Not All Populisms Are the Same

Frank argues that the language of populism forecloses our ability to focus on the economic and political developments that have been undermining democratic institutions. Ultimately, Frank wants to make a distinction between authoritarianism and populism in order to preserve the democratic spirit of “we the people.”

By focusing on populism as the primary source of democratic decline, the economic and political developments that have most profoundly undermined democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic citizenship over the past forty years are obscured. Worse, populism has become the name given willy-nilly to all movements challenging these developments on behalf of a recovered sense of collective authority and political control, whether articulated from a racist and xenophobic right or a radically egalitarian left. Authoritarian attempts to centralize and expand the state’s executive power and wield it against “enemies of the people”—however defined by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others—should never be equated with the radically democratic institutional experimentalism of Podemos or the Farmers’ Alliance. More attention should be paid to how “the people” is envisioned by these different movements, and how they propose popular power to be democratically enacted.