Smokers’ corner: Decoding populism
In the July 2017 issue of The New Statesman, British academic David Marquand writes that populism is not a doctrine or a governing philosophy; it is a disposition, a set of attitudes and, above all, a style. Today, the term ‘populism’ has become quite the rage among political commentators in Europe and the US. Those attached to mainstream political parties of both these regions are genuinely concerned about witnessing an alarming increase in the popularity and vote banks of populists and their projected causes.
So if populism is not a doctrine, why the concern? It is because populism as a disposition is a dubious and disruptive disposition. For example, in Age of Reform (1955), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the late American historian Richard Hofstadter writes that the reason behind the formation of one of the first populist parties in the US — the 19th-century Populist Party — was not that a band of farmers had joined hands to fight for their rights. He writes that they were actually aspiring capitalists who, reeling from their loss in status, gave expression to their reactionary political concerns ‘in backward, anti-Semitic, and anti-modern ways.’
Hofstadter’s explanation was influential across much of the mid- and late 20th century in explaining populism as mainly an expression of a frustrated mid-level economic elite, which exploited various economic, religious and social tensions in ‘common folk’, triggered by modernisation. According to Hofstadter, theirs was a bid to cynically use these as a way to displace the conventional elite (the status quo) and replace it with themselves at the helm.
Populist outfits struggle to formulate policies because they excel more as disruptive movements
This is why during much of the 20th century, populism was largely linked to both large as well as fringe fascist movements whose core members belonged to middle or lower-middle-class strata who claimed to be speaking for the ‘common folk.’ Yet, as some later-day historians have suggested, this is a somewhat incomplete picture of populism.
In his 2008 essay, “The Thin Ideology of Populism”, Dr Ben Stanley, assistant professor of politics at Warsaw’s SWPS University, explains populism as having a thin ideological core as opposed to ‘thick ideologies’ such as socialism, liberalism and communism. These have elaborate and well-developed economic and political ideas and routes. But populism often sees populists jump on any prevalent bandwagon they believe can aid them to climb the political ladder.
This means populists can often be found in mainstream parties on both the right as well as left sides of the divide, or they may manage to form a broad-based party which merges together ideas from the left and the right in a bid to make the mainstream parties look static and one-dimensional. Thus, populist outfits often like to be seen as the ‘third force.’
The idea is to upset the apple cart of conventional parties and gather the spoils for themselves. This connects with what Hofstadter as well as Marquand suggest. Because even though the 19th-century Populist Party was demanding the imposition of leftist ideas of nationalisation of certain industries, yet, according to Hofstadter, its members were actually aspiring capitalists.
Considering Stanley’s thesis of populism being a ‘thin ideology’ — which could go left or right or merge both to grab power — Marquand argues that populism has no well-formed ideology of its own, but is just a pragmatic, albeit demagogic, disposition. That’s why, when in power, populists fail to have a plan and have to constantly be in ‘movement mode’ to continue rationalising their existence, mainly through popular optics and rhetoric.