Abstract
Populism sets people against elites. Most discussions of populism focus on the dangers that come with assuming too homogenous a vision of a ‘pure’ people against a ‘corrupt’ elite. However, an obvious question to ask is what elites do, or might do, to court populists ire. In this paper, I draw on Michael Saward’s work on representation to construct an account of populism that focuses on the ways in which elites can conceivably corrupt (and have conceivably corrupted) the institutions responsible for generating the representative claims that are central to democratic life. Specifically, I will sketch an account of the way elites have operated, within the American context, to corrupt the representative functions performed by political parties, those centrally important institutions tasked with producing representative claims within contemporary capitalist, liberal, representative democracies. If we are to properly evaluate populism, whether as an ideology, movement or set of tactics, it is necessary to take seriously and evaluate the stories populists tell of how elites have corrupted democracy. To simply assume they are wrong and dismiss populist critiques of democratic failures as wrong is to replace critical analysis with elite apologism.
1. Introduction
Populism has its friends, and it has its enemies. There are those who define populism as an ideology which, in the name of ‘the people’, rejects the inevitable tensions that exist between institutions of liberal constitutionalism and democracy. On this view, those who support populism are supporting the opening salvos of movements that spell the end of liberal democracies and the start of authoritarian rule. The friends of populism regard it as an ideology that can be usefully drawn on by those wishing to call out, confront and defeat elites who are accused of being uncommitted to democracy. On this view, those who define populism in the above terms do little more than provide excuses for various elite failings: The productive tensions on which the critics of populism tend to focus do not meaningfully describe the politics of (what they wish to call) liberal democracies. In this paper, I develop an approach to populism that accommodates both sympathetic and critical understandings of populism by rooting our evaluations of populist challenges in their differing understandings and explanations of elite failures. While this evaluation is not sufficient to evaluate populist activity, it is nevertheless a necessary part of understanding when and where populist challenges can be legitimate.
Having accepted that all populisms begin by drawing a line between ‘the elites’ and ‘the people’ in ways which favour the people, I start – against the usual tendency to start with the way populists define ‘the people’ – by focusing on how populists define the relevant elites. For the purposes of this essay, I focus my attention on democratic politics as conducted within a formal representative framework, one that is typically mediated through political parties (Saward 2010, 62). 1 I divide elites into two categories: The first set of elites consists of those agents responsible for producing formal ‘representative claims’. Within the representative democracies I consider, this producer includes the various personnel – leaders, representatives, bureaucrats and even rank-and-file members – that constitute, and operate within, political parties. These different personnel, who enjoy varying levels of power within party organizations, present themselves as claim-makers capable of governing a polity in a way that, whatever else it is, is responsive to the needs and interests of ‘the people’.
Populist critiques begin with a story of how the production of representative claims, for which this first category of (potentially benign) elites are responsible, has been seriously damaged by the actions of a second set of politically engaged elites. It is the second category of elites, unnecessary as far as democracy is concerned, and thus more problematic, which is open to a variety of different populist articulations. While these can range from anti-Semitic conspiracies to critiques of a politically active ruling class, all focus on the ways elite activity disables a political community’s ability to produce adequate representative claims. In the second section, I sketch the deep corruption that has been wrought by an active ruling class on the claim-making institutions of American democratic politics, which, I submit, offers a reasonable, empirically informed and potentially correct basis for a populist critique.
In the third section I then consider what happens to our evaluations of populism when we acknowledge the possibility that such reasonable, empirically informed critiques of an active ruling can, potentially, be correct. I lack the space in this essay to demonstrate how different populist descriptions of ‘corrupt’ elites can then generate complementary constructions of a relevant people. However, the consequences of my argument are straightforward: once our evaluations of populist politics accommodate an empirical evaluation of populist critiques of elite failures, that can be more or less plausible, and more or less reasonable, then those failures can themselves generate their own constructive, popular potential. In other words, the populist vision of ‘the people’ might simply refer to all those whose needs, interests and rights go unmet, unsatisfied and violated, because the elites have sufficiently undermined democracy in ways the populists claim is egregious and avoidable. Consequently, while populist constructions of the people can and do root themselves in ethno-nationalist understandings of the people, or an authoritarian system of governance, this is not something baked into populism qua populism.
1.1. Defining the elites
Notwithstanding the volume and range of work that has been published on populism, there is broad agreement that populists always posit, first, the centrality of the division between the people and the elite and, second, the favouring of the former at the expense of the latter: an ideology, a political program, a condemnation, a moral claim to legitimacy that fails to draw on this division in a way that favours the people cannot be populist. But the identification of that division, and the favouring of the people that it supports, is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one for populism to get going (Müller 2017, 2): One can simply favour the people without that having any political, let alone democratic, resonances whatsoever. At a minimum, populists must think that the people – or just some active section of it – can act to confront and defeat the elites to advance their own interests. This minimum also makes sense of Stuart Schram’s characterization of Mao Zedong’s ‘populist tendency’: Mao drew the line between ‘the mighty progressive force’ of a largely peasant population capable of defeating an elite who made very few pretensions to democratic representation, preferring instead to ground legitimacy in the sanctified language of rank and hierarchy. Of course, Mao differs from more contemporary populists in his far more open avowal that war – and violence and repression more generally – was needed if the people hoped to defeat those elites (Schram 1967, 54). Therefore, as soon as we, first, fill out the content of the two categories contained within the people-elite distinction and then, second, describe the ways in which populists politically favour the people against elites, we inevitably expand the potential meanings of populism and thus the variety of ways we can evaluate it.
