Since populism became widespread in parts of Latin America, was it mistakenly seen as foreign to Euro-American liberal democracy, and has it in recent decades become more widespread than parliamentary democracy or liberal constitutionalism? Is the potential for populism inherent in democracy itself, especially when conceived in terms of a dialectic between the majority and the minority? Is it always accompanied by a suspicion against the elites? Should progressive political forces resort to populist tactics and rhetoric in order to win back the masses from the far-right demagogues? Or does this inevitably pose a risk to democratic ideals of pluralism and universalism? Could this then pave the way to an exclusionary, antagonistic, imaginary system, which would play into the hands of ethno-nationalist forces? Is populism still compatible with democracy by continually testing its limits? And what distinguishes populist politics from post-fascist rule?
Guests featured in this episode:
Nadia Urbinati, the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. She is also a permanent visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa (Italy), and has taught at Bocconi University Milan (Italy), Sciences Po Paris (France) and the UNICAMP University (Brazil). Her main fields of expertise are modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic, as well as anti-democratic traditions.
GLOSSARY
What is the People’s Party?
(13:05 or p.4 in the transcript)
The People's Party: (also known as the Populist Party) was an important political party in the United States of America during the late nineteenth century. The People's Party originated in the early 1890s. It was organized in Kansas, but the party quickly spread across the United States. It drew its members from Farmers' Alliances, the Grange, and the Knights of Labor. Originally, the Populists did not form a national organization, preferring to gain political influence within individual states. The Populist Party consisted primarily of farmers unhappy with the Democratic and Republican Parties. The Populists believed that the federal government needed to play a more active role in the American economy by regulating various businesses, especially the railroads. In particular, the Populists supported women's suffrage the direct election of United States Senators. They hoped that the enactment women's suffrage and the direct election of senators would enable them to elect some of their members to political office. Populists also supported a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, improved working conditions in factories, immigration restrictions, an eight-hour workday, the recognition of unions, and easier access to credit. source
What is the Reconstruction?
(13:10 or p.4 in the transcript)
Reconstruction: in U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Long portrayed by many historians as a time when vindictiveRadical Republicans fastened Black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy, Reconstruction has since the late 20th century been viewed more sympathetically as a laudable experiment in interracial democracy. Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life. At the national level, new laws and constitutionalamendments permanently altered the federal system and the definition of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government. source
What is austerity?
(16:23 or p.4 in the transcript)
Austerity: (also called austerity measures) is a set of economic policies, usually consisting of tax increases, spending cuts, or a combination of the two, used by governments to reduce budget deficits. Austerity measures can in principle be used at any time when there is concern about government expenditures exceeding government revenues. Often, however, governments delay resorting to such measures because they are usually politically unpopular. Instead, governments tend to rely on other means—for example, deficit financing, which involves borrowing from financial markets—to mitigate budget deficits in the short run, a decision that usually necessitates the adoption of harsher austerity measures in the long run. source
What is universal suffrage?
(18:32 or p.5 in the transcript)
Universal suffrage: generally understood as the right to vote for political representatives conferred to almost all adult citizens or residents, regardless of their social status, property, knowledge, religion, race, gender, or other similar qualifications. The principle of universal suffrage, together with principles of equal, free, secret, and direct suffrage, present fundamental principles of elections common to all democracies around the world. Universal suffrage is one of two historically developed concepts of the suffrage—consisting of the right to vote and the right to stand for election. The other one, a concept contrary to universal suffrage, can be denominated as so-called limited suffrage. The concept of limited suffrage, preferred until the nineteenth century, was based on the exclusion of a large number of people from the suffrage. It was done based on social status, property, knowledge, religion, race, or gender. source
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SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
In this episode, I'm pleased to welcome Nadia Urbinati, professor of political theory at Columbia University. Her field of expertise is modern and contemporary political thought, and she has published extensively on both democratic as well as anti-democratic political traditions. And she is the author of numerous award-winning books, including Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People, and most recently, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, which is the main topic of my conversation with her today.
Populism has become a ubiquitous and hotly debated concept in academic and public discourse of late. We will begin by clearing up some misconceptions regarding populism and address some fundamental dilemmas we face due to its resurgence. As Nadia reminds us in many of her writings, populist politics comes in many forms that depend on local political traditions and socio-historical context. In Me the People, she delineates some common defining traits of the many varieties of populism, including the central role of a leader claiming to embody without any institutional mediation a silent, disgruntled majority.
