This episode explores the concept of populism and fundamental structures that give legitimacy and efficacy to democratic politics. Is populism the direct result of a crisis of representation? How can we strengthen representative democracy against the threat of soft authoritarian politics? And what has happened to intermediary institutions of democratic politics in this era of populism?
Glossary for DiQ ep 7 series 3 – Jan Werner Müller
Who was Alexis de Tocqueville?
(pg. 1 tocquevillian question of the transcript or 00:1:08)
French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) traveled to the United States in 1831 to study its prisons and returned with a wealth of broader observations that he codified in “Democracy in America” (1835), one of the most influential books of the 19th century. With its trenchant observations on equality and individualism, Tocqueville’s work remains a valuable explanation of America to Europeans and of Americans to themselves.
What is nativism?
(pg. 1 of the transcript or 00:4:42)
Nativism represents the political idea that people who were born in a country are more important than immigrants. Source.
Who is Marine Le Pen?
(pg. 3 of the transcript or 00:10:03)
Marine Le Pen, French politician who succeeded her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as leader of the National Front (later National Rally) party in 2011. She was that party’s candidate in the 2017 French presidential election. In 1998 she joined the administrative apparatus of the National Front, which had been founded by her father in 1972 and was the main right-wing opposition to France’s mainstream conservative parties. She served as the director of the party’s legal affairs until 2003, when she became the National Front’s vice president. The following year she made a successful run for a seat in the European Parliament where she joined her father in that body’s nonaligned bloc. As Le Pen emerged from her father’s shadow to become a national figure in her own right, she distanced herself from some of his and the party’s more extreme views. While she embraced the National Front’s established anti-immigration stance, she rebranded the party’s traditional Euroscepticism as French nationalism and she was a vocal critic of the anti- Semitism that has marginalized the party in the past.
In June 2018 Le Pen announced that the National Front would change its name to Rassemblement National (National Rally), in an apparent effort to distance the party from its overtly neofascist and anti-Semitic past. The National Rally topped the field in EU parliamentary elections in 2019, and opinion polling indicated that they were likely to carry that momentum into French regional elections in 2021. The party performed far below expectations in the first round of balloting, however, in an election that was characterized by extremely low voter turnout. Source
What was the Fairness Doctrine?
(Page 6 of the transcript or 00:25:14)
U.S. communications policy (1949–87) formulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities, including by granting equal airtime to opposing candidates for public office. The fairness doctrine was never without its opponents, however, many of whom perceived the equal airtime requirement as an infringement of the right to freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
In 1987 the FCC formally repealed the fairness doctrine but maintained both the editorial and personal-attack provisions, which remained in effect until 2000. In addition, until they were finally repealed by the commission in 2011, more than 80 media rules maintained language that implemented the doctrine. Source
Who was John Dewey?
(page 7 of the transcript or 00:28:02)
John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had a global reach, his psychological theories had a sizeable influence in that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice deeply influenced debates in academic and practical quarters for decades.
Dewey also developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. In addition to academic life, Dewey comfortably wore the mantle of public intellectual, infusing public issues with lessons found through philosophy.
He spoke on topics of broad moral significance, such as human freedom, economic alienation, race relations, women’s suffrage, war and peace, human freedom, and educational goals and methods. Typically, discoveries made via public inquiries were integrated back into his academic theories, and aided their revision. This practice-theory-practice rhythm powered every area of Dewey’s intellectual enterprise, and perhaps explains why his philosophical theories are still discussed, criticized, adapted, and deployed in many academic and practical arenas. Source
Who is Elizabeth Anderson?
(page 7 of the transcript or 00:30:40)
American Philosopher specializing in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality. Source
SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges that democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, the 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, my guest is the political theorist, Jan-Werner Muller, who is a professor of politics at Princeton University. Among his many books, the ones which are relevant for the discussion today are "Contesting Democracy" published in 2011, also an earlier volume "Constitutional Patriotism," 2007, but more recently, the two books that are really at the heart of our discussion today: one titled "What Is Populism?" already translated into some 20 languages, and "Democracy Rules" from 2021. It's about democracies' critical infrastructure and it is rethinking the basic tocquevillian question of intermediary institutions.
What I would like to explore with Jan-Werner Muller today is, to begin with the concept of populism, not simply from the point of view of something that constitutes a corruption of democracy, but actually also an opportunity to think more deeply about some of the fundamental structures that give both legitimacy and efficacy to democratic politics. Is populism the direct result of a crisis of representation? How can we strengthen representative democracy against the threat of soft authoritarian politics? And what has happened to intermediary institutions of democratic politics, such as political parties and the media in this era of populism? How do we account for their decline?
