Populism
Populism is a political tradition especially prevalent in Latin America, though
various European and North American movements (National Socialism,
McCarthyism) have been described as populist. Its essence is that it mobilizes
masses of the poorer sectors of society against the existing institutions of the
state, but under the very firm psychological control of a charismatic leader (see
charisma). Populism tends to have no precise or logically consistent ideology,
but to be a rag-bag of attitudes and values chosen, perhaps cynically, to appeal
to alienated and deprived members of a mass society and to direct their fury
and energy against existing rulers, without actually committing the populist
leaders to any very concrete promises about the likely reforms. It attacks
traditional symbols of prestige, in the name of popular equality, but not usually
by promising the creation of a normalliberal democracy. Thus populist
rhetoric tends to be a collection of strands of both left- and right-wing
thought, with a heavy stress on leadership on the one hand, and popular
equality on the other, often with a highly illiberal and intolerant position on
traditional civic liberties. The most famous post-war populist is probably Juan
Pero ́n of Argentina. Typically, he was among the leaders of a militarycoup
d’e ́tatin 1943, before cultivating sufficient mass support to have himself
elected president in 1946, and characteristically of populist movements in
general, he studied and admired Italianfascismin practice. Perhaps the closest
to an example in the last two decades is the French Front National leader, Jean-
Marie Le Pen, who advanced to the second round of voting in the presidential
election of 2002, although most far right movements have some element of
popularism.
Populism tends to be over-used, being applied to almost any unorganized
mass protest movement whose leadership comes from a higher social class than
most of its membership, and it is doubtful whether it has, as a concept, enough
analytic capacity to be useful. Those who fear populism as a danger to the
stability of the democratic state, such as W. Kornhauser in hisThe Politics of
Mass Society, make much of the alienated and drifting marginality of the
followers of typical populist leaders, and advocate social systems where multi-
ple ties to class, family, ethnicity and ordinary organized political groups can
give a sense of identity and meaning to the individual, thus making them
immune to the often irrational and emotive forces that populism both uses and
inspires. In another sense populism simply means having mass popular backing,
or acting in the interests of the people, hence the derivation from the Latin
‘populus’. In this decreasingly common usage ‘popular’ or ‘populist’ democ-
racy carries none of the sinister overtones of the main definition. In a much
looser way a politician in a functioning democracy who appeals deliberately to
attitudes in the mass public which are not much found among the governing
Populism