Are we all populists now?

Populism is usually understood as a reaction against mainstream politics. The populist is supposed to renounce expertise and impartiality, and to favour instead superficial appeals to her identity or her “biases”. Populism is thus understood as a threat to the legitimacy and efficacy of parliamentary democracy: the people it elects must be permanent outsiders, lest they be targeted themselves by populists. So long as they remain in power, good sense cannot prevail.

The goal of my talk is to show that this widely accepted viewpoint is uncharitable to those it seeks to describe: it asserts, rather than proves, their irrationality. And just to that extent, it hides the fact that the problem faced by “populist” is no different to that faced by those in the mainstream. We must all identify which politicians would supply the best solutions to problems, yet none of us (including those politicians) know with certainty which solutions would work—otherwise there wouldn’t be any political disagreement. In the end, we all rely on conventions, not truths, to guide our decisions. The populist claims that mainstream conventions are wrong, which does mark her out as different. But the same claim is made by anyone who claims that changes are necessary. Voters, campaigners, prospective politicians, even students in classroom discussions all propose, with the populist, that they know the answers to difficult policy problems—and that their opponents are thereby wrong. What, then, marks the populist out as different, other than that we disagree with her non-obvious policy beliefs (just as she disagrees with ours)? Isn’t everyone who has an opinion about complex political questions technically a “populist”?