Abstract
Populism describes those strategies which actors endorsing populist ideas must use in order to be considered populist. Typical populist strategies include the hijacking of state institutions; the development of clientelistic relationships with constituencies labelled the people, or employing certain rhetorical moves in which enmity between the people and a corrupt elite looms large. In this paper, I argue against tendencies to define populism according to a specific set of tactics that are supposed to flow directly from populist ideas. Instead, populism should be understood in terms of a particular orientation, which grounds and justifies a range of strategies, all of which – nefarious or otherwise – should be considered populist. This orientation posits that enmity between ‘the people’ and an elite is a defining feature of political life, in part because it is responsible for serious failures in a country’s ostensibly democratic institutions. These failures create a degree of ambivalence with respect to these institutions’ claims to authority and obedience, and generate the perception that political actors thereby enjoy an expanded set of moral permissions. Finally, populists argue that elites prosecute revanchist projects aimed at resisting populist pathways to power and undermining them once in office. Populist strategies then are simply whatever range of tactics political actors use who accept the validity of that above orientation.
In current discussions of the phenomenon, populism as ideology usually links to populism as political praxis in the following way: At the ‘ideational level’, populists divide the world into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. The people, because of their purity, decency and goodness, need support against a hostile and unresponsive elite, who represent an antithesis to all popular virtues and thus must be defeated. As part of the support they provide, populists claim to represent the people against both elites and those parts of the people that are not really part of the people – or not part of the real people. As a result of having drawn these lines of antagonisms, and pitched themselves onto the political battlefield as defenders and redeemers of the people, populists then proceed to engage with a particular repertoire of populist tactics, which include establishing clientelistic relations with the relevant constituency; disenfranchising actors not part of that constituency from political contests; broad suppression of dissent and civil society, accompanied by invectives against certain parts of the media; the use of rhetorical tropes like ‘enemies of the people’, and a host of others.
However, although populism’s ideational level can and often does generate, and seek to justify, tactics of just these kinds, I argue such elisions, between what political actors think and what they must then do, afford only unbalanced and inaccurate appraisals of populism. Rather than confining our understanding of populism to any particular tactical repertoire, I argue we should understand populism as, in part, a specific orientation to politics. The different strategies – the normative evaluation of which require careful empirical analysis rather than blanket rejections, even when those strategies appear extreme – which are then enacted on the basis of this orientation, all count as populist.
I begin the article by showing how both critics and defenders of populism move from definitions of what populism is, to what populists always and everywhere do. As a result, some supposedly typical populist strategies are presumed to be essential, rather than contingent, aspects of populism: the exaltation of leaders, political disenfranchisement and the formal exclusion of opponents from political contests, the bypassing of mediating organizational forms like political parties, and antagonistic discursive manoeuvres are taken to be the sine qua non of populist political activity. One result of this has been a tendency to preclude, by definitional fiat, movements which describe themselves as populist, but use other methods to pursue their goals. Another result has been to reduce the possibilities for populists to act in sophisticated – or, indeed, even minimally subtle – ways: By defining populism according to sets of (more or less nefarious) strategies, populists are constitutively unable to accommodate themselves, and their ideas, to novel or fluctuating circumstances. To begin their projects, populists must use some combination of tactics drawn from the populist arsenal and once these stop working, populists can only double down or bow out.
I then provide a definition of populism as an orientation, which avoids conflating populism with particular tactical repertoires populists have typically used. My definition of this orientation emphasizes a number of distinct, but related aspects. First, all populists argue that the central division organizing a community is that between the people and an elite (or elites). To be a populist, one must first suppose an ongoing battle between these antagonists, and favour the people in that battle. In addition, populists must also ‘handle’ a range of actors who, for different reasons, do not endorse the populists’ renderings of these antagonisms. Second, all populists blame elites for the serious failings of their country’s democratic institutions, and are therefore ambivalent regarding those institutions’ claims to authority and obedience. From this combination of blameworthiness and the seriousness of democratic failures, emerges an expanded set of morally permissible action populists believe can be taken against elites. Third, populists anticipate that elites will react – potentially violently but at the very least in concerted and well-funded ways – against populist insertions into political life. As a result, populists believe they must chart routes to power, and maintain that power once it is won, in the teeth of both failed institutions and vengeful elites.
The tactical repertoires different populists develop are thus generated by a shared commitment to this deeper, and more broadly conceived, orientation. But it remains possible for populists to share this orientation with other populists – even as they belong to entirely different points on the political spectrum – while adopting different tactics than those thought typical. Populist orientations – unrestrained – certainly allow for the employment of all manner of nefarious tactics, including many even authoritarian-right populists have yet to employ. But, it does not necessitate them. Populism, as an orientation, can be enacted via other means. To aver that the orientation invariably and inevitably disfigures, damages or otherwise corrupts democracy is, at worst, to rule by fiat in favour of a (potentially damaged, disfigured, corrupted) status quo or, at the very least, to endorse only certain readings of the political terrain and certain ways out of that status quo.*
Before delineating the populist orientation, I will first describe different versions of the tendency, common in discussions of populism, to claim that political actors, convinced of the plausibility of populist ideas, must inevitably commit themselves to some specific set of strategies. This confusion – between populism as an understanding of the political world and populism as a set of instruments political actors use to navigate a political world – means that particular tactics are taken to describe not just particular strategies that particular populists have used at a given moment, but as somehow essential and constitutive of all populisms. Furthermore, evaluations of these strategies typically fail to adequately account for the different contexts within which they play out – whether, for instance, they are conducted under the shadow of aggressive oligarchic or imperialist projects, terroristic violence or revanchist white supremacy. This means the urgency of adapting to certain political exigencies, the stakes of the perceived battle between ‘the people’ and elites, are usually addressed in only cursory and unsophisticated ways.
Kurt Weyland’s ‘political-strategic approach’ bakes populist strategies into definitions of populism, something he regards as an advantage of his approach. On his view, ‘populism is best defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, institutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’ (Weyland 2001). Populists are those actors with a demonstrated willingness to use particular tactics to concentrate power in their own person, which they hope will augment their personal glory (Weyland 1999); who use ‘diffuse, often emotional, appeals’ to both build and maintain their constituencies (Weyland 2003); and who must necessarily ‘lack firm commitment to ideologies and principles’ because theirs is a ‘quest for personal power’ (Weyland 2013). Analyses of populism can thus be reduced to analysis of a particular kind of person’s strategy for gaining, keeping and augmenting personal power.
