‘Get off your high horse and vote for us’: The anti-populist construction of the elite and the people

Abstract

Recent research on populism has shown how anti-populist politics have served to discredit alternatives to the status quo by constructing them as threats to democracy, creating false equivalences between vastly different political projects. Yet, while the people of populism are often represented as a threat, it would be a mistake to conclude that anti-populist discourse is equivalent to faith in the elite. We explore how elites and peoples are constructed in anti-populist discourses. Left-wing voters are constructed as active agents in their political choices, even though these choices are often blamed on their youth and/or minority status and radical naivety. Supporters of the far right are instead presented as having legitimate concerns around migration and nationhood, but manipulated by a crass ‘populist’ elite. In contrast, a ‘good’ people is constructed to justify the presence and leadership of the ‘good’ elite who rules for them (if not by and of them).

Whether we like it or not, ‘populism’ is one of the political labels of our time. Commentators display a nearly fanatical commitment to the concept when trying to explain almost any political phenomena beyond business as usual. Anti-populism, its inversion, has also become an increasingly prominent area of study. As the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature demonstrates, anti-populism can have a decisive political impact by delegitimising challenges to the status quo through pejoratively labelling them ‘populist’ (Hamdaoui, 2022b; Katsambekis, 2014; Miró, 2019; Stavrakakis et al., 2018). As such, anti-populism has been described as a demophobic and elitist discourse, which fears ‘the people’ and seeks to minimise the role of the demos in politics (Marchart, 2023; Markou, 2021; Voutyras, 2024). Nevertheless, a full investigation into how anti-populist discourses construct ‘peoples’ and ‘elites’ has thus far been missing. Following Ietter’s (2023) claim that anti-populism constructs its own version of the deserving and undeserving ‘people’, we seek to remedy this theoretical deficit.

Our central argument in this article is that anti-populism, as a depoliticising discourse, constructs a restricted version of ‘the people’ who confer legitimacy upon a sensible ruling elite that shores up the status quo in opposition to supposedly ‘populist’ challenges. In doing so, we first position ourselves within the discursive approach to populism (Laclau, 2005). However, as the focus of this article is on anti-populism, we are interested in how ‘populism’ is used as a signifier, or label, rather than a concept (De Cleen et al., 2018). Subsequently, we survey the literature on anti-populism before putting forward our own definition: a discourse which opposes the transgressive politicisation of, so-called, ‘populism’, and seeks to defend or reinstate the depoliticisation of a given policy area or set of institutional arrangements. Then, building on the anti-populist contexts in the United Kingdom and United States, we contend that anti-populism constructs both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ versions of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ to gain legitimacy and strengthen hegemony. Through a conceptualisation of the ‘bad’ people and elite of anti-populism and its ‘good’ people and elite, we argue that anti-populism, therefore, can be understood as a paradigmatic case of post-democratic politics. Contrary to what is often thought, we illustrate how anti-populism has a place for ‘the people’, but only through the limited and nominally democratic processes of voting and peaceful protest against ‘populism’. As such, anti-populism ultimately aims to restore responsible elite rule: government for the people, rather than of or by them.

This article builds not only on secondary literature on populism and anti-populism, but also on our past and present research and datasets (Brown and Mondon, 2021; Yates, forthcoming). The aim is to map the broader discursive terrain to facilitate the critical exploration of anti-populist discourse in a variety of contexts. While our empirical data is key to informing our findings, as are confirmations from the literature in related fields, this is an exploratory, conceptual paper and, as such, seeks to avoid an overreliance on data so as not to obscure wider theoretical arguments about hegemony and its concealment. Our approach is also informed by psychoanalytic political theory (Glynos, 2021; Stavrakakis, 1999, 2007), which means that we are not solely interested in what is actually said in our data, but also what is left out, obscured or invertedly revealed (Freud, 2002), which necessitates, therefore, a degree of abstraction.

Populism, anti-populism and transgression

It is a cliché in the field of populism studies to argue that the concept of populism is deeply contested. While we are not interested in rehearsing these debates here, it is important to note that we take our cue from the discursive approach (Laclau, 2005) which defines populism as a discourse which is people-centric and anti-elitist (Stavrakakis, 2017a). As such, we contend that populism does not have a predetermined ideological content contrary to thin/thick ideology approaches. This starting point is important to recognise as it not only guides how populism can be used by populists, but also how it can be constructed by anti-populists. What we are interested in, therefore, is how populism is used as a signifier (De Cleen et al., 2018): how it is talked about and what political effects such discourses have. As Yannis Stavrakakis (2017b) has argued, how we talk about populism has an impact on how it is politically responded to. For example, positing right-wing populism as an external and existential threat to liberal democracy, in the form of ‘populist hype’, prevents liberal-democratic elites from being reflexive about their own role in providing mainstream support for reactionary politics (Glynos and Mondon, 2016). Following the recommendations of De Cleen et al. (2018), it is specifically the negative use of ‘populism’ in anti-populist discourses, and the way in which anti-populism constructs its own noble ‘people’ and ‘elite’ in contrast to supposedly reactionary or misguided populist ‘people’ and ‘elite’ that is the concern of this article. Here, crucially, ‘populism’ is understood not as a concept, but as a pejorative signifier, or label, that has political effects worthy of investigation.

