begot resentment and class warfare. The difference between the ancient classes was not marked by reason versus passion, but by different kinds of passions, different tastes for self-destructiveness, like the difference between single malt whiskey thrice distilled and industrial alcohol: consumed in sufficient quantities, they both kill, though at different price ranges and levels of smoothness. Elite and popular populisms fed on each other and led to mutual destruction in civil wars, the end of the republic.
I adopt the core of the ancient concept of populism as the politics of passions, while rejecting its class bias, the exclusive association of the passions with lower classes. I propose to interpret populism, ancient and contemporary, as the rule of political passions. I maintain the ancient association of populism with passions and their manipulation by demagogues, but drop the class bias that associated populism exclusively with the politics of bread and circuses in Rome or beer and sausages in Marx’s view of the politics of the undisciplined poor, the Lumpenproletariat.
The eighteenth-century “moralists” introduced a useful Greek-inspired tripartite division of motivations between passions, interests, and reason. Contemporary political theorists like Jon Elster used this terminology to explain politics and liberal constitutions. Framers of such constitutions foresaw circumstances when politicians and voters would be compelled by passions to act against their interests. They enacted constitutions that constrain passionate choices, much as a sober recovering alcoholic may give the keys to the liquor cabinet to a trusted friend, with the instruction not to open it, irrespective of what the alcoholic may say in the future. Liberal institutions like the independent judiciary and central bank act as that trusted friend, to constrain political passions. Neo-illiberalism lifts such constraints to permit the politics of passions, populism.
The distinctions between passions, interests, and reason do not have to presume value judgments about which motivations are “legitimate” or “rational” and which are not. When the realization of passions comes at the expense of most other life projects, the passions are clearly and distinctly self-destructive. For example, irrespective of which life projects and goals jealous spouses may have, if they commit murder in jealous rage, whatever else they may have wished for, the rest of their lives will become impossible. Similarly, some economic policies give precedence to economic growth and social mobility, while others prefer economic equality and social cohesion. But populist policies, as in Venezuela, destroy the economy to an extent that growth and equality, mobility and cohesion, all become impossible.
Not all passions are sufficiently extreme to be assuredly self-destructive. Some passions lead the people they motivate to take extreme risks, thereby increasing the probability, rather than certainty, of self-destruction. Political passionate recklessness may pay off when the populists who lead it are lucky. They may come to believe themselves invincible, smart, or empowered by their passions, until luck runs out.
Other passions come at the expense of interests that, upon reflection and consideration, people would give precedence to. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999, 337) put it: “Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man’s own interest.” For example, anger has led people in history to burn down their own neighborhoods. They lived another day, but made themselves homeless. States have overreacted to provocations, built lavish dysfunctional buildings, and paid for the rescue of whales caught in ice, when the same resources could have been allocated for other purposes (hospitals, orphanages etc.) that both government and people, upon reflection, would have recognized as more important. Populists find challenging postponement of gratification to maximize satisfaction, giving precedence to some motivations over others, and recognizing that scarcity of resources forces choices between motivations.
Populists tend to miss what Harry Frankfurte (1988, 11–25) called second-order volitions, a will to determine their own passions. Populists accept all their passions and do not recognize contradictions between the passions; the constraints that satisfying some imposes on satisfying others. Demagogue may enflame and manipulate passions, but cannot control them and would not try. Populist leaders must promise immediate gratification in the form of simple policy solutions that they may misrepresent as having no undesirable consequences. They cannot acknowledge the complexity of the world (Mounk 2018, 36–39). When populist leaders cannot gratify, they divert attention to something else. Populist passions demand policies that are incompatible and undermine each other. They necessitate more policies to correct those contradictions, and so on. This is most obvious in macro-economic policies that want to improve public services, reduce taxes, and keep inflation and the national debt down; or keep high levels of transfer payments from the young to the old, with low birth rates, and strict restrictions on immigration of young workers, as in Japan. Populist policies, as distinct from populist rhetoric or expressions of passion, eventually consume themselves in self-destructive bonfire of passions.
Populist passions can be powerful enough to affect the beliefs of their adherents. Beliefs become narrative representations of passions, rather than probable results of reliable processes of inference from evidence. For example, if populists hate or fear somebody, they come to believe that they must have committed horrible crimes. Since the passions precede the stories told to represent them, evidence cannot convince or dissuade the passions. For example, fear and hate may cause populists to believe that immigrants commit higher rates of crimes than natives; while continuously ignoring the glaring evidence to the contrary. Vice versa, American populists ignore the fact that almost all the mass shootings in the United States have been committed by native white males because there is no corresponding passion to this belief.
Whether or not populist leaders actually possess the passions they manipulate or rather use the passions of others to further their own interests, is neither clear nor important. “Great orators are those who somehow manage to have it both ways, to enjoy the benefits of sincerity and those of misrepresentation. Their emotions belong to … the gray area between transmutation and misrepresentation; they are neither fully genuine nor entirely feigned” (Elster 1999, 390). For example, plutocrats whose businesses are becoming uncompetitive have an interest in protectionism and overregulation as well as in misrepresenting their protectionist interests as xenophobic passions shared with many others with no such interests. Likewise, employers who rely on cheap immigrant labor have an interest in presenting themselves as xenophobes who promote immigration restrictions because it strengthens their bargaining position with the undocumented workers they employ, while presenting themselves as ideologically above suspicions of employing illegal immigrants.
No person or state can always be entirely in control of their passions. There are degrees of populism, as the politics of the passions, just as there are degrees of democracy and liberalism. The exact borderline between populist and not so populist systems that have some populist aspects can be disputed, just like the borderline between democracy and authoritarianism and liberalism and absolutism. The extreme cases are obvious, while the exact classification of intermediate cases may be ambiguous. Moderate levels of populism can be sustainable. For example, some expensive penal policies are neither in the interest of victims nor of reforming perpetrators, but satisfy passions for revenge and retribution. Passionate politics have costs and unintended consequences, but the political system may be able to pay them without becoming insolvent. The transition from systems that have some populist aspects to populism proper is gradual, resembling a live frog slowly and gradually boiling into a soup.
Populism as the politics of the passions is important for understanding neo-illiberalism, the topic of this book, because liberal constitutions and institutions were designed and constructed often to constrain and even block the political expressions of passions and absolutist governments. Liberalism gets in the way of much of populism. Varieties of populism that find themselves in conflict with constitutions and institutions like the independent judiciary can make common cause with absolutists or illiberals who are not necessarily populist but want the liberal institutions out of their way so they can exercise absolute political power.
The contemporary alliance between illiberals (or absolutists) and populists is an alliance of convenience and not of
