Concerned murmurs of “populism” hang over many political movements that emerged in 2016. The word littered headlines, describing political parties, politicians and popular movements in the US, UK, Spain, Italy and the Philippines, among others.

As far as “isms” go, populism made an indisputable comeback in the last year—but what exactly does this mean? For a term so easily recognized, it appears to carry limited insight if it applies to such a vast array of ideological agendas. Whether a warranted, misused or merely incendiary label, it suggests that there is a shared global sentiment unifying recent anti-establishment movements around the world—potentially stimulated by the same international factors.

 An Empty Qualifier

Attempts to standardize populism reveal conceptual inconsistencies. For example, its recent use in descriptions of US president Donald Trump and in discussions surrounding the UK Brexit movement highlight distinct anti-immigration stances rooted in nationalism. Meanwhile, the Spanish “populist party” Podemos advocates voting rights for immigrants. And as Bolivia’s populist president Evo Morales supports coca cultivation by indigenous farmers in spite of drug problems, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte—also labeled a populist—conducts brutal drug crackdowns.

This inconsistency isn’t unique to current politicians. Past uses of the label refer to the US 19^th century People’s Party and the Free Silver movement (a rural movement), Peronism in Argentina (an urban working class movement), and even to the Soviet Union’s People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe (a communist movement). A better approach to a comprehensive definition may be to acknowledge that one of its only constants is this historical inconsistency. Despite the lack of a universal definition, another rare constant is its self-evidence: somehow everyone knows a populist when they see one. Beyond this, and beyond its paradox of consistent inconsistency, populism offers very little regularity.

But hurled as an insult, it has proved reliable throughout history in eliciting disdain. Uttered with revulsion, the word “populism” is usually flanked by qualifiers like “aggressive” and “violent.” Clearly, being labeled a populist is not a compliment. It is rarely embraced openly, nor used in favorable descriptions. Despite Trump and his supporters’ re-appropriation of the insult, in which they proudly turn their noses up at “fake” or “mainstream” news, populism carries a negative historical connotation.

Yet it may not be immediately clear why a word that refers to the will of constituents against elite machinations, would be so defiled in democratic societies. On its face, its derogatory use may seem contradictory. Perhaps use of the word reveals just as much about the labelers as those labeled.

Populism is largely rhetorical, and usually combined with other “isms.”

While an all-encompassing definition eludes academics, it’s clear populism can be linked with certain types of rhetoric. For example, many associate it with reactionary nationalism, sometimes in response to a perceived drop in national welfare.

Other populist movements are hinged on the charisma and political maneuvers of particular leaders. Also known as “strongmen,” these leaders make use of a rhetoric that pits a good, wholesome people against corrupt elites or oligarchs. Usually this is done in conjunction with an appeal to ethno-national identity.  Examples of such strongmen can be found in Latin American populism, including leaders like Juan Peron and Hugo Chavez who campaigned on platforms that eschewed existing power-holding institutions in the interest of “the People”—the true national representatives.

USC SIR professor Pablo Barbera is working on a project examining populist rhetoric and the communication strategies of populist politicians on different channels, including social media.

According to him, “Populism thinks that society is divided in two groups. There’s a very large group, which is the People, or the masses, who are morally superior. And then there’s a tiny minority—the elites, who are in power. They’re kind of like parasites, and they’re just trying to enrich themselves, and they are corrupt.”

Thus, one way to make sense of populism’s lack of ideological color is by establishing it as a purely rhetorical rather than ideological ism—a political strategy rather than a coherent platform. In fact, according to political scientist Cas Mudde, populism can be conceived as a “thin” ideology, usually combined with “thick” ideologies like communism or fascism. Because of its inconsistent application to these ideologies, populism looks different every time it is practiced (despite being self-evident), and frequently adopts a distinct national identity—hence its strong correlation with nationalist rhetoric.

Populism can rise in the wake of economic change

Regardless of the personality, rhetoric and ideology that can qualify a movement or a campaign as “populist,” economic and social changes—particularly the exposure of inequality—can trigger the success of populist movements. According to Barbera, two types of factors have led to recent success.

“One is underlying; and the other is a trigger. The underlying is that there are a lot of citizens in many countries that are suffering the consequences of globalization, and technology is making the skills of blue-collar workers in many countries obsolete,” he said.  “So that means there’s a lot of people unemployed. For them, objectively their economic situation is much worse now than it used to be. There’s also a trigger, and I think that’s the economic crisis.”

