#321: The Problem with Populism: Why Democracy Needs More Than Simple Answers

Don’t you love elections? You’ve heard a lot of promises. You’ve seen a lot of charismatic people. You’ve seen some people that maybe were less charismatic. But recently, it’s obviously so-called charismatic people who win, the populists, those who tell you, “I have an easy solution to fix your problem.” Not everywhere but frequently. What do you do about this? What do we do about this?

What Is Populism?

So what does it mean when I say populism? Of course, every politician wants to be popular. That’s how you win votes. So you create a persona for yourself because never make the mistake to think that what you see on the screen is what’s there in real life. It’s always a performance. It is always a performance.

You create a public-facing persona that is deliberately crafted by yourself, by your advisors, by the expectations set in you, and sometimes also by the issues and by the circumstances. So if we’re living in a time of populism, populist messaging, populist styles will proliferate. Once that time goes away, we may see more reality based, more subdued styles of politics again. Maybe hopefully.

But we right now see people who try to fight populism by becoming populists themselves. They mimic the styles of others. They say things are very easy. I just have to do XYZ and everything is fine. They play people against each other and they find that it’s best not to tell people about details.

The Myth of “The People”

So more concretely, what is populism? I’ve seen some people who say, well, populism means it’s being close to the people and doing what’s popular. So, isn’t that good?

The people as a group don’t exist necessarily as a political entity. You need to first create the people as a constituency. They don’t come together naturally. You’ll have to work to create them as your voting block. And so when you say the people, that is okay if you mean the generality of all people living in a country or if you say my dear citizens something like that, but the people as an organization don’t exist, not as a group. They have to be made into a group and that’s what a lot of political models are trying to do.

So by saying we are doing that which is popular, by whose standards? Who measures that? What do we do with things that are unpopular but still good?

And you will see that frequently that which is claimed to be popular is then projected onto the group and they then assume that that is indeed what is popular. People can be manipulated into believing that something is popular and they like to sometimes be manipulated because they like to get this feeling of togetherness.

The Danger of Identity Politics

What makes populism attractive is that it attracts people to a common cause, to a common identity. People are sometimes herd animals, but you lose something in that because you’re focusing on identity, on identity politics, rather than to actually focus on the problems.

I like to think of politics as something that is there to solve problems, concrete problems, not necessarily shape identities. And if you shape identities, be very careful because they can have a power of their own.

So when you say populism is doing what’s popular, then you need to think a little bit more harder about why these things are popular and be careful about everything that is a little bit too popular because then people tend to get this herd mentality and do things that in the aftermath they probably will regret. Details get lost.

In one way, it’s an insult to the populace to project something that should be popular. Sometimes populism means elevating the worst in us because especially if it defines itself in an us versus them attitude. This does not elevate the best in us.

The Dumbing Down of Politics

In many ways, what you see with populism is a dumbing down of politics, a simplification of complex matters rather than the elevation of political discourse.

Now, these are all complex words and so let me try to say this a little bit simpler. People are asked to vote on really difficult problems. There’s not always an easy solution. People are tired. People are working. People are sometimes scared for the future and they sometimes welcome someone who just explains things to them.

But you need to listen to more than just one opinion. You need to actually do some work on your own because democracies need citizens not just voters. They need people who take an active role in shaping the politics of the country.

The Responsibility of Citizens

If you limit your citizen activity to just voting, first of all, if you vote, fantastic. Many don’t and that’s a shame. But if you vote and that’s it, without necessarily informing yourself, just going there to vote because you vote for the party you’ve always voted for. You vote for your team. That’s not good enough.

In a democracy, every citizen is part of the sovereign, which means it gives all of us rather high burden of responsibility. Whatever is happening in the country is all of our responsibility. We are all asked to contribute to solutions. We are all asked to contribute to solving problems.

So that’s what we also ask for when it comes to our politicians. They need to work on actual solutions rather than to repeat sound bites. Also, we are not moving forward if we promote things that haven’t worked before or cannot be scaled up.

The Problem with Simple Solutions

The most frustrating thing to see is if you see politicians promoting things that have not worked in other cities or in other countries. So you need to always compare where has this worked, where has it failed and then say why has it failed? Maybe you can get it to work but often times when it fails time and time and time again it has been disproven by reality.

So the problem with populism is in many cases or most cases the emptiness of its promises, which is oftentimes connected to a lack of capacity to actually solve problems in their complexity. Because after a certain time you find that if you repeat simple slogans you start to believe simple slogans.

So you it’s always easy for instance to say tax the rich because we are all romantics sometime and this Robin Hood mindset is nice. Throw out all the illegals sounds nice if you’re appealing to a sense of fairness, but it does not speak to the complexity of the reasons why people actually had to come to another country and what they could possibly contribute here.

Politics has to make case-by-case decisions. You can’t just say one thing that captures all and then we have to do it. This is the strength actually of democracies by saying we are people oriented. We are not necessarily ideology oriented. Once you put ideology on the forefront, you’re losing the sight of the people.

The Alternative: Moderation and Complexity

So what is the alternative? I’ve said this before on this channel, I’ll say it again. Of course, it’s not being too ideological. Or okay, everything is an ideology. Okay, but then let’s say the ideology of centrism, of complexity, if that’s an ideology at all. Moderation, not playing for a team.

Yeah, you may have to vote for someone and you have to maybe coalition with somebody, but always retaining that mindset that both sides may be right and that the truth doesn’t have a side and that there may be more than two sides.

So moderation or centrism is the realization that things are difficult, that reality is complicated and that whatever decision you make, there are unintended consequences to any decision and sometimes things take time.

Building Democracy from the Ground Up

Most of all, we need to educate the public and strengthen their role as active and knowledgeable citizens because when we mimic populists, this just elevates populism as a principle. And there are some people who can do this job better than anybody else.

So the problem with confronting populism by mimicking them is that you’re not defeating something that is a problem in the country. Populism can have its good sides in rallying the people to a cause. But eventually you have to get together. You have to sit down to each other and talk and let our democracy work.

And it has to work also on its lowest level that actually is also the highest. The people themselves, the citizens, each and every one of them. We all need to create democracy on a small level. We need to talk to people who think differently than us. We need to overcome thinking that everybody who thinks differently than us is an idiot or somehow mentally not quite there.

We all have different interests. We all have different stations in life. But we will all find something in common to us because otherwise if we don’t do that then we can’t have a democracy.