Word of the Week: ‘Populism’
Nicholas Clairmont
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is responsible for the most famous line in the history of unsatisfying definitions. In 1964’s Jacobellis v. Ohio, he said the following in determining whether some material constituted hardcore pornography:
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
In political and social “science,” the debate over the term populism has attempted to avoid resorting to such a subjective definition, as “populist” is one of these words that, for several years, now people have used to mark people and ideas as illegitimate. There are a few exceptions, such as Frank Rich’s The People, No, a pro-populism book. But largely, writers and scholars try to rope in the word as a piece of invective, and it’s all the more effective if it seems like some technical designation. That’s how we got to a Social Sciences Research Council publication from 2019, which reads: “[Our research team] has begun uncover [sic] the unifying tenets of populism in a variety of ways, most significantly through textual analysis. The group analyzed over 1,000 speeches from 215 presidents and prime ministers across 66 countries spanning 2000–2018, calling it the Global Populism Database.”
That sounds very technical. A database must be much more precise at knowing what populism is than someone who just knows it when he sees it, right? I found this quote because it is what a January report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change cites in a section called “defining populism.” The Tony Blair Institute report has been widely covered in the days between its release and this writing. “Number of populist leaders around world ‘falls to 20-year low,'” reads the headline in the Independent. In the Guardian, we hear that the “number of populist world leaders at 20-year low” above a subheadline noting that “after Bolsonaro’s defeat and Duterte’s departure, 1.7 billion people are now living under populist rule, report says.”
The Philippine leader who replaced President Rodrigo Duterte, the madman who previously led the country and advocated citizens take it upon themselves to shoot drug dealers, is President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who ruled by organized torture from 1965 to 1986. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Jair Bolsonaro’s successor as the president of Brazil, was president previously. A self-declared socialist who once tried to jump-start the Brazilian tech sector by slashing taxes on the computer production industry to zero, he is a popular, if divisive, and, above all, complicated figure. In the English-speaking press, he is commonly described in an uncomplicated way, such as in the headline of a Washington Post article from October 2022 “explaining” that “Brazil’s presidential runoff is between two populists.”
Populism is like pornography and, for that matter, fascism, in that people have strong feelings about what it is and isn’t, but no way to define it crisply. We do not need the Tony Blair Center for Kids Who Can’t Politics Good to determine who is a populist for us, nor whether populism is good or bad. Anyway, if this institute were honest, it would favor populism. Blair’s career rests on populism, after all. He was the leader of Britain’s Labour Party from 1994 to 2007 and the country’s prime minister from 1997 to 2007. The Labour Party’s name and its ideological identity are populist appeals to the “true people” in the form of the more numerous working class and of movements for rights like a maximum workweek and a minimum wage.
But if the populism experts at the institute disagree, that’s fine with me, because I simply do not think it is important that there be one true definition of terms such as this. What is not fine is their insisting that they possess the one true definition according to some external, verifiable standard. The term is just not meaningful. Words do have agreed public meanings, ideally. But not all of them — and especially not the ones that end in “-ism.” We have to agree what the number four means, but fuzzy concepts from academia are best squabbled over by academics who get paid to squabble over abstractions. The rest of us should be wise enough to know when we see a waste of time and energy.