So, warm welcome to you Jan-Werner on the podcast.
JWM: Thank you very much for having me, I appreciate it.
SR: As I said, let's start with populism, which is probably the most used and abused of terms, both in academic and in popular discourse. In the past few years, authoritarian leaders and also populist political movements have captured political power in various countries, the world over so that populism seems to have become the conceptual framework to make sense of these new developments. A large part of the persuasiveness of the term populism seems to me to come from the fact that it locates the problems, the threat of liberal democracy as coming from inside, from within the system. Unlike in earlier eras, where the alleged enemies of democracy came from a neatly delineated outside of liberal democracy - be it Sagittarianism, religious fundamentalism, autocratic rule. Populist leaders, and populist forces today evoke elements of democratic rhetoric, most significantly, that of the “people”. And, of course, they've also come to power through mechanisms and processes of former democracy, such as free if not always fair elections. And yet, as you've pointed out in your writings, populism remains a vague term, almost incoherent because it's used to describe everything from a party like Syriza in Greece to the Brexit movement in the UK. It's also used as a term for a social democrat, like Bernie Sanders in the U.S., as much as for the ex-President Donald Trump.
So, let's start with some clearing of the conceptual ground. And let me begin by asking you, is it possible to arrive at a set of criteria which could define populism or even populist politics? You have argued that two characteristics seem important here, anti-pluralism and the criticism of elites. And here, it may be interesting to look at with you, how these two elements even relate to one another.
JWM: So first of all, let me underline a point you made just a moment ago, I think at the risk of sounding pedantic, that it's become in and of itself a problem that because pundits, and to some degree, even politicians now constantly tell us that we live in the age of populism, that therefore, we kind of affixed this label to all kinds of phenomena for which we in fact have much more precise concepts. You know, just think of nativism or economic protectionism, or for that matter, racism. Now, my own conceptual offering in this area, so to speak, is that not everybody who criticizes elites is necessarily a populist, let alone somehow dangerous for democracy. In fact, up until recently, I think many people would have thought that sort of keeping a critical eye on the powerful is a sign of good democratic citizenship. But, of course, that's not just what populists really do. They - and we really - are talking about leaders or parties, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call “the real people of a silent majority”.
Their idea of “the people” is usually an exclusionary one. So, not all citizens are “the people”. And in a certain way, populists manage or try at least to reduce all political conflicts to questions of belonging. Just one example, I mean, if you think back to a character you just mentioned, the ex-President of the United States. It was very characteristic that often when his administration was criticized, the response was not what I think a "normal politician" would have done, which is to say, "Look, we are elected, here are the reasons for our policies and you are wrong as an opposition," you know, completely fine. Instead, very often, the answer was simply, "If you criticize me, you are un-American." So, the anti-pluralism partly consists of basically, criticizing other political actors, but more invidiously, it consists in telling certain audiences that are probably already vulnerable minorities and don't truly belong to the people that anybody who criticizes populists also doesn't truly belong, is a traitor to the people, is morally suspect, might at best be a kind of second-rate citizen.
So, to get to the core of your question, you can be an elitist and an anti-pluralist at the same time, but populists are anti-pluralist of a particular kind, they talk about the people in a particular way.
SR: So, let me turn to another aspect of populism on which you have written very succinctly as well, and that is that many political scientists have argued that populism is the answer to people's dissatisfaction with the democratic principles of representation. And it does so by offering an immediate and complete identity between the people and the person of the powerful ruler, like Trump speaking in the name of America. And I quote you here, you say, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists do not have to be against the idea of representation as such, rather, they can positively endorse a particular version of it. Populists are fine with representation, as long as the right representatives represent the right people to make the right judgment and consequently do the right thing." So, in this argument of yours, the dichotomy representation versus participation might not necessarily account for the appeal of populist politics but it's very much a question of morality, which is the inner logic of populism somehow.
JWM: So, I think it is important to underline that, contrary to what some of our colleagues would say, populism does not really aim at broader participation. And it's not an accident that if you look at some of the regimes that de facto we're talking about when we're talking about, especially right-wing populist in power, so think of, you know, Orban in Hungary, de facto Kaczynski in Poland, Erdogan, Modi in India, Trump in the U.S., Bolsonaro, none of them has really changed anything structurally, in terms of allowing wider participation, more open debates among so-called ordinary citizens. Yes, there are these highly manipulated National Consultations in Hungary, but clearly, these are not living up to an ideal of a truly open debate where people aren't already basically given the answers through very expensive government campaigns. So, in essence, I would stick with the idea that they're not against representation as such, they just think that right now we have the wrong immoral because corrupt representatives, and as soon as they are in power, the problem is basically solved.
