After the Brexit referendum: revisiting populism as an ideology

In late May 2016, shortly before the British referendum on membership of the European Union that resulted in a modest majority of 51.9% for leaving the EU (and among those eligible to vote, a 37.47% vote to leave), I was interviewed on Czech TV on the topic of populism. At the height of the crisis of refugees from Syria, Africa and other middle eastern countries, I pointed to one striking difference between sentiments on migration on the European continent and in the UK. In continental Europe, people were afraid of refugees; in the UK, people were afraid of Europeans. Of course, this needs the kind of fine-tuning that a media soundbite cannot provide. The fear of refugees was unequally distributed spatially across Europe, attaining a higher intensity in its eastern and east-central reaches. The UK avoided similar sentiments of alarm simply by accepting a trifling number of refugees in the first place, so that their visibility was negligible (and in the case of the now dismantled Calais ‘jungle’ camps, forcibly keeping most of them out of British territory). The fear of non-national migrants was also unequally distributed ideologically, broadly affecting more people on the right-of-centre spectrum than on the left-of-centre. Furthermore, that fear was unequally distributed on socio-economic and age indices. And the modes of movement across borders were dissimilar: Europeans from EU countries entered and exited the UK freely, while non-European migrants into the European mainland entered illegally or were subject – usually retroactively – to national quotas. Not least, in a telling twist of vocabulary, public discourse in the UK has for decades inserted a caesura between ‘Britain’ and ‘Europe’, setting Britain adrift from its European geographical location and rendering it, sometimes provocatively, continent-less. Uniquely, the main advocates of Brexit summon up a peculiar insularity, one that ostensibly prefers the distant to the near: The Commonwealth (mainly a one-way love-affair of the British ex-imperialist right that is gradually becoming unrequited), the USA, or China; to the proximate European neighbours of the UK with which mutually deep and significantly growing economic, legal, and cultural ties have been fashioned.

The vote for Brexit has occasioned the need to reassess the ranges and guises of populism, especially when populist agendas are voiced in part from within the political Establishment of a democratic state. Whether the UK still is a liberal democratic state, while lacking a liberal government – particularly in view of the current government among whose aims it has been to translate certain strands of populist sentiment into a fundamental restructuring of the state itself, without Parliamentary approval – is a question that focuses the spotlight more broadly on the ideological and institutional relationship between state and government.¹ An evaluation of the kind of liberalism the UK may yet be thought to incorporate becomes increasingly pressing. It is certainly insufficient to use criteria commonly employed in international relations theory that rest content with equating liberalism with constitutionalism and the rule of law; with free markets; and with a mid-20th century view of human rights as mainly civil and individual, rather than also social and economic. Liberalism in its many variants is richer and more intricate than that. A commitment to humanist ideals concerning free individual flourishing, social reform based on mutual assistance as expressed in welfare state legislation, the active promotion of the needs and identities of diverse social groups, and a generous helping of tolerance are also liberal prerequisites.² For that reason, to equate populism with democratic illiberalism³ requires further elaboration, particularly on the ideological dimension, as the liberalism to which it is contrasted appears in many guises and is often sweepingly and imprecisely attached to all West-European, North American and Antipodean states – whose governments and political parties have very different takes on liberalism. In that light, the co-option of populist politicians into the governments of ostensibly liberal democracies – in the UK they are no longer restricted to populist parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – results in a new ideological brew. The Brexit oddity in mind, however, needs to be examined against a broader consideration of European populism.

A general consensus obtains that populism is a slippery concept to define, attracting a range of cultural and geopolitical connotations that overlap only with difficulty. But that is no more the case than with other ideological variants. Precision is not an attribute of ideologies or of types of vernacular political thinking; ipso facto it cannot it be a methodological dogma of their analysts, and there is no need to regard its absence as a lacuna. That said, certain patterns of political thought and speech are detectable in populism as in other clusters of political thought. Additionally, there seems to be confusion about whether populism is an ideology and, if so, what kind of ideology; or whether it is a mentality or a movement. I have neither the intention nor the capacity to pronounce authoritatively on those issues because anyone active in the field of analyzing ideologies should be wary of the clear-cut definitions preferred by some political philosophers and political scientists. Indeed, referring to the name of an ideology in the singular is merely a convenient short-cut. Populisms, like liberalisms and socialisms, exist only in the plural, though they will share fundamental elements. The usual perspectives on populist ideology are not incorrect, but they require refinement. We should ask not whether populism is an ideology pure and simple, but probe it by means of a range of intersecting questions, not all of which can be considered in detail in this editorial: Do different populisms display the usual features of an ideology and discharge its normal roles? Do we – as analysts, commentators, or political practitioners – employ the descriptor ‘populism’ ideologically in order to bring together some disparate themes? Does our encounter with populism necessitate readjusting our understanding of what an ideology is? And is there something exceptional about populism or can all its components be traced to other ideologies, leaving a configuration distinct only in its skeletal amalgam? In the pages that follow I refer only to right-of-centre European populisms. For brevity’s sake, I will deploy the term ‘populism’ for that variant, leaving aside the persuasive argument that left-populisms constitute a different ideological genre.

