10 december 2019
In this small book, JWM proposes a definition which describes populism as a style of performing politics (and NOT as a set of political statements). For him populism is a way of performing politics in a democracy which claims to make the democracy stronger while in fact it erodes key elements of a robust democracy. Populism is therefore, according to JWM, a threat to real democracy.
Key elements of the populist style are that populists claim to fight the elites while, at the same time, they claim to be the representatives of the people. Hereby they believe that “the people” are a homogeneous group and that they are its representatives. People who do not fit in the homogeneous mass are outsiders or even enemies. Populists are therefore no pluralists and their ideology always contains some kind of identity politics (to determine the real people).
Once in power, populists try to occupy the state apparatus, they are corrupt, engage in “mass clientalism” and try systematically to suppress civil society. Sometimes they even re-write constitutions to outlaw pluralism.
JWM is strongly against the use of a concept like “illiberal democracies” because according to JWM a democracy without the necessary checks and balances, the liberal context, is no democracy at all. Critics of a regime who call it an illiberal democracy admit implicitly that it still is a democracy, quod non, according to JWM.