It's true, of course, at the same time, that occasionally, we can say that, yes, some of these leaders may have appealed to constituencies, which really were sidelined. So I'm not saying that, oh, anything that any populist leader has ever said, you know, we can automatically discount as lies and falsehoods and so on.
Last point, if I may, it is important to distinguish between direct representation and a form of representation, which builds in more pluralism. So the directness suggests that, look, there's nothing in between me as a citizen and the leader with whom I identify. So, it's still representation but it basically doesn't go through a more complicated process of mediation, where maybe other citizens and other institutions have a kind of voice.
SR: So let me turn to one more aspect of the kinds of leaders whom you have mentioned, and interestingly, most of them are men, I think Marine Le Pen in France may be one of the few exceptions. But if we focus on the personality of the leaders in these movements, we could see some kind of similarities. Another way of looking, however, beyond the charismatic personality of the leader would be to look at the tool kit, the playbook of popular politics, how do they go about putting a certain kind of style of governance in place. Do you think it's helpful to analyze the personality or should we really be shifting our attention purely to the practices, the style of governance, because they do seem to copy each other across the board?
JWM: So, I would shy away from more psychologizing approaches. I think this is partly the legacy of the 20th century, that sometimes populism and charisma are, sort of, associated automatically, and sort of conjures up images of, you know, a man standing on a balcony in Buenos Aires with, you know, their shirt half-open and the mass is all being seduced by the great demagogue. And so, very often, unfortunately, observers tend to say, "Because we have a, let's say, successful populist party or movement, therefore, you know, we must be dealing with very charismatic figures."
Now, with all due respect, I don't think that Marine Le Pen or to stick with a more Austrian context, perhaps a figure like Heinz-Christian Strache, that these were truly charismatic figures. I agree with you that we do need to look at the practices, we do need to look at how some of these actors have become very, very savvy, both in terms of building up their personal PR, but also in suggesting to people in ways that aren't always so obvious, their vision of the real, authentic people.
So think of Modi, who's been a master I think of this kind of propaganda. Even if you look at more recent videos, for instance, of what is now the Rassemblement national in France, it's very well done. I mean, if you know nothing else, you would look at some of this material and you would think, "Okay, what is this party about?" It's about young French women defending Republican values of equality, and so on and so forth. Only if you look more carefully and decode some of the other messages, does it slowly become apparent how exclusionary this is. I would certainly agree with the suggestion that these leaders are learning from each other.
If we look at some of the figures we've mentioned previously, the similarities are striking. But it doesn't follow from the fact that we see these similarities, that the reasons for their success, the causes of right-wing populism if you like, are all identical. I think this is a kind of short-circuiting of explanations that is not plausible. It's much more plausible to say that, yeah, they can also learn from each other. One invents a new law that looks facially neutral, but the de facto serves to intimidate, you know, civil society, then that can very easily be copied.
SR: So, one of the tricks, if I may say, or at least one figure, rhetorical figure, which plays a role in their arsenal is the conceptual figure of illiberal democracy. Many of these, what I call, soft authoritarian leaders, call themselves democrats, but illiberal democrats. So they are basically not contesting any of the principles of democracy they claim only Western liberalism is something that is alien to them and to their societies. You have made a very strong argument against the term illiberal democracy, saying, "Not only is it conceptually an oxymoron but that it's politically misguided as well." So, would you say an illiberal democracy is not a democracy at all?
JWM: So let me make two points, one is that liberalism and democracy are not the same thing. So we can have a very meaningful, complicated, long theoretical debate about the tensions between these two concepts. But that's rather separate from looking at contemporary manifestations, such as Orban's political system in Hungary and others, where the leaders are telling us as you just said, we are democrats or in some cases, even we are the real democrats because the liberals are all elitist, and so on and so forth. And the important point there to make is simply that what they are doing is not just illiberal, it is actually undemocratic, and it's important to contest them on the point of democracy. Because unless you believe that it's already democracy if, on the day of the election, the ruling party doesn't stuff the ballot boxes with fake ballots, then it seems clear to me that you have to include in your understanding of democracy, basic democratic rights, such as, most obviously, free press, free assembly, free association. As soon as you do that, it becomes clear that some of these actors who kind of claim democracy for themselves are actually damaging democracy itself. And this is not just about liberalism.