Mediation and organization is anathema to populism on this view, just as exaltation of leaders is central. One upshot of this approach is just how much it excludes from studies of populism: a group of people can despise elites with all their heart, deign to root them out from all institutions, and by any means necessary, regard these elites as the only problem in the world, but if they decide to accomplish this without a specific kind of leader they cannot be populist. In order to know whether or not any political actor is populist, we thus need a sense – which is not forthcoming from Weyland, or other adherents to this approach – of when mediation might sufficiently kick in, when organization might become robust and perhaps formalized enough (does attending meetings, knocking on doors, electing a branch treasurer count?), and thus when support is indirect enough, for a movement to no longer count as populist (Rueda 2021, 170). Does, for example, the existence of an extensive system of communes in the Venezuelan context – up to 45,000 in 2016, responsible for all manner of initiatives, ranging from road construction to textile collectives (Maher 2016; Webber 2017, 33) – insert enough of an alternative mode of popular participation to excuse Chavez of his (ego-centric) populism? Or, are such institutions to be rejected as the disingenuous manoeuvrings of an individual who, in fact, ‘lack(ed) firm commitment to ideologies and principles’ and was concerned only with ‘the quest for personal power’ and ‘clout’ (Weyland 2013, 31)? Without answers to these questions – which raise, as a start, acute epistemological problems regarding populist leaders’ motives (Rueda 2021, 170–171) – the analytical purchase of such an approach, distinct from whatever political use might be made of such scholarship, is minimal.
Although broadly sympathetic to Weyland’s strategic approach, Nadia Urbinati is also more alive to the variations contained within phenomenon designated populist (Urbinati 2019b, 117). First, there is ‘populism as a movement of opinion – oppositional, not always interested in constructing a representative constituency, and not unusual in electoral democracy’. Her examples here are Italy’s Girotondi, Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street in the US (ibid. 118). Notwithstanding their use of often fiery ‘antirepresentative discourse’ because Urbinati assumes the members of these groups wanted to remain ‘independent of elected officials’, and ‘resist becoming an elected entity’, neither having nor wanting ‘representative leaders to unify their claims’, these groups escape her opprobrium (2019a, 118; cf. Smucker 2017). Indeed, Urbinati seems to regard such groups as necessary agents within democracy’s contestatory evolutions and developments (Urbinati 2019a, 10). Second, there is ‘populism as a movement that strives to become a ruling power within the state’ (2019b, 118). Narrowing her focus to ‘populism in power’, and specifically within what she describes as populism’s ‘most mature, vexing profile in constitutional representative democracy’, it this dimension of populist ideas and praxis which needs to be handled with ‘special care’ (Urbinati 2019b, 115). To evaluate this profile then is to evaluate populism as a particular ‘strategy for conquering power’, and its effects on mature democratic institutions in contexts where mass enfranchisement has already been achieved (2019b, 113). In contrast to its potential in ‘democratising contexts’, within which ‘populism can become a strategy for rebalancing the distribution of political power among established and emerging social groups’, populism in power, as Urbinati sees it, necessarily ‘consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it’ (Urbinati 2019b, 115; 111).
Even as Urbinati’s approach is more sophisticated than Weyland’s – in particular because she both avoids the epistemological and psychological quagmires into which Weyland’s analysis wades, distinguishes phases in the evolution of populism and explores the wider institutional implications of specific populists’ transformations of actually existing democracies – she nevertheless follows Weyland in his emphasis on the constitutive centrality of leaders to populism as ‘a form of collective action aiming to take power’ (2019b, 112). Urbinati argues that populists’ striving for power necessarily entails establishing unmediated, anti-partisan connections between themselves and the claimed constituencies of ‘the people’. As a result, although populists might draw on the familiar language of ‘the people and the majority, elections, and representation’ its means of activating that language ‘shatters intermediary actors, such as parties and accredited media, as well as institutional rules, bureaucracy, and monitoring agencies’ (Urbinati 2019b, 113). Whereas the divisive rhetoric of that first variant of populism limits itself to a ‘movement of opinion’, and thus might form part of a functioning democratic culture’s public sphere, as soon as populists strive for power, ‘populism’s adversarial identity’ must necessarily be concentrated in a leader who then ‘mobilizes the media to convince the audience that he embodies the people’s many forms of discontent against traditional parties’ spineless mainstreamism’ (Ibid.). Populism thus simultaneously entails commitment to a particular form of hierarchy between ‘the people’ and their leaders, and the related rejection of the hierarchies, pluralism and combativeness constitutive of partisan politics (2019a, 171). Populist claims to legitimacy are embodied in leaders, who thereby absorbs ‘the collective body in his person and acts “as” the people, which is the condition for him to act “for” the people’ (Urbinati 2019b, 118). By definition, populist ideas in action abhor mediation, such that this form of ‘exalted’ leadership, or ‘leader(ship) beyond parties’, becomes the sole mode of populist governance (2019a, 113–157).
Populists must reject the constraints of constitutional democracy because it is only through such rejection that their power can be sustained and their ambitions achieved. In other words, once they focus on state power, populists are driven to a particular set of strategies in which it is the leader who looms large as the exclusive embodiment of legitimacy. Should a political movement chart a route to power that is not also ‘a path toward the exaltation and entrenchment of a leader and his or her majority’, or to any mode of legitimacy other than one centred on exalted embodiment, then, it would seem, it cannot be populist (Urbinati 2019a, 39). Within such an understanding of legitimacy, elections are understood in a ‘singular’ way – as ‘a strategy to reveal a majority that... already exists in the country and that the leader brings to the surface and makes victorious’ (2019b, 119). Electoral legitimacy thus remains ‘a key defining dimension of populist regimes’, but it is of a disfigured kind because it rejects the constraints, mediation and pluralism of constitutional democracy (2019b, 115).
