Michael Magoon suggests that we stop using the term “populism”. He argues that it is ill-defined, incoherent, pejorative and selectively applied — that it is used to attack political opponents without having to engage in a serious discussion, to quietly imply authoritarianism, and to stir up support for limiting free speech and democratic competition.
But one can restate the problem in a different way: The problem with the term is that calling someone a populist comes with no cost. Compare: When you accuse someone of being on the left, it implies that you are on the right. Attacking the right implies that you are on the left. But with “populist” there is no such position-taking. It does not bind you to anything. You insult the other person without opening yourself up to criticism. It’s cheap.
This is what Magoon has in mind:
“Marine Le Pen is a populist.”
“Oh, wow. Scary. What can we do to keep her out of the elections?”
But what if we just started to call the anti-populist stance “elitism” instead? How about this?
“Giorgia Meloni is a populist.”
“Oh, wow. So you’re an elitist? Do tell me more.”
***
Once you start thinking of populism as the antonym to elitism, the term is no longer as vague as it used to be. You can link both populism and elitism to concrete policy preferences.
If you think interest rates should be set by an independent central bank, rather than by elected officials, you are an elitist.
If, on the other hand, you believe the guilt of a defendant should be settled by a randomly selected jury rather than by a professor of jurisprudence, you are a populist.
If you believe that people are overwhelmingly in favor of price controls and have no idea how damaging those are, and that therefore they should not be let anywhere near the ballot box, you are an elitist.
If you think the decision to turn a neighborhood into a pedestrian zone should be made by popular vote rather than by the mayor, you are a populist.
If you believe that constitutional change should require a supermajority, a second chamber and a constitutional court rather than just fifty percent plus one, you are an elitist.
If you believe that a nuclear power plant design should be settled by popular vote rather than decided by nuclear physicists, you are a populist.
If you agree that people should choose names for their babies from a list curated by language experts, you are an elitist.
If you believe the name of a polar research vessel should be settled by internet poll, that it should be called Boaty McBoatface rather than RRS Sir David Attenborough, you are a populist.
In short, as a populist, you prefer a referendum to an elected politician, and an elected politician to an unelected bureaucrat. As an elitist, you prefer a nuclear physicist to an elected politician, and an elected politician to a referendum in which a technical matter is decided by a mass of clueless voters.
***
By the way, the distinction is not set up so that one side always comes out on top. There is a coherent argument to be made on each side.
The elitist argument: The world is getting ever more complex. There’s barely a single political decision to be made without facing a lot of technical details. Unintended consequences abound, visible only to experts. More decisions should therefore be made by the people who actually know what they are talking about.
The populist argument: Leaving the populace out of the decision-making process creates resentment. Trust in government goes down, legitimacy collapses. In the US, it is currently at 18%. Experts make better decisions, but deferring to them erodes social consensus. Proceed like this and people start wondering about whether elections are being stolen. Expect a drop in state capacity, people sabotaging the state out of sheer resentment and, eventually, a civil war.
***
Many contemporary political questions make more sense on the populist/elitist axis than on the left/right one: DOGE, Brussels bureaucracy, NIMBY versus YIMBY, building nuclear plants and datacenters, even immigration.
But very much like left/right, populism/elitism is a scale, not a binary distinction. The best solution lies at neither extreme. Neither communists, nor Nazis build successful, happy states. And neither do far-populist, vote-about-everything people or far-elitist social engineers.
What you want, in the end, is a balance. The real discussion happens between center-elitists and center-populists. Let experts decide, by all means, but let a popular vote stop them when they go off the rails. Accept technically inferior decisions on a few salient matters so that the general populace can verify that the democratic safeguards still work.
***
Finally: Would politicians accept these labels?
Well, the term “elitism” is approximately as offensive as “populism”, so it balances out. Neither side has cause to feel wronged.
Besides, the actors involved don’t seem all that reluctant to appropriate the terms.
Matteo Salvini: “I am and I will always be a populist, because who listens to the people does his job and his duty?”
There’s a lot of that kind of conditional acceptance, from Trump to Mélenchon. (“Populiste, moi? J’assume!”)