Anti-populism received its first comprehensive treatment from those operating within the socio-cultural approach to populism. ¹ Here, anti-populism is described as a stylistic performance of the socio-cultural ‘high’ constituted by a polished presentation, rationality, cosmopolitanism and the centring of institutional procedure over popular sovereignty. In contrast, populism flaunts the ‘low’ of coarse speech, local customs and strong personalistic leadership (Ostiguy, 2009). Such a conception is overly prescriptive, however, in its strict binary of ‘high-low’. As Benjamin Moffitt (2016) has indicated, many populists engage in ‘high’ performances, such as Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders whose polished style is combined with a ‘high’ liberal-cosmopolitanism used to demonise Islam in his Islamophobic performance. However, Moffitt (2018) still connects anti-populism with the socio-cultural ‘high’. Yet, those competing with populists themselves often embody the socio-cultural ‘low’, such as Joe Biden’s repeated reference to his support for trade unions and use of simple language (Conway and Zubrod, 2022). Understanding populism and anti-populism as merely expressions of a socio-cultural ‘high’ or ‘low’ fails to appreciate the stylistic malleability of both kinds of politics and how many actors can easily exist and engage their audience or electorate across these fuzzy boundaries depending on the context. France is a good example here where Emmanuel Macron, the epitome of the liberal ‘high’ politician, often performs in ways we would expect better suited for ‘low’ populists, whether it is through his over-the-top enthusiasm at football games or his photoshoots showing his hairy chest through his unbuttoned shirt or at a boxing session. Furthermore, by focusing on the performances of political elites, the socio-cultural approach struggles to account for the anti-populism of other symbolic elites, such as those in media and academia, whose contributions other scholars have shown to be decisive (Demata et al., 2020; Goyvaerts, 2021; Nikisianis et al., 2019).

More promising attempts to theorise anti-populism are found in the discursive approach to populism. Under this understanding, populist discourses emerge in the context of a crisis, narrating it as a crisis of the system, claiming the ‘system’ is hopelessly corrupt and power must be returned to ‘the people’. Anti-populist discourse, instead, frames the crisis as a crisis in the system, which can be fixed technocratically (Ietter, 2023; Stavrakakis et al., 2018). This managerial discourse in anti-populism, which Stavrakakis et al. (2018) observe, is married with the construction of a deep antagonism against ‘the populists’, who are blamed for the crisis in the system (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2019). It is through the defeat of ‘the populist’ that such a crisis can apparently be resolved. Anti-populism is understood, therefore, as the moment where elites threatened by populism go on the offensive (Miró, 2019).

Jonathan Dean (2022), operating within the same discursive approach to populism, however, problematises this conception of anti-populism by embracing the constructivism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001) discourse theory. He defines anti-populism as

a political sensibility characterised by a preoccupation with the figure of ‘the populist’ as a novel, distinctive and urgent – perhaps existential – threat to the health and viability of liberal democracy, and by the belief that this threat must be urgently neutralised. (Dean, 2022: 6)

Dean (2022) argues that not only do anti-populist discourses perform crises through the demonisation of ‘the populist’ as an existential threat to liberal democracy, ‘populism’ itself may not actually be present in the political scene. Instead, it is constructed through anti-populist discourse. ‘Populism’ or ‘populist’ is used as a signifier to demonise political opponents regardless of whether or not such opponents can actually be considered populist. ² If ‘populism’, therefore, is not the object of antagonism against which anti-populism is positioned, but instead, a valance that anti-populist discourse builds around such an object, this demands that we focus on what features of supposedly ‘populist’ movements incite this pejorative labelling.

Our first key task is to address what specific feature of so-called ‘populism’ is threatening to those who propagate anti-populist discourses. Several empirical studies of anti-populism have investigated its ideological underpinnings, which vary across cases. Anti-populism is most commonly thought of as a defence of liberal governance, where counter-hegemonic alternatives are demonised as irresponsibly ‘populist’ and opposed to the technical competence of ruling elites (Biglieri, 2020; Goyvaerts et al., 2024; Grainger-Brown, 2022; Hamdaoui, 2022b; Howse, 2019; Markou, 2021; Miró, 2019; Ronderos and Glynos, 2023; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2019). Other ideological formations of anti-populism have also been identified, however. Soraya Hamdaoui’s (2022a) analysis of the social-democratic Sardine Street movement in Italy argues its anti-populism vis-à-vis Matteo Salvini’s Lega party is based on a stylistic preference for elegance and moderation against Salvini’s crassness. Similarly, in an American context, anti-populism is associated with the protection of institutional norms against Donald Trump’s authoritarianism (Crothers, 2023; Lorenzetti and Mattei, 2022). What unifies these anti-populist discourses across all cases, we suggest, is the ‘populist’ label used to demonise political formations which seek to politicise otherwise depoliticised policy areas or institutional arrangements. It is this transgression of the norms of depoliticisation which constructs ‘populism’ as an existential threat in anti-populist discourses.

Transgression has been commonly associated both implicitly (Laclau, 2005) and explicitly (Aiolfi, 2022; Peetz, 2020; Zicman de Barros and Aiolfi, forthcoming) with populist politics. For Théo Aiolfi (2022: 6), in addition to their positioning of ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ and a performative construction of crisis, populist leaders transgress by breaking ‘a norm of political relevance’. Although not an exhaustive list, Aiolfi identifies three norms commonly violated by populists. Rhetorical norms correspond to the style of the populist performance, interactional norms pertain to the treatment of political competitors, and theatrical norms refer to the overall ‘rules of the political game’ (Aiolfi, 2022: 2). These transgressions, however, are not the sole preserve of populists. In fact, some are perfectly commensurate with anti-populism. Aiolfi (2022: 8) highlights the transgression of a theatrical norm on the debate stage, for example, in which the populist reveals the artificiality of their opponent’s performance, referring to their opponent’s ‘soundbites’ or ‘pivots’. Yet, US presidential candidate Chris Christie employed similar tactics in the 2016 campaign, while positioning himself as the responsible and constitution-respecting alternative to Trumpian populism. In addition, mainstream parties, such as the Spanish Partido Popular (Popular Party) or the Greek PASOK, and New Democracy parties have been mired by corruption scandals, a clear violation of theatrical norms, without being labelled ‘populist’. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Jason Glynos (2001) argues that social orders require periodic transgressions to form the conditions of social stability. They act as a pressure valve for enjoyment in an otherwise conformist liberal context, which values egalitarian respect. One sees this, for example, in the broad permissiveness towards acting violently against disruptive climate protesters in the United Kingdom, even though this contravenes the supposed commitment to non-violence in contemporary liberal-democratic regimes and ignores the original violence unleashed by those hastening the climate catastrophe. This speaks to Georges Bataille’s (1986) argument that transgression can reinforce the rigidity of the taboo that it violates. Bataille’s claim is typified by fascism, whose leaders’ heterogeneity, their position outside of the social order, reinforces the homogeneity of society (Bataille, 1979). We must, then, identify the specific transgressions which precipitate an anti-populist response.