However, while considerable attention has been given to defining ‘the people’, relatively ‘few authors have theorized about the meanings of “the elite” in populism’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2007, 11). This neglect signals a failure to, first, clarify who the relevant elites might be and, more specifically, what dangers they might, if only potentially, pose to non-elites. Indeed, the stipulation that some given group of people count as elites has no necessary political resonance whatsoever. To describe athletes, artists, soldiers or particular professionals as ‘elite’ might only assert that such people possess exceptional talents and no more. Nevertheless, within discussions of populism – and democracy more generally – it is the manner in which elites, of various kinds, interact, or at least might interact, with a political community’s ostensibly democratic institutions that raises problems.
In earlier contexts, where ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ each had their own institutional structures to represent them, distinctions between those groups were easily discernible political facts. For Machiavelli, the clear and explicit institutionalization of this division helped clarify and control the class antagonisms he regarded as productive of republican liberty (Machiavelli 2003, 28–29; McCormick 2001). In a situation where those distinctions were blurring somewhat, Tocqueville exhorted the most ‘upright classes’ to accept the ‘widespread revolution toward democracy’, whilst simultaneously trying to purify the lower orders' morals and actions, with the aim of preventing their ‘primitive instincts’ from running amok (Tocqueville 2003, 16; 11). Within contemporary democracies, the elite-popular division is, prima facie, harder to justify, given the pervasive commitments to social and political equality that are supposed to limit and structure such communities. Indeed, such commitments might be thought incompatible with the very notion of, at least, a political elite. 2 The fact that, today, members of the ‘elites’ have the same formal status as ‘the people’ blurs the political lines between them – even as social, economic and cultural lines remain apparent – and appeals to elite-tutelage, such as Tocqueville recommends, strike us as anachronistic (Canovan 2005, 80). 3 Whatever inequalities do exist between ordinary people and those who are delegated the powers and responsibilities of government must be monitored to ensure that they remain compatible with those central commitments to equality that underpin democratic government.
Of course, within both media and academic commentary, the category of ‘the elite’ often refers to individuals and groups beyond those who directly possess political power: the usual coterie of ‘political’, ‘party’ and ‘bureaucratic’ elites, are complemented by a plethora of other elite fractions – there are financial elites, which might refer to the owners of large corporations, or the ‘billionaire class’ where elite status is grounded in one’s position within the economy; there are ‘cultural and intellectual elites’, where elite status is associated with having attained a certain level of education, holding a certain set of ideas, following a given ideology, or having a certain role in the cultural life of the community; the charge of elite can also have a regional or geographic inflection, where one belongs to an elite on account of where one resides or hails from. Across each of these differing renderings of the elite-category, certain groups of people are marked out as enjoying a status which not only sets them apart from ordinary people, but presumes to place them, in a certain sense, higher than ordinary people.
Although this diversity within the category of the elites is sometimes recognized, there is also a tendency to use the catch-all term ‘elites’ (Müller 2017, 30). But the specific powers of different elites, the differences between what different elites actually do, as opposed to what some perceive them to be doing; how the powers of different elites might connect with others – for example, how members of the ‘learning classes’ connect to ‘party elites’, who in turn might connect to various ‘financial’ or ‘cultural’ elites – and how these connections might affect the democratic credentials of a society, have received remarkably little attention within recent discussions of populism.
This lacuna is all the more remarkable considering the extensive attention elites (and elite activity) received in mid-20th century debates on how the existence of a ‘power elite’ affected the venerated pluralism of modern political systems (Dahl 1961; Mills 2000, 269–274). By contrast, Cas Mudde simply derives the identity of the relevant elite ‘from the fact that it is not the people’, but is rather ‘its opposite, its nemesis’ (Mudde 2004, 544; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 149–150). Jan-Werner Müller provides even less sense of who the elites might be – elites are simply those populists accuse of being ‘immoral (and) corrupt’ (Müller 2017, 3). On this view, populists start with their portrayal of the people as pure and blessed with common-sense, which they then contrast with elites whom they depict as corrupt and lacking such sense. This lack of purity will invariably combine with elites' economic or political power, or their status as agents without national affiliation or traditional loyalties, but it is the identification of a specifically moral property, grounded in the presence or absence of purity, which Mudde and Müller regard as constitutive of populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2007, 11–16).
Because so much commentary on populism accepts the category of elites as not essentially anti-democratic – even as it also accepts that elites can justifiably be made the objects of limited, non-moralized forms of criticism (Müller 2017, 3) – the assumed general compatibility with democracy effectively limits what kind of elites are justifiable: Elites with the power enjoyed by warlords or imperial administrators, for instance, are not the kinds of elite such commentators have in mind when they accept elite existence, nor when they reject the legitimacy of those who seek to posit antagonistic and immutable divisions between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ as the driving force of political life. But this negative definition can take us only so far: We know elites in democracies should not be warlords, kings or plantation owners, but what they are beyond such constraints remains an open question.
