What’s Wrong with the Critique of Populism

Abstract

Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change.