It’s a purely hypothetical someone, so who knows? FWIW the people I know who are horrified by the rise of right-wing populism (which is what I actually said, and which is not exactly the same thing as being horrified by Donald Trump as such) are no fonder of Putin and Erdogan than of Trump, so far as I can tell. (FWIW I am not exactly horrified by the rise of right-wing populism, but I don’t like it at all and think it likely to do much harm; I think Putin and Erdogan are both substantially worse than Trump, but they’re less surprising than Trump because Russia and Turkey have much stronger track records of awful awful leaders.)
I’m not going to believe that.
OK. (It turns out that what skeptical_lurker was describing was distinctly more extreme than in my scenario, so it’s not terribly relevant how well that scenario actually matches reality. I’m not much of an expert on leftist Facebook groups; is there a good supply of such groups that don’t have any extremist stuff in?)
the people I know who are horrified by the rise of right-wing populism
So, is this really a thing? I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists. What I observe is that some left-wing ideas became less popular than the left wing expected and wanted them to be (which caused a massive hissy fit on the left).
In general, “populism” is one of those irregular nouns/adjectives: my ideology is (rightfully) popular but yours is populist. Since democracy is essentially a popularity contest, I tend to treat the label “populist” as a sour-grapes insult with little content.
So are we just talking about some general re-assertion of the right wing (which, despite the left’s best efforts, continues to insist it’s not dead yet) or do you think the “populist” moniker has some meaning?
Dunno. There are quite a lot of politicians and political movements at the moment with the following characteristics:
They are more openly nationalist than it has generally been fashionable to be until recently. (“Right-wing”.)
They are more appealing to “ordinary people” and less to “intellectual elites” than political groups previously in the ascendant. (“Populist”.)
In particular, their signature policies are often ones “experts” would be very sniffy about but that sound good to a lot of people. (“Populist”.)
They advocate economic policies whose consequences are probably better on the whole for the wealthy than for the poor. (“Right-wing”.)
They get some of their support from being seen to be happy saying things that are “politically incorrect”. (“Right-wing”, “populist”).
In the US, we have Donald Trump. “Make America Great Again”, border walls, keeping Muslims out of the US; hugely more support among the less-educated than among the more-educated; advocates trade barriers and fierce border controls; favours large-scale tax cuts and abolishing Obamacare; grabs ’em by the pussy.
In the UK, we have UKIP and the rest of the anti-EU movement. Keeping scary foreigners out; support, again, strongly concentrated among the less-educated; leaving the EU has been widely predicted by economic experts to be a terrible idea; UKIP at least proposed tax and benefit changes whose first-order effect would have been a large transfer from poorer people to richer people; UKIP seems to attract an awful lot of people who are upset at, e.g., anti-black prejudice no longer being widely socially acceptable.
In continental Europe we have a whole lot of politicians and movements that are widely described as right-wing populist: the Front National in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Golden Dawn in Greece, etc. I don’t know enough about them to evaluate those claims, but they seem plausible. And they seem to be gaining rather than losing members over the years.
do you think the “populist” moniker has some meaning?
I do. I think it means something like “getting a substantial amount of their support from clear, simple ideas that a large fraction of the population find attractive but that those generally regarded as experts and intellectual elites are skeptical of, even those with broadly similar political leanings”.
So, for instance, opposition to immigration tends to be a rightish thing and opposition to free trade tends to be a leftish thing; lots of people like these; but most experts on both “sides” tend to think they’re a bad idea and will actually make almost everyone worse off.
some left-wing ideas became less popular than the left wing expected and wanted them to be
Sure, that happens sometimes. It doesn’t look to me as if it always gets described as “populism”. Cutting taxes on the rich and state benefits for the poor are things that the right tends to like and the left tends not to like; sometimes they are popular; but I don’t generally see them described as populist. (Though of course sometimes people who are called populist for other reasons advocate them.)
And not everything people get called populist for is right-wing. One of the reasons I call Trump a populist is his advocacy for trade barriers and his opposition to treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the whole, the TPP was more popular on the right than on the left; opposing it isn’t particularly a rightist view (there are other things that make Trump a rightist rather than a leftist); but it’s certainly populist.
So no, I reject the suggestion that “populist” just means “popular but I don’t like it” or anything of the sort. (I am inclined to agree that the TPP was a bad idea, though I don’t know enough about it for my opinion to be worth very much.)