In a related vein, Jan-Werner Müller argues that a ‘political actor qualifies as populist’ if he combines (at least) the rhetoric of anti-elitism with claims to ‘exclusive representation’ that necessarily make any and all opposition illegitimate (Müller 2017, 20). Crucially, such rejection cannot just relate to the here and now, because of, say, perceived failings amongst a particular set of claim-making representative institutions. Populists, for example, cannot just argue that some set of political parties are thoroughly corrupted ‘claim-making institutions’, incapable of answering the needs of the relevant public, but must claim that the democracy in question is inherently incapable of producing claim-making institutions to rival its own (Saward 2010). Populist critiques, for Müller, always entail the wholesale rejection of any and all claim-making institutions other than its own (cf. Vergara 2020, 234): Without this assumption of ‘moralized antipluralism’ as a basic fact of political ontology, political actors cannot be populist (Müller 2017, 20). With this definitional fiat in place, Müller goes so far as to argue that political actors who might even regard themselves as populists, but do not adopt particular strategies, have to be disabused of such labels – including the original American Populists (ibid., 18–19) and Podemos (ibid., 1; 2021, 182).
For Müller, it is this antipluralism which generates the strategic repertoires and organizational tendencies that constitute populist ideas in action: ‘internal authoritarianism’ within parties, the ‘aesthetic production of (leaders’) “proximity to the people”’, and the thorough rejection of ‘complex party organization as intermediaries between citizens and politicians’ (Ibid., 36; 43; 35). Once in power, such moralized antipluralism necessitates agendas of state capture, corruption, clientelistic relationships between populists-in-power – ‘caretakers to the people’ – and their favoured constituency, and the suppression of civil society (Ibid. 30; 4).
Crucial to the critiques of both Müller and Urbinati, is the role exclusion performs for populist politics: Populists, to be populists, commit to treating all those excluded from the relevant popular constituency in the same way – their interests are to be neglected, their membership in the polity challenged, their basic political rights and assumptions of political equality ignored and violated: To challenge populists is to court one’s political erasure. Whatever ambivalence populists feel toward opponents, or simply to those who are not on board with their agenda, is necessarily cashed out in strategies of straightforward elimination from the political game. These strategies, which necessarily disfigure the institutions of constitutional democracy – such as the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and the acceptance of peaceful alternations in power typical of elections – are not incidental features of populism, but are essential and constitutive aspects of what it means to be, to think and to act as populists.
Both Urbinati and Müller are right, not only about the dangers contained within populist ideas, but specifically that something like exclusion is often a prominent feature of populist politics. Populists are always deeply critical of their political opponents, and to such an extent that they often regard them – and the interests of those they claim to represent – as illegitimate. One way in which such criticisms can be cashed out is with straightforward disenfranchisement. Crucially, Müller is not opposed to exclusion, but limits the use of it to situations he regards as extreme. Silvio Berlusconi, for example, should have been allowed to return to political life, which he did when he became a member of the European Parliament in 2019. Donald Trump, on the other hand, having shown no remorse for his role in the events of the January 6th insurrection, ‘was a much better candidate for permanent banning from political life’ (Müller 2021, 170). If Urbinati is right that it is incumbent on theorists of populism to ‘explain what makes populism’s antiestablishment position different from what we find in the republican paradigm, in traditional oppositional politics, and in democratic partisanship’ then we need a sense, even here, of the distinctiveness of specifically populist forms of exclusion (Urbinati 2019b, 117). Müller and populists might agree that exclusion should only be enacted in extremely perilous circumstances, but the latter just have a broader sense of what counts as perilous: For Müller, the absence of remorse over an attempted coup does the trick, whereas populists want to include more. Nevertheless, there is a continuum at work here that should be seen as an empirical dispute. 1
However, more importantly, even as exclusion might be more readily justifiable to actors operating from within a populist orientation, populists can also draw on other tactics to achieve the same purpose, including straightforward inclusion. For example, populists might push for the mass enfranchisement of voters – including the incarcerated – in the hope that this will help them win electoral majorities. They might even push for open borders to ‘flood’ a country with people they hope to mobilize and win to their cause, and who will help them sustain a preferred vision of peoplehood. Similarly, populists might push for the introduction of independent, non-partisan delineation of electoral wards because this will aid their perceived constituency gain ascendancy and help them marginalize their opposition to such an extent that the policy preferences of their opponents can be contained and ignored within established institutional parameters. Just as political parties with large, disciplined majorities can largely ignore the protestations of opposition parties and their constituencies, so too can populists attempt to do the same.
Urbinati is thus right that populists perceive themselves as having to marginalize opposition, and do so because that opposition represents constituencies that are against the interests of the people. But exclusion from politics – disenfranchisement, suppression of civil society, partisan gerrymandering – is only one form such marginalization can take. On Müller’s and Urbinati’s views, it would seem to be literally impossible for populists to marry ambivalence with respect to the functioning of existing democratic institutions – to regard them as compromised and disfigured – to a commitment to at least some of those institutions, as potential vehicles and pathways for concerted political activity, through which enemies – and all those who refuse to stand with them in their battle against elites – can be defeated. On such a view, populist strategies cannot evolve, even in unforeseen ways, without becoming something other than populist, because it is only once populists act on those ideas with a certain repertoire of nefarious tactics, or generate certain institutional effects, that they are to count as populists. Once again, commitment to populism welds populist actors to corrupt practical commitments, which means populist ideas are made irredeemable.
I now turn to Rogers Brubaker, who offers a thinner and more expansive account of populism, one less focused on the pre-eminence of leaders within populist movements, but which nevertheless still insists on describing populism in terms of ‘a discursive and stylistic repertoire’. This repertoire consists of the construction of ‘vertical and horizontal oppositions’ between elites and other non-elites (Brubaker 2017, 362); the ‘antagonistic re-politicization’ of certain areas of social life (364); appeals to ‘majoritarianism’ and ‘anti-institutionalism’ (365); ‘protectionism’ against the hostility of the elites and outsiders (366) and an emphasis on ‘low’ rhetorical styles (366–367). Not all populisms will draw on all these elements to the same extent, but are, instead, connected to one another through ‘family resemblances’ in which it is ‘the combination of elements’, centring on ‘a core element: the claim to speak and to act in the name of the people’, which generates that which is distinctive about both populist ideas and praxis (361).
Because of his more expansive approach to populists’ ‘tactical repertoire’, Brubaker avoids many of the problems inherent to the other approaches considered thus far. In particular, Brubaker’s approach honours the self-descriptions of many members of the ‘left populist insurgencies of Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, the Podemos movement in Spain, and Syriza in Greece’ (ibid. 358). The American Populists too, can recover, at least by implication, their position as progenitors of the term. Nevertheless, even while I agree with Brubaker that populism can generate similar ‘discursive, rhetorical, and stylistic commonalities’ (ibid. 360), pinning definitions of populism to those commonalties, even when caveated with reference to ‘family resemblances’, poses a stark choice for any analysis of the phenomenon. One choice is to assume that populists can only ever exist during moments – ‘populist conjunctures’ (ibid. 368) – when a given repertoire of tactics is going to do minimally well. However, as soon as these tools are put aside, or when their combined use falls below a particular threshold, we will no longer have populism or populists.