The ‘thin-centred’ problem

There is a prevailing assumption that one shared characteristic of conventional, mainstream, ideologies is that they exhibit a series of ideas concerning socio-political issues that constitute a reasonably inclusive blueprint and a programme of action. Twenty years ago, in my Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, I coined the term ‘thin-centred ideologies’ to denote a different phenomenon. It embraced those ideologies whose morphology, whose conceptual patterns and arrangements, were insufficient to contain the comprehensive solutions for the full spectrum of socio-political problems that the grand ideological families have customarily sought to provide. I argued that thin-centred ideologies abstained from offering their own brand of programmes about, say, social justice, or the conditions for individual development. They either restricted themselves to a narrow core, becoming single-issue or at most double-issue political advocacy discourses, or borrowed from, and appended themselves to, other ideologies to thicken out. The two thin cases I investigated were feminism and green political thought, and in a later article I added nationalism.⁴ Green political thought in particular proceeded to expand its basic arguments over the years in order to provide viable alternatives to its big conventional ideological competitors – the German Green party is the most striking example. Feminism, too, has historically affiliated itself to liberal, socialist and radical ideologies that have fleshed out its core. Nationalism, on the other hand, rarely appeared on its own but was taken over by host ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, fascism – and, some may contend, infiltrated by populism as well.

Rightly or wrongly, I made no mention of populism in my 1996 book. But then a number of scholars, Catherine Fieschi,⁵ Ben Stanley,⁶ and Cas Mudde,⁷ among others, attached the notion of thin-centred ideologies to populism, a practice that has since spread to other populism-related literature.⁸ I have no objection to anyone employing that device in their own theorizing – indeed, both Fieschi’s and Stanley’s articles were published in the Journal of Political Ideologies. We all are engaged in the art of interpretation, not of laying down academic diktats. Yet we should entertain considerable doubts about the applicability of thin-centrism to populism. The various populisms do not easily conform to the thin-centred ideological variant for two reasons. First, because that variant, although curtailed, is nonetheless well-articulated and the product of long processes of measured and reflective political thinking. Second, even more decisively, because it is structured so as to rely systematically on other ideological positions to fill it in. Many recent European populisms are not greatly worried by their high selectivity of topic, ideas and catchwords, emphasizing only those items on which they wish to mobilize public opinion and ignoring the rest. Sometimes policies are added that chime in with the particular value systems of their leadership – one has in mind, for example, Pim Fortuyn’s liberal views on women’s rights and sexual orientation⁹ – but those can appear incidental to the main messages that such populists convey and not shared by the rank and file.

Nor do populist ideologies nest within broader ideological families as do nationalist variants. Rather, they display a limited overlap with segments of other ideologies, in particular with some forms of traditionalist conservatism that possess both romantic and exclusivist hues. In some hybrid cases, it is unclear which is the dog and which the tail. As for the populism-nationalism ideational axis, as nationalism itself is thin-centred, not much thickness is added by their overlap. If anything, that combination acts as a constraint on the capacity of nationalisms to align themselves with their broader potential: with those nationalists who were liberal – think, for example, of Mazzini in Italy. Note also that despite salient overlaps with nationalism, populisms do not compete with each other as do some aggressive nationalisms. Populisms are hardly threatened by other populisms unless they adopt irredentist or statist forms and are consumed by nationalist aspirations. Unlike populism, nationalism is predominantly defined vis-à-vis external political entities. Populisms seek the enemies in their midst or those who, they believe, are about to be in their midst.