On the other side of the barricade, Richard Hanania would, I believe, gladly describe himself as an elitist. Or here’s an article self-describing effective altruism as an elitist movement. Even more so, it puts the elitism at the very core of the ideology: Stop being an elitist and you stop being an effective altruist. When Greta Thunberg says “listen to the scientists,” she’s taking an explicitly elitist stance. Whether she’d own the term is not clear, but in the end, nothing stops the others from applying it to her.
***
It often feels like the old left/right spectrum has outlived its usefulness. Stretched to fit current controversies, it no longer resembles its former self. Maybe the populist/elitist spectrum would fit the modern world better. Or, for those attached to the old labels, one can think in terms of a political compass with left/right and populist/elitist axes.
I really don’t think most people would refer to someone in favor of juries or the existence of referendums as necessarily supporting a “populist” policy. Even arguments for direct democracy, when they’re serious and well-constructed, aren’t typically labelled with the term in my experience. At the same time, a very poorly-argued call for authoritarianism, filled with conspiracy theories and fear-mongering, might be pretty likely to be described by pundits as “populist”.
I’d argue that in practice, “populist” is usually used to mean something like “very dumb policies intended to appeal to people who don’t understand the world very well”. I think people find it useful because it sounds positive-valence to the people its criticizing, which lets people talk in public about the very real phenomenon of politics targeted at low-information voters without usually offending anyone.
In that light, I think a more accurate opposite of “populist” would be something like “technocratic”.
Spot on imho: “populism” is rather clearly not at all e.g. in OP’s words a believe “that a nuclear power plant design should be settled by popular vote”.
To your definition I’d add that it often comes with the aim to attract voter support for these dumb things all while ~ hideously pushing an agenda that is very clearly not in that electoral circle’s interest and maybe mostly unrelated to what they officially stand for (e.g. talk poor people’s problems, but benefit the rich firms—and maybe in the worst case, when a solution for the poor people’s problems could be in sight, even purposely not fully tackle it as it’s not in the party’s interest to make the people less angry).
Slightly ironically though, your “technocratic” though would be the better opposite to OP’s definition of populist in the nuclear example, rather than the usual one (yours/mine).
Imho the better opposite to the commonly used notion of “populism” is more things like “serious”/”honest” or so—though esp. the latter isn’t really a fit as most people who talk about populists and the rest know that in politics much is not in a broader sense honest anyway.
I mean, I would guess that OP is not trying to capture every last nuance of how the word is already used, but is instead engaged in conceptual engineering, making a bid to modify how the term is used to make it more useful.
Correct.
The word sucks at the moment. If the definition of “populist” is “advocate of harmful policies that happen to be popular among voters”, then all your opponents are, almost by definition, populists. (Well, expect for those who hold unpopular views, but shrug, why care about those?)
So how to make the term suck less?
Magoon proposes to stop using the word. But the cat is already out of the bag. Won’t work.
You can make your own, sensible, definition of populism, but good luck force-feeding it to the people.
Finally, you can invent the opposite word. People are slaves of their own ontology. Once they start thinking in terms of populism vs. elitism, as especially once they start forming political alliances based on it, the us vs. them psychology kicks in, along with gather-around-the-flag effect, and suddenly, instead of one vague term, you have two sharply delineated ones.
> If the definition of “populist” is “advocate of harmful policies that happen to be popular among voters”, then all your opponents are, almost by definition, populists.
I don’t think that’s quite right. Some politics are objectively much more targeted at low-information voters than others, and those will look like a pretty distinct and unique cluster even to supporters.
Suppose an oracle were to divide up every politician into three groups according to the degree to which their policies follow from an accurate model of the world- one group for the most accurate, a second for the least accurate, and then everyone else. I think most people would perceive these to represent very different styles of politics.
To supporters of the second group, the policies of the first would look complicated, cold and dull. They might understand that the policies have a lot of support from academics and experts, but would assume that this is because experts are themselves cold, dull and out of touch with the experiences of ordinary people. The policies of second group, by contrast, would look revolutionary- wheres previous politicians constantly dismissed their fears and refused to give them what they wanted because they were too cold, dull, and caught up in strange intellectual cultures, the politicians in this group are offering simple, sweeping fixes to every problem with no trade-offs.