Alternatively, we can acknowledge populist political actors are capable of developing tactics – beyond the ‘improvisation and elaboration’ of a set of fixed populist moves adapted for local contexts (ibid. 361) – to respond to new ‘conjunctures’ demanding different tactics (Smucker 2017, 120). This alternative view assumes populists have some capacity to develop new methods, beyond the typical repertoire, which allows them to gauge their resources and strengths, and those of their antagonists, and develop strategy accordingly. In other words, populists can continue to function beyond those moments when they are seen acting like typical populists. For example, Brubaker is rights that populists often do ‘distrust the mediating functions of institutions, especially political parties, media, and the courts’ (Brubaker 2017, 365). But, what he fails to acknowledge is that if, within a given conjuncture, populists believe that the forms of mediation provided by, say, a political party will work to advance their cause, or different rhetoric might assist them in the pursuit of their goals, it gives populists too little credit to assume they are inherently unable to adjust to the opportunities of the moment. To deny populists even that level of adaptive political acumen, implicitly assumes that they can only exist when some set of circumstances has already reached a given pitch, paving the way for the chance of some success, electoral or otherwise. Outside of such moments, they must cease to be populists, knocking up against the hard walls of their own tactical limitations. But, if socialists can turn away from mass assembly toward the formation of political parties, from trade unionism to occupation, from corporatism to wildcat striking, from guerrilla warfare and targeted assassinations to positions of state management – and back again – while still being socialists, we should also permit populists similar qualities of strategic adaptability. As with all the other approaches, Brubaker assumes that populists, in contrast to nearly all other political actors, commit to a given, narrow set of repertoires.
Operating from a more sympathetic – if also decidedly more abstract – position, Laclau’s (2011) and Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) understandings of populism provide the most expansive account of the connection between populist strategies and populist ideas. In so doing, they more nearly escape from this tendency to see populist strategies flowing directly from populist ideas. Laclau, in particular, is explicit that his is an attempt to capture a ‘populist logic’ which underpins populist mobilisations of all forms (Laclau 2011, 16–20). It is to Laclau’s credit that he never assumes that all populists must, in order to honour their populist ideas, pursue some scheme of institutional disfigurement, or must assert monopolies over all claims to legitimacy, in perpetuity, even as they may assert certain time-specific monopolies to exclusive representation. From within Laclau’s discursive approach, ‘ideological “elements” taken in isolation have no necessary connotation’, whether for the ideology itself, or for the institutional settings within which they developed: ‘Connotation is only the result of the articulation of these elements in a concrete ideological discourse’ (Laclau 2011, 99). These processes of articulation are, for populists, as well as other actors, radically open.
Nevertheless, because Laclau and Mouffe’s vision of populism grows out of a particular (post-Marxist) understanding of the social world, against which populists are assumed to operate, their discursive approach still tends to assume populist orientations must be acted on in particular ways if they are to be successful. As Urbinati also avers, this approach produces a ‘practical template for the making of populist movements and governments’ (Urbinati 2019b, 117). 2 To be sure, populism is no longer described as a particular path to power necessitating the disfigurement of democratic institutions, not least because those institutions are always already assumed to be quite seriously disfigured (Mouffe 2018, 1). Instead, it is now the very ontology of the social world itself that dictates how populists must act and what they must do to be successful. For example, Occupy’s most famous discursive move – its declaration that, as a movement, it represented ‘the 99%’ – effectively operationalizes populist logic, in part, because of its vagueness. Discursive strategies that assumed any more ‘precision characterizing the social chequerboard’ misunderstand the ways in which social reality imposes certain constraints on political actors: Insisting on more precision undermines populist strategy because it entails being insufficiently attentive to the fact that ‘vagueness and imprecision’ do not demonstrate ‘cognitive failure(s)’, but rather acknowledges the fact that ‘social reality (is) itself so heterogeneous and volatile’ (Anderson 2017, 82; Laclau 1977, 17–18). Tactical repertoires of certain kinds are necessitated by a particular vision of how social reality operates, explicitly dismissing, amongst others, Marxist approaches to that reality. As Perry Anderson notes, this appeal to strategic vagueness is most pronounced when populists come to delineate their adversaries, ‘since to specify it too accurately or realistically risks casting the net of hegemonic interpellations too narrowly, exposing the rhetorical percentages as the fiction they are’ (Anderson 2017, 82).
And so, what Laclau describes as populist political activities – fleshed out in terms of abstract processes of ‘the accumulation and dispersion of demands, naming, condensation, and dichotomization’ of a political field into antagonists – not only posits antagonism as the central concept of populist activity – and, at times, political activity tout court (Laclau 2011, 67) – but also assumes that such antagonism must be navigated, at the level of articulation, always, in explicitly antagonistic ways (Valdivielso 2017, 300). Navigating this antagonistic field, populism only begins once actors themselves have performed a number of discursive moves, condensing an accumulation of disaggregated ‘social demands’ – ‘the smallest unit’ in politics (Laclau 2011, 73) – into forms that are incapable of being satisfied within any given institutional framework. This condensing establishes ‘regimes of equivalence’ between different constituency’s demands, generating first ‘democratic demands’ and then ‘popular demands’, which in combination creates a political frontier, on one side of which stands ‘the people’ and on the other ‘the elite’ (Ibid. 120). To remain populist, these always unstable ‘regimes’, which are always explicitly articulated and expressed – through ideas like ‘the average man’, ‘working man’, and ‘silent majorities’ (ibid. 135) – need to be constantly maintained through engaging in ‘hegemonic struggle’. Doing this entails keeping the popular class’s frustrations explicit, discursively front and centre, and aligned with one another against an unresponsive elite, which in its turn attempts to neutralize and reduce those antagonisms to ‘simple difference’ (Ibid. 132; Laclau 2011, 173).