I asked Nadia, whether the potential for populism is inherent in democracy itself, especially when conceived in terms of a dialectic between majority and minority, accompanied by a suspicion of elites. Should progressive political forces resort to populist tactics and rhetoric in order to win back the masses from far-right demagogues? Or does this inevitably pose a risk to democratic ideals of pluralism and universalism? And could this then pave the way to an exclusionary, antagonistic, imaginary, which would play into the hands of ethno-nationalist forces? Is populism still compatible with democracy by continually testing its limits? And what distinguishes populist politics from post-fascist rule?
These are some of the questions I look forward to discussing with Nadia Urbinati. Nadia, welcome to the podcast, and it's a great pleasure to have you with me today.
NU: So, thank you, Shalini, and thank you, all of you for having me here. I would like, if you allow me, to start with a historical overview that gives the sense that populism is not like a mushroom that comes suddenly but has a recurrent character that comes every time the people or those who speak in the name of the people perceive and detect a kind of betrayal of the promises to the people. So, we can say immediately that populism is internal to the process of democracy or the democratic or democratization process. It is very hard to have populism in a despotic regime, in some sense, because it is an expression of people's discontent.
So, let me allow you to frame better this historical background. Until recently, at least in continental Europe and the United States, what we call the West, populism was primarily a political movement of opposition. Only in Latin America did it succeed in becoming a political regime of its own after World War II. Thus, this geopolitical bifurcation between the Atlantic model, liberal democracy, and the Latin American model, populist democracy, is part of the populist phenomenon. And this led scholars, until recently, to surmise that populism in power was foreign to the consolidated liberal democracy countries. It belonged to countries that are in the process of constructing the unity of the people, the unity of the sovereign people.
This is a very interesting change recently because, after the Cold War, this reading changed dramatically. First, because the stabilization of so-called liberal democracy did not neutralize the possibility for populism. And second, because populism today is the phenomenon that actually unifies all the aspects, all the countries belonging to the so-called large West, that is both the United States and Europe, and other countries around the world, like India, Latin American countries; so that it is a very global phenomenon, much more than the liberal character of democracy, more than parliamentary democracy. It is the populist phenomenon or the populist democracy. This is a very important point to be made.
SR: Thank you, Nadia. That gives us a very good entry into the historical background and making the very important point that populism is neither new, nor is it sudden and confined to the west, but that there is a whole history of Latin American populism, which we can only neglect at our own peril.
Let me turn to your definition of populism because I think that is relevant here. You define it as a new form of representative government which disfigures the rule of law and the division of powers associated with it. And you argue that it should be viewed as emerging within constitutional democracy rather than in opposition to it from the outside, as it were.
And that populism is not a regime, except in the Latin American historical context, but a rhetorically constructed process of representation whereby the populist leader claims to embody the voice of the people, or rather a part of the people who are deemed to constitute the virtuous majority. And we'll come back to that in a moment. But by doing so, what populist leaders are doing is eliminating conventional forms of institutional mediation and are claiming to enact direct representation, speaking to the people and for the people without any intermediaries.
So, the question I have for you is, formally, free elections remain because of this an absolutely indispensable component of populist legitimacy. But what is difficult sometimes to understand is, should one say that populism in this sense is the boundary of representative democracy, or should one say all democracies are potentially populist?
NU: So, let me say, first of all, to re-affirm what you already anticipated, that populism is not a regime of its own. By regime, I mean the organization of institutional procedural system of government, or the state, which we can define in two ways. That is, regimes based on the centrality of the leader, could be despotic or could be electoral-despotic regimes, as we have today, hybrid regimes. Or a regime based on the consent of the people through elections and an open plural sphere of political opinion. Populism grows within the democratic or the government based on consent because, although not a regime of its own, it is in the name of the people, not in the name of the leader or the chief of the state that makes his claim.