With this in mind, I disaggregate elites into two kinds. Before detailing the activity of those elites whose role in political life is not obviously compatible with democratic norms and practice, I first offer a vision of elites that is consistent with democratic ideals, broadly understood. Specifically, while democracy abjures the forms of inequality that characterize relations between serfs and masters or colonialists and the colonized, I take it that a distinction between what Michael Saward calls the ‘makers’ and ‘recipients’ of representative claims is a division that democratic societies can, and perhaps must, accept (Saward 2010). This is a strictly functional, but nevertheless hierarchical, definition built into the way representation, broadly understood, operates. To describe these makers as elites does little more than acknowledge the potentially significant disparities between those citizens who are tasked with making representative claims, and those who receive them within any ostensibly democratic relationship. 4
A distinct advantage of Saward’s work on the ‘representative claim’, and the so-called ‘constructivist turn’ his approach more generally inaugurated, is that it offers an account of representation capable of incorporating the ‘multitude of claim-makers’ (Guasti and Geissel 2019, 99). In its most general form, Saward describes representation as a practice involving five parts: There are, first, the ‘makers of representations’, offering themselves as, second, ‘subjects’, capable of standing for, third ‘an object’ – which is the maker’s ‘idea of (the relevant) constituency’ – that is constructed out of, fourth, a ‘referent’, ‘which is all the other things the constituency is, or might be’ beyond that constructed object. Fifthly, and finally, this representation is offered to an ‘audience’, which ‘receives the (maker’s) claims and accepts, rejects, or ignores them’ (Saward 2010, 37). As a result, practices of claim-production extend far beyond the confines of representative democracies.
For example, in the case of certain Marxist-Leninist-elites, establishing a properly representative relationship between the makers and receivers of representative claims must, at least in certain circumstances, be unconstrained by either rule of law or commitments to a competitive electoral process. All this, and more, must rather be ‘swept aside’ lest it allow for ‘the mental confusion and indecision which reigns amidst the middle classes’ to ‘place itself across the path of the revolutionary movement’ (Trotsky 2017, 44). The demands of proper, representative claim-making, which from this perspective involves charting a correct course along the paths of revolutionary movement, requires the kinds of decisive, even violent action, that cannot countenance the delayed, horse-trading that is deemed typical of parliamentary politics.
In the making of his claim, for example, Mao Zedong positioned himself – whether in his role as the leader of the guerilla movements fighting against the ‘militarists and profiteers who sided with the foreigners’ or, later, as the leader of the party that defeated the Nationalists (Kuomintang) – as a subject capable of standing for the object (those whom Mao tasked with ‘the revolutionary mission of the Chinese people’, and whom were drawn from the larger referent of the Chinese people as a whole), which he offered to an audience that consisted of not just the Chinese, but the international communist movement as a whole (Schram 1967, 54). Even as the divisions these claims establish between makers and receivers create, potentially, large and dangerous gaps between representative and represented, they are still offered – and potentially understood – as representative. Of course, in Mao’s case, those who rejected his claims, that is, those who rejected the various Maoist articulations of those component parts of the claim, were castigated, rightly or wrongly, as ‘imperialist running dogs’ or ‘capitalist off-roaders’, and often humiliated, tortured or killed. But this describes only Mao’s responses to those who denied the offering that was made. It does not undermine the fact that the claim was made, offered and received. 5
The differences in power between the elite-makers and popular-receivers of representative claim can thus be vast, without putting those claims beyond democratic aspirations; however attenuated, fantastical or dangerous such claims might appear. For the purposes of this paper, I narrow my concern to the production of claims as these occur within modern, liberal, capitalist representative democracies. Even more precisely, I focus on the specific claim-making labour typically performed by political parties. Consequently, although I have demonstrated the relevance of claim-making beyond such institutional settings, and although I believe populist challenges can thus be made within other settings that claim democratic and representative legitimacy, I am unable to detail the application of such populist challenges into those other settings.
In fleshing out the populist critique, I thus limit myself to claim-making as it is performed by political parties within modern, liberal, capitalist representative democracies for a number of reasons. First, while we need not agree with E.E. Schattschneider that ‘modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties’, political parties are major elements of any meaningful evaluation of the democratic credentials of contemporary democracies as they currently exist, such that failures at this level will be difficult to remedy with gains that are made elsewhere in the ‘rich plurality of representative practices’ (Schattschneider 1942, 1; Saward 2010, 9). Secondly, while some commentators, like Jonathan Dean (2020, 3) and Thomas Frank (2020, 87), have remarked on the importance of the wider cultural dimensions of populism, in particular the way in which representations of ordinary can be important features of populist movements people – in Frank’s gloss, how ‘the vernacular of the everyday’ can be employed ‘to describe the nobility of the average’ (Frank 2020, 114) – most contemporary discussions of populism focus on populists' perceived attempts to ‘shatter intermediary actors’. While these intermediaries include ‘accredited media… institutional rules, bureaucracy, and monitoring agencies’, a major player amongst these intermediaries are political parties (Urbinati 2019, 113). Finally, even as ‘corrupted’ political parties are thus only one of the many targets for populist ire, parties operate upon a terrain which populist political actors have themselves tended to intervene. 6 That is, wherever else the effects of elite-intervention can be felt – in a political community’s social, economic and cultural institutions – parties and party contests have been major sources of crises for which populists demand redress and, typically, form part of the battles waged by populists. Parties are, in other words, those institutions against and through which populists tend to make their own representative bids.
