POPULISM is a widely used term, but one that is also widely misunderstood. The most elementary error is to derive the meaning from the adjective “popular”, where the latter refers to a person or thing that is well-liked. By contrast, we should understand populism as a distinctive way of practising politics. I shall demonstrate that Azruddin Mohamed (AZM hereafter) is a populist.
In what follows, I outline the key elements of populism.
(a) populism is based on a politics of mobilisation rather than a politics of aggregation. While democratic politics work by aggregating interests and developing policies and programmes to address the same, populist politics focus on recruiting or mobilising sections of the population who are told that they are the REAL people, but who have been abandoned, ignored, and forgotten.
(b) populism is leader-dominant. The top man, such as AZM, presents himself as someone who is above society. He stands above the fray and will only intervene to save the ‘people’, who in fact are only a segment of the population. In this case, the populist leader emits messianic waves.
(c) The populist leader (AZM again) uses images and other signifiers to portray himself as a ‘strongman’ who is unafraid of those who hold political and economic power. Max Weber used the term charisma to specify this strongman quality.
(d) The populist leader makes promises to the poor, knowing fully and well that these promises are not realistic and won’t be delivered. The message is that if you are a faithful follower, you will be rewarded, one way or another, but nothing really specific. The trick is to make belonging to the movement itself the key reward.
In aggregative (democratic politics), citizens make requests that governments respond to in ways set out in the governing principles, institutions, and capabilities. The work of Amartya Sen is indicative of how this works at an aspirational level.
The populist, by contrast, converts all requests into demands.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe explain the differences here. While a request is the product of a civic process, a demand politicises the ‘thing’. For instance, if a trench is clogged, resulting in flooding, a community can request that NAREI clear it up. If that fails, a call might go to Lionel Wordsworth. Still in the ambit of ‘request’, the matter can climb the governance ladder all the way to OP. Nothing political so far.
A demand occurs when a request is transformed into something political. The populist leader can take the same trench, call a meeting, and say something like, “Look how they take their eyes and pass you.” He then calls for a march to an iconic political location (perhaps OP). The task and strategy of the populist leader is to transform a matter of mundane governance into a political crisis. The underbelly of the crisis is the elite versus the people.
The danger of populism is that this strategy can be enacted quite easily at an operational level, and with practically no political costs to the populist movement. The worse the crisis, the higher the populist leader rises.
The ruling party in these instances must worry about the proclivities of the middle class, whose political identity is highly unstable and can shift tactically if and when the streets become crisis-prone.
The populist model is based on constantly finding ways to divide the country. Simple differences are regularly transformed into implacable confrontations. The leader of the movement is more like a field commander who issues the order, and the infantry goes out because of the movement patriotism, based, as it were, on a world divided between the saved and damned, a Manichean world cultivated, constructed, and reproduced through endless rhetorical performances.