Let’s not get into the weeds of specific European or US policies. But the notion of “populism” is an interesting one (by the way, there’s certainly left-wing populism as well, see e.g. Chavez). You defined it as:
getting a substantial amount of their support from clear, simple ideas that a large fraction of the population find attractive but that those generally regarded as experts and intellectual elites are skeptical of, even those with broadly similar political leanings
There are implications, or, perhaps, prerequisites to this definition. A big one is the distinction between “a large fraction of the population”—basically, the masses—and “experts and intellectual elites”. Journalists love these terms, but they look a bit too jiggly-wiggly to me.
So there is some axis on which we can arrange people with one end being “the masses” and the other end being “the elites”. By which criteria do we do that?
One obvious one is money. Masses are poor and elites are rich. There are problems here, though—for example, successful Kansas farmers are not poor at all and yet people rarely call them elites. But a negative-wealth grad student in San Francisco is a bona fide member of the elites, isn’t he?
Social status is not a good criterion because it’s basically as synonym for the axis we’re trying to define and I don’t know how would one go about assigning “objective” social status levels to people or communities.
The traditional class distinction is still in play in Europe, to some degree, but is by and large absent in the US.
The city/country division is a good proxy in many ways, but by itself it’s a different axis.
IQ, maybe? Masses are dumb and elites are smart? That’s an interesting approach but it has scary consequences for the idea of democracy and whole égalité thing.
All in all, I’m not happy with the fuzziness of the masses/elites concept which is thrown around with wild abandon nowadays.
Moreover, you definition of populism assumes that the masses/elites distinction matters—they like different things and, presumably, make different choices. And there is the implication that in this divergence the masses are “wrong” and the elites are “right”. Again, there are interesting consequences to this idea.
Taking a look at this from a different side, populism—espousing ideas appealing to the numerically dominant masses—is a necessary and unavoidable part of democracy, specifically of getting elected. Every (serious) candidate is a populist. Granted, some are more so and some are less so, but the position of the “less so” ones is not very enviable—since their ideas are less popular by definition, they are reduced to asking the masses to, basically, trust them to do the right thing even though the masses don’t think it is the right thing to do. In practice this means you spend your campaign time kissing babies and proclaiming your love for, to use an American expression, motherhood and apple pie, while carefully tiptoeing around actual policy issues. Not really a great solution.
by the way, there’s certainly left-wing populism as well
Of course I agree (perhaps Bernie Sanders is a more prominent, though less extreme, example than Chavez) but I find it interesting that you’ve leapt so readily from “right-wing populism: is it even a thing at all?” to “of course there’s left-wing populism as well as right-wing populism”.
Journalists love these terms, but they look a bit too jiggly-wiggly to me.
Non-technical terms are always a bit jiggly-wiggly. Possibly also wibbly-wobbly and maybe even timey-wimey on occasion. There are, as you say, lots of ways to distinguish “masses” from “elites”, many of them correlate strongly with one another, and if you look at people who appeal to “masses” much more than to “elites” then I think you tend to get roughly the same people for a wide range of ways-to-distinguish.
If you want a specific proposal, here is one, but of course it’s ad hoc and somewhat arbitrary. Imagine asking for each person in a country (1) how wealthy they are, (2) how smart they are, and (3) where a panel of 100 random people from that country would put them on a “masses/elite” scale, according to whatever principles they happen to prefer. Measure #1 and #2 as percentiles and #3 with a 0..100 scale. Take the average. There’s your measure of eliteness.
(Wealth should be measured as NPV of assets plus expected income stream. You may notice that this handily puts that SF grad student somewhat higher than their negative net wealth might leave one to think.)
your definition of populism assumes that the masses/elites distinction matters
Nope. I can apply that definition just as well if it turns out that the distinction doesn’t matter at all. But, as it happens, I think it’s clear that the masses/elites distinction, fuzzy and ambiguous as it is, does matter—not least because there are a lot of influential politicians doing well for themselves by explicitly telling the “masses” how they’re being screwed over by the “elites”.
the implication that in this divergence the masses are “wrong” and the elites are “right”
There is no such implication. (Though there are some reasons to suspect that on questions that admit of actually determinable right and wrong answers, the “elites” will be right more often than the masses.)
populism—espousing ideas appealing to the numerically dominant masses
But that is explicitly not how I define populism. Some ideas appeal to (many of) the numerically dominant masses and also to (many of) the elites, and those are not populist ideas. What makes an idea populist is its differential appeal to the masses, by comparison with the elites.
Every serious candidate espouses policies that are meant to appeal to a large fraction of the population. What makes a candidate a populist is that they don’t mind when those policies look terrible to the elites. It is not necessary to be a populist in this sense to be a serious candidate.
I find it interesting that you’ve leapt so readily from “right-wing populism: is it even a thing at all?” to “of course there’s left-wing populism as well as right-wing populism”.