Thomás Zicman de Barros and Théo Aiolfi (forthcoming) refine Aiolfi’s previous work on transgression by identifying transgression within populist movements which make visible the demands of excluded sections of society. Using Jacques Rancière’s (1999) terms, populist transgression is the disruption of the police order, which distributes lots within society, by the part of no part, the section of society miscounted and deprived of recognition. This is what, for Zicman de Barros and Aiolfi, makes populism properly transgressive. However, locating populism with the part of no part is a claim in need of empirical verification. In many instances, populist discourses are used as a strategy in inter-elite conflicts, rather than as a mobilisation of the excluded (Canovan, 2005; De Cleen and Ruiz Casado, 2024; Mondon and Winter, 2020). Yet, in these instances, ‘populism’ may still be used as a pejorative signifier against other elite projects, even if they are not transgressive in the Rancièrian sense. The unacceptability of the populist transgression for anti-populists, therefore, remains elusive.

To identify what in the populist transgression gives rise to an anti-populist response, in both proto-populist horizontal movements, such as Occupy or the Spanish and Greek Indignados, and counter-elite projects, we argue transgression can best be located at the level of (de)politicisation. Rather than understanding depoliticisation as merely a governing strategy (Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2006), following Laura Jenkins (2011: 160), depolicitisation is thought of here as the assertion of ‘necessities, permanence, immobility, closure and fatalism and concealing/negating or removing contingency’: depoliticising discourses claim that certain issues are beyond contestation. In contrast, a politicising discourse ‘entails exposing and questioning what is taken for granted, or perceived to be necessary, permanent, invariable, morally or politically obligatory and essential’ (Jenkins, 2011: 159). Where depoliticisation moves policy areas from the governmental realm into the realm of necessity, politicisation operates in the reverse (Hay, 2007). Such politicisation can be undertaken by the part with no part or a disgruntled counter-elite. It is this contestation of necessity, which is anathema to anti-populism, be it the right’s re-politicisation of European integration (Scott, 2022) or the contestation of austerity by the left (Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis, 2019).

It is not surprising to witness the rise of anti-populism at a time when the post-political order is under pressure and must contend with various attempts at re-politicisation. As such, anti-populist discourse serves as a diversion away from more radical processes of re-politicisation which could threaten the hegemony, such as anti-racist or environmentalist movements. Anti-populism constructs and hypes ‘populist’ others, who can be more easily defused and discarded, to reinstate the necessity of the post-political hegemony. After all, if everyone is too busy being distracted by the ‘populist’ threat, the rot at the core of the liberal hegemony is concealed. In other words, anti-populism politically antagonises ‘populism’ in the hopes of reinstating the post-political hegemony and suppresses any attempt to radically challenge it. Therefore, anti-populism exists in this liminal space between post-politics and post-post-politics where cracks in the hegemony start to appear. ‘Populism’ in the anti-populist toolkit, then, is a way to establish an antagonistic relationship on more favourable terrain for the hegemonic elite.

Therefore, inverting the claims of Aiolfi (2022), we argue that as opposed to transgression being a constitutive feature of populism, it is this transgressive politicisation that leads anti-populist discourses to label a movement or party as ‘populist’. As Dean (2022) argues, although, for example, the actual populism of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was far from certain (Maiguashca and Dean, 2019), he was nevertheless still demonised as a ‘populist’ by political, academic and media elites. This anti-populist response to Corbyn can be understood as a reaction to his re-politicising of the austerity consensus which had emerged in the post-financial crisis milieu, and of his opposition to long-held norms in British foreign policy, such as his scepticism towards British NATO membership or the Trident nuclear deterrent. In moving these issues from the realm of necessity, into contestation, Corbyn committed a politically significant transgression, albeit not necessarily a counter-hegemonic one, which precipitated an anti-populist reaction. What is key here, therefore, is that to be pejoratively labelled as ‘populist’ requires neither the staging of a conflict of the part of no part against the police order (Rancière, 1995), nor even a construction of antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Anti-populism, instead, is an attempt to defeat the contestation of necessity by alternative political projects, be they populist or otherwise. Therefore, we can understand anti-populism as a discourse which constructs ‘populism’ as an existential threat to the system, due to its politicising transgressions, and seeks to reinstate a depoliticised, or post-political, state of affairs.