Now, perhaps, within an ideal understanding of how representative democracy operates, the relationship between the ‘makers’ and ‘receivers’ of representative claims might be thought to structure that relationship in such a way as to render the elite status of the maker benign. For example, when Jane Mansbridge argues for establishing a recursive relationship between representatives and those they claim represent, one that is grounded in ‘iterative, ongoing communication’, such a process could conceivably close the gap between makers and receivers (Mansbridge 2017, 304). But, to assume without argument that this relationship is approximated in reality, simply assumes that populist critiques of actually existing relationships is incorrect, and that the distance between the makers and receivers of these representative claims is limited and unimportant.
In order to reckon with the importance of the distance between elite ‘makers’ and citizen ‘receivers’, it is thus necessary to describe the work parties perform within that relationship. As makers, parties – their candidates, members, infrastructure, expertise – offer themselves, through manifestos, policy platforms, styles of governance, etc., as subjects capable of standing for the interests of, for example, ‘families’, the ‘middle’ or ‘working’ classes, ‘patriots’ – all of which are the potential objects parties articulate from out of the referents, that is, that wider set of potential objects from which they do not draw. 7 The party-maker, finally, presents this construction to the electorate – the audience – which then receives and adjudicates between those claims before casting their votes. Parties, as a major agent tasked with the production of these representative claims, are thus responsible for ensuring these processes of articulation and presentation remain responsive to the relevant constituencies' ideas about themselves, their interests and their demands.
By mapping the dynamic interaction of the various elements that constitute representative claim-making practices – what he characterizes as events rather than social facts – Saward also draws attention to the ways in which this production, and these claims, can stall (Saward 2010, 55). Or, in the terms of this paper, how that stalling might be the outcome of active, elite-led corruption. Challenges to representative claims can be mounted against each of those constituent parts of the representative claims. First, challenges can be directed, most basically, against the competence of the would-be ‘maker’, disputing his or her claim to be an effective ‘subject’ of representation (Guasti and Geissel 2019, 101). The argument might be these makers are too remote from the audiences of their claims to be trusted with adequate production. A challenger might argue that the relevant ‘audience’, those adjudicating these claims, should imagine themselves – their needs, interests and demands –in terms of some feature X, rather than a proposed feature Y: for example, to imagine themselves along racial, ethnic, national or gendered lines, rather than class lines, or vice versa. Alternatively, some challenger might accuse a maker – or makers – of representative claims of artificially restricting what the constituency has a right to demand from their representatives: The ‘object’ the current claim-makers isolate from the wider referent is too conservative or too passive, and the challenger argues the audience of those claims deserve better.
In general, then, challengers in representative democracies, often articulated by other political parties, turn representative claims ‘back against their makers’, effectively posing the question: ‘who are you to tell me (us) who I am (we are) and what I (we) need’? (Saward 2010, 54). When a would-be representative claims that they, ‘by virtue of some alleged capacity or attribute, can speak for Y, to Y, and a wider audience’, challenges take the form of, first, a rejection of the would-be representative’s claim that he or she enjoys those capacities and attributes through which the claim to representativeness is being made. Alternatively, challenges might involve a rejection that those alleged capacities or attributes are relevant to the representative role they want to fulfil (Ibid. 43). In either case, wherever claim-makers offer themselves as actors that are capable of representing the interests of some constituency, challengers want to encourage the intended audience of the claim, to reject those claims as inadequate – to ‘receive’ it, ‘read it back, dispute it’ and, with the aid of the challenger, ‘unmask it by revealing its coded character’ (Ibid. 55).
When such challenges are pitched against all elite ‘makers’ of representative claims, such that the distance between them and the citizen ‘receivers’ has become problematic, the challenge is all the more damning. Such radical challenges are the kind populists make when they intervene in the party-mediated processes of representative claim-making, articulating reasons to reject all currently existing political parties, at least as they currently operate, in their role as agents responsible for producing the representative claims on which evaluations of a community’s claims to democratic legitimacy depend. When populists promote such wholesale rejection, they will do so for distinctive reasons: That is, they argue that there is a dearth of minimally legitimate representative claims not because of the well-intentioned, but bumbling incompetence of that first set of claim-making elites, but because of the actions of a second group of elites, who in pursuit of their interests have acted in ways that are incompatible with democracy. Populist challengers argue that these are the elites who, in combination with the elites of claim-making institutions – a combinations that might amount to collusion but need not for populists to regard them as problematic – are responsible for the overarching inadequacy of their political community’s formal representative claims and assertions of democratic legitimacy.
What is thus common to all populist challenges, is an underlying sense that some group of elites has corrupted – capturing or otherwise disabling – those elites who should be producing a democracy’s representative claims on behalf of the relevant people. Again, while my focus is on the way this process plays out within the formal institutions of modern, liberal, capitalist representative democracies, the structure of this populist challenge could be applicable to other fields of representation, across a range of institutional settings. In any event, central to all populist critiques is the charge that it is the interaction between these differently situated elites that has disabled a democracy’s representative functions. The populist gloss on the idea that it is the ‘structural changes of modern society’ that have ‘cut off the public from the power of active decision’ is that, first, those structural changes have been wrought to accord to the interests of some group(s) of elites and, second, that the effects of that separation can be remedied, and that they, as populists, are part of that remedy (C. Wright Mills 2000, 302).
In section 1, I have defined the role of elites within representative-claim making practices generally, before drilling down into the specifics of its application to party politics, and the processes through which challenges to representative claims are articulated. Within this framework, I characterized populist challenges as those grounded in an argument that the entire field of representative claim-making has been disabled by elite activity. In section 2, I put empirical meat on the theoretical bones of that critique by offering a brief but, I submit, reasonable and plausible (maybe even compelling) account of why populists might be justified in making the kinds of radical critique of disabling elite activity just described.