Abstracted as this populist logic is – and as dense as the ‘veil of jargon’ in which it is explicated (Therborn 2008, 141) – it nevertheless implies certain practical forms of populist strategy. Populism always entails bringing together, in explicit and openly combative ways, a necessarily diverse range of unfulfilled demands under the heading of the people. Before the lines are explicitly drawn, before that antagonism has been declared, we cannot have reached a threshold of populism. Political projects that avoid open declarations of divisions, hostility and enmity, for specifically tactical reasons, even while they might recognize and aim to treat some opponent as an ‘enemy of the people’, are not populist. In other words, populists cannot be subtle political actors, but must always articulate their claims in ways that are divisive, before then moving to act on the fallout from those declared antagonisms, including acting to counter elite reactions to that declaration. Subterfuge and deception, it seems, are simply unavailable to populists.
There is no doubt that open declarations of antagonism are an important tendency within populist political strategy. However, it also behoves us to retain an openness with respects to populist tactical repertoires for both practical and analytical reasons. For example, a populist capture of a country’s judiciary – ‘legislating with the gavel’ – is performed using argumentative strategies at some distance from typically populist discursive moves. Indeed, attempts to openly construct a populist vision of peoplehood in the courts would likely undermine such strategies. But, it nevertheless remains possible for such a project to be motivated by a populist agenda, i.e. as working for the benefit of something like a ‘silent majority’ or a besieged heartland. To be sure, this might only be one strategy operating within a wider repertoire of tactics, but there is nothing inherently non-populist about strategies that only commit to such subterfuge.
Similarly, if more spectacularly, if we are to understand Machiavelli as a populist – as John McCormick has argued we should – when the Spartan king Cleomenes, believing ‘that he could not confer this benefit on his country unless he obtained sole power’, and seeing ‘that the ambition of others made it impossible for him to do what was useful for many against the will of a few,’ decided to murder ‘the Ephori (senior magistrates) and all others likely to oppose him’, this too could also be seen as a populist move (Machiavelli 2003, 46; McCormick 2018, 51). This action, taken in order to ‘renew the laws of Lycurgus’, did not invoke a set of ‘democratic demands’ to be articulated and held in balance. No ‘naming’ occurs to institute an antagonistic relationship, no articulation of some ‘particular demand (that) comes to represent the universality of a larger set of demands’ (Valdivielso 2017, 299). But Cleomenes decided on mass murder because he was inspired by profound hostility to a group of elites, with whom immediate confrontation was deemed necessary, and the successful prosecution of which was intended to benefit the people.
The fact that Laclau and Mouffe are adamant that ‘everything is articulation’ thus redounds onto their vision of successfully waged political struggle (Anderson 2017, 81). Populist politics is always conducted, essentially and unavoidably, via an extended, constructive and complicated articulation of divisive and heterogeneous ‘equivalential chains’. This means they implicitly deny Müller’s characterisation of populists as only ever claiming to ‘find’ the collective will of the people, because such a ‘collective will can be deduced directly from the one authentic understanding of the people’ (Müller 2021,38). But when Müller focuses on populists ‘finding’ ‘a homogenous and morally unified body’, rather than ‘articulating’ a constituency from out of considerably more heterogeneity, he undoubtedly does capture an important aspect of populist politics (Müller 2017, 27).
For example, while the original American Populists did make considerable efforts to form common cause with members of the urban working class, if they had instead launched a campaign in which they argued that farmers alone, as the besieged members of a dwindling agrarian republic, had sole claim to the mantle of the true American people, then their representative claims would have been no less populist (Dubofsky and McCartin 2017, 151–152). The constituency of a besieged minority grounded in a single identity – occupation, faith, skin colour – struggling with demographic changes that threaten to dilute authentic sovereignty, is a not uncommon feature of populist versions of peoplehood, especially of reactionary kinds, but it goes against the grain of any necessarily complex frontier building. For populists more sympathetic to this notion of ‘popular discovery’, there is ‘an empirical referent’ and not only ‘a discursive political construction’ called the people to be articulated from out of ‘equivalential chains’ (Mouffe 2018, 62). Alternative visions of social ontology can remain populist without drawing on the discursive strategies Laclau and Mouffe place at the centre of populist politics.
Now, to take stock of the different ways populist activities have been seen to flow from populist ideas: First, we began with Weyland’s strategic approach, where populism just is a certain set of repertories used by a certain type of self-seeking leader. With Urbinati and Müller populism becomes a more complex, variegated phenomenon, in which the exaltation of leaders is combined with moralistic and monopolising claims to legitimacy, to be enacted via illiberal and undemocratic forms of exclusion. Brubaker delineates a more expansive account centring on the ‘discursive and stylistic repertoires’ underpinning populist activity, before Laclau and Mouffe move discussion of populism into the plane of an abstract populist logic in which populists articulate antagonism by drawing discursive frontiers between people and elites. Across this gamut, there is a progression, from narrower understandings in which something like egomania is baked directly into the definition, to thinner and more inclusive approaches, to the point where populist ideas and activities are understood as the necessary mode of progressive political action. Nevertheless, this expansiveness notwithstanding, an implication of all these accounts is that populists, as political actors, remain locked into a given set of tactics. Whereas actors with other ideas in their heads can evolve different tactics to pursue their ends, populists cannot. This thinnest of ideologies, it seems, must always cash out in limited strategic repertoires.
In order to recognize populists as minimally sophisticated political actors, we need a more nuanced account of the ways in which populist actions grows out of populist ideas. In what follows, I argue that what populism generates, and what populists thus share, is not some repertoire of tactics, but rather a particular orientation. This orientation consists, first, in a broad understanding of the antagonisms and antagonists that shape the political terrain they perceive themselves as having to navigate; second, a sense of the seriousness of the institutional failures wrought by elites, for which they should be blamed, and which generate significant degrees of ambivalence with respect to the democratic credentials of those institutions; and third, a belief that populist entries into the political contest will elicit elite responses – that can range from more or less organized scurrilous media campaigns intended to delegitimize populist personnel, to projects of violent revanchism – all of which aim at reducing populist influence and power, and which require, in turn, a populist reaction. To be clear, this orientation can be used to ground many of those tactics discussed in the first half of this essay. However, it can also be used to justify whatever range of tactics those convinced of the correctness of this orientation opts to use in following it. In what follows, I am thus keen to recognize the dangers, range and thus potential of populist ideas and activities.
