Democracy and Populism

Jan-Werner Müller is a political philosopher born and trained in Germany, as well as in England and at Princeton where he now teaches as Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University and is also a fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study. The emphasis of this latest book by him is that democracy depends not only on maintaining liberty and equality but also on dealing with uncertainty. His previous book was What Is Populism? (2016) where he does not really emphasize, though he seems to recognize, that populism can be the expression of rational grievances of an aroused population, reacting against the rise of elites increasingly unaccountable in practice if not necessarily in theory. Peter Mair (2013), the late great Irish political scientist in Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, became known for his comments on this very subject, of politicians who think more like civil servants concerned with keeping their jobs long enough to retire with nice pensions than in being leaders of social movements. Müller emphasizes more the unreasonableness of populist movements, their tendency to think of themselves as ‘the real people’, and therefore their tendency to scapegoat those they consider to be social outsiders, particularly immigrants and ethnic minorities, and therefore their tendency to ignore other sources of social problems requiring other solutions. As for such solutions, keeping out or even expelling these ‘outsiders’ is according to many economists a short-sighted solution to short-term economic problems that can be dealt with by economic growth, perhaps by using these same immigrants as cheap labor or by exporting certain