I started with right-wing populism because that was the subject mentioned in the preceding comment, but the accent here was on populism, not on right-wing. I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing in exactly the same way.
if you look at people who appeal to “masses” much more than to “elites” then I think you tend to get roughly the same people for a wide range of ways-to-distinguish.
I don’t know about that. How about Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP? Same “masses”?
this handily puts that SF grad student somewhat higher than their negative net wealth might leave one to think
That actually depends on his profession. If he’s going to get a degree in underwater basket weaving, I don’t think making coffee at Starbucks pays that much.
I can apply that definition just as well if it turns out that the distinction doesn’t matter at all.
Can you? If the distinction doesn’t matter, there’s no way to appeal to the masses and annoy the elites at the same time, since there are no distinctions that matter.
There is no such implication.
If there were no such implication, the word “populist” would not have derogatory and condescending overtones. And yet it does.
What makes an idea populist is its differential appeal to the masses, by comparison with the elites.
Didn’t you say above that you can apply the definition even if the difference doesn’t matter?
But let’s see. Any sane politician-to-be would espouse popular ideas. So what makes positions populist is not that the masses like them, but that the elites dislike them?
Does this mean that “populism” is a label for views elites dislike?
As an aside, I find it hilariously ironic how the left wing nowadays defends the elites and denigrates the stupid masses :-D
I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing in exactly the same way.
I am not sure it’s consistent to say both “of course there’s left-wing populism” and “I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing”, but never mind.
Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP
I think you misinterpreted me. Of course there are populists of different sorts. But who they are doesn’t depend much on exactly how you define “populist”. Corbyn and UKIP both appeal more to the less-educated than the more-educated, appeal more to the poor than to the rich, etc.
That actually depends on his profession.
For sure. I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student, precisely because the latter is likely to be well off in 10 years and the former isn’t. (Well … for that exact same reason, maybe it’s the more-elite-to-start-with people who can afford to go into underwater basket weaving; I’m not sure.) But I think all you’re pointing out here is that “elite”-ness isn’t the exact same thing as wealth, which I already agreed with.
If the distinction doesn’t matter, there’s no way to appeal to the masses and annoy the elites at the same time
Either you’re equivocating between two notions of “mattering” or I misunderstood you the first time. With the notion you’re apparently using now, I think it’s obvious that the masses/elites distinction “matters”, and—one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens—the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians is good evidence for that.
So what makes positions populist is not that the masses like them, but that the elites dislike them?
No, it’s both. A position disliked by both the masses and the elites is not populist. (A politician who espouses too many of those won’t last long, but I expect it’s possible to survive with one or two, and having them doesn’t constitute populism.)
the left wing nowadays defends the elites and denigrates the stupid masses
Not all of it. You yourself drew attention to Jeremy Corbyn not so long ago, and in the US there’s Bernie Sanders. And by and large all that’s happening is the same thing that always happens whoever’s in power: their opponents attack them with whatever stick is ready to hand. If it happens that the people in power are on the right, their opponents will mostly be on the left; if it happens that the people in power can credibly be accused of stupidity and pandering and whatnot, their opponents will make those accusations.
If you mean there’s some particular inconsistency when lefties denigrate “the masses”, I’m not really seeing it. Sure, left-wing politicians tend to claim to be the defenders of the Ordinary People. But so do right-wing politicians; as you’ve pointed out more than once in this discussion, politicians of all stripes want to be popular. So I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
The concept of populism certainly exists in the map. People talk about it, they point fingers at things and say “this is {right|left}-wing populism”. My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory to carve along.
For example, consider how you can treat a shadow as a thing in itself, or you can treat it merely as absence of light.
I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t. Especially if his basket-weaving is called something like “How Picking Your Nose Is A Transformative Genderqueer Activity That Subverts Patriarchy-Imposed Rules”.
the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians
But that is exactly what I contest. See the map/territory distinction above.
I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory [...] consider how you can treat a shadow [...]
Ah. That would have been clearer to me if you’d found a different way of expressing your concern than by saying ‘I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists.’ I mean, if you want to say—as you should! -- that shadows are better understood as regions where there’s less light because of occlusion rather than as separate objects in their own right, I don’t think “Shadows don’t exist” is the best way to say it. (But it probably works better than doing the same for “right-wing populism” because it’s more obvious that shadows at-least-kinda-exist, and therefore your audience is more likely to think “hmm, he probably means something cleverer than what he seems to”.)
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t.
Quite possibly. Again, I’m not claiming (and so far as I can tell no one is claiming) that there is a single metric for “eliteness” that everyone completely agrees on, any more than there is for right-wing-ness or intelligence or good musical taste—so I’m not sure how what you say is meant to be a counterargument to anything I’ve been saying. (It is meant to be a counterargument, right?)