The first part of this populist orientation then proceeds from the fact that all populisms argue that the central category of political life is the division between ‘the people’, on the one hand, and some group designated ‘the elites’, on the other. Populists are those who favour the people in that battle, whereas elitists recognise the same confrontation, but favour the other side (Mudde 2004, 543). This aspect of the orientation is broadly conceived – different populists provide different reasons why they favour the people over the elite. It might be simply that the people are many and the elite few (Brubaker 2017, 365). Alternatively, it can take an essentialist path in which the people are ‘pure’ and ‘untainted’, as opposed to the morally corrupt – and/or evil – character of the elite (Mudde 2004, 544). In other words, peoplehood tracks not numbers but purity, which can inhere in numerical majorities or besieged minorities.
But such essentialism is also contained within an expansive ‘pan-ethnic’ vision of peoplehood: In such instances, the important popular feature is not purity, but rather commitment to this particular vision of peoplehood, coupled to an assumption that ordinary people have political competence sufficient for exercising considerable political power in some fashion, a capacity heretofore thwarted by elites and others (Frank 2020, 109). Similarly, elites can be branded ‘the enemy’ for essentialist reasons. For example, elites can be despised because their cultural values are corrupted, effete or otherwise ill-esteemed; or because they belong to a reviled ethnic group that is considered alien to the people proper; or because their interests are necessarily opposed to those of a pan-ethnic, multinational peoplehood or because they practice religions regarded as foreign to the faith of the people.
But all these essentialist renderings incompletely capture what populists can mean by ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’. Another, structural definition, which we can derive from Machiavelli for example, describes the conflict between people (popoli) and elites (grandi) as one of merely situational animosity: It is not that the people are somehow pure or morally virtuous but only that they are structurally disabled from imposing their will on others in the way that elites can (McCormick 2001, 299). The issue then is not the supposed virtuousness of the poor confronting the moral corruption of the rich, but simply the fact that elites are structurally enabled to impose upon the popular classes their own preferences, interests and designs. While plebeian virtù is cultivated and exercised by people resisting those impositions in order to preserve their freedom, purity, or even decency, is no part of that virtù. Elites, too, can be branded the enemies for purely structural reasons, related to their capacity and willingness to convert wealth into political and ideological power which is wielded against the interests of the people, including against the interests of those people who might identify with elites (Frank 2004).
Crucially, though little commented on, populists only posit popular-elite battles as the central division of political life, rather than the only relevant division that needs to be taken into account: Carl Schmitt’s definition that ‘the political’ can be reduced to the friend-enemy distinction is a stipulation far more substantive and reductive than the populist orientation need be, which argues only for something like the organizing centrality of such enmity to political life (Schmitt 2001, 19). Populists’ politics begin with the positing of a hostile division at the centre of political life, but that does not spell out much, or indeed anything else, with respects to what other divisions there might be, nor how other cleavages interact with that central division. Alongside friendship and enmity there are potential allies, or those labouring under false consciousness who might – or might not – be winnable to one’s cause. Along the ‘horizontal dimension’, there are also the undecideds and the intransigently opposed – whether to populist visions of political life or their representative claim more specifically – some of whom will be ‘deplorable’ but political inactive, and some of whom will be deplorable and active (Brubaker 2017, 363; Smucker 2017, 157; cf. Müller 2019, 1211). The importance of that central antagonism does not determine what populists must do with these other categories of people. It is just not the case then, that whomever disagrees with populists are destined ‘to be labelled a ‘traitor’, ‘enemy of the people’ or, at least, as ‘un-American’ and so on’ (Müller 2019, 1210). Traitors and enemies exist for populists, but so do other problematic categories demanding distinctive populist treatment.
Enumerating these different relationships – all of which might be important to populists, in part because they contain actors who might, willingly or otherwise, facilitate elite political projects – does not determine how populists must handle them. For example, when political insiders like William Galston write things like ‘there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy’, and philosophers like Jason Brennan suggest disenfranchising the stupid, they are not likely to be understood by populists, or even propose themselves, as friends to the people (Brennan 2017; Galston 2018, 22). While this is not necessarily a reason to declare enmity against such individuals, the serious intellectual weight such thoroughgoing anti-populism enjoys – coupled to such people’s descriptions of the failings in actually existing liberal democracy as the result of ‘a complex compromise of popular democracy and liberal elitism’ (Mudde 2004, 561), rather than the result of more egregious elite failings – needs to be confronted. Without declaring enmity, it is still possible to scorn these people’s distance from ordinary people and hope that labelling them misguided reactionaries committed to orthodoxies that defend the inequities of a Second Gilded Age will have some effect. Moreover, attempting to minimize the impact of such figures through the mediated environments of a party – including its intellectuals or partisan media – remains a populist option.
Moving to the second part of a populist orientation: what makes these antagonisms, and related relationships, so important, is that populists argue existing democratic institutions are not only failing in serious ways, but that the source of these failures – and their seriousness – can be blamed on elites (and those who enable them). It is the perceived seriousness of failure, and the conviction that certain groups are responsible for the egregious harms thus caused, which seem, inevitably, to inspire all populists to extreme forms of political reaction: if democratic institutions really are in crisis, those who would seek to confront those responsible for such institutional failings also enjoy an expanded set of moral permissions. Echoing Simon Caney’s description of people’s rights to resist global injustice – a situation where stakes are also extremely high – populists might argue they ‘have a right to act in ways that are contrary either to existing domestic law or to international law in order in order to attempt to change certain practices, policies, or political systems so that the agents in question, or others, are better able to enjoy what they are entitled to as a matter of justice’ (Caney 2020, 511). In Caney’s example, those who suffer from global injustice enjoy expanded permissions to violate border controls; to steal food, medicine and water; to violate intellectual property rights and to illegally access energy grids and the like (ibid. 512–513). Stated most generally – ‘those facing global injustice may generally engage in acts of resistance that are illegal’ and ‘lack an obligation to obey laws that perpetuate global injustice’ (Ibid., 528). Following the same imperative, those injustices that result from failed democratic institutions expand the range of actions, illegal or otherwise, populists perceive as justified.
