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Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.
But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.
One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.
The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.
Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'. It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.
In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
Of which citizens, by what measure and in what direction? Up or down? "Quo bono" is never answered. Well, it's clear if you look at the charts - the curves never change direction regardless of who's in charge.
> "letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried"
Washing hands with the will of the voters is demagogy. Trump promised stopping the U war in 24 hours, bringing prices down and unseen prosperity from day one but all that was replaced by "it was a joke" and endless "necessary pain" (for you, not him). The spin now is that the voters elected a person, not his promises, and if he lied and joked... it's voters' fault. As if there was ever a choice without jokers in it.
Of course it is never that easy.
That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.
What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.
I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...
Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.
The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.
Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.
Though it's true that they may know it's a trap. Ulterior motives aplenty.
It is often not clear when that is.
But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason with noone else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...
No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...
But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error. In a republic like the US it's actually not the job of the official elected in the belief he'd get the price of eggs down to overrule courts, and it seems hollow to claim it'd be more democratic to skip the process of legislative change in favour of executive fiat when the public doesn't agree with him on many of the details.
It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better though it would be more democratic. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves the president insisting his his yuge popular mandate places him so far above the law that bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it, never mind other populists like Maduro or Mao or Mussolini who didn't even worry too much about the mandate bit.
We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.
What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.
The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.
Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?
And some of the actions have been simply lawless. For example, after the Supreme Court ruled that Judge Boasberg lacked jurisdiction in the deportation flights case, the proper course would have been to dismiss. Instead, he initiated contempt proceedings based on failure to follow an order that was void ab initio, citing case law that applies to private litigants but makes no sense in a case where a district court exceeds its jurisdiction to compel a co-equal branch of government to act. Sanity prevailed and the DC Circuit administratively stayed those contempt proceedings. Judge Howell, in one of the law firm EO cases, asserted that firms had a first amendment right to pursue “progressive employment policies”—even though the first amendment obviously doesn’t apply to race-conscious employment policies. Other courts are insisting that Trump can’t revoke temporary authorizations by executive fiat that Biden granted by executive fiat.
More generally, courts are abusing their injunction powers. Read Marbury v. Madison again. The court goes out of its way to avoid enjoining the secretary of state even to perform the “ministerial” task of delivering a letter the president had already signed. Marbury makes clear that, while courts have the power to declare the law, and overturn Congress’s laws, its power to compel the executive branch to act is extremely limited.
The Supreme Court correctly ruled in the deportation flights case that the administration must allow detainees to file habeas petitions in the districts where they’re detained. That’s a proper exercise of district courts’ jurisdiction to adjudicate alleged deprivations of individual rights. It’s not proper for the courts to try and use that authority to enjoin entire executive policies that offend a judge’s sensibilities.
If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?
How did that happen? It was because Biden and Mayorkas did not “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He ignored laws that required him to keep immigrants out. He also interpreted the law in ways that were not “faithful” to Congressional intent. For example, he took a law that allows parole on a “case-by-case” basis, and gave blanket parole to hundreds of thousands. But then judges will say that these blanket protections must be revoked on a “case by case” basis.
People are prattling on about the Impoundment Act and whether Trump has statutory authority to reorganize executive departments. Meanwhile, Obama created an entire amnesty program (DACA) nowhere in the INA, after failing to get the same amnesty through Congress. All of this stuff about “the rule of law” is rank hypocrisy from people who don’t believe in rules or law.
Course he did, by your own arguments not only did he have precisely that mandate as the president that people voted for [on a manifesto of broadening pathways to citizenship], but nobody else should have had any right to try to stop him.
It's interesting that you regard Biden's administration pursuing a policy in their manifesto (but ceasing part of the parole-in-place programme as soon as the unelected judges of a state court ordered them to do so) to be a more egregious violation of the rule of law than Trump rocking up in El Salvador to sneer at the idea of abiding by a rare unanimous Supreme Court verdict. Much like your insistence that whereas Trump has a mandate to disregard court orders, Biden didn't even have a mandate to undo executive orders on border control he said he was going to undo, the "rank hypocrisy from people who don't believe in rules of law" displayed in this exchange is all yours...
Sorry, I was unclear. I was mirroring the language in the post to which I was replying, which assumed that the margin of Biden’s win meant he didn’t have a mandate. I think Biden had a mandate to do most of what he did. My only quibble would be that Biden didn’t campaign on opening the border, but Trump clearly campaigned on mass deportations.
And yes, I view the introduction of millions of illegal immigrants as being the more egregious violation of the law than what Trump is doing. The former reflects millions of instances of the administration violating american law and americans’ right to determine the kind of society in which they want to live. The latter applies to a small number of individuals, and reflects mostly administrative flubs involving people who are undisputedly non-citizens.