Because anti-populism opposes these politicising phenomena and seeks to reinstate a pre-populist status quo, we argue that, following Yates (forthcoming), anti-populism can be thought of as a conservative political logic (De Cleen, 2018). For Benjamin De Cleen (2018), conservative political logics may not necessarily have a right-wing ideological orientation, but instead they construct a desirable continuity between past, present and future that is under threat by some supposedly dislocatory social change. Anti-populism, as a type of conservative discourse, labels threats to this desirable continuity between past, present and future as ‘populist’. Importantly, conservative political logics can be also propagated by those on the left. Trade unions, for example, often advance left-wing economic proposals but may couch these policy demands in conservative terms by presenting themselves as conserving previously secured workers’ rights against neoliberal reforms (De Cleen, 2018). This can help us to account for ideological variation within anti-populist discourse, as a conservative political logic. Communist anti-populists, for example, who oppose so-called ‘populism’ for its centring of ‘the people’ as a political subject rather than ‘the class’ led by the vanguard party, propagate a conservative political logic by advocating for a return to a Leninist mode of organising which ‘populism’ has supposedly interrupted (Venizelos et al., 2019; Venizelos and Stavrakakis, 2023). Similarly, the Sardine movement on the centre-left advocated for a politics of kindness, emphasising the importance of physical gathering of activists in public spaces in opposition to Matteo Salvini’s digital repertoire (Hamdaoui, 2022a). Yet, the Sardine movement’s charge that populism is child-like in its instance that there are simple answers to complex problems, and that politics is, in fact, very complex and requires rationally minded people to participate is a restrictive view of political participation. By demonising populism as irrational and arguing that politics is only a place for the rationally minded, anti-populist street movements risk advocating for aristocratic rule of the excellent, rather than democratic rule of the many (Ober, 2008). Even left-wing anti-populism, then, ultimately operates as a conservative political logic which seeks a return to a desirable past of ‘pre-populism’. Now we have arrived at an understanding of anti-populism as a conservative political logic which defends the social practices that so-called ‘populism’ contests, we can investigate who, precisely, is to blame for this politicisation in anti-populist discourses, and who is posited as having the potential to defeat such agents.

Having established why certain phenomena are portrayed as ‘populist’ by anti-populist discourses, we can now move on to identifying how anti-populism constructs ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. To do so, we build on the academic literature on both populism and anti-populism across different national cases. We triangulate this academic work with primary sources from prominent political and media actors who position themselves against the rise of ‘populism’ which we take from datasets that we have used for previous research and are also using for current research projects (Brown and Mondon, 2021; Yates, forthcoming). In doing so, we follow the hermeneutic methodological approach of Farkas and Schou (2024: 48) which analyses the discourse of symbolic elites to uncover ‘meaning, interpretations, and understandings that are currently produced and circulated[. . .] and what such meaning-making entails for democracy as a historic construct’. To do so, our data, much like Farkas and Schou (2024), do not take the form of individual national case studies, but instead is constituted by a wide range of journalistic, academic and political outputs which allows us to map an anti-populist discursive terrain. Specifically, the first dataset contains 1548 articles from a single publication in the United Kingdom collected over a period of 12 months, while the second dataset contains 439 opinion pieces from broadsheets in the United Kingdom and United States which have been coded as anti-populist in accordance with Yates’ (forthcoming) definition. We have also included 5 academic books which rank in the top 10 most cited books with ‘populis*’ in the title in the corpus from the Web of Science and Scopus databases which have had their summaries coded as anti-populist. Combining this deductive sampling with an inductive approach, we have also selected 6 further academic books which are not included in the database, due to not including ‘populis*’ in the title or not being as well cited as the other books, along with 4 non-academic non-fiction books that have emerged from the literature review process. Nevertheless, these books are of theoretical interest in as much as they hold an anti-populist position and construct ‘populism’ as an object to be contested.

Our aim, therefore, is not to describe empirically how ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ are used in elite discourse, but rather to explore their construction which is not always named as such. Rather, we seek, instead, to uncover who anti-populism presents as being legitimate political actors, which political demands are acceptable within an anti-populist framework, and the level of popular participation in politics that is deemed as being desirable in anti-populist discourse.

The bad and the ugly: (So-called) populism’s people and elite

Core to our argument here is that anti-populism builds on different constructions of the people and elite depending on whether it is directed against left- or right-wing ‘populisms’. Against the former, the ‘populist’ elite and people are generally conflated or at least share the blame for their misguided politics. The ‘people’ following elites such as Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders are rarely considered as being fully conned into supporting them and therefore granted little sympathy – for example, their grievances are seldom discussed as ‘legitimate’ the way those on the right are, regardless of the latter’s unsavoury nature to those discussing them. Instead, ‘the people’ on the left tend to be portrayed as active agents in their political choices, even though these choices are often blamed on their youth and/or minority status (‘identity politics’) and thus radical naivety about the working of contemporary (liberal) democracy. When they are seen as young, their assumed educated and middle-class backgrounds mean that they are not only believed to be aware of what they are doing and thus responsible, but in fact part of an elite themselves. When their demands are blamed on other identities such as ethnic background or gender and sexuality, they are excluded from the people at large and limited to their one assigned identity, ignoring the intersectional nature often core to their struggle. Overall, this allows for their demands to be dismissed as elitist, factional and/or based on identity-politics. This of course ignores the diversity of the support garnered by left-wing alternatives, but also the intersectional element core to the demands taking their source from particular identities (Altamura and Oliver, 2022; Farrer and Zingher, 2022). For example, support for LGBTQ+ communities and rights are rarely in opposition to support for workers or people of colour and yet portrayed as such and thus derided as minoritarian (Bronner and Bacon, 2020). Crucially, this is constructed in contrast with the demands of a fantasised majority. What is key here is that the construction of the populist people by anti-populists rests on deeply politicised (and reactionary) understandings of who makes up the typical Brit or American: Joe the Plumber or Workington man (or generally a white working-class man as fantasised by upper-middle-class elite). This could be witnessed in the Macron government’s reaction to Gilets Jaunes (Hamdaoui, 2022b) which was more conciliatory than its reaction to more clearly politicised demonstration or democratic push on the left. This is made clear by Macron’s conscious dismissal of the support for a left-wing alternative after the 2024 snap election which led to the appointment of very right-wing governments under Barnier and Bayrou. No matter how strong a left-wing mandate appeared in comparison with others, it was never considered by Macron as a sensible alternative, while the far-right Rassemblement National was allowed to be kingmaker.

