What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Muller

Author:Jan-Werner Muller [Müller, Jan-Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL042000 Political Science / Political Ideologies / General
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Can the People Never Say “We the People”?

It might seem that the implications of the analysis so far must be profoundly conservative: politics should be confined to an interaction of official political institutions, whatever these institutions produce by way of empirical outcomes must be legitimate, and claims about, for, let alone by the people are prohibited. But this would be a misunderstanding. In a democracy, anybody can launch a representative claim and see whether a particular constituency is responsive to it—or, for that matter, whether any constituency will identify with the symbolic rendering of a group identity of which citizens hadn’t been conscious at all. In fact, one might even say that democracy is precisely designed to multiply such claims: the conduct of official representatives should be contestable, and the contestation may involve the argument that the representatives fail to represent—which may mean that they fail to act for their constituents or that they even violate the symbolic self-understanding of the political community.32

Street protest, online petitions, and so on—these all have genuinely democratic meaning, but they lack proper democratic form, and they cannot yield a kind of democratic trump card against representative institutions.33 In any case, such contestation is different from attempts to speak in the name of the people as a whole—and efforts to morally delegitimize all those who in turn contest that claim.

But what about those struggling in the name of “people power” in various parts of the world? To take a recent example, the demonstrators against the Mubarak regime in Tahrir Square used expressions such as “One hand,” “One society,” and “One demand.” (There were also more creative slogans, such as “The people want a president who does not dye his hair!”)34 Should they be lectured and told that, unfortunately, they had failed properly to understand democracy and were fated to misconstrue constitutionalism?

The analysis presented in this book does not in any way exclude claims about exclusions, so to speak. Anyone can criticize existing procedures, fault them for moral blind spots, and propose criteria and means for further inclusion. What is problematic is not the claim that present arrangements have failed but the claim that the critic and only the critic can speak for “the people.” What is problematic is also the assumption—prevalent but neither empirically nor normatively justified—by many self-declared radical democratic theorists that only the pars pro toto claim can achieve anything truly worthwhile for the previously excluded, and that everything else will amount to mere administration or cooptation into existing political and social arrangements.35 This perspective fails to see that a claim of “we and only we represent the people” might sometimes help political actors gain power but then make securing the long-term stability of a polity all the more difficult. Once the stakes are raised to the level of nonnegotiable identity claims, continuous conflict appears likely.

It is almost a cliché to point out that many constitutions have evolved because of struggles for inclusion and because ordinary “citizen interpreters” of the constitution have sought to redeem previously unrealized moral claims contained in a founding document.

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