Democracy is based on two important conditions. First, the appeal to the people as the basis for legitimacy of all decisions made by public officers or the state, and the other end, the people that do not operate directly, but through institutions and elections. So, populism is not a regime of its own. It is a style. It is a tenure of political life and is derivative of democracy because it is an appeal to the people against the system of representation that we know since the 18th, 19th century, which is based on the pluralistic voices of parties and political groups. According to populism, this pluralism of parties and political groups divides the people. Thus, they weaken the people, and this is all in the interest of the leaders or the elite representing constructing those pluralistic groups.
So, populism is an appeal against the establishment in the name of the people. For this reason, it's very hard for non-populist leaders to make a claim that is straightforward and truly convincing because after all, all democrats claim to represent the people and not an elite. All the democrats claim to distribute power and not to monopolize power. And yet, when they have to operate through elections, they pluralize the people and they create elite parties, which are considered to be an instrument of oligarchy.
Populism, it appeals to representation, and it claims that we need to have a different way of representing the people, not by pluralizing, but by unifying. So, it is the principle of the one versus the principle of the plural that populism claims. And this emerges very well through the process of opinion formation. Thus, if we consider that representative democracy is based on two kinds of authorities, one institutional and one extra-institutional or opinion-based, populism grows from within the opinion one and acquires power inside of the institutional one. So, we need to read populism in two ways, both as a movement of contestation within the organization of opinion, as movements or parties, and when it is empowered.
What I'm trying to do is to focus on how populism operates on democracy once in power. And in order to understand the bad implication that it can have on institutional representative democracy, we have to analyze what it does to the people, elections, to the majority, and finally, to representation. At the end of the day, populism is peculiar because its destiny is tied to democracies, and its destiny is to remain never completely achieved, always in the process of transformation, but without an outcome.
SR: So, the question then arises for me, Nadia, why do you think that this hijacking of democratic anti-establishment impulse, or also this hijacking of the feeling that the unity of the people is currently threatened, why is it so compelling and persuasive today? What has happened that allows this impulse to get so much traction? And why is it that people are so amenable in so many different contexts, in Brazil as much as in the United States in the last years, or even currently in Turkey, in Hungary? Why is it that people are so amenable to identifying with these populist leaders who claim to represent a "virtuous exclusionary" or non-inclusive, certainly, majority?
NU: So, let's go just to make a comparison, or a parallel, to one form of populism, which was the first one in a democratizing country in the American republic, with the birth, the growth, and the foundation of The People's Party in 1892. That moment, during the Reconstruction after the Civil War, there was a really evident inegalitarian turning point between an elite, economic, financial, and social, not simply political, capable of putting a lot of capital in order to create the infrastructure of industrial democracy, with a concentration of economic and financial power, and the disempowerment of the republic of citizens in the name of which the United States was born in the 18th century.
So, what The People's Party asked, it was in the name of the founders, meaning the ordinary citizens, we the people, in that name, attacking the oligarchic transformation of representative government. So, this accusation of oligarchic transformation of our institutions, on the one hand, is still there. Democracy, on the one hand, makes the argument of giving the people, the sovereign power, but on the other hand, the governments produced in the last years are less and less capable of being true to these promises. Thus, the weakening of the nation is today an important element to be considered, particularly in Europe, but also in Latin America, but also in India.
The issue is to reconstruct the people against the threatening forces, not only the economic and financial, but some other more simple, more unfortunately capable of being manipulated by the rhetoric of the demagogues, meaning those others who are here to threaten us and the unity of the people. So, it can be the immigrants, the minority religion, or a minority in gender preferences, those kinds of minorities that represent a threat to the unity of a people. Thus, and here is my answer to your question, the specificity of populists today is that the unity of the people it claims, it is, most of the time, an ethnical kind of unity, not simply a political kind of unity. Though some theorists, like Laclau and others, claim populism is a way of making political the unity of the people and constructing this new political subject that is collective. Today, the construction of these political subjects is made through important forms of exclusion from the point of view of ethnical, cultural, religious, and so on and so forth.
Other topics are involved here, not simply the political one, that is the people want the power, but the definition of the people through culture, through religion, through ethnicity. That is an issue today and is very intractable sometimes.
SR: So, Nadia, I'll come back to your critique of the left-populist position, which people like Mr. Laclau or Chantal Mouffe have argued for. I'll come back to that in a moment. But what I would like to ask you, can you say something about the structural preconditions and the historically contingent factors that make democracies particularly amenable to this populous capture today?