Though its inconsistency prevents populism from forming a “thick” ideology, certain conditions and features add dimensions to populism beyond pure rhetoric. Economic gaps appear to fuel populism. Historically, industrialization has been accompanied by the rise of populist movements.

This is true for the US in the 19^th century, but perhaps even more for Latin American industrialization at the beginning of the 20^th century. In the wake of these changes, the political system in place no longer accurately represents the resulting new and/or displaced groups. These groups—whether the rural poor or a new working industrial class—whom the political system failed to represent become, in a sense, “up for grabs.” Thus, perhaps most simply, populism is the manipulative mechanism employed by politicians on either side of the political spectrum to win the vote of these disenfranchised groups.

Arguably, the changes and uncertainty of the 21^st century mimic the gaps left by industrialization in previous eras of growth. The downturns and transitions of the 2008 recession and the advent of the Internet which has been described as “the greatest technological surge since the industrial era,” combined with huge demographic shifts and the rise of global terrorism all contribute to a very different-looking world in the new century.

The economic and security ramifications of this “newness” and uncertainty can render certain populations ripe for political manipulation. The feeling of disadvantage is inherently economic. Political freedom, explains The Atlantic, is inextricable from economic freedom. Economic freedom here is understood as an equal ability to compete in the marketplace. In left-leaning populist platforms, this makes redistributive policies and land reform particularly appealing. On the right, it means standing up to a corrupt elite that betrays the national interest.

The reactions these platforms have elicited in the US are not only seen through the Trump and Sanders campaigns in 2016, but in the increasing failure of the US bipartisan “duopoly” to represent Americans. More evidence is the growing percentage of self-identified independent voters. A recent Glimpse article by Senior Correspondent Luke Phillips illustrates how both candidates utilized the American working class frustration with globalization and growing inequality.

Populist politicians capitalize on this antiestablishment sentiment through the “us vs. them” rhetorical framework mentioned above. An “us vs. them” rhetoric is not exclusive to populism, but it is a necessary condition. This framework can be split into two camps, as described by political scientist Werner Muller. An exclusive populism seeks to shut out stigmatized groups. In Europe, these are refugees. In the US, immigrants. In Latin America, inclusive populism is more common, in which increased representation is demanded for stigmatized groups such as the poor and the indigenous.

However, “us vs. them” in the populist dimension rarely addresses class conflict. Rather, it relies on a narrative of ordinary, honest people exploited by corrupt elites. Populists build coalitions within specific demographics and cast them into these roles. For example, Donald Trump received support from both the poor and the wealthy: his coalition brought together blue collar workers, wealthy white women, and even prominent names in the finance industry—proving that his rhetoric was not class-oriented.

In both, there is a strong grassroots component. Regardless of whether it panders to an agrarian movement demanding land reform, or a reactionary working class, populism is presented to the public as a bottom-up solution. This goes back to its etymological roots—populism is for the plain folk, for the masses, for the opposite of the elites. It serves those who feel somehow disadvantaged or usurped of what is owed them. Because of this, populism often champions democracy.

“Populists are usually, at least at first, ultra-democratic. For example they’re huge fans of direct democracy like referenda, popular initiatives. The whole Brexit referendum that happened in the UK is something that the populist party in the UK had been demanding for a long time,” Barbera said.

What populists ignore, however, are systems of checks and balances. Unlike direct democracies, parliamentary democracies can aggregate the interests of the population and represent them equally, taking into account minority groups.

What Barbera sees as most harmful are the inconsistencies contained within the rhetoric.

“On paper, giving power to the masses and getting rid of the corrupt elite sounds great, but there’s all these logical fallacies. The first thing is that the democratic system already gives the power to the masses. Second, most politicians are not corrupt. They’re kind of like picking out the black sheep and saying the whole thing is polluted,” he said.

On the other hand, use of the word could also be trigger-happy response of the opposition.

Populism is often wielded by the opposition to classify anti-establishment movements as radical or extreme.

Conceptual inconsistencies have not stopped populism from being hurled as an insult. For populists themselves, the label is an elite response. From this perspective, the label itself serves as a rhetorical tool to shut down uprisings that threaten current power-holders. The underlying implication is that “the people” are incapable of voting in their interests, or at least manipulated into voting against their interests.