But that is exactly what I contest.
Thought experiment: We pick 100 people from (let’s say) the population of adult Americans and anglophone[1] Europeans with an IQ of at least 100 as measured by some arbitrarily chosen standard test. We give them all a brief description of populism, but attach some other name to it in the hope of avoiding pre-existing associations. The description does not name specific politicians or movements. Then we show each of these people a list of the 10 most prominent politicians in several Western countries, and give them a summary of their policy positions and a sample of their speeches (with translations as appropriate). We ask each person to say for each politician how well they fit the profile of Sneetchism or whatever we say instead of “populism”.
[1] Anglophone so that we can give them all the same description. We could equally well pick just francophones or something, but there are more anglophones and I wanted to be able to include reasonably representative Americans too.
I claim that if we did that, we would find (1) good agreement between experimental subjects about how to score each politician and (2) good agreement between typical scores given by our subjects and actual general perceptions of politicians as “populists”. Our subjects will rate Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as more Sneetchy than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They will rate Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn as more Sneetchy than Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
(These two are what I mean by saying that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them from everyone else. Note that that’s not the same as saying that doing so is actually a good idea; as I said before, one can apply the distinction even if it doesn’t “matter”.)
I claim, further, that our subjects’ “populism” scores will not be the same as their own approval scores (e.g., both Trump-lovers and Trump-haters will agree that Trump is highly “populist”) nor the same as the politicians’ actual popularity (e.g., Trump is one of the most “populist” recent US presidents but one of the least popular as measured by vote fraction or approval ratings).
Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
I’m not sure it’s exactly either left-wing or right-wing. In any case, what’s relevant is surely not whether one particular slogan that mentions equality is a left-wing one, but whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does, I’ve said why I don’t think it does, and quoting a single allegedly leftist slogan that talks about equality is in no way responsive to my reasons.
Thought experiment: … Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
I don’t know. First, the setup isn’t specific enough (e.g. an awful lot depends on the formulation of your “brief description of populism”), and second I don’t know. I think the outcome of this poll can go this way or that way or sideways or make a nice pirouette or something else. I am surprised you feel so certain about the outcome.
whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does
I think it does. I think the history of the two movements makes it very clear. And notice how the left has a habit of accusing the right of being in the pocket of the rich and the powerful (in other words, elites), but the right does not accuse the left of this.
So you want me to guess how would you set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Is the idea that we can argue afterwards about what the outcome of that imaginary situation could be, using words like “realistic”? X-D
What, never? Well, hardly ever.
Individual politicians, sure. That’s just the accusation of being a traitor to the “masses” or, alternatively, of being a LINO (Left In Name Only, see RINO and DINO). Plus, of course, you just throw all the mud you have and see what sticks :-/
But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites, other than from the certifiably extreme left.
So you want me to guess how you would set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Not if you think the answer is highly sensitive to the details of how you guess. I don’t think it is, but evidently you do.
(Which is, as I said two comments upthread, an answer to my question of which of my guesses about the outcome of this hypothetical experiment you disagreed with.)
Individual politicians, sure. [...] But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites
Ah, I see. Yup, I’ll agree that that accusation is sometimes made by lefties about the Right as a whole (or at least big chunks of it) and very rarely if at all by righties about the Left as a whole (or big chunks of it). I’m not sure this makes for an actual compelling argument—the context, recall, was whether it’s more unreasonable for lefties than for righties to complain that their political opponents are pandering to the masses instead of listening to the wisdom of the elites. Remember (not that I expect you need reminding) that “the elites” and “the rich” are not the same thing. The people some lefties are accusing some righties of not listening to are not really the same people as those some lefties are accusing some righties of being in the pockets of.
(Note, by the way, that if someone on the right accuses someone on the left—or indeed anyone at all—of being ‘a traitor to the “masses”’, then unless they’re just saying “of course I have no problem with that, but you guys should” they are in fact claiming to speak for those “masses”.)
By the way, you said that the left and the right changed over the past 20 years so that there is no “by default” association of the left with the masses any more. Why do you think so? It sounds like an unusual position to me.
I think the political right tries harder than it used to to appeal to those masses. The left says to the masses “Unlike those bastards on the right, we are going to look out for your economic interests”. The right says to the masses “Unlike those perverts on the left, we are going to respect your values”. (Of course I am caricaturing in both cases, and of course both sides say a little of both those things, and of course the Left/Right dichotomy is a simplification, yadda yadda yadda.)
So, if Team Blue claims to act in the interests of the masses and Team Red claims to share the values of the masses, which one is acting more hilariously/hypocritically if it criticizes its opponents for ignoring the opinions of the elites?
