As with many dangerous things, the dose makes the poison.
As with many dangerous things, the dose makes the poison.
P opulism isn’t necessarily bad, but it can be very dangerous. Before touting populism as an unadulterated good, we should consider why that is.
We should view populism the same way we view nationalism: It’s an impulse that is impossible to eradicate, and in appropriate doses, it can be an asset. But the dosage makes the poison. Populism, like nationalism, can be dangerous if imbibed too deeply. The Founding Fathers mistrusted it. So have many of our greatest leaders and thinkers — even those who knew how to summon its energies. William F. Buckley Jr. had a complicated relationship with populism; he found it a useful ally at times, but could never abide the tendency to follow it blindly. As he wrote in 1969, “Populists should be not only expert but enthusiastic at reasoning through to the justification of the people’s demands.”
The virtue of populism is not only that it can stoke the engines of parties and movements with popular energy, but also that it provides a useful corrective to leaders and elites, keeping them grounded in the experience of the common man. It’s a two-way street. A healthy political movement must have grassroots and elites, populists and experts. A movement or party will function best when each is open to listening to the other and working toward common causes. Wars cannot be won without generals who provide strategy, direction, discipline, and careful assessments of intelligence. But neither can they be won without foot soldiers who carry the packs, fire the weapons, hold the ground, and report back what they see when it turns out that the map is not the terrain.
Populism’s defenders tend to focus on the weakest reasons to question it. Populism can be crude and embarrassing, but that is just atmospherics; it’s not a serious standalone case against it. It can be disruptive to existing institutions and elites, which can be good or bad. But if we take seriously the real problems with populism, there are three particular ways in which it can be dangerous if taken to excess without checks on its influence.
Lies: The central danger of populism is that it invites its practitioners to prefer what is popular to what is true, correct, accurate, reasoned, right, or moral. The populist’s instinct, when contradicted, is neither to reflect upon whether the populist might be wrong, nor to explain and illustrate why the populist is right. Instead, the populist’s instinct is to insist that The People must be right, and that contradicting the populist just shows that you are an out-of-touch, ivory-tower elitist who Doesn’t Get It — or worse, a bought-and-paid-for shill for The Man. Truth or falsehood doesn’t enter into the discussion, except perhaps through the implication that whatever is wanted by The People (or at least by a preferred subset of them) must be right.
Lies, mistakes, half-truths, and moral fallacies can be found anywhere in politics, of course. Experts and elites have given us plenty of each in our age and have sometimes responded with their own deflector shields of appeal to authority. But what makes untruth such a malignant feature of runaway populism is precisely the habit of treating truth as beside the point. If you purport to stand for what is true and then lie, you can be called out by your own standard. If you say that you must be right because you “know what time it is” or are “not a globalist elite,” how would one even test whether that is so? The entire mindset fails the test of falsifiability that is supposed to be our guide to getting things right and telling a hamburger from a cow patty.
Worse, once populism devolves into an automatic instinct to oppose elites in every particular simply for being elite, it becomes increasingly likely to get things wrong by asking the wrong question. A stopped clock will at least be right twice a day; a clock that insists on dissenting from all the other clocks is capable of being wrong all day long.
In its final form, populism that disdains the provable truth as its benchmark will end up not even caring what’s popular, rejecting polls and election results alike on the theory that “they” are rigging the system, and telling the denizens of an ever-shrinking tent that they alone represent The People and that the majority are either elites or their brainwashed puppets.
As I often like to remind people about one of the most famous incidents in the history of National Review and its founder, Buckley didn’t go after the Birchers because they were extreme or eccentric or unpopular, but because they were liars. They sold theories that could not survive contact with reality. No amount of popular enthusiasm could make that worthwhile.
Inconstancy: A close cousin of lies is inconstancy. Many truths are eternal, or at least enduring. Yet, populism shifts with the tides. Populist foreign policy may alternate between warmongering and isolationism. Populist economic policy may veer from raging at government bureaucracy to endorsing public seizures of the means of production. To be a conservative populist is often to say that populism decides when you will turn against conservative policies, ideas, and outcomes.
Bigotry: Like lies, bigotry can be found in any political faction or style, but it is harder to dislodge from populist movements. So much of the style of populism – its us-against-them framing, its habit of arguing that conspiracies of elites are keeping The People down — lends itself to bigotry in general, and to the conspiratorial bigotry of antisemitism in particular. That’s a big reason why we are now encountering a surge of antisemitism today emanating from both the populist left and the populist right. It’s all too easy for populist defenders of bigotry, when called out, to make the story about what they don’t want you to hear, or to deride critics as pearl-clutching tone-policers, rather than to actually grapple with the substance of what is said and argued. As with the disdain for truth, the problem is less that populism produces this sort of thing than that populism disables our defenses to it.
Defenders of unchecked populism need to take seriously the reasons why it can be so dangerous, before we all overdose.