Now regarding Kilmar, probably yes his rights were violated as happens routinely. I am not sure I am going to lose sleep over it because millions of people came here in one of the largest human migration events in history and we're still at this point where we can't talk about that but instead we debate about whether this clerical error was the event that turned us into a fascist dictatorship. I think it's all disingenuous. I don't know if there's a term for it in the law but our country created an extraordinary legal situation and there's bound to be mistakes made and I think significant political bias is present among judges and lawyers in what should be a neutral court. Do they really care about rights or is this more about keeping immigrants here at any cost?
Actually in 2018 Trump deported an elderly guy who may have had dementia who was accused of being a Nazi war criminal, his name was Jakiw Palij you can look it up. There wasn't strong evidence he was evading war crimes though and he wasn't accepted as a citizen anywhere in Europe because of border changes. I suspect his rights were violated in some way but no one cared for obvious reasons. None of the lawyers you see now jumped to defend this guy. So might there be political concerns ahead of rights? absolutely.
The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.
I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.
The reason we have elections and not issue polls is because voters balance the totality of the circumstances in reaching their decisions. People may or may not like this or that incident in the moment, but that doesn’t mean they disapprove of the overall arc of the policy. So, for example, polls show that virtually no Trump voters regret their vote and he’d probably win a rematch: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/trump-100-days/ (Emerson is a good pollster, its final 2024 polls nailed Trump’s actual share, and overestimated Harris only by 2). Issue polls taken in the moment also suffer from response bias—e.g. people who approve of the overall arc of Trump’s immigration policy are less likely to respond to polling about a flub than people who are outraged by the policy itself. (The 2024 Harris bounce should be a good lesson in response bias!)
And a rule based on second guessing election results based on issue polling would never be applied even handedly—judges are definitionally elites and such a rule would be applied to favor their preferences. Issue polling showed the ACA under water for quite some time. Roberts had ample basis for finding the statute unconstitutional—far less of a stretch than the expansive interpretations of asylum laws—but he admirably saved it. And I’d argue that, contrary to the issue polls, Obamas’s reelection ultimately bore out that the ACA had a mandate.
No, the reason the United States places issues in the hands of a small elite of people elected for fixed terms and some of it in a single individual is a practical feature of the design of a republic which is obviously less democratic than alternatives, like having ballots on most issues or absolutely every implementation detail. It's also a feature designed for practical implementation and less disruptive governance, but so is the separation of powers and rule of law (the "anti-democratic" separation of powers and rule of law having much stronger and more enduring support than actions of any individual president suggests that wasn't a decision the Founding Fathers got wrong...). A rule based on letting the public decide exactly who got to stay in the country and who won each court case would obviously be more democratic than delegating that power to judges, but it would not function particularly well. A rule based on letting ICE elites rather than the judiciary rule on the rights and wrongs of particular immigration cases and giving the president the right to ignore people's constitutional right to due process if they found it inconvenient would not be more democratic and would, I suspect, also not function very well. And suffice to say migration policy is not the only area where Trump is or was arguing that rules shouldn't apply to him or that he should have more power.
Again, the difference between popular sovereignty and populism is quite well illustrated by your argument that if Trump's deportation policy is underwater even in the poll you picked showing him with neutral favourability overall, the "totality of the circumstances" means that deportation decisions he approves and laws he chooses not to follow must be him enacting the will of the people, cheerfully disregarding details like the people explicitly wanting him to do something else and overwhelmingly endorsing the right of institutions ordering him to do something else to make those orders. The belief that the people should have some say in the decision making process is quite different from the belief that the people's will is manifest in every action of some guy they elected on some issue that seemed salient.
populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.
How do you decide if they are "pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace" or "standing up for neglected people"?
Proposed policies being realistic vs vague broad strokes that are unlikely to be legal to implement would be another indicative axis.
When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.
How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
I don't think many people would say Biden was anti-establishment. In 2020, Trump hadn't been in office long enough to change the establishment very much.
At least on the GOP side, it’s because they care only about cheap labor. Free trade to harness cheap labor abroad, and mass immigration to harness cheap labor for what can’t be outsourced.
Populism is not inconsistent with pluralism, though it is incompatible with the elaborate anti-democratic machinery that’s been created to manage pluralism: administrative bureaucracy, elaborate laws, racial political machines and interest groups, etc.
“Pluralism” as it exists in places like New York City and Chicago are failure states of democracy, where you’ve got divided populations managed by ethnic political machines, with politics consisting of horse trading between interest groups. Yes, populism is quite at odds with that version of pluralism.
To put it differently, you characterized populism as a rejection of pluralism. And my point is that, insofar as populism has anything to do with pluralism, it’s more a rejection of the anti-democratic structures that have been installed to manage pluralism. Which just makes it democracy.
It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.
Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.
That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
Who is characterizing him as populist? His supporters in India or the global elite? (Honest question, I don't know much about India.)