While the ‘bad’ people of ‘left-wing populism’ are therefore generally judged as responsible for their bad politics or derided as naïve because of their youth, privilege and/or identity (Cockerell, 2024; Levin, 2017), the ‘bad’ people of ‘right-wing populism’ generate a contradictory reaction in elite public discourse. On the one hand, they are painted as unreasonable as they act against their own interests. For example, the political ‘earthquakes’ of 2016 have often been explained as acts of self-harm committed by the communities who voted for them. Whether it is the rust belt in the United States or the former mining communities in the United Kingdom, it is argued that the most destitute parts of both countries voted to cut the support they received from their benevolent liberal elite, whether it be the Democrats under Obama or the European Union (EU). Yet, while left-wing populist people are given no sympathy for the claimed wrongdoing or unrealistic politics of their elite, such a self-destructive act by the right-wing populist people is often excused or at least understood and afforded sympathy. This often takes the form of a patronising analysis blaming the vote for Trump or Brexit, for example, on a lack of (formal) education and prospects leading to misplaced anger. These people are simply gullible enough to fall for promises of ‘sunlit uplands’, ‘oven-ready deals’ and ‘empire 2.0’ or ‘Making America Great Again’. While there is an acknowledgement from the anti-populists that the situation is hard for those at the sharp end of the neoliberal hegemony, the belief that radical change is possible or desirable is considered naïve at best. Therefore, while the vote for ‘right-wing populists’ is seen as a fault, there remains a tendency to accommodate the ‘legitimate grievances’ of those ‘left behind’: Trump and Brexiteers ask the right questions but provide the wrong answers (see Dobbernack, 2024). This could not be clearer than in the focus on immigration during the 2016 EU referendum campaign in the UK as demonstrated by the analysis of media coverage undertaken by Moore and Ramsay (2017). As they explored, ‘[c]overage of immigration more than tripled over the course of the campaign, rising faster than any other political issue’ (Moore and Ramsay, 2017: 8), and became ‘the most prominent referendum issue, based on the number of times it led newspaper print front pages’. This made clear that either those with the power to shape the news agenda chose to either lead on immigration themselves or respond to what they thought were ‘popular’ demands (see Mondon (2022) on the top-down nature of anti-immigration coverage). This is confirmed by Katy Brown’s (2023) research on the mainstreaming of far-right politics during the referendum which highlights that this negative focus on immigration was also central to the remain campaign (see also Begum et al., 2021). It is, therefore, no surprise to have seen the Starmer government take a ‘strong’ stance on the issue as well, both during the campaign and since, blaming the former Conservative government for not having done enough to respond to the people’s legitimate concerns (Courea and Walker, 2024). This is echoed by the situation in the United States where Trump’s election in 2016 was a shock to the anti-populist elite and yet its fantasised roots in the ‘left behind’ ‘white working class’ from the rust belt meant these grievances must be heard if populism was to be defeated (Mondon and Winter, 2018, 2020). Two examples illustrate this positioning in a striking manner, both of which appeared in the Guardian at key anti-populist moments: Hillary Clinton gave an interview in 2018 (Wintour, 2018), a mere two years after her defeat to Trump, urging ‘Europe [to] curb immigration to stop rightwing populists’, while an interview of Tony Blair, published a few days after Starmer’s election in 2024, warned him ‘to keep grip on immigration to tackle rise of far right’ (Crerar, 2024). For the anti-populist, only right-wing demands are legitimate it seems, regardless of their actual support. This could not be clearer than in Starmer’s focus on conservative issues in his 2024 campaign, even if this was at the expense of the traditional Labour support on the left and led to a low turnout and an incredibly fragile coalition of voters which has begun eroding within months.

While it may seem counterintuitive, it is no surprise that anti-populists tend to be more understanding of the ‘right-wing populist’ people than of its left-wing counterpart: the former is a construction that conceals a much more concerning trend in the mainstream elite’s tendency for reaction (Mondon, 2024; van Dijk, 1993). Indeed, both Trump and Brexit found the core of their support in wealthier sections of the population, despite being widely covered in public discourse as being a working-class reaction or a response to the reactionary working class (Begum et al., 2021; Mondon and Winter, 2018, 2020). This should not come as a surprise considering the economic programmes were not a radical challenge to the hegemony in and of itself. While it seemed to depart from the neoliberal consensus and turned towards protectionism, both projects remained faithful to most key economic tenets and offered no break from capitalist logics. The threat posed by even moderate projects on the left could have far bigger repercussions for key industries and interests should they be taken seriously as they would require a major rethinking and redistribution. Furthermore, while the threat to the economy is foregrounded, the very practical harm ‘right-wing populists’ do to various communities through their implementation or legitimisation of far-right politics is often overlooked or downplayed. Again, this is hardly surprising considering that many of these policies have been accommodated by ‘really existing liberalism’ (such as the militarisation of borders, the otherisation of minoritised communities or curtailment of key democratic rights such as protest) (Finlayson, 2012; Losurdo, 2011; Mondon, 2024; Mondon and Winter, 2020; Walia, 2021; Whyte, 2019; Wolin, 2008). This could be explained by the ability of those who predominantly form the anti-populist elite to ‘say the right thing’ when it comes to oppression, while refusing to act practically on it or even acknowledging the structural nature of the issue (see Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Mills, 1997). As Perry et al. (2021: 10) note, there is a difference between words and deeds:

although progressive racial views are strongly associated with self-describing as ‘anti-racist’, among the strongest predictors was also identifying as ‘‘colorblind’ when it comes to race’. In fact, color-blindness was an even stronger predictor of identifying as ‘anti-racist’ than willingness to confront a racist friend or a rejection of oldfashioned racism.

