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!
Under this logic, academics, journalists and other pundits were quick to label almost any instance of politics they had no liking for as “populist,” and issue stern warnings about populism’s threat to (a typically fuzzy idea of) democracy. As populism was discovered to exist in almost every country across the globe, a pseudo-science of populism grew out of any proportion, both inside and outside of academia. In 2016 alone almost 2,000 articles in The Guardian mentioned the p-word, a huge increase from the about 300 that did so back in 1998. No less impressive was the number of countries whose leaders became regarded as populist.
In one of the earlier and most influential Guardian articles (title and subtitle pictured below), Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton professor, determined that Britain’s party leader Nigel Farage, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and freshly elected US president Donald Trump are all populists since they “try to grab power with the help of a collective fantasy of political purity.” He further asserted that, presumably because of their populist fantasies of purity, those leaders represented a common threat for democracy in their respective countries. Three errors were committed consecutively. The first was a misconception of “populism” since the criteria of what constitutes it are not clearly defined. That led into misclassifying three leaders who are not really comparable, at least with respect to populism, into one and the same class. Which eventually led to mistaking reality since, evidently, not all three leaders represented dangers for democracy.
For, indeed, in real historical fact not only did Farage, Erdogan, and Trump not belong in the same populist lump; instead, each of them has caused his respective country to take a unique path: Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Farage helped reinforce Britain’s liberal democracy; Erdogan led Turkey into the abyss of autocratic rule; and Trump, by rallying against established institutions and promoting deep social polarization, prompted the rapid transformation of the United States into an illiberal democratic state.
With the benefit of hindsight, let us have a fresh look of the events that occurred in Britain, Turkey and the United States in 2016. As we now know, not all of them were simply facets of the same phenomenon, populism. Nor did they represent everywhere threats for democracy. The developments in the three countries have been strikingly different, each leading to a distinctive outcome.
BRITAIN: A perfectly liberal democracy organizes a referendum to decide about national sovereignty
In February 2016, amid Europe’s migration crisis and the euro mess, Britain’s prime minister David Cameron announced a referendum to decide the country’s membership in the European Union. Politicians from all parties split into two opposing camps. One camp, the Remainers, wanted Britain to stay a full member of the EU. The other camp, the Leavers, wanted the country to withdraw from the single European market and end payments into the EU budget, roll back the jurisdiction of foreign courts, choose freely whom to trade with, and reclaim control of immigration. The real star risen during the campaign was Nigel Farage, the leader of the virulently anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), which pushed hard for Brexit. In the ensuing referendum (June 2016), the British voters gave a clear and legitimate command to end a 44-year political and economic union, leave the EU and “take back control.” In its simplest interpretation, therefore, also given that the Scots and northern Irish voted against, Brexit was a victory of English (and Welsh) nationalism.
But the country’s liberal democratic system remained intact. In the aftermath of the referendum, the government initiated the process of withdrawal from the EU, and engaged in protracted negotiations with Brussels that lasted until January 2020, when a divorce deal was ratified by the parts and came into force. In the four years that elapsed from what was effectively the biggest poll in its history and her formal withdrawal from the EU, Britain became a magnificent showcase of liberal politics. The two general elections organized in 2017 and 2019 respectively caused three changes of leadership in the Conservative Party and one in the Labor Party. Still, everything was worked out according to the normal political playbook, established liberal norms and full respect to institutional legality.
TURKEY: A typical autocrat exploits a badly organized coup to strengthen his authoritarian rule
In July 2016, a faction within the Turkish armed forces attempted a coup against the elected government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which however failed. There followed an orgy of mass detentions in the army and arrests in civil society. Public administrators, judges, school teachers, university professors lost their jobs for being allegedly complicit to the coup plotters. The long-term consequences for Turkey would be far more important.