If you told these supporters that the politicians had been sorted according to the intelligence of their policies, they wouldn’t believe you- but if you give the groups names like “technocrats”, “populists” and “everyone else”, they’ll mostly be willing to go along with it. After all, the groups are obviously different enough to warrant names- and the first group has policies supported by dry technical arguments, while the policies of the second seem like they must be overwhelmingly popular with ordinary people and only really opposed by some tiny cabal of out-of-touch elites.
The issue with “elitism” as opposition to populism is that the current crop of elites are generally not believed to have earned their keep. If we had a crop of elites that were exceptionally smart, or had proven their dedication to the country by fighting for it, or shown a special degree of noblesse oblige, then there would be a coherent position around keeping them in power and giving them extra slack, but most people, left and right, see the people who currently have power as morally shaky at best and usually much, much less competent than the elite of 100 years ago.
I think there would be a decent block of support for a society run by Henry Fords, or Werner von Brauns, but I don’t think any sizable group of people want a society run by Richard Hananias and Larry Finks. As a concrete example, a lot of people stopped trusting scientific institutions when a sizable share of the people saying that covid lockdowns were critical to public health immediately did an about-face during BLM. A scientist willing to hold to the evidence at hand even when it’s politically dangerous is worth listening to, but backing down on that even once is permanently discrediting. Scientists who want to influence policy must maintain a pristine record of never falling into Lysenkoism, or they will be treated as just another lobbying group[1].
Put briefly, “elitism” can only exist when the ruling class got there on merit and reliably polices its own to maintain an aura of benevolence and competence. While past populism was of the liberal conviction that power should be delegated as broadly as possible, current populism is generally a reaction to the current crop of elites being viscerally repulsive to a large segment of the population, and people reacting by trying to get absolutely anyone else to replace them.
In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to be politically sacrosanct, you must be above politics in your conduct. You don’t get to enjoy the benefits of being a political client without the costs of being a political target.
I am with you, but I think you underestimate how repulsive the elites used to be in the past.
There’s a difference between “powerful man who does some mean things because that’s how the sausage is made” and “utterly irredeemable, useless person that the nation would unambiguously be better off without”. Most people are realistic enough to tolerate the former, but view the current elite as being better described by the latter.
Ford, for instance, said some things that are uncomfortable for most modern audiences, but also revolutionized manufacturing, was vigilant about his workers’ quality of life, and, moreover, seemed to genuinely love America and its people. Vlad the Impaler put quite a few heads on pikes, but did it to save his homeland from invasion, and is thus regarded by many of his countrymen as a hero. Larry Fink, in contrast to them, is strictly parasitic in his relationship with the broader society[1].
Visceral, literal ugliness is also a factor in public opinion. Having read through a few of the Epstein emails, I think anyone that trashy would have been escorted out of any gathering of America’s past ruling class fairly quickly. A lot of modern populism stems from the fact that Midwesterers with 1600 SATs are struggling in life while a Rothschild scion is chatting to Epstein about her 1070, and while Epstein is gloating tastelessly about his clique’s intellectual superiority to the rest of society in another tab.
Economists may object, and I’d have sympathy in a freer market than this one, but the ostensible value of this kind of finance is in profiting off of inefficiencies in the market and thereby removing them. This defense starts to falter when the government can be lobbied to maintain these efficiencies indefinitely at taxpayer expense.
My instinct is that the “aura of benevolence” part is the most necessary and the “aura of competence” part is almost optional. If an elite class (or faction of elites) is perceived to be hostile to the interests or values of the people (or a faction of people), then it would be quite sensible for those people to reject those elites in proportion to their (perceived) competence. There might be some people who are awed by power and competence, any power, regardless of where it comes from and what it does, and thus worship that power regardless of whether it seeks to help or harm those people. (Right now I have in mind the AI successionists who say that it would be immoral for humans to continue existing if it stifles the growth of far superior artificial beings, or the e/accs posting about worshipping the “god of thermodynamics”.) But, although I might be typical-minding here, I think that most people want to be able to trust that the people with power will work to preserve and augment rather than destroy the things that they care about.