It is therefore possible that the construction of ‘the people’ of ‘right-wing populism’ taps into politics the anti-populists dare not speak but believe. This would link to the findings from Geoffrey T. Wodtke’s (2016) research suggests that:

despite their more favorable views about blacks, greater support for racial equality in principle, and great awareness of discrimination, whites with higher verbal ability are generally no more likely than their counterparts with lower ability to support specific policies designed to realize racial equality in practice. In fact, whites with higher ability are significantly less likely than whites with lower ability to support school busing programs or workplace racial preferences, although the relationship between verbal ability and policy support is not strictly monotonic (p. 41). ³

Therefore, while the people of left and right ‘populisms’ are both considered as threats to the status quo, their construction potentially reveals some deeper political mechanisms. While the former is derided as elitist and minoritarian, the latter is considered as expressing legitimate, popular grievances, which are diverted onto harmful ‘populist’ solutions. As such, even when standing against reactionary politics, anti-populism does not provide a democratic renewal or response. Instead, on the one hand, it legitimises reactionary demands and politics by constructing them as ‘popular’, ‘legitimate grievances’ (despite much evidence to the contrary) as it allows them to appear as responsive to ‘the people’s demands’ while ensuring no threat is posed to the existing order or that they are contained or directed against already minoritised communities rather than a challenge to power and hegemony (Brown, 2023; Mondon, 2024) . On the other hand, it strengthens processes of depoliticisation by reminding sensible voters that there is no alternative: left-wing populism is for spoilt children, right-wing populism is for the uneducated masses. Both meet in their demands for unrealistic alternatives and their disregard for sensible, real-world politics. In this, both the populists and the populist peoples act as thieves of enjoyment (see Chang and Glynos, 2011). The populists steal the anti-populists’ enjoyment of democracy in as much as they manage to appeal to the people in a way the anti-populists can only fantasise at a time when their political project is deeply distrusted and unable to address the many contemporary crises while remaining ‘popular’ by hegemonic standards. In this, the populist enjoys themselves at the anti-populists’ expense. The populist people steal the enjoyment of democracy from the ‘good’ people by irrationally enjoying democracy regardless of the cost: of course you can vote for whoever you want, but really, you shouldn’t (Glynos and Mondon, 2016). Crucially, while the ‘left-wing populist people’ are dismissed as a part of an elite themselves, the ‘right-wing populist people’ are constructed as a justification to push more reactionary and authoritarian measures into the mainstream (Katsambekis, 2023; Mondon, 2024) which the liberal hegemony can accommodate while pretending to stand as a bulwark against the less savoury far right, thus constructing the latter as the only alternative to the status quo. It is in this contradiction that the anti-populists can uphold the status quo, accommodate reactionary politics and appear as the hero-guarantor of democracy, to which we now turn.

‘There’s no such thing as a perfect candidate’: Preserving sensible enjoyment

Although the misguided ‘left behind’ of the right and ‘woke’ idealists of the left, along with the ‘populist’ elites who deceive them, constitute the main threat to anti-populism, it would be a mistake to claim that anti-populist discourses see their salvation solely in the form of technocracy and managerial politics. Certainly, anti-populism betrays a mistrust of the lower orders and the rule of the mob. However, in contemporary democracies, to pursue an entirely elitist, technocratic, or oligarchic project with no reference to popular sovereignty is not a tenable strategy (Rancière, 2005). Instead, we argue, it is the ‘good’ people, understood as a collection of rational and realistic individuals subsumed into a homogeneous support group for the sensible elite who are charged with standing as a bulwark against challenges to (neo)liberal governance signified as ‘populist’ in anti-populist discourse. This responsible elite forms the hero-guarantor of anti-populist enjoyment, where the ‘populism’-prone people and their leaders threaten it: it is the responsibility of the ‘good’ people to endorse such an elite in their struggle against populism, even if said elite is less than appealing. The anti-populist construction of the ‘good’ elite depends on ‘lesser evilism’, ‘accepting that we cannot always have what we want that we must somehow swallow our disappointment and make do with the second worst’ (Finlayson, 2024: 59–60). The ‘good’ anti-populist elite is constructed as preferable to the destructive ‘populist’ alternative and the act of voting for the least bad option becomes the ultimate democratic choice.

In contrast to the horrific figure of ‘the populist’ and their followers, who act as a thief of enjoyment, stands the figure of the hero-guarantor whose role is to safeguard enjoyment. In anti-populism, this takes the form of the responsible, managerial political elite, the mainstream media (Krzyżanowski and Ekström, 2022) and academic punditry who ‘objectively’ confirm their own myopic of the world and the innate good of the liberal contract (Finlayson, 2012; Mills, 1997; Mondon, 2024). Sebastián Ronderos and Jason Glynos (2023) evidence how key establishment figures in the Brazilian political scene were presented as saviours from the apparently existential populist threat of President Lula. More broadly, such heroism could be personified through an individual, political party or a set of elite institutions which promise to take back lost enjoyment from the populist thief. This institution-centric expression is particularly evident in anti-populist discourses. Hitherto depoliticised institutions, positioned beyond contestation, are often understood as the hero-guarantors which will return normality once ‘the populists’ are defeated. In the case of anti-Brexit commentary, parliament was repeatedly presented as the saviour of the United Kingdom from the ‘populist’ risks of Brexit. In arguing that Britain is uniquely positioned to stave off populism, Timothy Garton Ash (2019) claims

[m]any people around the world have been laughing at the House of Commons, with its antiquated procedures and theatrical Speaker. Actually, the Westminster parliament is doing us Britons proud. Over the last couple of years, those green leather benches have seen great speeches, deep emotion and courage, with members putting the national interest before personal and party advantage. Now parliament has stopped the populist bullies in their tracks[.]