Obviously, we shouldn't fashion our concepts according to strategic imperatives, but I think it is also important, from a strategic point of view, not to leave democracy to these actors. Democracy, despite all its recent problems, remains a highly prized conceptual possession. And I think it's in and of itself, highly problematic, if, for instance, EU actors de facto agreed with them, and then this sort of image is conjured up that, oh, yeah, there's a bit of a problem with the rule of law and liberalism in Hungary. So, the liberal repair Trump group is sent from Brussels with, Frans Timmermans or some other well-meaning liberal, who kind of goes to Hungary and fixes things.
Again, in a technocratic language also, you know, we all by now know that the EU always talks about mechanisms and instruments, and so on, and this, I think, is just the wrong way of addressing the issue. They should much more openly say, "Look, this is also about democracy and popular will formation," plus, maybe less obviously, it's also fatal if one de facto accepts a kind of division of labor, where the nation-state always has democracy and the supranational actors, well, they care about liberalism. Again, this plays into the hands of the Orbans and the Kaczynskis of this world and reinforces the kind of conceptual frames that they want to suggest to particular audiences.
SR: So, Jan, let me turn to your new book, "Democracy Rules," which I read with great interest for the focus you put there and the emphasis on what you call the critical infrastructure of democracy. And, in particular, the role of political parties, the press, the media, both conventional media, print media but also, social media. And what you're looking at is some of the transformations that this critical infrastructure has undergone.
And let me draw you out on both of these, when we're thinking of the media. I did one episode a few weeks ago, in this podcast on the radio, and realized there that because we are so fixated on social media, we forget the fact that even in the United States today, the radio is perhaps the most listened to medium, and we underestimate the kind of propaganda that the radio is being used for and misinformation, disinformation. On the question of political parties, I think, again, the U.S. is a very interesting example, in a sense, of a two-party system, in which one party seems to have really turned against the very basic principles of democracy by wanting to put its leaders through elections perpetually in power, by gerrymandering, by voter suppression. So what does this tell us about the real damage done to the critical infrastructure of democracy today?
JWM: I realized that this emphasis on political parties and news media organizations can sound somewhat old-fashioned to people. But on another level, you might say, we're not truly beyond what, for instance, Alexis de Tocqueville already saw as important characteristics of representative democracy in the U.S., namely the importance of political parties, but also in those days, newspapers, essentially, to enable people to connect to each other and to use what you might call basic communicative freedoms, freedoms of expression, of association, assembly, and so on. So, my emphasis on this is not to dismiss other new organizations, or movements, or even trade unions, or civil society more broadly, they matter too. But at least the kind of democracy we still have today requires functioning political parties. If parties become personality cults, you know, as has de facto been the case now in the U.S., it's not only bad for the party, it's bad for democracy as a whole. Because, as for instance, the founding mothers and fathers of the German basic law already knew, if you have a party that's autocratic on the inside, there's a pretty good likelihood that it will also act in autocratic ways if it gets hold of the levers of government. Hence, the German constitution basically makes internal democracy mandatory for political parties. That's not the case everywhere. I mean, if you take something like, you know, Geert Wilders right-wing populist party in the Netherlands, well, I was gonna say it only has one member, officially it has two members, namely Geert Wilders as a person, and then a foundation of which you will be surprised to hear Geert Wilders is the only member. That would simply not be possible.
And you might say, "Well, but look, internal democracy and parties, you know, anybody who's actually lived this will agree with Oscar Wilde that the problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings, endless sitting around, and in the end, the debate is always won by the person who doesn't have a profession or who doesn't have a family because they can sit around the longest and at the end decide the outcome." All true. I don't wanna idealize these things, but if you don't have internal pluralism and democracy, you also are not gonna have anything like legitimate opposition or critical loyalty inside a party, hence, nobody, who might occasionally at least restrain the leadership of a party. Because again, that's what we've seen in the U.S. I mean, by now, it seems impossible to be a Republican in good standing and at the same time be, you know, a really open critic of Trump. And that really unfortunate constellation, I think, is directly connected to what happened on January 6th, 2021. Nobody able to restrain an actor like this, a party that has a personality cult, a party that has no time horizon, beyond basically the life of the leader that has no genuine program anymore, even. You remember that in 2020, at the convention, the party simply said, "We're not gonna issue a new manifesto basically, our manifesto is, we'll do whatever he wants." So, that's, I think what's pointing us in the direction of the importance of the internal health of these kinds of organizations.
