This is the title of one subsection of a chapter in Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.
The book was published last year, before the latest presidential election in the USA. However, this section about populism scares me….some excerpts from the book below:
First – “the term ‘populism‘ derives from the latin ‘populus‘ which means ‘the people’. In democracies, ‘the people’ is considered the sole legitimate source of political authority. Only representatives of the people should have the authority to declare wars, pass laws and raise taxes. Populists cherish this basic democratic principle, but somehow conclude from it that a single party of a single leader should monopolize all power. In a curious political alchemy, populists manage to base a totalitarian pursuit of unlimited power on a seemingly impeccable democratic principle.
The most novel claim populists make is that they alone truly represent the people.
Thus…
If some party other than the populists wins elections, it does not mean that this rival party won the people’s trust and is entitled to form a government. Rather it means that the elections were stolen or that the people were deceived to vote in a way that doesn’t express their true will.
It should be stressed that for many populists this is a genuinely held belief rather than a propoganda gambit. Even if they win just a small share of votes, populists may still believe they alone represent the the people.
An example is the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which never won more than 0.4 percent of votes in a general election but was nevertheless adamant that it alone truly represented the working class. Millions of British workers, they claimed, were voting for the Labour Party or even for the Conservative Party rather than for the CPGB because of ‘false consciousness.’ Allegedly, through their control of the media, universities, and other institutions the capitalists managed to deceive the working class into voting against its true interests, and only the CPGB could see through this deception.
so….what turns someone into a populist is claiming that they alone represent the people and that anyone who disagrees with them – whether state bureaucrats, minority groups, or even the majority of voters – either suffers from false consciousness or isn’t really part of the people.
This is why populism poses a deadly threat to democracy. No group, including the majority group, is entitled to exclude other groups from membership in the people. This is what makes democracy a conversation. Holding a conversation pre-supposes the existence of several legitimate voices. If, however, the people has only one legitimate voice, there can be no conversation. Rather, the single voice dictates everything. Populism therefore may claim adherence to the democratic principle of people’s power, but it effectively empties democracy of meaning and seeks to establish a dictatorship.
Populism undermines democracy in another, more subtle, but equally dangerous way. Having claimed that they alone represent the people, populists argue that the people is not just the sole legitimate source of political authority but the sole legitimate source of all authority. Any institution that derives its authority from something other than the will of the people is antidemocratic. As the self -proclaimed representatives of the people, populists consequently seek to monopolize not just political authority but all types of authority and to take control of institutions such as media outlets, courts, and universities. By taking the democratic principle of ‘people’s power’ to its extreme, populists turn totalitarian.
mikesteinharter.com 