For populists, their critique of a country’s failing democratic institutions necessarily expands feelings of ambivalence about those institutions’ claims to our obedience: Acting within the perimeters of current institutional rules, norms and practices is sustaining the unnecessary harms caused by those corrupted institutions. Even so, neither the expanded set of permission, nor the lack of authority enjoyed by existing institutions, permits a free-for-all. For Caney, any act of resistance oppressed people, even severely oppressed people, take ‘should be judged in terms of whether they better advance people’s rights. If resistance – either short-term or long-term – results in greater injustice, then it is impermissible’. Consequently, ‘those engaged in resistance should employ the least harmful means available’ (Ibid. 522). When, for example, Noam Chomsky describes the Republican Party as the ‘most dangerous organisation in human history’, this names them as an enemy that needs to be confronted and defeated (Chomsky 2021). But that does not imply Chomsky thinks anyone is morally permitted to go door to door rooting out Republican leaders, financers or rank-and-file members. Defeating Republicans must be accomplished in ways that minimize harms, and there might then be good reason to commit to certain institutions because doing away with them will cause more harm than good. Populists do not necessarily act on their ambivalence by committing to the physical destruction or political disenfranchisement of their enemies: it is possible to resent, despise and distrust elites, without thereby committing to ‘unmembering or dis-membering’ them (McCormick 2001, 298). But just as Rawls exaggerated civil disobedients’ commitments to the ‘near justice’ of their country’s institutions, populists’ remaining within (or even nearly within) institutional limits does not equate to their having accepted the basic legitimacy of those institutions (Lyons 1998; cf. Müller 2021, 172). Populist strategy, in order to be justified, must thus navigate these moral constraints, but ambivalence remains and that can be dangerous. However, it is precisely the populist contention that the status quo is itself a dangerous, indeed lethal game, that could and should be otherwise.
Precisely what action counts as justifiable and what does not is difficult to judge in advance. But populists – of any stripe – need not, as part of the perceived seriousness of failures, commit themselves to the position that certain claim-making institutions, like political parties, are always going to be enemies, or are always going to have to be treated as illegitimate institutional forms. Some particular party, or parties, might, as things stand, be incapable of offering representative claims that satisfy populists. Populists can be wary of these mediating institutions precisely because that mediating role renders them vulnerable to processes of hollowing out and elite capture (Mair 2013; Mudge 2018). Moreover, any given representative field might, at any given time, consist wholly of parties whose claims to representative legitimacy populists reject as having failed to reach some minimum threshold. As an example of navigating those above constraints in ways that both preserve and attempt to reform existing institutions, populist challenges might also be conducted within as well as against some particular party, operating in the hopes of reforming it into an institution that is capable of making representative claims that escape from elite capture, and which can subsequently reach minimal thresholds of legitimacy.
Of course, party elites also react against ‘entryist’ projects and attempt to steer ‘their’ parties back towards what they regard as more credible strategies and orientations, to which concerned populists will also have to respond. For example, this is one way of understanding how factions within the UK Labour Party’s used charges of anti-Semitism to marginalize the leadership, left-wing and much of their rank-and-file membership (Stern-Weiner 2019). Similarly, Democrats in Nevada reacted to the victories of a progressive slate of candidates by resigning en-masse and stripping the party of its contacts, financial resources and personnel (Lacy and Grim 2021). 3 That brings us to the third part of the populist orientation. Populists take seriously elite reactions to their own efforts to change the situation in favour of ‘the people’. In other words, populists envisage elite responses, of varying intensity, as a necessarily correlative to their own entry into political life (Laclau 2011, 131).
One way for populists to shore themselves up against elite reaction, act on both their ambivalence toward existing democratic institutions and their perception that they enjoy an expanded set of moral permissions, is to endorse what Urbinati calls the ‘possessive conception of political institutions’ and capture state institutions. For Urbinati, such a conception necessarily entails denying ‘rights to free speech and freedom of association’, which in turns leads to the use of majority mandates ‘overwhelming enough to block its (ie (a democracy’s)) own potential evolutions and mutations’ (Urbinati 2019, 12; 10). There is no doubt that such moves are dangerous, and for precisely the reasons Urbinati identifies. But, it is still necessary to pause and ask what happens if the state institutions are not captured in the name of certain purposes and for certain constituencies. For example, refusing to capture state institutions might provide precisely the opportunities for a belligerent elite response in which the basic interests of large sections of the population, as populists perceive them, are put at risk. Appealing to idealized processes of evolutions fails to allay those concerns. It is not only then, that populists can draw on different tactics, outside of the repertoire typically allotted them, but that the meaning and justifiability of even that typical repertoire also changes, depending on when and where it is used.
Take the Latin American context. To describe the ongoing political crises in this region as the result of US’s ‘failure ... to tackle the levels of inequality in the region’ is, at the very least, to obscure the material reality of what others might want to do describe as the inevitable consequence of an imperial project unconcerned with the daily lives of millions of people (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 167). 4 It is therefore necessary to recognize that the advances achieved by movements and parties headed by populists like Morales and Chavez in Bolivia and Venezuela, respectively – in economic growth and literacy, dramatic reductions in extreme poverty and inequality (Webber 2014) – were always incredibly unstable. While Chavez survived a coup in 2002, Morales was more recently toppled by a successful one, after having also survived one in 2008 (Webber 2011). For years now, Venezuela has been in the grip of US imposed sanctions that former UN Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas described as crimes against humanity (Selby-Green 2019). Part of taking elites seriously, as a political force, is accepting they will organize themselves to counter populist activity and disrupt populist attempts at hegemony (Laclau 2011, 130). Evaluations of this part of the populist critique thus need to be made very carefully: It is at least reasonable for populists, and others besides, to reject as wrong those who argue that actions taken by figures like Morales, Chavez or Correa were always motivated by ‘paranoia’ (Mudde and Rovira-Kartwasser 2007, 13), and to find scandalous claims that ‘right-wing populism did not ruin democracy in Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia’ but that ‘left-wing populism has a more negative balance sheet’ (Weyland 2013).
To be clear, one need not endorse the capturing of state institutions that has, undoubtedly, occurred in these countries. Jeffrey Webber, for instance, from an anti-imperialist perspective, criticises Morales for failing to deepen and expand the power of his party’s extra-parliamentary bases, relying instead on the development of rent-extractive ‘compensatory states’, which were often protected against indigenous protest using populist language of enmity (Webber 2017, 18). But, it is as well to recognize, as Webber does, that the region is marked by reactionary movements’ committed to white supremacist ideology, elite willingness to use considerable violence, high levels of corruption, and the presence of a foreign actor – the United States – that has consistently demonstrated its willingness to imposes its own views of who should manage its regional interests (Webber 2017, 30; Weisbrot 2012). The ‘evolutions’ we can expect from these state institutions under the aegis of a revanchist, imperialist class – local and foreign – with histories of terroristic carnage, is not going to be a reason to support them. While Urbinati’s arguments that such capture is disfiguring to democracy are well taken, when democracy is already disfigured – when the pluralism she places at the heart of functioning democratic system is not meaningfully present – it might make sense to win and maintain, at whatever cost, the prize of state power.