In sum, populism is dissimilar to thin-centred ideologies such as feminism, ecologism, or nationalism, for two reasons, the one substantive, the other morphological. First, all of the latter harbour – or in the case of nationalism, harbours in some of its versions – a positive, self-aware, drive, whose transformative alternatives are not predicated on resurrecting primordial social intuitions but on future-oriented change. Second, thin-centred ideologies have the potential to become full if they incorporate existing elements of other ideologies; whereas the truncated nature of populisms seldom evinces such aspirations or potential – take as an example the implosion of UKIP post-referendum: it is simply ideologically too scrawny even to be thin! Even when having more range than UKIP, other European populisms do not come with the outward-pointing sockets that enable additional and systematic plug-ins to be attached, if and when desired, and that allow thin-centred ideologies to broaden their ideational appeal significantly. They have a minimal interest in expanding their very specific ideological brief and, when they do, it is generally for ephemeral cosmetic reasons rather than for principled ones. A thin-centred ideology implies that there is potentially more than the centre, but the populist core is all there is; it is not a potential centre for something broader or more inclusive. It is emaciatedly thin rather than thin-centred.

The populist core

Like conservatism, populism is subject to analysis not primarily in its substantive content, which will vary across circumstances and societies, but in its underlying features. Those are not always visible to its proponents, but they should be discernible to the student of ideologies. The list is not exhaustive and, to reiterate, pertains primarily to those European populisms generally considered to be on the right of the political spectrum.¹⁰ Three core attributes of right-of-centre populism are an insistent monism: that is, an inclination to conceive of society as a singular unitary body, as Paul Taggart and others have noted; an appeal to the origination and integrity of a defining founding moment or natality, even if not articulated as such; and a visceral fear of imported change in law, customs and people.¹¹ To elaborate:

(1) The undifferentiated understanding of society, the indivisibility of the people, is an ontological view of the social world, a world that endures corruption by various kinds of social impurity, not necessarily racial. But it is an error to interpret that homogeneity as leading to democratic egalitarianism, as substantive notions of material equality or equality of respect are hard to find in recent European populist versions. Given the many ways in which the concept ‘people’ can be and has been decontested, the particular conceptualization in play here relates to a bloc that cannot be disaggregated in any shape or form.

(2) The commitment to an initiating moment of a society is a common feature of political thinking. It implies the monopolistic ownership of the national timeline. Significantly, its main interest lies in reformulating sovereignty not merely as the spatial control over territory but as the appropriation of a temporal trajectory of ‘we were here first’, hence we are the ultimate deciders, the fons et origo of what matters and happens here, and hence also we always have precedence over immigrants, disregarding the fact that our ancestors were immigrants too. These kinds of stories – for stories is what they are – have in principle been woven elsewhere with some sophistication, as with social contract theories or the divine right of kings. Indeed, all secular versions of the political are self-launching: they invent themselves, they are their own origin, and they dream of uncontested priority and dominance over what happens next and later. Take Napoleon’s famous reputed words at his coronation as emperor, after taking the crown and placing it on his own head: ‘To be a king is to inherit old ideas and genealogy. I don’t want to descend from anyone.’ That is sovereignty as an insistence on the exclusive control over beginnings and hence over what comes after. Shifting from arrogant emperor to speaking in the name of an obdurate and hardy people merely replaces autocracy with populocracy – both removed from the practices of liberal democracy. Populism’s temporal sovereignty – and it is about imagined natality, not concrete nativism – is offered as the birth of a straightforward cultural exclusivity that cannot be delegated, preceded or brushed aside, and that has propelled a given society on an irreversible path of preserving its unique properties in the face of continuous challenges. Donald Trump’s electioneering slogan ‘Make America great again’ has been precisely such an instance, not merely of American exceptionalism but of a self-assumed past time-line that needs to be reinstituted in the face of its rupture.

(3) The fear of change is all-too often a vulgarized conservative anxiety that has accrued a neurotic antipathy to extra-national or extra-group located practices, populations and policies, whether or not that externality is real or imagined. Indeed, once internal elites are added to the list of alien forces, the fear and revulsion those elites prompt are reinforced by the fissure they inflict on the undifferentiated singularity of the people. It is often argued that populism is an ‘uprising’ of the people against distant and unresponsive elites. But that argument fails on two counts. The first is that such dualism constitutes a superficial symptom that merely masks the strongly underlying ideological monism epitomized in the first core concept. After all, populist movements and parties themselves often exhibit a particularly strong, top-down, elitism when party leaders such as Nigel Farage or Jörg Haider appropriate the voice of the people, or even of their own party, by channelling its ostensible unity through their own. Right-wing populism is not a grassroots phenomenon. Crucially, aggressive populist leadership filters, articulates, shapes and streamlines – often through individuals who themselves have socio-economic profiles not dissimilar to those found in the Establishment they scorn – some of the worries of the ‘people’ in whose name they speak by means of a more than usual simplistic set of messages, even given that ideologies always are simplifiers. The brutally successful campaign of Donald Trump for the American Presidency attests to that dependence on ideological sound-bites rather than policies. In addition, at a cruder level the expressed anti-elitism reflects the direct animosity of populist leaders and politicians towards the establishment elites that shun them and attempt to exclude them from office – an ideological reckoning, one could say. In other words, in the real world populists actually inhabit, elites battle elites, as distinct from the ‘real’ world populists conjure up in their imagination. Farage’s ‘Westminster elites’ who ‘marry each other’s sisters’ and Trump’s ‘such a nasty woman’ illustrate that point,¹² tellingly laced with misogyny.