Here it is the institution of parliament itself, supported by the ‘good’ elite who populate it, which acts as the hero-guarantor for anti-populist enjoyment. Where populists threaten the national interest, the ‘good’ elite of democratic institutions are argued to be its brave advocates. Lane Crothers (2023: 95) similarly analyses the US Congress’ hearings surrounding the January 6th insurrection, claiming that

the January 6th committee has worked as if law, and facts, and norms matter. The staff and members who undertook the investigation and exploration of the events around the January 6th insurrection acted on the premise that deep understanding, expert analysis, and careful consideration of complex information were keys to a healthy, productive, democratic society. As such, the committee’s efforts stand in stark contrast to the emotionally charged, leader-focused, and internally self-legitimating politics that are at the heart of populist movements around the world.

In combination with these elite-led institutions, the ‘good’ people are also afforded a key role, albeit passive, in anti-populist discourse. These ‘good’ people are those who assist the responsible elite in restoring a depoliticised state of affairs that can be enjoyed without ‘populist’ interruption. They are activated in anti-populist discourse, but only for the aim of bringing back, preserving or (re)legitimising depoliticised rule by the ‘good’ elite: their active, agentic role is thus limited to achieving the returned passivity of the people. The ‘good’ people’s political participation and engagement must be limited to securing a return to pre-populist elite.

This can be witnessed in popular mainstream books on politics in particular. For example, Yascha Mounk (2018: 186), who has become one of the most prominent mainstream anti-populist voices following the publication of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, argues that citizens must ‘take to the streets to show that populists don’t speak in the name of the whole people’. This anti-populism is mobilising even with its oligarchic tendencies, constructing a ‘good’ people whose ability to enjoy the fruits of liberal democracy is threatened by the easily swayed ‘left-behind’, and the irresponsible populist elites who manipulate them. Core to Mounk’s (2018) argument is an uncompromising demand for voters to rally behind liberal parties in response to ‘far-right populists’ (Mounk, 2018: 7), regardless of their own shortcomings and responsibility in the mainstreaming of far-right politics. The solution to populism can only be found through uncritical trust in the elite. In the British context, a similar trend is displayed by former New Labour political advisor turned commentator Alistair Campbell (2023: 5), who in response to the ‘populism’ of Trump and Brexit, implores the reader to get involved in politics; however, he warns ‘[p]rotest is good. People power is great. Ultimately, though, we need individuals with intelligence, energy and ideas to enter elected politics’. The instruction for politically conscious readers who are alert to the ‘populist’ threat that Campbell constructs, therefore, is to pursue a career in (mainstream) politics, stand as a (mainstream) candidate or get involved in a (mainstream) pressure group which lobbies (mainstream) parliamentarians (Campbell, 2023). His comments prior to the 2024 UK general election directed at those dissatisfied with the Labour Party’s position on the war in Gaza to ‘get off your high horse and vote Labour’ as ‘there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate’, in reference to Labour leader Keir Starmer (Cockerell, 2024), further evidences this elite-centred view. This is not to say that the pro-Palestinian movement is ‘populist’ per se, but instead reflects anti-populists’ elitist commitments and their aversion to the challenge that social movements pose to the power of the supposedly responsible liberal elites. For Campbell, overly ambitious demands of ‘the people’ are secondary to the sound political judgement of non-populist elites. By holding their nose and voting for Labour, the ‘good’ people give responsible elites their due. In contrast to the impulsive people of left and right ‘populism’, the ‘good’ anti-populist people know that it is in their self-interest to return power to this elite. This is of course ironic considering how said elite has played a key part in hyping so-called populist alternatives and the far right in particular (Brown and Mondon, 2021; Goyvaerts et al., 2024; Mondon, 2022).

Overall, the activation of the ‘good’ people provides support for anti-populism’s depoliticising project. The ‘good’ people are activated to reverse the politicising transgression of the ‘populist’: by awakening the ‘good’ people, the populist threat can be defeated, namely and solely through the ballot box (Mounk, 2018), thus securing orderly liberal-democratic enjoyment. What makes these ‘good’ people morally commendable is their engagement in acceptable forms of limited political participation which secure elite-led democracy. This is most apparent in Biden’s promise of a return to the ‘normality’ of pre-populist bipartisanship upon the defeat of Trump (McGowan, 2022). The ‘good’ people are instructed to vote for Biden, such that the ‘polarisation’ of the Trump years can be left behind, and a return to politics as usual can be secured. One sees a similar move in anti-Brexit activism after the 2016 EU referendum in the United Kingdom, which called for a ‘people’s vote’, or second referendum, on the final negotiated Brexit deal, with the option to remain in the EU on the ballot paper. A referendum is proposed and ‘the people’ are activated to kill off the issue of Europe once and for all, the politicisation of which is blamed on irresponsible populist elites and their followers (Grainger-Brown, 2022). By demanding a final say on the government’s Brexit deal, with the hope of ultimately remaining in the EU, the ‘good’ people are activated to disempower the ‘bad’ elite and endorse the ‘good’ elite who can return them to liberal-democratic stability. In doing so, the ‘good’ people must suppress any anti-establishment impulses they may have. As Grainger-Brown (2022: 1248) has highlighted, in the case of anti-Brexit anti-populism, the central appeal to voters in the 2016 EU referendum was to ‘put aside the desire to kick the establishment, for their own good’. The ‘good’ people are permitted to participate in political activity which secures the rule of the responsible elite but are urged to repress the desire to pursue any alternatives.