Well, people like Thatcher or Reagan were popular—notably, with the masses—and they predate the shift that you are talking about.
In the US context that would imply that during the Clinton years the Republicans decided they needed to “appeal to those masses” and the result was the success of Bush Jr. That doesn’t look terribly persuasive to me—Bush wasn’t that appealing to the lower classes. The rightist rants for family values and against the degeneracy of the left were also pretty standard fare for more than a couple of decades.
In the UK context this means that after Tony Blair came to power the Tories decided they need more mass appeal and again, I don’t see much evidence for this suggestion. Just like Bush, Cameron was a fairly standard conservative leader.
It’s a purely hypothetical someone, so who knows? FWIW the people I know who are horrified by the rise of right-wing populism (which is what I actually said, and which is not exactly the same thing as being horrified by Donald Trump as such) are no fonder of Putin and Erdogan than of Trump, so far as I can tell. (FWIW I am not exactly horrified by the rise of right-wing populism, but I don’t like it at all and think it likely to do much harm; I think Putin and Erdogan are both substantially worse than Trump, but they’re less surprising than Trump because Russia and Turkey have much stronger track records of awful awful leaders.)
OK. (It turns out that what skeptical_lurker was describing was distinctly more extreme than in my scenario, so it’s not terribly relevant how well that scenario actually matches reality. I’m not much of an expert on leftist Facebook groups; is there a good supply of such groups that don’t have any extremist stuff in?)
So, is this really a thing? I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists. What I observe is that some left-wing ideas became less popular than the left wing expected and wanted them to be (which caused a massive hissy fit on the left).
In general, “populism” is one of those irregular nouns/adjectives: my ideology is (rightfully) popular but yours is populist. Since democracy is essentially a popularity contest, I tend to treat the label “populist” as a sour-grapes insult with little content.
So are we just talking about some general re-assertion of the right wing (which, despite the left’s best efforts, continues to insist it’s not dead yet) or do you think the “populist” moniker has some meaning?
Dunno. There are quite a lot of politicians and political movements at the moment with the following characteristics:
They are more openly nationalist than it has generally been fashionable to be until recently. (“Right-wing”.)
They are more appealing to “ordinary people” and less to “intellectual elites” than political groups previously in the ascendant. (“Populist”.)
In particular, their signature policies are often ones “experts” would be very sniffy about but that sound good to a lot of people. (“Populist”.)
They advocate economic policies whose consequences are probably better on the whole for the wealthy than for the poor. (“Right-wing”.)
They get some of their support from being seen to be happy saying things that are “politically incorrect”. (“Right-wing”, “populist”).
In the US, we have Donald Trump. “Make America Great Again”, border walls, keeping Muslims out of the US; hugely more support among the less-educated than among the more-educated; advocates trade barriers and fierce border controls; favours large-scale tax cuts and abolishing Obamacare; grabs ’em by the pussy.
In the UK, we have UKIP and the rest of the anti-EU movement. Keeping scary foreigners out; support, again, strongly concentrated among the less-educated; leaving the EU has been widely predicted by economic experts to be a terrible idea; UKIP at least proposed tax and benefit changes whose first-order effect would have been a large transfer from poorer people to richer people; UKIP seems to attract an awful lot of people who are upset at, e.g., anti-black prejudice no longer being widely socially acceptable.
In continental Europe we have a whole lot of politicians and movements that are widely described as right-wing populist: the Front National in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Golden Dawn in Greece, etc. I don’t know enough about them to evaluate those claims, but they seem plausible. And they seem to be gaining rather than losing members over the years.
I do. I think it means something like “getting a substantial amount of their support from clear, simple ideas that a large fraction of the population find attractive but that those generally regarded as experts and intellectual elites are skeptical of, even those with broadly similar political leanings”.
So, for instance, opposition to immigration tends to be a rightish thing and opposition to free trade tends to be a leftish thing; lots of people like these; but most experts on both “sides” tend to think they’re a bad idea and will actually make almost everyone worse off.
Sure, that happens sometimes. It doesn’t look to me as if it always gets described as “populism”. Cutting taxes on the rich and state benefits for the poor are things that the right tends to like and the left tends not to like; sometimes they are popular; but I don’t generally see them described as populist. (Though of course sometimes people who are called populist for other reasons advocate them.)
And not everything people get called populist for is right-wing. One of the reasons I call Trump a populist is his advocacy for trade barriers and his opposition to treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the whole, the TPP was more popular on the right than on the left; opposing it isn’t particularly a rightist view (there are other things that make Trump a rightist rather than a leftist); but it’s certainly populist.