1.2. What Elites (can) do
Different populist political projects offer different accounts of the specific elites they charge with having corrupted and disabled a given political community’s representative institutions. For example, populists might focus on the distinctive characteristics of the personnel populating the relevant elite, arguing for the relevance of their ethnic identity, educational levels or geographical location within a given political community. The relevant elite might, instead or as well, be defined according to their functions and status, the positions they enjoy within a community’s social, economic, legal, political or cultural life. Populists might posit a degree of contiguity or cohesiveness between the perceived ‘fractions’ of the elite, such that their power includes dominance across all sectors of a society, or else their influence might be confined to one sector that is considered critical. Populists might, as well, argue that some group(s) of people perceived as elites, perhaps because of their ethnicity, perceived values or wealth, should not be understood under the rubric of ‘elite’, but rather as part of the people, or at the very least a ‘renegade elite’ fundamentally committed to popular interests (Winters 2011, 114). It is therefore possible for parties to address the interests of these elites without undermining their claims to ‘descriptive representation’, that is, where it is ‘the match between representatives and represented regarding their demographic features’ that is understood to matter (Heinisch and Werner 2019, 476).
There are different concrete ways that populists have combined these elements to construct their version of the relevant elite: some have posited Jewish cabals and paedophilic death-cults ascending to power through a particular political party, academia and cultural industries; others argue for the existence of a complex ‘ecosystem’ of think tanks, law societies and lobby groups corrupting legal institutions, democratic practice and political parties. In what follows, I offer one example of elite construction, one that I submit is prima facie plausible and reasonable, while still being contestable. The plausibility and reasonableness of this construction grounds the plausibility and reasonableness of a populist critique of the political effects that have been wrought by such an elite on political parties' representative functions and thus, more broadly, the democratic credentials of a community.
Within the American context, when Doug Henwood describes a ‘politically engaged capitalist class, operating through lobbying groups, financial support for politicians, think tanks and publicity, that meshes with a senior political class that directs the machinery of the state’ he implicitly draws on the above distinction between the different kinds of elites (Henwood 2021, 51). This active ‘ruling class’ has, relatively recently, developed a sophisticated and wide-ranging ‘production chain’ of political ideas to generate, educate and further the careers of ‘right-wing candidates up and down the ballot’, from ‘the Oval Office all the way down to places like Schoharie County, New York’ (ibid.). This class has also ‘funded professors, think tanks, publications, and advocacy organizations... as part of a coherent, long-term, and ideologically rigorous strategy’ (Ibid, 68; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). Charles Koch – as Henwood describes him, a ‘rare case of a serious capitalist organising independently on his class’s behalf’ – is explicit about this political project, arguing as he does that ‘libertarians need an integrated strategy, vertically and horizontally integrated, to bring about social change, from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action’ (Koch cited in Henwood 2021, 69). Koch is engaged in an explicit and concerted attempt to shape the political landscape, including political parties, in directions that populists can argue favour the interests of his elite class against those of the people: Chomsky’s description of the ‘business class’ as Marxists ‘fighting a vicious class war all the time’, is both a characteristically blunt description of that attempt and the identification of a class capable of organizing on its own behalf (Chomsky 2021; Mayer 2016).
Again, this is but one theory of elites-at-work within one country. It is a theory that assumes a degree of cohesiveness within, at least, some part of the elites, which thereby amasses into what Mosca describes as ‘the totality of (an) organized minority’ capable of acting upon major political institution, like parties, forcing them to respond, accommodate and adapt to their well-funded, concerted strategies (Mosca 2019, 278). It is for this cohesiveness, to be generated out of a sense of responsibility, that Lewis Powell (later an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court) argued in his now infamous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce. In this memo, Powell lamented a perceived lack of political consciousness and acumen amongst the ‘boards of directors and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels’. To correct for this, Powell urged business leaders, as part of the ‘primary responsibility of corporate management’, to ‘press vigorously’ through various ‘political arenas’ – legislative committees, the Supreme Court and consumerist culture more broadly – to create robust ‘support of the enterprise system’ (Powell 1971). Other theories might contend that such militant cohesion is always tempered by divisions across different elite factions or complicate this story by introducing other active clusters of elites, pursuing somewhat different goals. Some populists might even argue that, at some given conjuncture, it is the absence of any coordinated elite strategy that corrupts democratic institutions. Rather than a class of elites capable of acting on behalf of maintaining the system as a whole, including navigating the tensions and contradictions thrown up that system, various factions, acting independently, pursue their own interests, which precipitate swingeing cuts in public investment, tank people’s real wages, and trigger various national, international and existential crises (Mizruchi 2013, 265). On this view, populists might describe political parties and democratic institutions more broadly, as having been disabled by the precipitating chaos unleashed by such organized elite activity (Ibid. 282–283).
In any event, parties are not only never immune from these processes, but are its targets and participants: Ruling class activism does not sit over representative democracies, but rather, to borrow the pathological language from one of populism’s critics, ‘infects’ them (Mounk 2018, 3). According to certain populist critiques, parties that have been infected by this class of (more or less cohesive) elite activists will produce representative claims that must, above all else, be consistent with the interests of the ruling class. Consequently, parties must articulate an ‘object’ for the relevant audience, that is compatible, in broad ways, with the projects of that class. For example, a party might construct and present an object of a hard-working American as entrepreneurial, opposed to collective action and committed to the specific kinds of freedom that are made available by reductions in regulations and welfare provisions, interventions they are encouraged to understand as nefarious fetters, holding them, their children and their country back. The constituency is encouraged to see themselves in these terms, rather than others, where the meaning of regulations and state provision might have more positive connotations, perhaps serving security, equality, freedom, community and prosperity.