Again, these shortcuts to power can be justified by populists’ sense that the stakes are high and timeframes for remedies are short. But such an ‘ideology of immediacy’ need not cash out in the capture of institutions for the simple reason that populists can be alive to the fact that acting too quickly will not work out well for them (Innerarity 2010, 41). Recognizing the dangers of taking shortcuts to power might persuade populists to commit to existing institutional processes in order to regulate, weaken, marginalize and otherwise dwarf the influence of elites, and others who oppose them, for the sake of longer term projects of hegemony (Faris 2018).
Indeed, when considering the balance of forces in any given context, it is perfectly intelligible for political actors to grant full political rights to another group of actors whom they nonetheless regard as utterly illegitimate, whose views they regard as repellent and whom, if successful, they believe would be catastrophic for the political community. Having granted this enemy rights of participation, populist actors in power might still think it a central part of their mission that they engage in concerted and wide-ranging political activities in order to marginalise this group to the fringes of political life. Indeed, adopting this approach might make pragmatic sense, being much less costly than attempting wholesale political exclusion and disenfranchisement of a political organization, whilst also keeping enemies in plain sight and committed to institutional games they are, it is hoped, destined to lose. However, when political actors perceive that such marginalization strategies are failing, and that enemies might thus be gaining ground, their ambivalence with respects to the institutional background against which they operate, coupled to the perception of what is at stake, might well counsel other measures. Once again, populist commitments to existing institutional process need not amount to accepting the legitimacy of those institutions, but can count as tactical decisions based on the fact that it is the only approach that, in the long-term, will viably defeat elite reaction.
Finally, it is also worth attending to other arenas beyond institutional politics broadly conceived, within which populist political actors can operate, discursively, to articulate an appeal to their intended audience and rouse up and sustain anti-elite sentiment. In recent years, the UK has witnessed what Jonathan Dean calls the development of ‘politicised cultural processes’, in which commentators on the left use ‘irreverence’ and an ironic ‘affective tenor’ to frame angry denunciations of neoliberal ideology and establishment politicians. Whether or not the operative tone of these processes – ‘subversive, mocking, and in some cases unapologetically rude’ – endears them to popular constituencies is open for debate (Dean 2020, 10). Indeed, Thomas Frank’s study of American populist culture evidences a much more earnest appreciation of ordinariness. In Frank’s vision, populist culture conveyed ‘a basic optimism about Ordinary People, expressed ... in Hollywood movies and plays, in popular poetry, in Radio programmes, in art, photography, in strike manifestos, in folk music and in WPA murals’ (Frank 2020, 87). Prominent poets like Carl Sandburg combined ‘the vernacular of the everyday in order to describe the nobility of the average’ with often violent castigation of the moneyed, the bosses and the political class (Frank 2020, 114; Sandburg 1994, 10, 20; Sandburg 1960, 46, 56). In a way that also eschews irony, Marc Stears encourages political actors to combine a degree of anti-elitist rhetoric with campaigns that emphasise the ‘magic of the everyday’, as a way to ‘reconnect millions of people to the political process who are currently tired and dispirited by what they have seen of it for years now’ (Stears 2021, 186; 102).
Such cultural movements could form part of concerted, populist attempts to sustain the people’s ‘enchantment’ with their representative claims, and to invigorate a sense that they deserve, and have the competencies necessary, to exercise sovereignty, whatever opponents might do to prevent that (Brubaker 2017, 380). Of course, there is no doubt that such cultural production celebrating ordinariness and fostering anti-elite sentiments could also favour resentment, or racialized, gendered and exclusive forms of identification, and thus feed into what Stuart Hall labels ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall 1988, 150–160). As with all the other elements of the populist story, there are considerable dangers here that cannot be overlooked. Nevertheless, by investing in, exploiting and contributing to, the shared meanings of their given cultures – raising and expanding the profile of ordinary people, castigating the elites – populists can also feed their efforts into more formal arenas of politics (Saward 2010, 43). Populist discursive repertoires could, potentially, extend far beyond the ‘low’ ‘attention-seeking strategies of provocation’ currently in vogue (Brubaker 2017, 367).
Conclusion
By blaming a country’s serious democratic failures on elites – bad faith actors unconcerned with the ‘will of the people’ – populists play a dangerous game, characterised by the significant degrees of ambivalence with which they regard existing institutional frameworks and those who oppose them. But, viewing the world in this way does not necessarily commit populist actors to a specific tactical repertoire, even as it might justify that repertoire.
In this paper, I have argued that we should understand the connections between different populist ideas and strategies as flowing from a shared populist orientation. The tactical repertories developed by populists are such tactics employed by actors who orient to a political field that is characterised by an antagonistic division between people and an identified elite (in which the people are favoured); consequent to that elite’s egregious failure; which has produced serious corruption in a democracy’s claim-making institutions and for which they need to be held responsible and defeated, even as they attempt to resist that defeat. Conducting themselves according to this orientation, we cannot rule out the possibility that some populist activity will be based on reasonable and accurate critiques of the worlds they confront, even as others will be unreasonable, divorced from reality, and acted upon in immoral and unjustified ways.
Like any other minimally competent political actor, populists can adjust their tactics to accommodate themselves to situations they perceive themselves as having to confront. Sometimes such adjustments will warrant attempting to create, in unmediated and direct fashion, ‘proximity’ to the people; sometimes it might be aided by subterfuge and even the capture of state institutions; sometimes it might even be reasonable to argue for more extreme measures. But it is also rational for populists, as they aim to defeat an illegitimate and corrupt(ing) elite, to use, in creative ways, mediation, ordinary institutional processes and mechanisms, to navigate the political terrain they confront, and the expanded moral permissions they enjoy.
This is important because it allows for populist actors to emerge, or reinvent themselves, through more critical reflection on the kinds of strategies populists have previously used. Once populism is understood as an orientation, distinct from commitments to any repertoire of tactics, we can no longer reject populist strategies out of hand. Instead, the different ways different populists fill out this orientation must be carefully evaluated, both in terms of the reasonableness of the critiques they offer of existing systems, and the all things considered justifiability of the political responses they use to act on those orientations. There is nothing that thereby limits populists to drawing only from some narrow repertoire of tactics adjudged populist.
