One Approach to Defend Populism

There’s a means and, I recommend, just one method to defend populism from a liberal viewpoint: it’s to reject the populist idea of “the individuals.”

Let the individuals be plural, that’s, a set of people. Let every particular person be acknowledged as having a proper to veto (at some contractual-constitutional degree) any prohibition or mandate he (or she, in fact) doesn’t consent to. A fortiori, no subset of the individuals might use coercion in opposition to the people in one other subset. It follows that the elite or the specialists (“they”) or the politicians themselves might not legitimately boss individuals round. If populism is thus characterised, it’s defendable from each an ethical and an financial viewpoint as it will coincide with (classical) liberalism. Liberalism is a few adverse veto proper of every particular person–at the very least as formalized by James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay, however the paradigm runs deeper. Liberalism definitely and emphatically doesn’t help an unrestricted constructive proper of some people, even a majority of them, to impose bans or mandates on people within the plural individuals.

That isn’t how populism, in the usual that means of the phrase, is outlined and offered to the lots, that’s, to a majority or a plurality of them. Populism requires the existence of “the individuals” singular (see, for instance, Cass Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Brief Introduction [Oxford University Press, 2017] for the academically accepted definition, which is near the one I assign to the populists). If “the individuals” (singular) doesn’t exist as such, then populism shouldn’t be potential; it’s only a label that hides an interventionist, collectivist, and authoritarian ideology. (See my “The Impossibility of Populism,” The Unbiased Assessment, Summer season 2021.)

To be each internally constant and suitable with liberalism, populism must take “the individuals” within the plural and liberal sense of “people,” with none extra deserving of energy over his fellows. It might not be “populism” anymore.

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