Against this background, suitably motivated populists can, first, describe the making of representative claims as having been artificially restricted by elites in pursuit of their own agendas and, second, make the argument that, in light of these restrictions, ‘the arrangements we call “representative democracy” have become a substitute for popular self-government, not its enactment’ (Pitkin 2004, 340). Condemnations such as these – which could come from especially thoughtful populists, as well as much-respected political theorists – could be thought to argue, simply, that certain elites have acted in concert to create a reality that must now be accepted as the way the world most basically is.
In his discussion of popular apathy for politics generally and elections specifically, Colin Hay points to the ways in which politicians appeal to the existence of ‘non-negotiable external economic constraints’ as a way of ‘deny(ing) political responsibility for policy choices’, which thereby limits what actions they can take as representatives (Hay 2007, 87). This ‘depoliticization’ of issues operates, intentionally or otherwise, to occlude radical alternatives to the representative claims that are on offer. Such claims that attempt to go beyond these constraints are variously described as naïve, unrealistic or irresponsible (self-identifying reference removed). Populists contend that recipients of these constrained representative claims should expect more from claim-makers and push to open up alternatives that have heretofore been – unnecessarily – occluded. In a similar vein, Samuel Moyn has more recently described how intellectuals associated with what he calls ‘Cold War liberalism’ acted to constrain the ambitions of various political actors – politicians, parties, state leaders – vis-à-vis the possibilities held out by concerted government action. On Moyn’s view, ‘chastened’ liberal intellectuals abandoned the emancipatory, Romantic-inflected legacy of liberalism, reconfiguring liberalism as ‘a minimalist call for safety amidst the horror and ruins... less a basis for the construction of a free community of equals and more a means of harm reduction’ (Moyn 2023, 37). Populists might argue that such chastened liberalism has affected the claim-making practices of all political parties, thereby voiding the field of a claim-making institution capable of offering the people what it is owed.
Where the fractions of an active class are capable of ensuring that all the major parties – as claim-makers – articulate particular ‘objects’ that align with their own interests, populist challenges can be expressed as, first, an invitation to deny the legitimacy or attractiveness of those various parties' proposed objects and, second, the articulation of an alternative uncorrupted, because unaligned, object. Those constituents should expect, and deserve, something more from these claim-makers. Populists can then accept that the distance between Maoist ‘makers’ and receivers of such representative claims are prime facie dangerous, whilst still refusing to accept that liberal constitutionalism has effectively guided party elites toward minimally democratic purposes. Critics of populism might wish to argue these elites and such distance are benign, but their verdicts on such matters must await careful empirical study.
1.3. Evaluating different populist critiques
None of this is to say that populists are always entirely correct in their assessments and challenges. Far from it. But any evaluation of populists' charges must proceed carefully. For example, as Samuel DeCanio has demonstrated, what Richard Hofstadter described as the dangerous ‘paranoia’ infecting the original American Populists' claims that a global conspiracy had been at play during the ‘Crime of 1873’, paving the way for the American’s adopting of the gold standard, ‘were more accurate than has been recognized’ (Decanio 2011, 202). The banks had indeed, just as Populists charged, ‘shamelessly bribed prominent politicians and bureaucrats into passing the Coinage Act of 1873’ in the hope of protecting their assets and position within the economy (Fadiman 2023, 10). To dismiss as ‘paranoia’ what might in fact be justifiable suspicion shields from view potentially deeply anti-democratic activity.
In particular, taking seriously the possibility of a politically dominant ruling class corrupting a democracy’s institutions complicates and refines the potential meaning of Müller’s description of populist claims to legitimacy as necessarily anti-pluralist. What is distinctive about the claims to legitimacy Müller calls populist is the fact that, on his view, they are necessarily monopolistic: ‘populists do not claim “we are the 99 percent”’. What they imply instead is ‘We are the 100 percent’ (Müller 2017, 3). 8 According to Müller’s reading of populist political ontology, populists cannot endure even the possibility for a remainder: all the relevant people are accounted for within their construction of the people and, by definition, those who disagree cannot be part of the people. For Müller, political actors who do not make monopolistic claims to legitimacy cannot be populist.
To be sure, if the sine qua non of populist politics is to reject, a priori, the legitimacy of any opposition whatsoever, then populism can only ever be beyond the pale. Indeed, understood in these terms, there seems little difference between populism and fascism, the former simply providing the opening charge of fascism, occurring within a framework where elections and constitutions must first be captured, marginalized or demolished in order to pave the way for fascism proper. But the difference between liberal approaches to pluralism and populist approaches to pluralism are not as clean cut as Müller et al. would like to assume. Just as liberalism is ‘not equally hospitable to all ways of life’, neither are liberal democracies equally hospitable to all claims to legitimacy (Galston 2018, 6). 9 In reality, liberal democracies can tolerate only limited pluralism. Both liberal and populist claims to legitimacy find pluralism problematic, it is just that liberals are, on their own view, capable of tolerating more diversity than populists. Put even more precisely, liberals, like Galston, are more willing to accept the legitimacy of an increased array of representative claims, because they do not regard elite activity, at least as things stand, as especially problematic. In contrast, populists are more liable to reject claims to legitimacy as insufficiently responsive to the demands, needs and interests of ‘the people’, that is, the audience for representative claims, because of how they perceive the corrupting influence of some identified set of elites on a political community’s representative claims. This need not be wedded to any anti-pluralist orientation but can be understood, rather, as an assessment that whatever pluralism seems to exist within some range of representative claims is largely superficial and its celebration naïve (Mills 2000, 271).