The second is that the often-understandable resentment towards political decision-makers, and a resistance to the policies or perceived apathy of central governments, does not necessarily equate with populist sentiments, but with a plethora of partially unrelated grievances that more marginalized section of the population carry, and that are then aggregated, coalesced, and diluted through populist rhetoric. Populism is often seen as an ideology of the dispossessed, and it may indeed recruit them, but it is not articulating their political agenda. Participation in deliberatively reshaping a broad national agenda – in the shape of root and branch social reform and the redistribution of wealth and of life-opportunities that the dispossessed want and require – isn’t the name of the right-wing populist game. Nor, indeed, is it a question of embracing diverse and hitherto frozen-out groups – social inclusivity isn’t the name of that populist game either. When Brexit populists repetitively voiced their mantra ‘take back control’ it was ‘control’ on their terms, not on the terms of those whose concerns they claimed to express, concerns that rankle at a much more fundamental level than the fear of immigration and the obsession with sovereignty.

The three core attributes of populism are uncomfortably related both to thin-centred ideologies and to full ones. The characteristic morphology of ideologies in general is that they have (1) long-standing, relatively durable core concepts and ideas, then (2) a more plural set of adjacent concepts that pull them towards diverse ideological variants, and finally (3) an outer band of looser contingent ideas and events on their peripheries that serve as the interface between happenings in the concrete world and the more general core concepts. Although any one of the attributes of populism can constitute a feature of other full ideologies, and be found either closer to or further from their cores, the case of populism is different in that various populisms have little else in common except for those ideationally isolated core features, unsystematically and often haphazardly surrounded by a fragile and inconsistent melange of ephemeral and fleeting notions and policies.

The transmission of populist ideology: speed and emotion

That is not all, however. The resultant assemblage of the core ideological features of populism also exhibits two stand-out properties affecting their transmission. First, the events, happenings and ideas at the periphery of populism – at the crossing point between a concrete occurrence and its processing through ideological channels – have almost instant access to the core. An economic crisis, a wave of high immigration, judicial intervention by an extra-national body, a vociferous exogenous religious grouping, or an adverse political or judicial ruling inside the country, all have immediate ideological impact, verbally, vocally, and performatively. By contrast, more complex ideologies produce filters in the form of intricate ideological paths that impede the speed at which such events penetrate an ideology’s heart. Unless they involve a state of emergency such as war or terror, they add qualifiers, and they introduce both cultural and institutional time-lapses – reflexivity and public debate on the one hand, or parliamentary and judicial scrutiny on the other. Lacking those filters as part of its political ethos – most notably a considerable reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy, let alone fruitfulness, of internal ideological debate – populism is particularly vulnerable to this rapid transit, so that concerns triggered off by events in its ideological environment place it in a state of permanent ideational emergency and manufactured crisis. The flipside of that is that populism generates immediate reactions that also obviate the more measured responses.

That feature of the speed of penetrability may be found in authoritarian structures but it is rare in open societies. The fierce struggle between those, including the British Prime Minister Teresa May and her ‘hard Brexit’ ministers who invoke the stark urgency and finality of ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and those who wish to apply parliamentary and judicial brakes to the scramble towards disengagement, revealingly illustrates how a populist mindset can spill over and penetrate deliberative and constitutionally prudent paths in well-established democracies. Consequently, strenuous attempts are made to freeze future temporality discursively, in particular any rethinking on that issue. The perceived crises of immigration and ‘sovereignty’ then collapse into another perceived crisis – that of removing the internally political destructiveness of the Brexit debate as quickly as possible, before it is adulterated by reflection and deliberation that could be met by a destabilizing populist insurgence. Among out-and-out populists, note Farage’s instant reaction – in the form of a veiled threat – to the High Court’s ruling on the need for Parliament to initiate the formal exit from the European Union: ‘I worry that a betrayal may be near at hand… I now fear that every attempt will be made to block or delay the triggering of Article 50.¹³ If this is so, they have no idea of the level of public anger they will provoke.’¹⁴