Branding a political movement as “populist” cites a Freudian notion in which individual inhibitions dissolve as people are “stirred up,” evoking dormant “cruel, brutal and destructive instincts.” In short, groups or “masses” are designated a mind of their own, which is subsequently associated with primitive instincts. But this generalization is colored by ideology. After all, not all constructions of “the people” are created equal, so ideology renders the labelers alternately defenders and condemners of popular movements.

If populism fills the gaps created by economic changes of the time, and is used by elites to decry movements deemed “too extreme,” any definition of the term must consider the era’s conception of the political center. During the Cold War, for example, because the Soviet Union made frequent appeals to “the people,” the populist label became even more loathsome. Because the subsequent use by any politician of “the people” was wont to generate US suspicion, populist rhetoric changed. Now, in the 21^st century, hardly any politician makes direct reference to the political group.

Populism and “the People”

Communication between populists and constituents is unconventional, and as a consequence these politicians share a curious relationship with the media. According to Barbera, there are two frameworks for analyzing communication between politicians and their constituents generally. The first is top-down, in which the mass media broadcasts messages to the population, which doesn’t have an input. The second framework, on which Barbera believes populists rely heavily, is bottom-up. In this approach, the population sets topics and concerns, which the politician picks up on and addresses.

A couple factors make this second framework the ideal communication strategy for today’s populists. First, populists generally don’t have a good rapport with traditional media, who dissect and criticize populist talking points. These criticisms threaten to disrupt the narratives created by populists related to corrupt elites and playing to popular dissatisfaction. While Hungary’s Victor Orbán quelled the opposition press through more traditional measures in response (shutting it down), other tactics involve absorbing or reframing criticisms. Trump supporters have done both—absorbed the “deplorables” label, and spun negative press into “fake news.” This is not unlike their European counterparts. One European study found that when criticizing mainstream media, populists employ five recurring themes: erroneous reporting, criticism of ownership, naming and shaming, discursive contestations, alternative phraseology and the promotion of other media outlets.

The other reason bottom-up communication works so well with populism is precisely because of the abundance of alternative media outlets thanks to the Internet.

“Now with social media it’s so easy to put out a message and it goes viral—it doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer in the middle of Iowa or a journalist. Everybody has the same power. So, I think populist parties, or parties that have a populist strategy, take advantage of that as a way of giving voice to the ordinary people in our country,” Barbera said.

At its core, populism implies a fear of the “tyranny of the masses.”

Populism can also be conceived as an answer to the question, “are there limits to democracy?” The answer depends on the existence of a belief that a body of constituents can be as tyrannical as a dictator. In other words, democracy can be abused for something that is not, overall, good for society. Because the populist label describes a lack of faith in the democratic mass to vote in their interest, its use implies that what would otherwise be a system of direct democracy must be checked. The manifestation of this implication in the US, for example, is the electoral college.

Regardless of ideological orientation, populism can be a good thing in a democracy. It pushes to the forefront underlying or unresolved issues that have not been addressed by institutional channels. That way, even in quelling a populist movement, the political center is still broadening the scope of the conversation.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

When Pablo Iglesias beat out his deputy and philosophical counterweight Errejón for leadership of Podemos in early February, he made a muted note of the party’s ongoing spiritual crisis: “There’s no doubt we’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Iglesias said, before ending the speech with his usual, “Unity! Humility! On to victory!” Spain’s young, radical anti-austerity party has been paralyzed by political infighting (in Iglesias’s words, “a psycho-drama”) since October, when the right-wing People’s Party (PP) finally secured a winning majority in Spanish parliament. The conservative victory came after 10 months and two general elections in limbo, without any party winning enough votes to form a government. The PP was fighting a fractured left, split between the Socialist Workers (PSOE), Spain’s mainstream leftist party, the old-school communist United Left (IU), and the newcomer, Podemos.

After astounding success in the initial election in December 2015, Podemos was positioned to overtake the hegemonic, centrist PSOE as the leading voice on the left. But then Podemos lost steam, and in the second general election in June 2016, Podemos ran a joint ticket with the communist coalition the United Left (IU) and lost nearly a million votes compared to the first round.