In the interest of maintaining a starting position of empirical ecumenism – one sensitive to the specific behaviours of certain elites in particular times and places – the possibility that elites can act with a view to their own interests, and that this might corrupt the making of representative claims, cannot be rejected out of hand. To be sure, the notion of a ruling class is something some might scoff at, straying, as they see it, too close to the paranoia of conspiracy theorists (Runciman 2019, 21; cf. Therborn 2008, ch. 2). Similarly, recent discussions of structural injustice also tend to emphasize the complex interactions between a wide variety of agents responsible for injustice, only some of whom could be understood as ‘elites’. Both Iris Marion Young’s critique of the ‘liability model’ and the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility she proposes, grow out of a desire to distribute responsibility in ways that adequately reflect those complex interactions and avoid simplistic assignments of blame (Young 2011, 101–4; cf. self-identifying reference removed). Such an appeal to complexity, and the approach it grounds, would also seem to warn against positing anything as straightforwardly blameworthy as a ruling class. But, as we have seen, there is no need to posit a single Napoleon issuing decrees on behalf of a self-consciously integrated and coherent cadre of ruling class actors: The story of a ruling class can accommodate fractions, internecine hostilities, conflicting agendas and unsteady coalitions even as that class can also recognize and act on some ‘general interest’ (Poulantzas 2014, 128). In any event, appealing to the existence of a ruling class does not require all of its members to be equally engaged as vanguards for that class, even as any elite will need to develop, and recruit those who display, the virtues associated with effective ruling (Pareto 1935).
Moreover, the compromised production of claims need not be framed, nor understood by their ‘makers’, as the result of those makers having succumbed to elite interests, let alone acknowledged as having been wholly determined by them. Those responsible for producing representative claims might, for example, explain the modesty of their claims as the result of having to adjust to certain political, social or economic realities beyond their control. Stephanie Mudge’s careful examination of the role party ‘experts and infrastructural bases’ played in pushing western European and American parties of the (ostensible) left toward accepting neoliberal ideologies leaves room for claim-making political actors to present themselves as having engaged in just such adjustments. But it remains possible to challenge such self-perceptions: Within the ‘third wayism’ of the 1990s, these parties' ‘TFEs (transnationalized, finance-oriented economists) spoke for markets, policy specialists spoke for what wonks, and strategists spoke for what wins—but it is by no means clear that any of them gave effective “voice to the voiceless”’ (Mudge 2018, xviii). This implicitly charges parties with offering ‘objects’, as part of their representative claim, that were shaped, exclusively, by reference to economic and political efficiency, thus severing any ‘claimed connection between the claim maker and the claimed constituency’ (Guasti and Geissel 2019, 102). It was less the articulation of representative claims which an audience was then invited to consider, than it was a default ‘object’ constituted by whatever remained once the ‘experts’ had done their job shaping policy to accord to the demands of the market – what Camila Vergara describes as the market being ‘encased from democracy’ and ‘elites insulated from democratic pressure’ (Vergara 2023, 60). 10 As these parties attempted to be ‘different things to different’ constituencies, populist challengers contend that what ‘the people’ were owed by their representatives did not figure highly enough, if it figured at all (Saward 2014, 723).
Focusing on the ways in which representative claims are balanced against the navigation of various constraints, especially as these are imposed by elites, is crucial for understanding where populist challenges intervene. How one understands the legitimacy of a populist charge that some elite has corrupted the processes underpinning the production of representative claims, ultimately depends on how one understands the specific situation within which that charge is being levelled. To reject the possibility for such a situation – especially in light of the fact that, in any given political community, the range of representative claims on offer is limited, sometimes to just two parties – surreptitiously imports empirical analysis into theoretical construction. Allowing for alternative, ultimately empirical, analyses is precisely what Müller fails to do when he rejects, without argument, Wolfgang Streeck’s insistence that capitalist democracies have, over the years, degenerated into ‘façade democracies’ (Müller 2017, 59). Müller simply dismisses Streeck’s claim that the economic system of capitalism is incapable of ‘recovering normative legitimacy’ and will, from now on, found ‘social integration on collective resignation as the last remaining pillar of the capitalist social order’ (Streeck 2016, 15). Müller gives nothing to back up his particular judgement, only claiming, correctly, that many western democracies have ‘not been captured by single parties trying to remold the entire political system in their favour’ (Müller 2017, 59). But there are, surely, more ways than one for a democracy to become a façade. For Streeck, that façade is, in part, a direct result of elite-orchestrated ‘destruction of collective agency in the course of capitalist development’, a destruction that has favoured some even as it harmed others, and will, in the medium to long term, seed the gradual disintegration of capitalist society (Streeck 2016, 12).