Overall, the ‘good’ elite of anti-populism are constructed as those reasonable, sensible servants of ‘the people’ who populate liberal-democratic institutions and stand as a bulwark against left and right ‘populism’. The ‘good’ people are thought of as playing a supportive role in this defence of liberal democracy. They are incited by anti-populist discourses to participate in restricted forms of politics, such as voting or peacefully demonstrating against, and only against, ‘the populists’, suppressing any desire for more radical action. In contrast to the politicisation of policies and institutions by ‘populists’, the ‘good’ people and elite can supposedly work in tandem to ensure a return to liberal-democratic norms.

Post-democratic anti-populism: Masquerading as democracy

We have now outlined the construction of the ‘bad’ people and elites, and their ‘good’ counterparts in anti-populist discourses: the ‘bad’ populist elites are those who appeal to the base emotions of their audiences, promising simple answers to complex problems. They are complemented by the ‘bad’, naïve, populist-prone peoples of the right and left. Together, they act as the thief of enjoyment: without the destructive populists and their easily fooled followers, it is posited that the enjoyment of sensible liberal politics would be accessible and fulfilled. The hero-guarantor of such enjoyment, to whom power must be returned if this enjoyment is to be achievable again, is the responsible liberal elite. In contrast to the ‘bad’ populist-prone people, the ‘good’ people are implored to activate to return power to the responsible elite through participation in mainstream electoral politics. Through this assertion of the necessity and desirability of depoliticised enjoyment, anti-populism can be understood as a paradigmatic case of post-democratic politics. Although anti-populism has a place for its own ‘people’, their activation has the ultimate aim of securing elite control of politics (Rancière, 2005).

In making this claim on the normative characteristics of anti-populism, we are somewhat out of step with the discourse-theoretical literature on the topic. As Stavrakakis et al. (2018) argue, anti-populism is a political logic that could take on either progressive or reactionary characteristics depending on how the antagonistic frontier against so-called ‘populism’ is constructed. It is plausible, for example, that anti-populist discourses could antagonise ‘populism’ for being too leader-centric, and propose a solution of participatory democracy. As Seongcheol Kim (2018) demonstrates, in the Dutch case, the signifier ‘populism’ is used almost exclusively to describe far-right politician Geert Wilders, as a frontier through which his reactionary policies can be opposed. As an expression of form, rather than content, it is suggested that anti-populism cannot be ascribed normative content a priori.

Such a claim depends, however, on an overly relativistic reading of Laclau, where the signifier ‘populism’ could plausibly mean anything. However, within discourse theory ‘no signifier is ever completely empty or meaningless’ (Linden, 2023: 2). Signification always operates upon a pre-existing field of meaning. Within this sedimented discursive context (Laclau, 1990), the link that has been forged between ‘populism’, ‘popularity’ and ‘people’ means that antagonising ‘the people’ when antagonising ‘populism’ is difficult to avoid. As such, anti-populism’s tenor is routinely demo-sceptic, if not out-right demophobic. Furthermore, using ‘populism’ as a synonym for ‘far-right’ in the case of Wilders (Kim, 2018) has the undesirable consequence of mainstreaming the far right by allowing far-right actors to have their politics associated with popularity and ‘the people’, granting them and their ideas democratic legitimacy (Brown and Mondon, 2021). As such, to suggest that anti-populism’s normative content is always dependent on its contextually specific articulation overstates the relativism of discourse theory and ignores the discursive terrain upon which anti-populism operates.

As we have outlined earlier, the likes of Mounk (2018) and Campbell (2023) advance an anti-populist project which seeks to activate the ‘good’ people to defeat ’populism’. Yet, only extremely limited forms of electoral politics, or electorally adjacent protests, such as taking to the streets to demonstrate against Trump or to demand a second referendum on Brexit, are permitted. This speaks to the close relationship between anti-populism and Colin Crouch’s (2004) concept of post-democracy which others have noted (Katsambekis, 2014; Medarov, 2015; Miró, 2019; Stavrakakis, 2014). While these authors emphasise the ways in which post-democracy minimises popular involvement in democratic life, based on tightly managed elections, cartel political parties, hollowed-out civil society organisations and the criminalisation of protest, we argue, in addition, that the post-democratic conjuncture relies on a simulacrum of democracy. By using the term post-democracy, we do not mean to imply a temporal shift, from a formerly more complete democracy to a contemporary degraded version. Instead, post-democracy captures the ways in which democratic iconography is used to provide legitimacy to our current conjuncture, without the necessary opportunities for popular participation which democracy demands. As we have outlined here, anti-populism sits comfortably in this post-democratic context in its assertion that power is only properly exercised by ‘good’ liberal elites. Even so, the notion of popular sovereignty remains symbolically powerful: a necessary referent to legitimise political power. What makes anti-populism post-democratic, therefore, is not only its narrow view of what constitutes proper democratic participation, but that this thin form of popular involvement allows it access to nominally democratic public life. In this sense, anti-populism is quintessentially post-democratic, with its democratic shell and elitist centre. Anti-populism aspires to a politics of expertise, which minimises the role of the demos and subdues political division (Rancière, 1995). Instead of popular sovereignty, for anti-populism, democratic desires should be repressed for the common good: the return of depoliticised enjoyment for all. Anti-populism, therefore, can be understood as a paradigmatic case of post-democracy. Although anti-populism has a place for ‘the people’ through nominally democratic processes of voting and peaceful protest against ‘populism’, it ultimately aims at the restoration of responsible elite rule: government for the people, rather than of or by them.