So, do you think that the austerity politics of the last years have played a large role in the success of populist leaders, the fact that there is growing inequality, leading to a very different kind of polarization, which cannot be mediated by parties which no longer are along class lines, and, therefore, the kind of inequality poverty, austerity, and its results are part of the preconditions which have led to a resurgence of populist politics today everywhere?
NU: Yeah, I think you finger-pointed out a very important question that characterizes the emergence of populists. You mentioned two important factors. The one is austerity, which is from the huge economic or financial crisis started in 2008. And then the austerity connected to the COVID. So, there was this element, very interesting, very recently, connected to the previous one, austerity, meaning a condition that economic interference by states in order to balance their national debts, which introduced an element of impoverishment within their own societies.
For the first time after World War II, the West faced a real process of impoverishment of their own citizenry. How can a democracy go to in front of its citizens, that is it’s own sovereign, and say they are incapable, democracy is incapable to take care of their own well-being? In all parties, all governments, in the last years after 2008, they present themselves to all the people, asking for support for policies that would curtail their own well-being, that would limit their own well-being. This is one important element to be paid attention to.
The other connected to that is the decline of organized parties, pre-democratic parliamentary regimes, like in the 19th century when there was not yet universal suffrage, and only few voted, the bourgeois few so-called, and they had their own representative in parliament. Now, with universal suffrage, parties started to become organizers of opinions and organizers of decisions on elections or voting. Thus, they had that important function first, to unify dispersed individuals, and to give the anomic organizational society à la Tocqueville: all individuals are free. That is an individualistic claim in democracy, right? But individuals are weak when they have to decide on power. So, parties were a way of strengthening the power of the individuals by making associations of them, and this gave power to those who didn't have, as individual citizen, much power.
So, that process changed the function of the states from a state socially involved in distributing the conditional well-being into states more and more as guardians of the existing political and economic system. And the parties also changed. Instead of promising expansion of well-being, they could simply promise the preservation of the existing well-being, which meant for some to be strong enough, but for many to lose well-being, in fact. The party came to become simply and only a system for selection of an elite without any ideological or narrative capable of involving the people in their own project.
So, there are many middle-class people, as the economists, they tell us, many ordinary people who really believe and feel that their condition is one of instability, social and economic condition. Do they have parties answering their claims? That is a no or a quasi-no. And this is the ideal terrain for the growth of populism. So, populism did not create the condition in which populism develops strong. Populism came as a consequence of a society that is incapable to give its citizens what democratic citizens are promised, that is, equal distribution of power.
SR: So, Nadia, let me talk about the background conditions for the rise of this kind of populist politics. And that would be the whole question of the rise of new technologies above all the internet and the effect it has had on social mediation and representation. In your book, you have a very interesting phrase, where you say that populism is about government of and by the audience, and you introduced the concept here of the audience democracy. Could you explain what you mean by that and why do you think the kind of people that are being created as consumers of these technologies are audiences?
NU: So, the expression ‘democracy of the audience’ came from a book by Bernard Manin, "The Principles of Representative Government." And it's the last chapter in which Bernard Manin gives, according to me, one of the best inputs to understand what populism is about. Meaning, the end of the democracy of parties means also the following: Parties were capable of organizing opinion, identifying people through opinion. Their decline as organized parties outside of institutions entailed that the opinion was and became a kind of horizontal ocean in which no internal pluralistic organization was any longer authoritative.
We have today a kind of democracy of preferences, or aesthetic judgment, through the television or through the web so that we participate in the making of the opinion by saying “I like”, “I dislike”, “I don't like”, and our change over this is permanent and is a progressive one. So that democracy in your opinion never stabilizes. The only moment of stabilization, like the individual moment of counting the preferences and this is what the audience is. The audience is tested, checked, through surveys. They tell us how many people will vote for, how many people will vote against in a permanent bombardment of surveys so that at the end, when we go to vote, we really don't know whether we vote because we make a choice, or the choice was already made by the surveys and we are influenced without a doubt.
So, it's a very interesting phenomenon. Interesting in the sense that it's difficult to organize it. Your audience is a permanent process of change. And for this reason, the populist leaders, the demagogues, the one who presents himself or she presents herself with strong messages, very publicitary message, that kind of capable of producing an echo so the audience implies that the leaders' personality, the politics of personality is much more attractive and capable of breaking these oceans of opinions without internal organizations than parties and movements.