Second, the speed of impact is hastened by the visceral rawness of emotions such as anxiety and fear, on whose power populism thrives, and the fabrication of threats from every corner. True, current scholars of ideology are now inclined to regard emotion as a standard feature of all ideologies. Even liberals, those ostensibly rational thinkers, get hot under the collar when confronted with abuses of human rights, and are self-righteously intolerant about intolerance. But the question is, do emotions underpin or replace reflexive argumentation? Many populisms should elicit interest not due to the presence of emotion alone, but specifically due to their compelling and central ideological elements of imagination run riot, and fantasy becoming conspiratorial and demonic. Whether those dystopias are painted in the guise of non-Christians overrunning Hungary or the entire Turkish nation potentially upping sticks and moving to the UK following an imminent EU expansion, populist politicians will not baulk at attempts to fan mass hysteria through fabricating threats. Populist ideology feeds on a sense of beleaguerment.

There exists also a frequently assumed third characteristic of ideologies – that they possess a degree of internal cohesion. Cohesion, unlike comprehensiveness, addresses a plausible degree of consistency and the close mutual interdependence of the ideational units of an ideology, rather than the range of issues it embraces. But cohesion has been related to two ideological styles that are not necessarily ubiquitous, each pulling in a different direction: the well-developed and intellectually complex ideologies that typify the traditional great schemes of conservatism, liberalism and socialism; or, conversely, the dogmatic and semi-closed communist or fascist ideologies against which the former groups were pitted. The idea of cohesion was reinforced during the interwar ideological battles of the middle of the 20th century. At the time, a high-intensity cohesion was thought to be an archetypical ideological feature, but in the longer perspective it turned out to be the exception, not the rule. The assertion that ideologies were doctrinaire was reinforced by the salience of superimposed, inflexible, and tightly-knit ideologies of a totalitarian, or at least total, structure that likewise turned out to be unrepresentative of the genre. It now appears that most existing ideological constructs, populism included, fit into none of those. They all tend to be more fragmented, more ephemeral, looser and less stable than the conventional model. Political thinking is always messy and indeterminate, which is why the endeavours of some political philosophers to construct rationally reflective theories are doomed at best to limited success outside the world of academia. Populism, however, is more fragmented than most and often inchoate in its internal consistency beyond its sweeping core ideas. Hence either intellectual gravitas or dogmatism would be too flattering an attribute of populism.

The indivisible people in Brexit discourse

The decontestation of the people as a unitary body is particularly simplistic, unlike other prevalent usages, such as ‘we, the people’ in the USA – a phrase that possesses a metaphorical appeal to democratic, emancipatory ideals of the enlightenment rather than to populism. Most populist references relating the people to democracy have a manipulative rhetorical effect, in which democracy is the abstract rule of the people en masse, without the liberal and intricate constitutional trappings that have come to be associated with European and North American democracies. Demoting the accoutrements of constitutionalism, it is precisely the de-pluralized, unreal and powerful word ‘people’, employed as a weapon of argument, riding roughshod over diversity counter-claims located in public political discourse, whether ideological, ethnic, religious or gendered, that enables some individuals to speak in its name. Populisms are adept at bringing forth a pseudo-charismatic figure who, rather than representing the people, arrogates and replaces their many voices, giving populism the articulateness that, paradoxically, would undermine it if it were genuinely encouraged at the vernacular level into which it claims to tap. Populism thus processes and ideologizes the ‘people’ as a stylized entity. It bears superficial resemblance to organic theories of society but bereft of the delicate interconnected structures that those theories develop in their many permutations.

Brexiters, too, invoke the referendum as the ‘will of the people’, a phrase understood as a singular homogeneous monolith, conveniently ignoring that 62.5% of the electorate (‘remainers’, and those who abstained from participating) did not vote to leave the EU but are ‘automatically’ included in that will. That discursive populism has been voiced not only by UKIP members but by UK government ministers and governing party M.P.s; thus Priti Patel, Secretary of State for International Development, insisted in an interview on 16 October 2016 that ‘the British people have spoken and we will deliver for them’.¹⁵ And the Conservative M.P. Nadine Dorries stated in another interview that there was ‘only one position the British people have taken and that is we are going to exit the EU.’¹⁶ The discursive spillage is not, however, limited to the political right of centre; even Labour MPs who campaigned for remaining in the EU have bought into and legitimated those populist constructs. Thus Hilary Benn declared in an interview on BBC Radio Four on 5 November 2016 that ‘I can’t see circumstances in which Parliament is not going to uphold the decision of the British people in the referendum,’¹⁷ while the Labour Deputy leader, Tom Watson, told BBC 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics: ‘We are not going to hold this up. The British people have spoken.’¹⁸

