Populism has taken many forms in America, from popular agricultural parties in the late nineteenth century to the 2016 presidential election. The term “populism” has been used for both democratic and authoritarian movements. In an idealistic approach, the term is applied to political groups or individuals who appeal to the people and compare them to elites.
The idea of leaders’ direct access to people is a common feature of populists and is seen as a feature that facilitates the definition of populism. But this focus on leadership does not allow populist parties or populist social movements to exist; for example, the US. The People’s Party, which invented the term populism, is not considered populist.
Populism is an essential component of extreme right-wing nationalism, an issue that cannot be separated from the current populist rhetoric, but does little to explain it. There is a dispute over the meaning of this key political term, with the prevailing use of populism in politics and the media pejorative.
We live in a moment when the word populism is never far from the lips of politicians. We keep hearing it as we try to get a grip on it, and there is confusion. The versatility of the definition of populism has made it applicable to party leaders across the political spectrum, but that has not stopped many from seeing it as a far-right phenomenon that applies to any party leader that fits the typical anti-immigrant, nativist mold.
This normative approach has been challenged by its defenders by the use of authoritative arguments, and its status as a political scientist who validates the name of the “populist” – a qualification often used to describe new parties and electoral success – has been challenged by those who take the time to analyze the motives behind it.
The Podemos strategy was analyzed as an attempt to apply the populism theory of Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s, but it has no comparable in the history of populist parties. Those who do not regard populism as an ideology claim that it is a strong discursive framework and agree with those who identify as populists. On the whole, some argue that the opposite of populism is pluralism and elitism.
It refers in short to an ideology that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite and argues that politics is an expression of the voluntary general will of the people. In the words of leading populism researcher Cas Mudde, populism is at the heart of this ideology. This is the key definition of populism used to describe key aspects of today’s far-right parties.
Populism is often described as a strategic approach that portrays politics as a struggle between the virtuous ordinary masses and nefarious, corrupt elites. Populism has been used by politicians on both the left and the right.
Populism is a political program or movement that champions or pretends to represent the ordinary person, as opposed to real or perceived elites and the establishment. Populist politics revolves by this definition around a charismatic leader who appeals to the will of the people and claims to embody it to consolidate his own power. Some populist parties focus on personalist leaders at the expense of institutionalizing the party.
Populism, with its focus on grass-roots, not elite, representation, offers the potential for representative democracy. Based on this definition, populism is democratic and defends the idea that the people are sovereign.
Populists present themselves as the only legitimate representatives of a homogeneous people. This logic is called par, which enables them to have certain qualities compared to other political parties. In a brilliant book, Jan Werner Muller defines the most prominent features of populism as anti-elitism, anti-pluralism, and exclusivity, which explains why Trump and other populists were defined in this way.
From Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, from Marine Le Pen to Hugo Chavez, populists are on the rise around the world. The success of the right-wing populists mobilizing in Brussels explains why Viktor Orban is back in power in Hungary, why Matteo Salvini is back in Italy and why European politics continues to be affected by Farage, Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and others.
The most famous current example of a populist leader is the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the renewed interest in populism is largely from his electoral success in 2016. But it was the understanding of populism as “people opposing elites” that spread among the academic community. The basic forms of populism were recognized only with the rise of the Boulangism in France and the American Peoples Party (also known as the Populist Party ).
To further explain, former president Donald Trump targeted political elites, relying on core populist characteristics such as anti-elitism, the use of human-centered language, and the heavy use of collective pronouns such as “our” and “we.”. Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist who vowed to burgeoning a global movement of nationalist parties, chose the populist label to describe Trump’s political movement that he compared to the populism of Trump’s predecessor Andrew Jackson. The German historian and political philosopher Jan-Werner Muller proposed a new definition of the term, suggesting that populist leaders self-define themselves by their anti-elitist rhetoric and insistence that they represent an outrageous majority of the population.