Understanding Populism: Populist Movements From the Tea Party to the Arab Spring
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
Populism is an ambiguous term: it is at once an insult and a description.
Too often the term is used to dismiss a troublesome political adversary whose nature one does not quite understand. Thus American left-liberals qualify the Tea Party as populist, which relieves them of the obligation to study the nature and the claims of this movement. And why, in any case, should populism have such a negative and disdainful connotation? As an insult, populism implies a denial of democratic processes and of intellectual coherence: populism suggests the manifestation of primitive passions and an exploitation of instinctual politics. On this view, populism does not respect the democratic rules of the game and disdains legal and legitimate institutions. Populist solutions are thus considered unrealistic, absurd, impracticable, and contradictory. In European usage, the term goes back to the 1920s and 1930s: populism thus involves an insidious allusion to fascist movements that have since been described as populist.
For this reason the charge of populism has considerable historical weight when applied to the Tea Party in the United States as well as to the extreme right, anti-immigration parties in France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria. The abusive risk inherent in this term is a failure to understand the distinctive significance of the historical, social, economic and even religious context proper to each of these movements.
It must be noted as well that populism, whether understood as a political fact or as a pejorative category, is not reserved to right-wing movements, although populist movements do tend to be on the right. In the 1920s, fascism was born more on the left: Mussolini and most French and Belgian fascists came out of socialism. One might argue, moreover, that the term populist should be applied to communist parties in Europe that also flouted democratic institutions and claimed to transcend traditional political and social cleavages. The alliance of socialists and communists in Europe in the 1930s called itself a popular front. Why would ‘popular’ be a positive term and ‘populist’ negative? Here one is caught between judgment and analysis, indeed leaning more towards a judgment of value as opposed to a dispassionate analysis.