What’s the Problem with Populism?

Abstract

‘A specter, one reads, is haunting more than just Europe’.1 So writes Justin Collings in his contribution to Rule of Law vs Majoritarian Democracy. The spectre is right-wing populism – not, I think, ‘majoritarian democracy’ as such. Marx and Engels had an account of where the spectre they thought was haunting Europe in 1848 came from: capitalist development – the economy, in short. The spectre, that is, had a specific political content and a specific economic cause, and for Marx and Engels the remedy was social and economic transformation. But, it turned out, they were wrong: capitalists were able to push the spectre away by a series of institutional reforms of governance. Rule of Law vs Majoritarian Democracy is representative of a spate of scholarship on the contemporary crisis of democracy, if that’s what it is. That scholarship differs from Marx and Engels’s work not solely because it is academic analysis rather than political polemic. It differs as well because it elides politics and economics and attends almost exclusively to institutional matters. Politics is elided by replacing a specifically right-wing populism with populism in general or, as here, with majoritarian democracy. Economics is elided by gesturing in the direction of causes of the crisis located outside of governing institutions – something like a combination of neoliberalism with modes of decision-making enabled by modern communication technologies (‘social media’, ‘the Internet’, and the like) – without seeking to change anything associated with those causes. And, as before, the remedies for the crisis are to be found within the design of governance institutions, generally – though not universally – by restricting the