Populism (Key Concepts in Political Theory) by Benjamin Moffitt

Author:Benjamin Moffitt [Moffitt, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

2 Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has particularly been cited as an inspiration for Podemos (see Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 80–93; Seguín 2015), the former party secretary Íñigo Errejón writing his PhD thesis on the party.

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Populism and Liberalism

One of the key narratives that have developed around populism in recent decades is that it is a threat to liberal democracy. But what happens when, instead of taking that narrative at face value, we break the term ‘liberal democracy’ down into its constitutive components – liberalism and democracy? On the one hand, while there is a fair degree of debate about the democratic credentials of populism – something we will get to in the next chapter – there is actually a significant amount of consensus about its liberal credentials: academics and pundits alike generally agree that populism is a profoundly illiberal phenomenon. Yet does this claim hold up empirically? Is populism actually synonymous with ‘illiberal democracy’, as Pappas (2016b) argues? Is it an ‘illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’, as argued by the likes of Mudde (2004) and Mounk (2018)? It is these types of questions that the present chapter takes up.

In contrast to scholars who argue that populism is always illiberal, this chapter contends that the reality is actually more complex. On the one hand, there are right-wing populists increasingly reconfiguring liberal tropes for their own purposes, claiming to be brave defenders of free speech, justifying limiting immigration from certain countries in order to protect gender and sexual equality, or even clearly self-identifying as liberals. On the other, there are left-wing populists who often extend their conception of ‘the people’ to include various minority groups, which on the face of things seems to be in line with pluralism and liberalism. To add to this confusion, ostensibly liberal ‘mainstream’ politicians have become increasingly adept at adopting the policies, discourse and style of populists in recent years, particularly on the right, which means that there is an increasingly blurry line between what is illiberal and liberal and what is mainstream and populist at the current historical conjuncture. At stake here, the chapter argues, is what version of liberalism we are talking about: is it a liberalism that values diversity (a Lockean liberalism), autonomy (a Kantian liberalism) or self-expression (a Millian liberalism) as the primary value that justifies liberal rights?

To examine how these distinctions play out when it comes to the relationship between populism and liberalism, the chapter first considers what the theoretical and empirical literatures on populism have to say about how these phenomena interact. It then examines the differences between how the populist right and the populist left use and invoke liberal tropes, and how these differences relate to the subtypes of liberalism just mentioned. It argues that, while some figures on the populist right may claim to hold liberal values, this is often a shallow commitment that is ultimately used for targeting minorities in a deeply illiberal fashion. On the flip side, the chapter argues that the populist left demonstrates a

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