So no, I reject the suggestion that “populist” just means “popular but I don’t like it” or anything of the sort. (I am inclined to agree that the TPP was a bad idea, though I don’t know enough about it for my opinion to be worth very much.)
Let’s not get into the weeds of specific European or US policies. But the notion of “populism” is an interesting one (by the way, there’s certainly left-wing populism as well, see e.g. Chavez). You defined it as:
There are implications, or, perhaps, prerequisites to this definition. A big one is the distinction between “a large fraction of the population”—basically, the masses—and “experts and intellectual elites”. Journalists love these terms, but they look a bit too jiggly-wiggly to me.
So there is some axis on which we can arrange people with one end being “the masses” and the other end being “the elites”. By which criteria do we do that?
One obvious one is money. Masses are poor and elites are rich. There are problems here, though—for example, successful Kansas farmers are not poor at all and yet people rarely call them elites. But a negative-wealth grad student in San Francisco is a bona fide member of the elites, isn’t he?
Social status is not a good criterion because it’s basically as synonym for the axis we’re trying to define and I don’t know how would one go about assigning “objective” social status levels to people or communities.
The traditional class distinction is still in play in Europe, to some degree, but is by and large absent in the US.
The city/country division is a good proxy in many ways, but by itself it’s a different axis.
IQ, maybe? Masses are dumb and elites are smart? That’s an interesting approach but it has scary consequences for the idea of democracy and whole égalité thing.
All in all, I’m not happy with the fuzziness of the masses/elites concept which is thrown around with wild abandon nowadays.
Moreover, you definition of populism assumes that the masses/elites distinction matters—they like different things and, presumably, make different choices. And there is the implication that in this divergence the masses are “wrong” and the elites are “right”. Again, there are interesting consequences to this idea.
Taking a look at this from a different side, populism—espousing ideas appealing to the numerically dominant masses—is a necessary and unavoidable part of democracy, specifically of getting elected. Every (serious) candidate is a populist. Granted, some are more so and some are less so, but the position of the “less so” ones is not very enviable—since their ideas are less popular by definition, they are reduced to asking the masses to, basically, trust them to do the right thing even though the masses don’t think it is the right thing to do. In practice this means you spend your campaign time kissing babies and proclaiming your love for, to use an American expression, motherhood and apple pie, while carefully tiptoeing around actual policy issues. Not really a great solution.
Of course I agree (perhaps Bernie Sanders is a more prominent, though less extreme, example than Chavez) but I find it interesting that you’ve leapt so readily from “right-wing populism: is it even a thing at all?” to “of course there’s left-wing populism as well as right-wing populism”.
Non-technical terms are always a bit jiggly-wiggly. Possibly also wibbly-wobbly and maybe even timey-wimey on occasion. There are, as you say, lots of ways to distinguish “masses” from “elites”, many of them correlate strongly with one another, and if you look at people who appeal to “masses” much more than to “elites” then I think you tend to get roughly the same people for a wide range of ways-to-distinguish.
If you want a specific proposal, here is one, but of course it’s ad hoc and somewhat arbitrary. Imagine asking for each person in a country (1) how wealthy they are, (2) how smart they are, and (3) where a panel of 100 random people from that country would put them on a “masses/elite” scale, according to whatever principles they happen to prefer. Measure #1 and #2 as percentiles and #3 with a 0..100 scale. Take the average. There’s your measure of eliteness.
(Wealth should be measured as NPV of assets plus expected income stream. You may notice that this handily puts that SF grad student somewhat higher than their negative net wealth might leave one to think.)
Nope. I can apply that definition just as well if it turns out that the distinction doesn’t matter at all. But, as it happens, I think it’s clear that the masses/elites distinction, fuzzy and ambiguous as it is, does matter—not least because there are a lot of influential politicians doing well for themselves by explicitly telling the “masses” how they’re being screwed over by the “elites”.
There is no such implication. (Though there are some reasons to suspect that on questions that admit of actually determinable right and wrong answers, the “elites” will be right more often than the masses.)
But that is explicitly not how I define populism. Some ideas appeal to (many of) the numerically dominant masses and also to (many of) the elites, and those are not populist ideas. What makes an idea populist is its differential appeal to the masses, by comparison with the elites.
Every serious candidate espouses policies that are meant to appeal to a large fraction of the population. What makes a candidate a populist is that they don’t mind when those policies look terrible to the elites. It is not necessary to be a populist in this sense to be a serious candidate.
I started with right-wing populism because that was the subject mentioned in the preceding comment, but the accent here was on populism, not on right-wing. I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing in exactly the same way.
I don’t know about that. How about Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP? Same “masses”?
That actually depends on his profession. If he’s going to get a degree in underwater basket weaving, I don’t think making coffee at Starbucks pays that much.
