Review article: forget populism?

ABSTRACT

Contemporary ‘crisis studies’ seek to advance democracy by emphasizing the threats that technocracy and populism pose to a specific form of it, liberal-democracy. Crisis studies argue that, since the 1970s, technocratic policymaking has deepened economic inequality. This has fostered citizenly anger, which populists exploit. Four well-known iterations of this argument are evaluated using a political realist lens. Political realism emphasizes the historical context of politics, actors’ possible motives, and a normative orientation derived from the political order itself, rather than an external ethico-moral ideal. The realist lens encourages comparison of crisis studies with historical political theory, which situates liberal-democracy within the long-term development of oligarchic systems of authority, and political history, which portrays technocracy as a product of the well-funded reaction to assertions of the democratic impulse that began in the 1970s. Populism is in this view not so much a perversion of liberal-democracy as it is a perhaps unintended consequence of anti-democratic reaction. The crisis studies make this error because based on a moral defence of the justice of the liberal-democratic order. Revealing the democratically unhelpful moralism at the core of crisis studies demonstrates the usefulness of political realism as a form of applied political theory, and not simply theory about theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Political realism
• populism
• democratic theory
• technocracy
• elitism
• oligarchy
• Raymond Geuss
• Bernard Williams

Acknowledgments

Research for this essay was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, through the Research Stays for University Academics and Scientists 2019 programme (ID 57440915) in collaboration with Dirk Jörke and the Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt, and by the Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech. I also thank Dirk, and Elisabeth Chaves, Tim Luke, Besnik Pula, editor Matt Mattravers, and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on versions of this essay. The argument’s failings are my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this sense, Frum echoes the views of other anti-Trump conservatives who have embraced classical liberalism, such as Max Boot (Shenk, 2019).

2. To be fair, the crisis scholars reject the norm of stability. Rather, they normatively prioritize the capacity of liberal-democracy to balance ineradicable tensions among interest-bearing but norm-observing partisans who exhibit faith in the neutrality of, or at least the ‘turn-taking-in-government’ required by, that system because such partisans are wedded primarily to one material interest in particular, the wealth or affluence associated with economic growth. However, this move merely begs the question.

3. A simple and admittedly flawed Ctrl+F search of Mounk’s book reveals 131 mentions of ‘we’ and 111 mentions of ‘us’ in 370 pages of text and notes. A similar search of Müller’s book reveals 46 results for ‘we’ and 24 for ‘us’ in 133 pages.

4. Clearly what is at stake here is not democratic but economic growth.

5. This baffling tendency to blame relatively obscure French intellectuals rather than, for example, the growth of privately owned ‘person-to-person’ media platforms, or the Reagan Administration’s deregulation of news-media responsibility for fact-worthiness, for US’ cultural relativism is common to anti- and pro-Trump conservatives alike (Shenk 2019).

6. For avowing realists Galston (2010) and Müller (2017, p. 106n.) at least, this is highly unusual.

7. Insofar as Galston served as an adviser to the Clinton, and Frum to the W. Bush, administrations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst [57440915/91730606].