So, politics is less a politics of Agora in which people discussed and more the politics of theater. So, this kind of back and forth between an audience and people operating on the stage is a new form of representation. For this reason, the old form of representation through parties doesn't function anymore.
SR: Let me come back, Nadia, to a point which you made earlier, and ask you to spell out your disagreements with the position taken by Ernesto Laclau or by Chantal Mouffe, who have argued that populism is, in fact, democratic politics at its best and they feel that, therefore, the left should reappropriate populism, imitate and thereby outwit and out-do the right by using the same rhetoric and the same tactics.
You have had a very strongly critical view of this position, which, in your view, mistakenly assumes that populism is a neutral means, that it's empty of content, and that by imitating it, we are actually also taking on board much of the anti-pluralist, anti-universalist positions. So, I would like to ask you to talk about that criticism, particularly in the light of the failure of this kind of left populism in the recent cases of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, or in France.
NU: So, Ernesto Laclau made very, perhaps, the only true political theory kind of book on populism. He made the important claims developing from previous authors who sometimes he quotes, sometimes he doesn't, one, certainly, is Carl Schmitt, and the other author is Claude Lefort. "Populism is," he says, " true democracy because it is the quintessential way of doing politics." Because politics means, for him, creating a collective subject capable of governing itself. And this is what populism does.
Properly distinguishing between populism and nationalism, to create a nation is not the same thing as to create the people. It distinguishes between populism and the class structure of discourse à la Marx because populism is capable of unifying different claims, it is not simply class-based and is capable of actually with the equivalence kind of discourse (but equivalence needs to be made by a leader) to find the common thread that unifies many different interests. And what is the goal? The goal is to recreate or construct a collective unit, the problem of the one, as I said before, collective unit that doesn't give rise to strong pluralism that actually covers up the existing different plural interests in order to operate at the level of government in the name of the people.
I make several critical arguments. First of all, this idea, which is a phenomenological interpretation, doesn't want to have the kind of normative implications. So, what if you have a leader capable of unifying the many interests into a project that is right-wing? That is fascist? Why not? So, what is the difference? What is the reference point we use within this reading in order to say this is fascist, this is not? And we need to have these normative reference points. Otherwise, the outcome is that those who win, the large majority of the people are right, or are the real populists, so we have nothing to say, but simply to accept.
So, the second argument is the following. Neither Laclau nor Chantal Mouffe focus on what populists in power do. How they use institutions, whether they violate the constitution, so they rewrite their own constitutions. So, they only focus on the constructing moment. I think that if we want to see populism in action, we need to understand what they do when they rule. Because the goal of populist is not simply to mobilize and create a discourse and create a narrative. The goal of the populist and the populist leader is to get into power. What I'm trying to do is to focus on how populism operates on democracy once in power. We need to understand what it does or they do to government. This is my main criticism. And if you see and if you analyze schematically all populist regimes in India, or in France, or in Brazil, you see that they do almost the same thing.
First of all, they stretch the division of the kind of constitutions they do have in order to make the priority power they have, stronger for each of the executive, the power of decision making of the leaders, and the justice limiting its own power. Second, they stretch the use of rights and the rule of law in order to favor one part against other parts of the population that is favor the majority versus the opposition or those minority cultures or minority styles of life or minority identities that don't belong in their own people description.
So, in some sense, all populists are forced to do that. They don't have the freedom of doing it, otherwise, they're no longer populist. I'd like to close by reminding you what the dictionary says when we go to see what is the meaning of populism. The first thing it says, perhaps the only important thing, is that populism is a movement of exclusion and constructing the identity of itself through exclusion.
SR: So, let me just follow up with a final question. Populists, when in power are ruling in mode, if you like, of permanent electoral campaigns or permanent mobilization. And this mobilization consists very much of portraying the majority as a victim, mimicking, in fact, the discrimination of a minority even when they are ruling on behalf of the majority because that is the kind of politics of resentment on which populist leaders thrive. Although there is a family resemblance between populism and fascism, what would be, for you, the distinguishing features of fascism as against populism? And I think this is, of course, a very pertinent question, as we very soon will see the victory, unfortunately, of two parties in your own country, Italy, which are actually quite unashamedly pro-fascist in almost 100 years after Mussolini's march on Rome.