Can you? If the distinction doesn’t matter, there’s no way to appeal to the masses and annoy the elites at the same time, since there are no distinctions that matter.
If there were no such implication, the word “populist” would not have derogatory and condescending overtones. And yet it does.
Didn’t you say above that you can apply the definition even if the difference doesn’t matter?
But let’s see. Any sane politician-to-be would espouse popular ideas. So what makes positions populist is not that the masses like them, but that the elites dislike them?
Does this mean that “populism” is a label for views elites dislike?
As an aside, I find it hilariously ironic how the left wing nowadays defends the elites and denigrates the stupid masses :-D
I am not sure it’s consistent to say both “of course there’s left-wing populism” and “I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing”, but never mind.
I think you misinterpreted me. Of course there are populists of different sorts. But who they are doesn’t depend much on exactly how you define “populist”. Corbyn and UKIP both appeal more to the less-educated than the more-educated, appeal more to the poor than to the rich, etc.
For sure. I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student, precisely because the latter is likely to be well off in 10 years and the former isn’t. (Well … for that exact same reason, maybe it’s the more-elite-to-start-with people who can afford to go into underwater basket weaving; I’m not sure.) But I think all you’re pointing out here is that “elite”-ness isn’t the exact same thing as wealth, which I already agreed with.
Either you’re equivocating between two notions of “mattering” or I misunderstood you the first time. With the notion you’re apparently using now, I think it’s obvious that the masses/elites distinction “matters”, and—one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens—the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians is good evidence for that.
No, it’s both. A position disliked by both the masses and the elites is not populist. (A politician who espouses too many of those won’t last long, but I expect it’s possible to survive with one or two, and having them doesn’t constitute populism.)
Not all of it. You yourself drew attention to Jeremy Corbyn not so long ago, and in the US there’s Bernie Sanders. And by and large all that’s happening is the same thing that always happens whoever’s in power: their opponents attack them with whatever stick is ready to hand. If it happens that the people in power are on the right, their opponents will mostly be on the left; if it happens that the people in power can credibly be accused of stupidity and pandering and whatnot, their opponents will make those accusations.
If you mean there’s some particular inconsistency when lefties denigrate “the masses”, I’m not really seeing it. Sure, left-wing politicians tend to claim to be the defenders of the Ordinary People. But so do right-wing politicians; as you’ve pointed out more than once in this discussion, politicians of all stripes want to be popular. So I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
The concept of populism certainly exists in the map. People talk about it, they point fingers at things and say “this is {right|left}-wing populism”. My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory to carve along.
For example, consider how you can treat a shadow as a thing in itself, or you can treat it merely as absence of light.
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t. Especially if his basket-weaving is called something like “How Picking Your Nose Is A Transformative Genderqueer Activity That Subverts Patriarchy-Imposed Rules”.
But that is exactly what I contest. See the map/territory distinction above.
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
Ah. That would have been clearer to me if you’d found a different way of expressing your concern than by saying ‘I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists.’ I mean, if you want to say—as you should! -- that shadows are better understood as regions where there’s less light because of occlusion rather than as separate objects in their own right, I don’t think “Shadows don’t exist” is the best way to say it. (But it probably works better than doing the same for “right-wing populism” because it’s more obvious that shadows at-least-kinda-exist, and therefore your audience is more likely to think “hmm, he probably means something cleverer than what he seems to”.)
Quite possibly. Again, I’m not claiming (and so far as I can tell no one is claiming) that there is a single metric for “eliteness” that everyone completely agrees on, any more than there is for right-wing-ness or intelligence or good musical taste—so I’m not sure how what you say is meant to be a counterargument to anything I’ve been saying. (It is meant to be a counterargument, right?)
Thought experiment: We pick 100 people from (let’s say) the population of adult Americans and anglophone[1] Europeans with an IQ of at least 100 as measured by some arbitrarily chosen standard test. We give them all a brief description of populism, but attach some other name to it in the hope of avoiding pre-existing associations. The description does not name specific politicians or movements. Then we show each of these people a list of the 10 most prominent politicians in several Western countries, and give them a summary of their policy positions and a sample of their speeches (with translations as appropriate). We ask each person to say for each politician how well they fit the profile of Sneetchism or whatever we say instead of “populism”.
[1] Anglophone so that we can give them all the same description. We could equally well pick just francophones or something, but there are more anglophones and I wanted to be able to include reasonably representative Americans too.