I think political scientists would agree with you. Competence has a complicated effect. It builds trust slowly, but then one spectacular failure destroys it quickly. Also, what’s tracked by the populace is the perceived competence, not the actual competence. An accusation of corruption can destroy the trust as much as actual corruption.
I’ve seen this position from a lot of academics, in quite a few well-cited papers on the subject, but I don’t think it holds. They were accused of corruption for a long time by lots of people, but trust didn’t take a nosedive until there were viscerally apparent examples of it that directly impacted peoples’ lives.
I am surprised to see a post exhibiting pretty naked poltical bias receiving this many upvotes.
“Politics is a mind killer”, and your mind should be firing alarm bells when someone confidently asserts that the set of political beliefs that best fit their own culture’s Overton window happen to be correct.
“Neither communists, nor Nazis build successful, happy states.”
I am not endorsing either ideology but I don’t think this statment is literally true.
There’s only been one state run by literal Nazi’s and they lost WW2, but white Germans reported decent levels of happiness until the war started to turn. If we look at states which exhibit facist or far-right stances, it becomes even less clear that they can’t build successful states. Franco’s Spain averaged strong economic growth despite being fascist
On the other side of the coin, the USSR won WW2 and put the first man in space. Life expectancy for citizens in Cuba is closer to their richer US counterparts despite a dramatically worse economy.
“And neither do far-populist, vote-about-everything people or far-elitist social engineers.”
Switzerland has practice direct democracy for over a century. China has been a one party state and has several examples of social engineering.
Neither country is doing terribly.
Viable economic and social strategies do not fit neatly on a 2 dimensional grid and what you think is the “center” is a purely a cultural artefact
Switzerland is a fun case study of how a country is, in theory, a direct democracy, but in reality, the system is (for a good reason) much more “elitist”. Almost all popular initiatives fail. What really happens is that the system of counterproposals kicks in with negotiation between the initiative committee, the government and other stakeholders. I’ve written about it here: https://www.250bpm.com/p/referendum-mechanics-in-a-marketplace
I suspect the elitist-populist dimension (as you put it; in common use, they have slightly non-opposite connotations) is not central enough to most political coalitions to be important. It’s not elitists vs populists, it’s various conflicting groups of elites fighting each other and various conflicting groups who claim popular alignment.
Elites fighting each other has always been the case. Still, there was at least a narrative dimension, eg. labor vs. capital. That one doesn’t seem to be so central nowadays, but I do see a lot of corrupt elites vs. common people talk.
The axis populism/elitism tracks appropriately the idea that one would prefer as a government a cabinet of experts consensually chosen among peers for their qualities, not unlike Nobels, rather than a candidate of random competence drawing all his legitimacy from a direct suffrage vote.
But we could also argue that this axis does not fully capture what we mean when we say disapprovingly that this candidate is a populist, pointing to the fact that he or she abusively exploits an intrinsic fragility of democracy, consisting in flattering and manipulating the less educated, saying whatever they want to hear, in a purely politicking and short-term calculus, without paying much consideration to the general interest or public good. A form of cheating/reward hacking/Goodhart. In this context populism would be synonym for demagogy, a hack or exploit of a system that we otherwise find legitimate and prefer to any autocratic or oligarchic models such as a board of non elected experts. Someone using the term in this sense might see themselves as a good-faith populist, a democrat, as opposed to a bad-faith populist, a demagogue, and would reject the elitist label. However I concede that you would probably place these people around the center of your axis .
I agree on the broad picture.
PS : minor correction it’s Marine Le Pen (not Marie).
Uh. Thanks! Fixed.
I trust the plebs when they same something is wrong (though I may disagree with their specific diagnosis), I do not trust them when they propose a solution. Where does that put me on the populism/elitism scale?
This sounds to me like a proposal of a new false dilemma; I am not sure what benefits is it supposed to bring.