SR: So let me pose a counter-question in a sense, the United Kingdom would be a country in which, at least, both parties still adhere to principles of democracy. The Conservative party certainly hasn't collapsed in the same manner internally as the Republican party, and yet Boris Johnson's style of governance is very similar to a certain kind of populist practice, in that, it's, you know, reeks of sleaze, nepotism, shady deals cut by him, his cabinet ministers discredited public, the judiciary, his home minister gives the police new powers to curb the rights of demonstrators, constrains the right to assembly. So it looks as if unnoticed behind this jolly personality of Boris Johnson, a kind of dismantling of democracy is happening, not unsimilar to many other countries in the world.
JWM: I would agree with you that people may not have paid sufficient attention to what's happening in the UK because, as you say, Boris Johnson just seems this kind of bumbling character who, you know, is very hard to dislike for many people. And the sort of really, in some cases, sort of far-right rhetoric that is happening at the same time, including by himself, when you think back to what he recently said, "Oh, the collapse of the Roman Empire because of immigration and so on," it's often dismissed because it's just not the kind of image that people have of the UK and off him, in particular. But it's true that both the rhetoric and some of the possible changes to elections, you know, think of the introduction of ID laws, think of other more structural changes that might be happening, that are very worrying.
And again, it might point to the importance of another set of intermediary institutions, namely news media organizations. It's not exactly a secret that for many decades, public debate in the UK has been dominated, has been conditioned by a tabloid press that is very right-wing. As we've seen more recently, whoever isn't right-wing enough, such as the editor of the "Daily Mail," apparently gets dismissed or gets replaced by somebody you know, who's back on a force of a pro-Brexit nationalist sort of direction. So, that feeds into it. And if you think about, you know, the infamous "Daily Mail" headline of the judges as enemies of the people, this is not harmless, this is something that can enable certain things, which in other democracies are much less likely to happen. What I would emphasize at the risk of saying the obvious is that every infrastructure, so to speak, is built on top of pre-existing infrastructures.
So, we sometimes look at social media and isolation, and we panic, and we say, "Oh, this is now the end of democracy because the irrational masses can participate more directly, everybody's become a publisher, and so on." And already dismissed the problems associated with especially platforms that basically have the optimization of outrage as their business model because that leads to more engagement and more profits. But if you look at the sort of most dramatic examples of what may have gone wrong with social media, it's not an accident that usually this is on top of a pre-existing, self-enclosed, what some of our colleagues call “right-wing media ecosphere”.
At least in the U.S, some of the craziest things we've seen: does possibly Hillary Clinton run, you know, a pedophilia ring downstairs from a pizzeria in Washington, D.C? These cannot really be understood without decisions that were made actually way before the internet. So, end of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in the 1980s, how the cable was set up in the '90s, what happened to radio, which you mentioned a few minutes ago; that basically led to a world where "news" is simply about political self-validation, and where those who are sort of stuck in that sphere, don't even have any contact with more or less reliable mainstream right-wing publications, let's say, "Wall Street Journal" online, something like that. There are also conspiracy theories on the left to be sure, but people who are tempted by those eventually read something in the "New York Times" or "The Washington Post" that kind of corrects their views through facts. That doesn't happen on the right.
SR: So, Jan, may I, towards the end, draw your attention to a different register in which we can think about democracy? I take your point about the necessity to focus, not only on the current infrastructure but its infrastructural basis and earlier political decisions taken, and yet we could look at democracy in a different register as a way of life.
I had Till Van Rahden here on the podcast discussing his book, talking about democracy as a way of life which is instilled into families, in values or practices, rather of intergenerational equality, of gender equality, of practices of tolerance in shared public spaces. So, how do we live democracy in everyday life? And that has something to do with a level of, not only analyzing democracy but also living it, which is different from the kinds of intermediary institutions that we are talking about at the moment.
So, do you see that as one element as a corrective or as something which could feed into contributing to the robustness of the infrastructures that you are talking about? Because they will need protection, they will need protection from citizens when they are being dismantled and hollowed out from the inside by populist political forces. And the question is, where should such a corrective come from?
JWM: Three brief points, if I may. So first one is that indeed, democracy also has to be understood as what some political philosophers called “social equality”. So the fact that people can sort of speak, look each other in the eye, that we do not have systematic patterns of quasi-feudal relations, where some dominate others, where, you know, people know they're dependent on the goodwill of others, so that they always have to scrape and bow in certain ways.
