Defining populism in complex settings

Let’s do away with the word “populist.” It’s become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger.

Worse, it’s freighted with contempt, applied to all voters who have decided that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.

“Populism” is a dismissive term for everything metropolitan elites can’t quite find the energy to understand. Donald Trump’s movement is “populist.” The supporters of Britain’s exit from the European Union are “populists.” The two very different parties in a coalition governing Italy are “populist.”

The Economist refers to a “populist virus”; The Atlantic, to “demagogic populists”; The Washington Post, to “populism sweeping the Middle East”; The New York Times, to a “Kurdish populist movement” and a Thai “populist movement”; the BBC, to the Catalan national movement as “far less about separatism than populism.”

Imagine for a moment that the adjective “elitist” were used in every description of a mainstream political party — as in the elitist Christian Democrats of Germany or the elitist Democratic Party. It may be partly true; it would also be lazy and offensive.

It’s a fair premise that nobody ever had his or her mind changed by being made to feel stupid. Therefore, it would almost certainly be helpful to the cause of liberal democratic politics to eliminate the contagious dismissal of the various forces that have produced a President Trump, or a Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Brexit, as “populist.”

Resort to the populist label is synonymous with dismissal. It reflects the superior view that the deluded plebes — seldom encountered in person — have got it wrong. It flirts with disrespect of democracy. Sometimes it reflects a grudging acknowledgment that these days populism equals political effectiveness — so we, the liberal victims of its power, need to find our own “populist” message.

Now, I understand that “populism” is a term with a history going back at least to the late 19th century in the United States; that it signifies a belief in the wisdom of the common people; and that, as a political ideology, it posits the separation of society into two hostile and homogeneous groups: the “pure people,” as Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia put it in an email, and “the corrupt elite.”

It derives its anti-establishment energy from the notion that nothing should stand in the way of an all-powerful popular will, including liberal democratic institutions with their checks and balances (an independent press and a judiciary, for example) contrived by elites. Ordinary people are honest and good; the powerful are self-interested and fraudulent (as manifested by the Great Recession, the euro crisis, growing inequality, rampant impunity for the rich, etc).

The problem is that the term “populist” has become a catchall so broad that the only common thread it contains is the distaste for it felt by its facile users. Populists may be authoritarians, ethnonationalists, nativists, leftists, rightists, xenophobes, proto-Fascists, Fascists, autocrats, losers from globalization, moneyed provocateurs, conservatives, socialists, and just plain unhappy or frustrated or bored people — anyone, from the crazed to the rational, from the racist to the tolerant, energized by social media to declare the liberal democratic rules-based consensus that has broadly prevailed since the end of the Cold War is not for them for the simple reason that it has not delivered for them, whether economically or socially or culturally.

This undifferentiated proliferation of the term is harmful. It’s critical to distinguish between a nationalist xenophobe and a reasonable voter who has made the plausible choice that Trump was a better option than other candidates, or that backing the anti-establishment Five Star movement in Italy represented a better way to register protest than supporting any of the mainstream parties.

In nearly every case, there is a better, more precise way to describe a current political phenomenon than the word “populist.” It just requires thought or even the effort to get out to the heartland and talk to people.

When I’ve done that I’ve generally found Trump supporters to be agents rather than victims. They’ve not been seduced by “populism.” They are not “populists.”

They have few illusions about the president. They think he’s a loose cannon, needy, narcissistic, erratic. They like the way he’s an outsider and “tells it like it is.” They wanted disruption of what they saw as a rigged system; he delivers it, daily.

Jan-Werner Muller, professor of politics at Princeton University, has written in The Guardian, “The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronizing to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents.”

For me, the key word here is “patronizing.” Liberal contempt is rampant. I also think Muller’s supporters of “populism” are in reality supporters of something more precise that must be identified.

In the name of freedom, retire “populism,” a blanket term that insults the differences through which democracy thrives.

(Roger Cohen is a columnist with The New York Times. )