I claim that if we did that, we would find (1) good agreement between experimental subjects about how to score each politician and (2) good agreement between typical scores given by our subjects and actual general perceptions of politicians as “populists”. Our subjects will rate Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as more Sneetchy than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They will rate Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn as more Sneetchy than Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
(These two are what I mean by saying that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them from everyone else. Note that that’s not the same as saying that doing so is actually a good idea; as I said before, one can apply the distinction even if it doesn’t “matter”.)
I claim, further, that our subjects’ “populism” scores will not be the same as their own approval scores (e.g., both Trump-lovers and Trump-haters will agree that Trump is highly “populist”) nor the same as the politicians’ actual popularity (e.g., Trump is one of the most “populist” recent US presidents but one of the least popular as measured by vote fraction or approval ratings).
Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
I’m not sure it’s exactly either left-wing or right-wing. In any case, what’s relevant is surely not whether one particular slogan that mentions equality is a left-wing one, but whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does, I’ve said why I don’t think it does, and quoting a single allegedly leftist slogan that talks about equality is in no way responsive to my reasons.
I don’t know. First, the setup isn’t specific enough (e.g. an awful lot depends on the formulation of your “brief description of populism”), and second I don’t know. I think the outcome of this poll can go this way or that way or sideways or make a nice pirouette or something else. I am surprised you feel so certain about the outcome.
I think it does. I think the history of the two movements makes it very clear. And notice how the left has a habit of accusing the right of being in the pocket of the rich and the powerful (in other words, elites), but the right does not accuse the left of this.
I’d have thought the rest of the thread would give a pretty good idea of the sort of thing I would put in a brief description of populism.
OK, so that in fact is a thing we disagree about: I would be extremely surprised to see much disagreement, and you wouldn’t. I wonder why.
I’d probably agree with you about the left and right of, say, 20 years ago. But political movements change.
What, never? Well, hardly ever.
So you want me to guess how would you set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Is the idea that we can argue afterwards about what the outcome of that imaginary situation could be, using words like “realistic”? X-D
Individual politicians, sure. That’s just the accusation of being a traitor to the “masses” or, alternatively, of being a LINO (Left In Name Only, see RINO and DINO). Plus, of course, you just throw all the mud you have and see what sticks :-/
But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites, other than from the certifiably extreme left.
Not if you think the answer is highly sensitive to the details of how you guess. I don’t think it is, but evidently you do.
(Which is, as I said two comments upthread, an answer to my question of which of my guesses about the outcome of this hypothetical experiment you disagreed with.)
Ah, I see. Yup, I’ll agree that that accusation is sometimes made by lefties about the Right as a whole (or at least big chunks of it) and very rarely if at all by righties about the Left as a whole (or big chunks of it). I’m not sure this makes for an actual compelling argument—the context, recall, was whether it’s more unreasonable for lefties than for righties to complain that their political opponents are pandering to the masses instead of listening to the wisdom of the elites. Remember (not that I expect you need reminding) that “the elites” and “the rich” are not the same thing. The people some lefties are accusing some righties of not listening to are not really the same people as those some lefties are accusing some righties of being in the pockets of.
(Note, by the way, that if someone on the right accuses someone on the left—or indeed anyone at all—of being ‘a traitor to the “masses”’, then unless they’re just saying “of course I have no problem with that, but you guys should” they are in fact claiming to speak for those “masses”.)
By the way, you said that the left and the right changed over the past 20 years so that there is no “by default” association of the left with the masses any more. Why do you think so? It sounds like an unusual position to me.
I think the political right tries harder than it used to to appeal to those masses. The left says to the masses “Unlike those bastards on the right, we are going to look out for your economic interests”. The right says to the masses “Unlike those perverts on the left, we are going to respect your values”. (Of course I am caricaturing in both cases, and of course both sides say a little of both those things, and of course the Left/Right dichotomy is a simplification, yadda yadda yadda.)
So, if Team Blue claims to act in the interests of the masses and Team Red claims to share the values of the masses, which one is acting more hilariously/hypocritically if it criticizes its opponents for ignoring the opinions of the elites?
Well, people like Thatcher or Reagan were popular—notably, with the masses—and they predate the shift that you are talking about.
In the US context that would imply that during the Clinton years the Republicans decided they needed to “appeal to those masses” and the result was the success of Bush Jr. That doesn’t look terribly persuasive to me—Bush wasn’t that appealing to the lower classes. The rightist rants for family values and against the degeneracy of the left were also pretty standard fare for more than a couple of decades.
In the UK context this means that after Tony Blair came to power the Tories decided they need more mass appeal and again, I don’t see much evidence for this suggestion. Just like Bush, Cameron was a fairly standard conservative leader.
I do prefer Berny Sanders over Hillary Clinton and at the same time I would label Berny a populist while I wouldn’t label Clinton a populist.
The opposite of people populist is being elitist.