The lack of success of anti-populist speeches has left a trail of people perplexed. Are our analyses bad or are the voters bad? How is it possible that the people sovereignly make such absurd decisions or vote for such undesirable politicians? It seems that the objective of these questions is not to understand the cause of bad decisions but to denounce their irrationality. Of course the people are wrong, but, as an analysis, this statement is insufficient. Those of us who try to understand what is happening would also be wrong if we reduced everything to the question: What is happening to people? Instead of taking it as a reason to investigate and question, we approach it as if it were a strange pathology that cannot have any objective basis.
The sovereign people, when they protest or vote, have become the culprits of unacceptable shocks, a black box that no one quite understands, a box of surprises, which makes conspicuous mistakes (Brexit) or recovers lucidity for a moment (second round of the French legislative elections). This is how we think about popular sovereignty and this is how we have depowered the unpredictability factor that is part of democracy, that uncertainty that is especially evident during election times.
Sovereignty means being able to contradict predictions and disappoint expectations, something that often happens in elections and referendums. Of course, democracy is not just electoral democracy, but there are those who think that the problem with democracy is the unpredictability of the people in elections. They are those who propose, as a solution, to save it by reducing its electoral dimension or the issues that are left to popular decision, constitutionally neutralizing everything that is possible, even if it means narrowing the political space and generating new conflicts.
This is how the old elitist narrative from the 19th century has resurfaced in the current debate about populism, the old fear of the dominant forces in the face of the political power of the majority. In fact, the entire classification of populism (as indignant, denialist, emotivist, irrational) continues to have a paternalistic flavour and is not helping us to understand it better, which should be the starting point for confronting it. One of the main arguments against populism is the appeal to scientific evidence, which, when handled in this way, can be perceived by many as a narrowing of pluralism and democracy, with a touch of arrogance. But the truth is that scientific evidence is neither abundant nor indisputable, nor is the technocratic ideal of placing hope in technology for the solution of political problems very compatible with democracy.
In order to curb authoritarianism, we may be offering a very unfriendly, dogmatic view of science and technology. The institutional design that removes too many issues from collective decision-making and the instrumentalisation of science and technology to limit public discussion have in common an authoritarian drift. Politics must respect the law and take scientific opinions into consideration, of course. But appealing to the absolute instances of law and scientific truth to resolve the problems posed by democratic uncertainty is not a good solution.
We will continue to fail as long as populist discourse, despite its weakness, continues to seem credible to broad layers of the population. It is more analytically useful to investigate what makes it credible than to insist on its falsity. Current research on populism, which is fundamentally research on political deviation, on democratic abnormality, is not getting it right. We will not get very far in understanding it by going this way. We have to understand it in its connection with liberal democracy, not as its opposite.
Populism is not the problem of democracy but the sign that it has a problem
We need to explain why populism, which liberals call the enemy of liberal democracy, has proliferated, but which seems to me to be more of an effect caused by the liberal conception of democracy than an enemy. Populism is not the problem of representative democracy but rather the sign that it has a problem.
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It is not easy to know whether the wave of constitutionalization that generated liberal regimes responds to the desire to protect themselves from populism or whether it is the other way around and populism arises as a response to an excessive limitation of the spaces for political action. Populism may not be the enemy of liberal democracy but its spectre, the reaction produced by that institutional design intended to limit as much as possible a possible loss of popular control. Liberalism does not find itself but rather produces its own enemies.
Populism and anti-populism are part of the same political framework. Declaring oneself against anti-populism does not, by virtue of an elementary dialectic, make one a defender of populism, just as criticizing technocracy does not imply being a populist. The defense of democracy in this 21st century consists in conceiving it and practicing it in such a way that this antagonism does not arise, that there is not such a radical break between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between reason and emotion. This split is what shows that we have a problem that is not resolved by taking a position on one of its terms.
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