NU: The point is the following. There is a kind of family resemblance, you know. Family resemblance is based on a few points. First, the unification, the unity of the people, minus those who challenge that unity, you know, à la Schmitt or à la fascism in the classical sense. The second is the insufferable deaths of those who are supposed to be the oligarchs' fuse, or simply the few who somehow are a disturbance of the decision-making process. And third, and this disturbance is made by all but the few together, meaning institutions, magistrates, those who operate inside of the institutions. They are considered to be violations or an attempt to limit the decision-making power of the leader.
In this sense, we recognize what they don't have, the populists in relation to fascism is organized violence, and instead of sending to jail their political opponents, they dwarf them through a permanent rhetoric and a permanent mobilization or lack in the electoral campaign to vilify them, to offend them, to trash them out. Populism in power has an impact on the quality of public opinion and political discourse. We become more violent through words, we become more intolerant through words.
And finally, I would say, populism, as you said, victim is more of the majority, because the majority has been always considered to be betrayed by the few, the elite. It doesn't matter whether the elite is the magistrates or the political elite or the economic elite. Those who are not the people. The permanent argument and the permanent electoral campaign is to convince the people that the leader is not an establishment, will never be another establishment. This victimism is a way for reconfirming that they are never like them, like the others they are fighting. So, they need the object of fighting, they need a fuse. They cannot send them to jail or to eliminate them because it is thanks to them that their rhetoric, permanent electoral campaign is fabricated.
SR: So, Nadia, thank you so much for addressing so many of the really important issues with regard to populism, both historical issues and conceptual issues, as well as looking at its characteristics, its structural preconditions, and what populists do when they are in power. So, this was really wide-ranging and a very, very informative conversation, clearing the ground for understanding the basis of so much of populist politics all over the world today. Thanks a lot.
NU: So, thank you, Shalini, and thank you, everybody. It was a pleasure to be with you.
SR: So, let me wrap up with some of the main points of the conversation. Populism has a long history. It's an expression of the discontent of citizens feeling betrayed by the unfulfilled promises of liberal democracy. And as such, populism is internal to all democracies. However, since it's only in Latin America that populism became a full-fledged regime, it was mistakenly seen as foreign to Euro-American liberal democracy. In fact, populism is much more widespread than parliamentary democracy or liberal constitutionalism. It grows within governments based on consent, and it is a style, a rhetoric based on claims in the name of the people, it speaks to, and for the people, but only a part of the people, the so-called virtuous majority.
Populism also makes the claim that pluralism weakens the people. So, it appeals to a different way of representation in that it unifies people through a particular process of opinion-forming, one that is highly detrimental for constitutional democracy and the kind of power that it creates for a tyrannical majority because minorities are seen by populists as a threat to the unity of the people.
Populism is also a reaction to the weakening of national sovereignty of governments. It's anti-elitist, anti-oligarchic, and with that, it feeds into a politics of resentment. The emergence of populist leaders today is also partly due to the austerity politics that we have seen so that it's also a reaction to neoliberal policies, which have disempowered and impoverished large numbers of citizens. Populist leaders have benefited from people's desire for freedom, fueled, for example, under the COVID pandemic, which did curtail our civil liberties for a period of time.
Political parties are crucial for democracies, and the decline of party politics is also responsible for the rise of populist politics also in consolidated democracies. Political parties are no longer capable of organizing and mobilizing public opinion, no longer capable of generating economic well-being or providing for a dignified life. We have become a democracy of preferences, often aesthetic ones of likes and dislikes, of emotions counted by surveys and by opinion polls. So populist governments can be seen as governments of and by the audience. This is a new form of representation, and so in a sense, populism is not democratic politics at its best, as somebody like Ernesto Laclau, for example, has claimed in making a case for left populism.
Left populism is as dangerous as populism of the right, for left populism, or populism of any kind, is not content-neutral. Left populism is also dangerous for it is anti-pluralistic because there we lose a normative compass in the name of popular majorities. There is a family resemblance between fascism and populism, but they are not the same. Both are based on the idea and the ideal of the homogeneity and the unity of the people. But populism is fascism minus organized violence.
This was the fifth episode of Season 5 of "Democracy in Question." Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode in two weeks’ time. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.