Innumerable scholars and commentators agree that a populist “revolt” is unfolding against liberal constitutional democracy. Whatever one thinks of this diagnosis––I, for one, find it unduly alarmist––it seems indeed that something has changed within established democracies over the last decade or so. Democratic politics appears more personalized than ever before; the tone of political debates has become aggressive and antagonistic; and even mainstream politicians sometimes portray institutionalized procedures of compromise building as something that needs to be overcome, rather than followed. What has happened?
In Me the People, distinguished democratic theorist Nadia Urbinati takes stock of these developments and systematically links them to the phenomenon of populism. The book opens with a clarification of the contested term: acknowledging that populism is “ambiguous” and “difficult to define in a sharp and uncontested way,” Urbinati suggests thinking about it not in terms of an “ideology or a specific political regime” but as a “representative process, through which a collective subject is constructed so that it can achieve power” (p. 5). This sounds surprisingly much like a radical-democratic conception of populism, as defended by Ernesto Laclau and others––but unlike radical democrats, whose primary concern is with the articulation and mobilization of collective identities, Urbinati is interested in the effect of populist politics on representative democracy.
The central claim of the book is that populism is not, as many believe, about opposing representative democracy but about transforming it from within. It is not merely a “movement of opposition” but one that “wants to compete for power, and ultimately rule” (p. 112). Along the way, argues Urbinati, it “disfigures” representative democracy. The argument is developed over four chapters, each of which analyzes a different dimension of populist politics. Throughout, an ideal-typical conception of representative democracy serves as the foil against which populism is contrasted, which also enables Urbinati to pinpoint which of the essential features of representative democracy are reshaped by populism.
The first chapter discusses populism’s “antiestablishmentarian” thrust. According to Urbinati, this is rooted in the “association of power with impurity or immorality” (p. 56). Populists scorn the political establishment because they view those who hold power as inevitably corrupted by their power, while ascribing to the powerless the status of higher moral purity. Although this is not per se an undemocratic impulse, populists use their “antiestablishmentarian rhetoric” in a distinctive way that is different from merely declaring opposition to the party or parties in power. They assert that the supposedly powerless mass on whose behalf they claim to speak “deserves superior recognition because it is objectively the ‘good’ part” of the population (p. 75).
Urbinati suggests that this moralizing view of political conflict has direct consequences for how populists engage with representative-democratic institutions. Most notably, it leads them to reject traditional party competition, which is predicated on the idea that no political collective can plausibly claim to deserve superior recognition due to its alleged moral purity. The book’s second chapter elaborates this point, examining how populism’s predisposition to treat the powerless as morally pure translates into a particular populist conception of the “people.” Populists, in short, reject the notion that the people are always indeterminate and open to change in a democracy. Instead, they “declare that they are the people, once and for all” (p. 90). As Urbinati shows, using recent examples from Hungary, Poland, and Bolivia, this delusional self-conception often makes populists aim for “unbounded power” (p. 109). Whenever possible, they will try to “fuse their party platform with the will of the state” by “inscribing their policy preferences onto the constitution” (p. 110).
As the third chapter explains, leadership plays a crucial role in how populists govern. Most interestingly, Urbinati draws attention to a major challenge facing populist leaders in office: they still need to make “strong proclamations of antagonism and antiestablishmentarianism, yet because they do not institute a dictatorship, they must [also] continue to negotiate with the opposition” (p. 115). This in turn puts pressure on them to “assure the people that power will not make them like the old establishment” (p. 116); that is, corrupt and out of touch with the people they claim to represent. A common solution to this problem is the cultivation of direct and highly personalized forms of communication, which are meant to sustain the faith of populist supporters in their leader. An early example is Hugo Chávez’s famously solipsistic TV show Aló Presidente, where the former Venezuelan president “spent an extraordinary number of hours denouncing capitalism” (p. 131) without ever having to answer critical questions. Today, populist leaders most effectively communicate via social media, Exhibit A being Donald Trump’s obsessive use of Twitter (at least until he was banned from that platform).
One of the major conceptual innovations that Urbinati introduces is the notion of “direct representation”––the topic of the book’s fourth and final chapter. Urbinati argues that populists, contrary to widespread belief, do not want to make democracy more direct. The tweeting of Donald Trump, the blogging of Beppe Grillo, or the “digital acclamation” (p. 187) methods used by Movimento 5 Stelle or Podemos suggest that they instead want to make representation more direct. Unlike traditional “mandate representation,” which is based on (a degree of) mistrust toward and the close monitoring of elected partisan representatives, direct representation should generate “trust through faith” in the leader, a faith that remains “undivided and unreserved” (p. 164). Whether this can actually be achieved with tweets or blog posts remains, of course, an open question, but the ambition to generate unreserved faith is arguably there. Supporters are meant to believe that the leader embodies the people.
In sum, this is a complex and highly stimulating book that adds considerable complexity to a theoretical debate that has largely ran out of steam. The book’s value lies not least in its distinctive approach: unlike most studies of populism that I am aware of, Urbinati tries to sensitize the reader to the fact that democratic institutions, procedures, and practices are always liable to dynamic change and to the role of political agency in effecting transformations of democracy.
This, then, leads me to a question raised by reading the book: Have populist parties and leaders also transformed their mainstream political competitors and perhaps even had a greater impact on them than on democratic institutions? Consider that we might be witnessing the dawn of a “post-populist” age: Trump has been voted out of office, and the same goes for Matteo Salvini’s Lega or the Austrian FPÖ––to name just three high-profile cases of populists in power. And although democratic institutions have withstood the challenge, it seems to me that ostensibly moderate politicians are increasingly assuming populist features. The social democratic Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, the conservative Bavarian minister-president Markus Söder (who may well have become German chancellor had the CDU nominated him), or the just-ousted former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz have all successfully instituted highly leader-centered forms of “direct representation,” silencing their party organization and opposing traditional forms of intermediation. However much one recoils from the idea of populist parties in power, the prospect of a mainstreamed post-populism is equally unsettling. Urbinati’s book helps us further understand why.
