This is an excerpt from my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
The study of populism is evocative of the story of the blind men and the elephant. This story, in which some blind men are asked to touch an elephant to determine what that thing is, has been told numerous times and in many versions, but never to its very end. The known part of the story is about each blind man feeling only one bit of the animal so that, on comparing their thoughts, they may decide on the object. In typical versions of the story, the blind man who feels the tusk says it is like a big tree branch; the one who touches a leg says it is like a big pillar; he who feels the belly says it is like a big wall; the one who touches the ear says it is like a big hand fan; and he who feels the trunk says it is like a big pipe. In this part of the story, the blind men cannot reach agreement about the thing examined.
But our men are blind, not deaf. Therefore, they know that what they touch is a living animal that breathes, moves, and emits sounds. Here comes the untold part of the story. In it, there exists another blind man who sits in a corner without touching the animal, only listening attentively to what the others have to say. He finally asserts: From what you are saying, this thing must be the biggest animal on earth! With that declaration, our man offers an ontological definition of the thing under examination based on size as its core characteristic (“the biggest animal”) while also contextualizing it (“among all fauna”). And, as none could argue against that conclusion, this is how since then the blind men identify their animal—“the biggest one on earth”—and tell it apart from all other fauna. End of story.
Now, the moral: As with the fabled elephant, and all its other features notwithstanding, populism is the major historical phenomenon of our times, currently posing an elephantine threat to many of the liberal democracies that became dominant after the end of World War Two. And this is precisely the core point that no definition of populism can afford to miss.