Reporting on the High Court judgement regarding Article 50, the pro-Brexit press emphatically evoked a stark populist dichotomy: ‘The judges vs. the people’ was the front headline of the normally austere The Daily Telegraph; while the Daily Mail went one further with ‘Enemies of the People’ under the front-page photograph of the three High Court judges.¹⁹ But the linguistic and ideological seepage infected government ministers as well. Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, declared on BBC1’s Question Time that the High Court case was ‘an attempt to frustrate the will of the British people and it is unacceptable.’²⁰ Staying ‘on message’ in effect entails reiterating a phrase that is at the same time both deliberate and unreflective; it means introducing a key populist term, with its illiberal, absolute, and unbending implications, into everyday political language. To that is added the fundamental preoccupation of populists with speed in implementing the ‘will of the people’ before that will can be unpacked as consisting of diverse particular components (bolstered by anxiety over their future (re)electability). The urgency of haste is thwarted by the rule of law’s insistence on the unavoidable ‘slowness’ of due process and public scrutiny. ‘Frustration’ is indeed the key emotion here, but it is frustration with the ‘awkward’ imperative of upholding a constitutional order, rather than with the socio-economic lot of the dispossessed.

All that corroborates Müller’s perceptive observation in his recent book that ‘for a political actor or movement to be populist, it must claim that a part of the people is the people.’²¹ Contrast that with the Rousseauian notion of the general will, which is painstakingly forged out of a reflective exercise by which each person is individually asked not what is good exclusively for him- or herself (the volonté de tous) but what would be good for everyone else as well as the reflecting individual (the volonté générale), who thus participates in the endeavour to identify a commonality amidst plural differences, a commonality arising ‘from the deliberations of a people properly informed’.²² Brexiters, however, fall into line with other European populists – a subtle irony here – by papering over normal pluralities and presenting themselves as articulating the true, real or unitary popular voice.

No wonder that sovereignty shares top billing with anti-immigration on the list of the political demands surrounding Brexit. The postulation of a particular kind of political and cultural singularity utilizes the culturally prevailing legal and political fictions of sovereignty as ‘one and indivisible’, on par both with the rejection of plurality and with the slogan ‘take back control’ – the latter a hollow demand in the face of the collapsing pound or the globalized interests of companies trading in, and with, the UK. Revealingly, also, despite the curious British fiction of parliamentary sovereignty, Brexiters insist on overriding it with a constitutionally unconventional appeal to the absoluteness of popular sovereignty. In typical populist vein, Farage dismissed the constitutional practice of parliamentary sovereignty, stating his preference for ‘constitutional change to make referendums binding’.²³ Although the great myth that majoritarianism equals the will of the people has been exploited in many democratic narratives, the implacable insistence that irreversible truths are spelled out in the name of majoritarianism is patently populist. In mature, self-confident democracies winners may willingly make concessions to losers. In the world of populisms – a world inhabited by anxious and unconfident fantasists alongside, and intercutting, the genuinely aggrieved and side-lined – a distaste for tolerance, and distrust of ‘others’, is a matter of principle, because compromise would be a betrayal of the ‘authentic’ people.

Note also the distinction between referring to the common people in populist discourse and in socialist thought, as in Cole’s and Postgate’s allusion to the British working class in their book The Common People.²⁴ Significantly, European populists do not normally accompany notions of group values or national exclusivity and originality with elaborated visions of social growth and purpose. And unlike most nationalisms, populist exclusivity is experienced as a generalized sense of siege that can be contingently and interchangeably applied to the influx of strangers of all kinds, to the identification of aliens in the midst of a society, to the threat of economic competition from abroad, or – indeed – to internal political elites. Tellingly, populism’s unity is tribal and de-individualized, unlike other solidarity-centred ideologies based on culture, citizenship, social rights, or the Marxist species-being.

