One way to defend populism

There is a way and, in my opinion, only one way to defend populism from a liberal point of view: it is to reject the populist concept of ‘the people’.

Let men be plural, that is, a collection of individuals. Let each individual be recognized as having the right to veto (at some contractual-constitutional level) any ban or mandate to which he (or she, of course) does not agree. A fortiori, no subgroup of the people may exercise coercion against the individuals of another subgroup. It follows that the elite or the experts (“they”) or the politicians themselves should not legitimately be in charge of people. If populism is characterized in this way, it is defensible from both a moral and economic point of view, as it would coincide with (classical) liberalism. Liberalism is about a negative veto power of every individual – at least as formalized by James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay, but the paradigm goes deeper. Liberalism certainly and emphatically does not support an unlimited positive right of some individuals, even of the majority, to impose bans or mandates on individuals in the plural people.

That is not how populism, in the standard sense of the word, is defined and sold to the masses, that is, to a majority or a plurality thereof. Populism requires the existence of ‘the people’ in the singular (see for example Cass Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: a very brief introduction [Oxford University Press, 2017] for the academically accepted definition, which is close to the definition I attribute to the populists). If ‘the people’ (singular) as such does not exist, then populism is not possible; it is just a label that hides an interventionist, collectivist and authoritarian ideology. (See my “The impossibility of populism,” The Independent ReviewSummer 2021.)

To be both internally consistent and compatible with liberalism, populism would have to conceive of “the people” in the plural and liberal sense of “individuals,” where no one deserves more power over his fellow human beings. It would no longer be ‘populism’.

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