For, indeed, in 2016 President Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development (AK) party ended Kemal Atatürk’s secular experiment, retreated from social modernity, and decided to severe links with the EU. Things turned particularly sour for democratic politics. After the purges that followed the coup attempt, Erdogan tightened his grip on state institutions, and restricted political dissent. Erdogan increasingly fundamentalist regime dismissed decisions by Turkey’s constitutional court (e.g., the Alpay case), hounded and imprisoned scores of journalists (Turkey emerged as the global leader for jailing journalists), forced Aydin Dogan, the secular owner of Turkey’s last big independent media firm into selling it to one of the regime’s cronies, installed members of his family to key government positions. In addition to its ongoing conflict with Kurdish insurgents, Turkey opened a new front in the Syrian war and also sent troops to Libya in support of the country’s government, which faced an insurgency led by forces that Egypt, the UAE and Russia back, which threatens to destabilize the fragile calm in Eastern Mediterranean. In May 2020, Erdogan threatened to let asylum-seekers and other refugees flood into Europe and in fact Turkey opened its land borders with Greece, which had to reinforce her, and Europe’s, border. Nothing else could better symbolize this shift than decreeing in July 2020 the change of the 1,500-year-old Byzantine structure of Hagia Sophia from a museum into a regular Islamic mosque.
USA: An arch-populist wins power despite his open disrespect of, and attacks to, liberal institutions
Already on the campaign trail that led to the November 2016 general election in the United States, presidential candidate Donald Trump had declared his intention to isolate the country behind a wall he would build along the border with Mexico, promised to kill terrorists’ families, encouraged violence by his supporters, indulged in conspiracy theories, and attacked time-honored liberal institutions that were sure to harm the country’s liberal democracy. Once in office, Trump sought to establish a new political order that, although democratic, was hardly liberal. As in all other cases of modern populism in Europe and Latin America, Trump’s populism displayed four interrelated, and mutually reinforcing, characteristics: First, a heavy reliance on his extraordinarily personal authority; second, the ceaseless pursuit of political polarization; third, the emasculation of liberal institutions and open display of disrespect for the rule of law; and, fourth, the systematic use of state-related resources to reward supporters and crowd out the opposition.
Today, almost four years into his rule, Donald Trump is still testing the institutions of the United States and many fear that, if re-elected, he may eventually destroy them. To just quote from an article in The Atlantic, “We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.”
What are the lessons learned from the foregoing comparisons? There are several of them but let me in this context only mention three.
The first lesson is that the most consequential developments in 2016 were entirely dissimilar between them and shouldn’t have been lumped together under the “populist” label. In Britain, euroskeptic leader Nigel Farage led a successful campaign for his country’s withdrawal from the European Union. In Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan introduced openly autocratic rule after a failed military coup attempt. And in the United States, a boastful man rallied against established institutions and introduced an illiberal yet still democratic political system. As long as we cannot clarify what “populism” is and does, we will not be able to select (dis)similar cases and compare them in meaningful ways. This takes us to the next lesson.
The second lesson learned is that infatuation with (mostly invented) populism still proliferates but, alas, in inchoate, rudderless, and above all fallacious ways. As our comparison has shown, not everything is populism and not every democracy is under imminent threat. But students, even in prestigious academic institutions, are falsely taught otherwise. This is unfortunate. For, when concepts are bad, then the cases get misclassified and are not really comparable. In such a situation, conclusions are wrong and any kind of political predictions are certain to also be erroneous.
The third lesson has to do with how to remedy the fallacious ways we have used to study populism so far. This is an old lesson, which I learned early enough during my own engagement with the study of populism. So, I am simply quoting here from my most recent book (cover pictured below):
“As populism seems to grow stronger, we still don’t know how to deal with it. But to deal with it, we need to know what causes it in the first place. But to establish causality, we need to do meticulous empirical research on several significant cases of populist occurrence. But to do such empirical work, we need first to select our cases carefully and, if possible, universally. But to be able to select the cases, we must first proceed with a decent classificatory scheme that tells populists apart from non-populists. But to construct such a scheme, we need to have a clear and unambiguous definition of the object under consideration. It is only when we succeed with all the foregoing tasks that we may hope to end up with a sound theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of populism” (p. 23).