Populism’s status as an ideology

Those who prefer the term ‘mentalité’ as a descriptor of populism seem to do so because they entertain an older conception of ideology to which ‘mentalité’ was opposed.²⁵ Larousse defines ‘mentalité’ as ‘ensemble des habitudes intellectuelles, des croyances et des dispositions psychiques caractéristiques d’un groupe’. That covers much ground on which recent understandings of ideologies now stand. Indeed, American social science definitions of ideology have for a long time included beliefs, attitudes and opinions. Populism could perhaps qualify as an ideology on those criteria, because it is a mixture of a loose grass-roots assortment of opinions and a top-down, orchestrated belief-system – reflecting both genuine attitudes among sections of the population and views verbalized by individuals who rise unconventionally to positions of leadership, where their own persona channels the alleged singularity of the nation into an imposed singularity of folk representation. Another reason why ‘mentalité’ is preferred, so the argument goes, is because populism lacks a defining text or texts, unlike socialism and possibly liberalism and fascism. But ideologies no longer have defining texts – ask contemporary European liberals and state socialists – and there are other ideologies, such as feminism and ecologism, that never had one. So that is no longer a necessary attribute of ideologies, if indeed it ever was. The concept of a defining text is logocentric in a manner that eludes populism, whose attraction is visceral and anti high-culture rather than intellectual. The appeal to referendums, and the absence of complex manifestos and nuanced policy platforms, constitute the Ersatz-democracy that populists seem to deliver. Finally, the concept of ‘mentalité’ is also too constricted to do justice to populism, lacking as it does a specific political content, whereas the manipulated anti-elitism of populism is strongly political. The slightly narrower German term ‘Weltanschauung’ doesn’t do the work, either.

Then there is the question of self-identification. Two axes of general analysis that run through ideologies are relevant here: are they deliberate or unconscious; and do their adherents or their analysts furnish them with a distinctive name? Populists do not like to call their beliefs an ideology, sharing that distaste with right-of-centre conservatives, who argue that ideologies are held only by their competitors – denounced as doctrinaire and reality-defying systemisers. Furthermore, very few European populisms refer to themselves as populism, and that lack is significant. Contrast that, for example, with the fervent competition over the tag ‘liberal’ by the claimants to that label. Outside populist circles, by contrast, the term populism is employed in a manner that reduces it to a scholarly or politically pejorative concept. Does that matter? The titles of so-called populist parties across Europe utilize terms such as ‘people’, ‘national’, ‘true’, ‘free’, ‘Nord’ (with a strong ideological undercurrent attached to that geopolitical word). And they usurp the labels of other ideological groups: ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’, ‘progress’. For that matter, some left-wing populist parties are curious hybrids containing anti-capitalist and social justice programmes, based on mass protest and quasi-socialist demagogic egalitarianism. But one cannot draw clear conclusions from that, as a common error is to assume a one-to-one relationship between party and ideology.

The aversion of populists to employing either ‘populism’ or ‘ideology’ may also shed light on the assertion by some scholars that populism is best understood as a movement rather than an ideology. That is an erroneous choice, for ideologies can be both. All ideologies perform the vital political role of mobilizing or withholding support for communities. Some ideologies are intentionally attached to movements such as liberation theology in Latin America, early Marxism, forms of radical Islam, or black power. Other structurally conservative ideologies lack the ideational incentive to organize themselves into movements, because the notion of movement gravitates towards reform, even revolution, which they abhor or at least regard with suspicion. But it is questionable whether populisms have sufficient organization, motivation, self-discipline or visionary impetus to constitute a transformative political movement, rather than embodying a reactive and anxious disposition.

Which understandings of ideology, then, might incorporate some forms of populism and which would not? For those who regard the domain of ideology as one of dissimulation and mythologizing, populism offers some evidence. Yet an ideology needs to be tested not in terms of whether it is true or false, but in terms of its own criteria of success. Does it communicate well? Can it be easily consumed by its intended audiences and thus make an impact? Does its inevitable simplification of political ideas for the purpose of mass consumption strike an appropriate balance between dumbing down and over-technical sophistication? Is it robust enough to have a durable agenda, yet flexible enough to adapt to the barrage of contingencies that will constantly assail it? Does it display an imaginative and experimental creativity and an attractive way of ordering ideas from which public policy can materialize? Populism ticks some, but far from all, of those ideological boxes: Like all ideologies, it competes discursively over the control of public political language: among many instances, some already alluded to above, the manner in which the populist and headstrong ‘Brexit’ has speedily engulfed and replaced the more stolid and restrained ‘Euroscepticm’ is indicative of the changing ideological odds. Populisms are good communicators and hence mobilizers, adopting efficient language, easily transmitted and persuasive for many; and they are demonstrably and urgently action-oriented. But in the long run, populisms are poor dischargers of the vital role ideologies possess as broad national agenda setters.

