Unpacking the Term "Populist"

We hear the word "populist" a lot these days.

As is usually the case with words that get tossed around very much by the sub-literates of the Media Establishment the word could stand some unpacking.

Fortunately at the simple definitional level this word's meaning is not very difficult. The word "populist" is commonly defined as a political tendency championing the rights and the self-determination of "the people" against an "elite" with whom they are presumed to be at odds due to the latter in some way failing to respect, exploiting and/or oppressing the former.

However, from here things get much trickier. At this moment the bit of that trickiness that I want to deal with is the plain and simple fact that in speaking of "populism," and thus "the people," we are obliged to say something of just "who" the people are--how we define this category of person, what and how they presumably think and feel, and why this or that purported appeal to them merits the label "populist."

In considering that it is essential to note that those who toss around the label "populist" on platforms sufficiently visible for us to be sensible of their doing so are not "of the people"--precisely because the media is a thoroughly elite enterprise, especially at its higher levels. (In social provenance, in acculturation and training, in their present condition and their aspirations and their identifications and their loyalties this most visible section of the chattering classes are most certainly of and for the elite, all while from their life experience and their more intellectual activity having very little contact with or respect for those persons who are not.) This makes it quite natural for them to think of "the people" as those who are "not like us."

At the same time said elite, reflecting its essential conservatism, reinforced by a postmodernism that is itself very much of the right no matter how much people of conventional mind insist otherwise, is far more comfortable interpreting political matters from the standpoint of "culture" rather than hard economic interest or social reality. (Thus do they treat the kulturkampf as the center of American politics as they drone on ceaselessly about "Red" and "Blue" states, the key to American politics all lying in the coloring of an electronic map seen in their asinine coverage of a presidential election a generation ago.)

The result is that they think of the people as those who are "not like us," and of those who are like or not like them as like or not like them in cultural terms. In doing so the "elites" make much of their "education"--not only in the narrow academic sense (they are very proud of having gone to Good Schools, for what little good their expensive schooling did their minds), but the broader, Jane Austen-ish sense of a whole upbringing. Where that is concerned they are from the great urban areas of the coasts, and especially the East Coast; they have traveled about, because of their parents' careers, because of the educations they often had far from home, because of their own career trajectories. By contrast those who are not of the elite can less say the same, and often not at all. They come from provincial areas, and unless their family was forced to relocate by hardship, know little but those areas, with even if they have one this extending even to their college education, for rather than going to the Good School (doing which would likely have required them to sell themselves into debt slavery, not that the elites ever think about that) they probably went to the local state U, and maybe that just after a stint in community college, and after graduating looked for a job in their "hometown," their whole life lived within that likely none-too-sophisticated area.

The result is that "the elite" are "cosmopolitan," whereas "the people" are localist in orientation, rooted in community, with all the difference in "prejudices" that goes with that, with said elite more urbane about and open to the wider world, "the people" less so--the latter more "localist," more "rooted" in family and neighborhood and community, more creatures of whatever tradition they were raised in, more fearful and suspicious of that bigger world generally and anything different from what they were brought up with particularly. All of this has had particular consequences given the way that a neoliberalism that it has been fashionable to identify with "globalization," and the "information" or "knowledge" age, has been at the center of political and economic and social life, namely the framing of the issue of what "globalization" meant for working people as against the elite not in material terms but cultural ones. Accordingly, rather than facing up to backlash against globalization as a matter of reaction to the ravages of deindustrialization working people suffered as the fortunes of the super-rich surged, such observers saw it as a matter of cultural dislike, of, as Barack Obama supposedly had it, people unsatisfied by "empty cosmopolitanism" and "just want[ing] to fall back into their own tribe."

That choice of word, "tribe," seems especially revealing of the understanding of populism discussed here--the populists those appealing not to the economic interests of the broad public as against elite, not to the demand for justice by working people for social justice, but to tribalism. There are, of course, other words that fit such a politics better than "populism." However, using "populism" is convenient for the sub-literate poltroons because other words would be much more harshly critical of those they describe as populists. Indeed, critics of the use of the term "populism" and its derivatives find that it has all but become an euphemism for "extremist," "racist" and "fascist," far more charged words that the "centrists" of our media hesitate to use (given their anti-leftist conservatism, and the way it makes them much more squeamish about criticizing the hard right than even the mildly "liberal"). It is also the case that equating populism with extremism, racism and other such attitudes has been a way of identifying them with a public the elites neither know nor respect, and avoiding the extent to which elites espouse and promote and exploit those attitudes; making the latter appear the protectors of what civility endures in contemporary life; and even implying that the broad public's backwardness makes its social grievances undeserving of attention, with, again, reference to globalization relevant here, those negatively "impacted" by the march of the global economy having no one to blame but themselves in the view of those respectful of market outcomes, with their very intolerance the reason for their troubles in an era in which openness paid off, and the motivation behind their objections.