Trump – Takis S Pappas

January 18, 2021March 23, 2021

How to distinguish charismatic from ordinary leaders: An infographic

If you are interested in the topic of leadership, have at the moment nothing better to do, or both of the above, why don’t you try to see whether the characteristics of charismatic leadership as explained this infographic fit the cases of political leaders that you have a good knowledge of? When you play this game, remember that there’s only one basic rule to it: To qualify as “charismatic,” the leader(s) you choose must meet all ten of the characteristics mentioned. They disqualify, and thus revert to the category of “ordinary” leader(s), if they miss even one of those characteristics. Playing it should be fun! (And, by the way, if you are a true fan of infographics, you may also enjoy this one.)

September 7, 2020June 7, 2021

Why Trump is likely to get re-elected: A populism expert’s view

Ante-postscriptum (April 2021): In April 2021, a memo came out in Washington D.C. stating a simple fact about the previous year’s electoral outcome. “Thanks to the quirks of the electoral college,” it stated, “the difference between a new administration and four more years of Donald Trump was merely 43,000 voters cast across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.” The report was signed by a group of five leading Democratic polling firms —ALG Research, GBAO Strategies, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Global Strategy Group and Normington Petts— banded together in an effort to understand the “major errors” and failure “to live up to [their] own expectations” and predict how close the 2020 race actually turned out to be. They admitted having underestimated turnout, as well as a number of measurement errors, but, I think, their major problem was the lack of a deeper understanding of how politics work, especially when the incumbent is a populist. Eventually, the pollsters settled on the idea that “there is something systematically different about the people [they] reached, and the people [they] did not.” Or, perhaps, they reached the same people as usual. Only that, in populist democracies, people get energized, and act, in unusual ways.

I have been studying and writing about populism for over ten years. And, with just 56 days left before the U.S. presidential election on 3 November, I think it likely that Donald Trump is to win re-election. This view is based on my published comparative research on the sum of postwar liberal democracies that have undergone the full populist experience: Populist rise, populist rule, and populist aftermaths. While building the argument below, I provide links to previous works of mine, which you may find useful. Let’s go, then, with this judgement keeping one thing in mind while hoping for another. What is to keep in mind is that, unless in the following days or weeks the American market suffers a massive decline, in which case Biden wins, spiralling polarization is of advantage only to Trump. As of the hope, may this forecasting be wrong.

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September 1, 2020September 3, 2020

The invention of “populism”

Making retrospective sense of what really happened in 2016, the year “populism” was invented, and addressing the stubborn misconceptions the populist hype has given rise to. There are lessons to be learned.

As 2016 was drawing to a close, a Washington Post journalist put it all in this nutshell: “If you had to sum up 2016 in one word, you might choose ‘populism’.” For The Economist, too, 2016 was “a year of triumph for populists in many places.” As this newspaper warned, in both America and Europe right-wing populists were on the march playing on widespread social resentment (picture below on left). Others were already busy in writing epitaphs for liberal democracy. Never mind that Grexit, perhaps the most sensational story of 2015 (it merited four Economist covers in that year alone), had been prompted by Greece’s leftist populist government. Never mind, too, the Economist’s own confusion with terminology since, by the end of 2016, it was using “nationalism” as synonymous to populism (picture below on right). Be that as it may, by then “populism” had become commonplace. It was now the catchword that could explain all the ills that afflict modern democracy. The logic is simple and goes as follows: Populism is bad for democracy; hence, when you think a democracy goes badly, look for populists. Or just invent them!

Continue reading “The invention of “populism””

July 30, 2020August 5, 2020

What path is Trump’s U.S. on?

In early 2019, I worked on a comparative analysis about what happens when a populist leader/party wins state office. It was published in the Journal of Democracy and can also be found here. Perhaps the major finding in that piece was the following:

“Once populists become established in power, what are the paths that a nation might take? The available cases suggest that there are three: 1) Populism might entrench itself and become systemic, inducing weakly liberal parties to shift in a populist direction; 2) populism might turn into outright autocracy; or 3) liberal forces might defeat populism at the polls and return to power” (p74).