In sum, none of this notably advances the case for employing the label ‘populism’ as the name of an ideology, except to observe two opposing ideological reasons for the persistent prevalence of the name: (1) when it serves as a convenient catch-all marker of radical popular demands that clamour for legitimation, and (2) when it is used to denounce particular brands of right-wing xenophobia. One is far less likely to discover ordinary members of society claiming the populist title with pride, marketing their ideas as populist, or imagining the future of populism in a dialogue with other ideological families. To return to the notion of a ‘thin-centred’ ideology, populism displays a slightly different trait. It not only falls short of comprehensiveness but short of nuanced specificity in what it does offer. Vagueness and indeterminacy may be good vote-catchers, but the result is at best a phantom ideology, a spectre that can be draped over pressing and intricate socio-political issues in order to blur and to conceal. Although that constitutes a difficulty in regarding it as a distinct stand-alone ideology, it cannot completely rule out the possibility that in populism we may be experiencing a new, unfamiliar genre of ideology: an amalgam of historically longstanding modifiers of ideology: amorphous, sporadic, truncated, discursively bellicose, inflexibly contemptuous of ideological rivals. Each of those can be found separately in other contexts, but under the masthead ‘populism’ they are combined in a unique but ideationally insubstantial fingerprint.

Michael Freeden
University of Oxford
[email protected]

Notes

1. See M. Freeden, ‘The elusiveness of European (anti-)liberalism’, in D. Gosewinkel (Ed.) Anti-liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 33–44.

2. M. Freeden, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3. On that argument see T. Pappas, ‘Distinguishing liberal democracy’s challengers’, Journal of Democracy, 27(4) (2016), pp. 22–36.

4. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 485–550; M. Freeden, ‘Is nationalism a distinct ideology?’ Political Studies, 46 (1998), 748–765.

5. C. Fieschi, ‘“Introduction” to special issue on populism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), pp. 235–240.

6. B. Stanley, ‘The thin ideology of populism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 13 (2008), pp. 95–110.

7. C. Mudde and C. Rovira Kaltwasser, ‘Populism’, in M. Freeden, L.T. Sargent, and M. Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 493–512.

8. 20 November 2014, available at http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025845034 (accessed 12 October 2016); P. Lucardie, S. Otjes, and G. Voerman, ‘Dealing with ideological diehards and eclectic extremists. The establishment’s reactions to political extremism in the Netherlands’ (Groningen: Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties, University of Groningen, 2014); T. Pauwels, Populism in Western Europe: Comparing Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

9. J. Rydgren and J. van Holsteyn, ‘Holland and Pim Fortuyn: a deviant case or the beginning of something new?’, in J. Rydgren (Ed.) Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-wing Populism in the Western world (Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005), pp. 41–63.

10. For analyses of left-wing populism – despite the shared name, a different ideational cluster – see Y. Stavrakakis and G. Katsambekis, ‘Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 19 (2014), pp. 119–142; and A. Kioupkiolis, ‘Podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 21 (2016), pp. 99–120.

11. Taggart astutely links that unitary aspect to the populist idea of a heartland stretching back in time to a romanticized past – combining the first and second attributes. See P. Taggart, ‘Populism and representative politics in contemporary Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), pp. 269–288.

12. N. Farage, 24 September 2014, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSv0aLZ6_co (accessed 10 November 2016); D. Trump, 19 October 2016, available at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/oct/20/donald-trump-calls-hillary-clinton-a-nasty-woman-during-final-debate-video (accessed 10 November 2016).

13. Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union spells out the procedures that are required for a member state to leave the European Union.

14. Nigel Farage, BBC News, 3 November 2016, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785 (accessed 3 November 2016).

15. Priti Patel on the Andrew Marr Show, BBC 1, 16 October 2016, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37670911 (accessed 2 November 2016).

16. Nadine Dorries on Peston on Sunday, ITV, 30 October 2016, available at http://www.itv.com/hub/peston-on-Sunday/2a4458a0017 (accessed 2 November 2016).

17. Hilary Benn on Radio Four, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z (accessed 5 November 2016).

18. Tom Watson, ‘BBC 5 Live’, Pienaar's Politics, 6 November 2016, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37886882 (accessed 6 November 2016).

19. The Daily Telegraph, 4 November 2016; Daily Mail, 4 November 2016.

20. Sajid Javid on Question Time, BBC 1, 3 November 2016, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b081wrzp/question-time-03112016 (accessed 7 November 2016).

21. J.-W. Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 22.

22. J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), esp. pp. 72–76.

23. Nigel Farage on the Andrew Marr Show, BBC 1, 6 November 2016, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37886882 (accessed 6 November 2016).

24. G.D.H. Cole and R. Postgate, The Common People 1746–1938 (London: Methuen, 1938).

25. See M. Tarchi, ‘Populism: ideology, political style, mentality?’, Czech Journal of Political Science, 23 (2016), pp. 95–109.