That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
Liberals are often about taking down (liberating) the current system. But for some reason they often don't want or don't get the populist labels. For example, I don't think anyone ever called BLM a populist movement.
If The People selected you as their Chosen Leader, who needs pesky Elites in the courts and the Corrupt bureaucrats holding you back, the Chosen One? All opposition to what The People want is elitist gatekeeping and needs to be violently eradicated.
Mass deportations, without more context, in and of themselves are more a policy and less a political style.
You can execute this policy in a democratic or populist fashion.
Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.
It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.
In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
We often use the word "democracy" as the vast eco-system underlying and upholding modern liberal societies in general, not just the elected parts. Whether that's correct use of the word - I suspect you think it's not - I leave open for discussion. If you want I can use the narrow definition in which case we are mostly in agreement.
Judges should exercise due caution and be mindful of their obvious biases.
However, this works both ways. Officials cater to their often not so well-informed electorate and this group, The People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
As you can tell I am also very much an amateur. I suggest you don't approach me as someone who has studied political science because I'll have a hard time keeping up.
> People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext). As usual, the scandinavians have figured this out.
> But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. > [...] > while protecting legally recognized rights
Agreed, provided that by "elites" we mean the branches of government not just "successful people". I guess we're mostly in agreement. I'm just cranky about The People because in my country they are quite ... self-destructive, but that is a topic for another time.
I guess "elites" [sic] don't qualify as "people," then. And given your personal background, I'm also guessing that the range of types of "people" in your life experience might not have been all that broad.
> If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext).
Objection, assumes facts not in evidence: Whence came these "legally recognized rights"? The odds are, it was from the "elites" that you profess to scorn, with "the people" — gradually or otherwise — being convinced that those rights were a good thing.
Edit: ... in your life experience in the U.S. ....
A little-d democrat might argue that the legal system not being immediately responsive to the expressed policy preferences of the majority of voters is anti-democratic. But a populist argument would add that this discrepancy is because judges as individuals are members of an elite class entirely separate from the common people because they're smart and went to school and stuff.
The populist argument here is an unnecessary rhetorical flourish. The platonic ideal spherical judge of uniform density rules entirely based on laws that by definition do not immediately change based on the results of elections. The idea that judicial rulings may at times oppose popular opinion as expressed in the most recent election should be taken as a given when the system is working as intended, whether that's democratic or not, rather than as evidence of ideological opposition from judges as individuals. But in populist framing, everything must be in terms of elite opposition to the common people, so arguments about the inherent inertia of the legal system are insufficient.
Populism vs democracy aside, I'd also argue that at least in the US, the federal judicial branch is no less democratic than the legislative or executive branches. There are plenty of avenues for the voters to change the outcome of legal decisions. They can vote for representatives who will change laws, Presidents who will nominate different judges to the bench, and there is even a democratic process to amend the Constitution. Of course none of those processes are quick or obtainable with a simple majority at a moment in time, but by that standard the legislative and executive branch don't fare much better. Voters can choose the President, but they only get to do so ever four years regardless of how they feel about the President's actions at any point in those four years unless they can meet the incredibly high bar of impeachment and conviction. There's a distinct lack of responsiveness there as well.
This is a gross redefinition of democracy.
But we can go down this path if you wish. If a judge rules that only men can vote by their interpretation of the constitution, is that democracy?
First of all no single judge will be capable of upholding this, but let's say the entire judiciary has indeed decided to disenfranchise half the population I'd say they are grossly failing at their job. But anyway, your question was: is that democracy?
Well, it depends. In my democracy it would not be, because freedom is a big part of what democracy means here - even if The People decide freedom is unimportant. That's what we don't like about naked democracy, it easily leads to mob rule in which freedom is stripped and the tyrannical majority overrides all other concerns.
In my mind democracy is a broad system of checks, balances and institutions in which the will of the people is just one element. An important one, but definitely not the only one.
Just for entertainment consider this: if The People vote to keep women out of the electoral process, is that democracy?
If a policy is enacted that I don’t like - which happens daily - then I shrug and reinvigorate my will to vote next time around.
I don’t really see how your conclusion follows from anything I said.
The objection to illegal immigrants is that they’re here. While deportation efforts should follow the law like everything else, there’s nothing about illegal immigration that makes the legal process especially important compared to other things.
What elites call populist voters are picking the candidate that they think will do the best at the job they want done.
Look at the People's Party's policies and that's what it stands for. The shorthand is that the policies prioritize wage laborers and small business over massive entrenched interests and insiders. The way the term has been used since then (always by people who disapprove) means "whatever the rabble are asking for now." Or "appealing to the lowest common denominator voter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States)
So the term is really meaningless, just a slur used against people whose ideas sometimes overlap with People's Party policies, used by people who would have hated the People's Party at the time.