We used to think following, you know, important insights by John Dewey, that schools were one sort of arena, where people, you know, practice social equality, but where they also practiced, how to basically disagree in such a way that a democratic common life remained possible. I think one of the very unfortunate trends of our time is that genuine civic, which is to say political education, either has been sidelined because we're so worried about competition from China that everybody always says, "Oh, but let's rather have more engineering because this sort of soft skills about democracy, you know, we can maybe reduce that quite strongly or less obviously”. Especially in the U.S., genuine political education has been replaced by so-called, community service or service learning, which is also very important. I mean, it's obviously a good thing that people go out there and do things which basically help civil society, help, you know, vulnerable minorities, and so on. But it's also very consciously apolitical because, in a highly polarised situation, many people are so worried about, you know, stoking more conflict, that they rather shy away from politics. And that's a mistake.
Secondly, I think it's also important, and you hinted at that too, that if we're serious about this, we can't avoid gender. That's another way of saying that rather than, you know, pushing on democracy as a way of life, kind of solving our problems short-term, or kind of quietening things down, or leading to more civility, or what the Germans inevitably called “Zusammenhalt”, social cohesion, in a certain way, it might actually in the short run, sharpen certain conflicts. Because as you also hinted at earlier on, a lot of these writing populist leaders, they have made it their business to defend what some of our colleagues would call “phantom possessions”. So, men are entitled to care and sex from women, men are entitled to certain family relations that has already disappeared or is disappearing in a certain way. But the enormous backlash we are seeing is, of course, part of what we need to recognize as an important element of our politics. So, in a sense, yes, pushing on this is important, but it's not gonna, you know, return us to some status quo before, you know, the mobilization of populist right-wing leaders.
And last, and I'll only very briefly hint at this, but I think it may be something that we should simply not neglect, if you think about how most people, you know, spend most of their days, well, in our firms, companies, the economy remains a site of highly unequal, sometimes outright dominating relations, as probably most famously in political theory, Elizabeth Anderson has pointed out when she said, "Look, you know, we have democracy in politics, and we have a dictatorship in many other areas of our lives, and we're just blind to that." And, of course, one of the really interesting questions for which, I'm sure we won't have time, is to what extent the pandemic may have shaken up some of these relations in certain ways. I know by now it's conventional wisdom to say, no, the pandemic has only deepened pre-existing inequalities, it hasn't changed anything. Maybe, maybe not. But I think things are still in flux. And, you know, if I hope to have the chance, maybe to be re-invited one fine day to your podcast, hopefully, we can talk about that rather different aspect because right now, I think it will take at least another three hours to do it any justice even remotely.
SR: Thank you so much, Jan for this really wide-ranging discussion. In fact, I will not only re-invite you to the podcast, we'll re-invite you to the Central European University with which you have had a long association. So, I look forward to welcoming you back here, both on the podcast and in Vienna. Thank you for being with me today.
JWM: Thanks for having me.
SR: So, what we learned is that populism hinges on the idea of the real people, the silent majority, but this in itself is an exclusionary idea of belonging that paired together with anti-pluralism, which is, again, an exclusion of minorities, of critics, critics label them as anti-national. These could be two important characteristics if we want to identify the conceptual core of populist politics. The inner logic of populism is an inherently moral one, that is the majority, the popular will, cannot be wrong.
Populism is therefore not aimed at broadening political participation or putting forward more open public debate. In fact, populist leaders and parties have sought to perpetuate their own power in very many ways. So it's more useful to think about the playbook of populist politics than to focus on the personality of the leader; charisma therefore may not be a really useful category.
Populist styles of governance are similar but that does not mean that the reasons for the rise of populism are the same across the very many countries, in which we are seeing populist governments in power today. It's so important to push back, as we heard from Jan-Werner Muller, against the claim that illiberal democracy is a democracy. Illiberal democracies, so-called, are not democracies; they are damaging, dismantling democracy from within using the electoral majorities at their disposal.
Functioning political parties, and especially their internal democracy, is part of the critical infrastructure of democracy as are robust print media and the radio, what Tocqueville already pointed to as the intermediary institutions, which determine the life of democracies.
And finally, that social equality is important. The practice of social equality, both in the workplace and in family as well as political life, is important for the life of democracy, and therefore, civic education, the soft skills, which may be needed to ensure the health of democratic institutions are neglected at their own peril.
This was the seventh episode of season three, thank you very much for listening. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes which you may have missed. And, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you've enjoyed 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.