Galston’s empirical assessment of our current situation has it that the ‘interplay of globalization and technological change fundamentally shifted the balance between labor and capital’. Against this background, the ‘established parties and institutions found it difficult to respond to rising public discontent’ (Galston 2018, 84; 16). Galston has had a salutary role within liberal political theory, imploring liberals to accept the ‘brute facts of disagreement’ as an inescapable feature of modern societies and to adjust their theories accordingly (Galston 2010). Here, however, he makes no attempt to situate his own account of the causes of late capitalist development, and the crises it has precipitated, alongside other accounts which give larger explanatory roles to the work of powerful elites in the deliberate destruction of, for example, institutions of organized labour, regulations that might be thought to serve ordinary people, belief in the efficacy and legitimacy of state power, authentically democratic institutions and much else besides, to foment their own wealth and political power. Mudde, at least, asks the question as to whether or not ‘elites’, considered broadly, deserve to be regarded as an enemy of the people. While his assessment of this contemporary situation is incredibly brief – at only three paragraphs – the reason he conducts that survey is to ask whether the current populist orientation can be justified in light of elite behaviour (his answer is largely that they do not deserve it any more than previous elites (Mudde 2004, 552–553)). This seems to leave open the possibility that, in circumstances where elite behaviour has become inexcusably egregious, a potentially vehement anti-elitist populist orientation could be justified. 11
Underpinning these various rejections of populist stories of elite corruption is thus a double move. First, there is a rejection of some particular story about an – or any – elite’s corrupting influence over the agencies, processes and practices that feed into the production of representative claims. This rejection combines, second, with the offering of an alternative story, which amounts, ultimately, to an insistence that the current problems of the world should be blamed on successive governments struggling to navigate the ‘uneasy combination of two different strands, populist democracy and liberal constitutionalism’, both of which are central features of a functioning liberal democracy (Canovan 2005, 67). Both those rejections and proffered apologetics/alternatives are open to populist-style challenges.
This is not the place to distinguish, in any comprehensive way, between the ‘good’ – plausible, reasonable, potentially correct – populist stories of elite failure, the bad – implausible, unreasonable, categorically incorrect – and the ugly – racist, anti-Semitic, demonic. But some, like that sketched above, are plausible, reasonable and backed by considerable evidence and sophisticated political theories. In any event, understanding populism as involving, first, a damning assessment of the current claims to representation that are on offer, followed by, second, a specific story as to how the absence of legitimate claims is the result of elites corrupting the production of the relevant agencies in ways that ignore, deceive or in other ways harm ‘the people’, brings all such theories under the heading of populism. In sum, in order to begin to evaluate any given movement, person or party that calls itself populist, one needs to respond, at an empirical level, to the charges they make regarding the corruption of the processes underpinning the production of representative claims. Even if some given populist critique can be rejected, rejecting populism tout court is no longer tenable: There is always, potentially, a justifiable populism on some horizon, somewhere.
Importantly, empirical assessments of elite failures are only part of how we must evaluate populist challenges. Such assessments specify neither the people – the audience for whom populist representative claims are produced – nor the strategies, tactics and other means through which the populist orientation is operationalized and through which such claim-production might be improved. I lack the space to address either issues of popular constriction or provide a more general evaluation of populist politics (self-identifying reference removed). Nevertheless, taking up from the position established here, and leading with a description of elite malfeasance, generates additional resources for populists to draw on as they articulate their relevant constituency – the people. In contrast to essentialist visions of the people as ‘pure’, an alternative, structural account might argue only that ‘the people’ – in whole or in part – includes all those who been harmed by elite corruption of representative-claim production.
Suffice it to say that populist claim-makers can argue that adequate representation will require an entirely new form of democracy, upending constitution and moving through terrorist conflagrations in order to initiate an authentic democratic society. In other words, populists need not commit to the representative forms of democracy with which we are familiar but push for an entirely different framework through which democratic practice must, in their view, be conducted. Nevertheless, the populist credentials of a political actor remain intact when he or she insists that ‘power must be taken from the elite and given to the people’ because of what some elite has done to the institutions of a democracy, while still wishing to maintain the mediating relations and functional divisions typical of party-mediated democratic politics (Canovan 2005, 66; Urbinati 2019, 35; cf. self-identifying reference removed).
2. Conclusion
Populism begins with an assumption of hostility between people and elites, in which the former are favoured against the latter. Much recent work on populism has focussed on the category of the people. Those wishing to defend populism point to the hopes that category holds out, those wishing to argue against it point to its dangers. In contrast, I began this paper with a description of elites, which divided them into two categories. The first category – consisting of those actors responsible for formulating a political community’s representative claims – is straightforwardly compatible with many understandings of democracy. The second category – wherein different populists charge different elites with corrupting the processes underpinning the production of representative claims – is potentially incompatible with democracy. Our assessment of populism needs to include an empirical assessment of the various populist stories that are offered to describe and confront that corruption.
The framework I offer in this paper can accommodate all variants of populism – good, bad and beyond the pale. Different reasons can be given as to why there has been an elite failure, matched with differing representative claims offered in response to the perceived dearth of such claims, articulated alongside different popular missions, pursued using different strategies either within or against the existing institutional framework. All responses, all navigation that takes this as the terrain on which politics must operate, are populist. Some of these populisms might be illiberal and authoritarian, some outright fascist; some might be democratic, socialist and emancipatory; some will commit to the institutions of liberal democracy even as they might have deep reservations about how effectively they can be reformed to respond to the reasonable demands of the people; some will want to sweep or, eventually, move beyond those institutions.