The whole logic was condensed simply in the following graph: Continue reading “What path is Trump’s U.S. on?”

April 26, 2020September 5, 2020

Πώς μπορεί να ηττηθεί ο Ντόναλντ Τραμπ

συντομη απαντηση: ακριβως οπως ηττηθηκε ο λαΪκισμοσ στην ελλαδα

Δημοσιεύθηκε στην Καθημερινή της Κυριακής, 26 Απριλίου 2020. Το κείμενο βασίστηκε σε αυτό το πρόσφατο άρθρο: “The pushback against populism: The rise and fall of Greece’s new illiberalism”.

Απομένουν περίπου 200 ημέρες μέχρι τις αμερικανικές εκλογές της 3^ης Νοεμβρίου και η πλεύση προς αυτές θα γίνει σε αχαρτογράφητα θολά νερά. Ανάμεσα στους αστάθμητους παράγοντες που πρόκειται να καθορίσουν το τελικό αποτέλεσμα θα είναι, ασφαλώς, η εξέλιξη της πανδημίας του κορωνοϊού στην Αμερική και οι επιπτώσεις της στην οικονομία της χώρας. Το δυσκολότερο όμως ερώτημα αυτών των εκλογών είναι άλλο: Με ποιόν τρόπο μπορεί να ηττηθεί ο λαϊκιστής Πρόεδρος της Αμερικής; Continue reading “Πώς μπορεί να ηττηθεί ο Ντόναλντ Τραμπ”

April 18, 2020May 19, 2020

Trump vs. Biden in main social media reach

April 12, 2020April 12, 2020

How to beat populism: Valuable lessons from Greece (especially for America)

This is the third in a mini series of posts on how to beat populism. The first post offered a concise theory while the second one validated the theory using Greece’s case of defeating populists as an exemplary case. This third posts is precisely about the lessons Greece may offer to other countries, including the United States, where populism is still in power. All three posts are extracts from my recent essay “The Pushback Against Populism: The Rise and Fall of Greece’s New Illiberalism,” published in the Journal of Democracy 31:2, April 2020.

For other countries where democrats are wrestling with the problem of populism, Greece’s contemporary experience offers four major valuable lessons:

First, modern parliamentary democracies are Janus-faced: One face looks toward a liberal democratic system, the other toward a populist one. In the liberal conception of democracy, societies are divided by multiple cleavages, which must be bridged by respect for the rule of law, institutional norms, deliberative practices, and minority rights. In the populist conception, societies are split along a single line that separates the vast majority of people from a small elite, with these two groups entangled in perpetual conflict. This leads naturally to the conclusion that what matters is satisfying the interests of the majority—even if this should happen to be achieved by illiberal or unconstitutional means. Continue reading “How to beat populism: Valuable lessons from Greece (especially for America)”

January 18, 2020January 25, 2020

The family album of the most important postwar populist rulers in Europe and the Americas

Who are the significant illiberal leaders who have ruled, and in several cases still rule, in the lands of populism? Here’s the complete postwar populist family album in Europe and the Americas. With the exception of the recent cases of Poland, Mexico and (arguably) Bolsonaro’s Brazil, all other populist leader cases are examined in depth and compared to each other in my book on Populism and Liberal Democracy. Enjoy the show!

ARGENTINA

Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Continue reading “The family album of the most important postwar populist rulers in Europe and the Americas”

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019

Pete Buttigieg

A BID FOR POLITICAL SANITY

The first time I heard about Pete Buttigieg was when he submitted his candidacy for the 2020 US presidential race in April 2019. Who was this guy?

Continue reading “Pete Buttigieg”

November 28, 2019December 3, 2019

The causes of populism

A detailed analysis of how the model of populist causality works is in my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 123-130

A TIP-OFF: The present model does not apply to nativist parties, which are often, unfortunately, and erroneously (mis)classified as “populist.” It only applies to populist parties that have emerged strong, and ruled, in the “lands of populism.”

The image featured above represents the causal model of populism qua democratic illiberalism. It is the outcome of an intricate interplay of structural conditions, quasi-rational extraordinary leaders, and political mechanisms. No factor is independent from the rest, and each factor must be examined in sequential causal logic.