After polling neck-in-neck with the Socialists for months, Podemos is shut out of power while a right coalition governs under a precarious cooperation with the leaderless PSOE. Defanged and outmaneuvered, Podemos leaders Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón are back to the strategic drawing board.

What went so horribly wrong? An outgrowth of the 15-M movement, essentially Spain’s version of Occupy Wall Street, Podemos had the backing of an energetic and educated middle-class youth (the indignados), unemployed with no promise of upward mobility. Led by Laclauian political scientists, Podemos also had the theoretical firepower to create a left-wing populist machine, a harder, better Syriza (“we lost our virginity in Greece” Iglesias told the New Left Review) that would challenge EU austerity, modelled after the anti-neoliberal efforts of Latin American governments in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But Podemos became arrogant, stubbornly refusing to cooperate with the “neoliberal PSOE” and keeping the left too fractured to compete. In their push for power, Podemos departed from their grassroots organizing model and became a centralized electoral machine with a top-down policy prescription disseminated straight from Iglesias’s lofty, intellectually pure political and media theory. Their original voting base seems to have become exhausted and alienated. With Syriza similarly subdued, the future of left populism and anti-austerity in Europe looks bleak.

Pink Tide Populism

Forget about relying on an inherently revolutionary proletariat to be an engine of change, says Laclau (roughly) in his work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Political identities don’t come prebaked into well-defined economic classes; they grow out of discourse, defining themselves by their relations to other identities. It’s not about accessing the “revolutionary potential” of the marginalized, it’s about creating a narrative that allows marginalized groups to understand their position and organize under a common banner. What’s important and what the populist logic understands, Laclau writes in On Populist Reason, is synthesizing a coalition out of many different political elements with disparate demands, and calling it “the people”, posed in opposition to some “other”. The people are the “real” citizens, the oppressed majority. Laclau writes:

The emergence of the ‘people’ requires the passage–via equivalences–from isolated, heterogeneous demands to a ‘global’ demand which involves the formation of political frontiers and the discursive construction of power as an antagonistic force.[1]

You pull off a synthesis with aggressively vague symbolizing, creating “empty signifiers”, open-to-interpretation phrases and images that different political identities can fill in for themselves. Iglesias speaks fondly of Chávez’s Bolivarian project in Venezuela, which united indigenous, working class and military demands and involved a construction of el pueblo against “the capitalists”. On the campaign trail, Chávez conflated his leadership with the idea of the people: “You are not going to re-elect Chávez really, you are going to re-elect yourselves, the people will re-elect the people. Chávez is nothing but an instrument of the people.”² The image of Simon Bolivar was a perfect empty signifier for Chávez’s socialist platform, representing land reform, centralization, national pride, redistribution and indigenous rights depending on who the audience was. It was a war of a sovereign underdog Venezuela against the West, against economic imperialism and the abstract, Goliathan oligarchy. For Laclau:

“Populism involves a division of the social scene into two camps. This division presupposes…the presence of some privileged signifiers which condense in themselves the signification of a whole antagonistic camp (the ‘regime’ the ‘oligarchy’, the ‘dominant groups’ and so on…”[1]

The strategy was replicated throughout Latin America (the so-called “pink tide”), from Morales in Bolivia to Kirchnerismo in Argentina.

Repurposing the Populist Logic

Translating these ideas to the Spanish context, Podemos carved out a space for itself separate from the orthodox communist left and the centrist left by trying to locate its mission outside of the left-right spectrum. In Iglesias’s words:

…socialist strategy, or a Marxist critique of neoliberalism, poses immense problems in the practical, political sense… So the strategy we have followed is to articulate a discourse on the recovery of sovereignty, on social rights, even human rights, in a European framework. Even if this involves immense contradictions and ambiguities, it’s proved in a certain sense at least to be able to articulate a social and political movement that can stand up to the regime.

Note the direct connection to Laclau: “the language of a populist discourse…is always going to be imprecise and fluctuating…because it tries to operate performatively within a social reality which is to a large extent heterogeneous and fluctuating.”[1]

Podemos branded la Casta, “privileged elites who have hijacked the power from the people (italics added),” explains Iglesias. This included all mainstream politicians, the neoliberal PSOE and, at least implicitly, the orthodox communists. “In Spain, at least, it seems that strategically this has been the only way to create something that wasn’t there.”

With the help of Juan Carlos Monedero, a former advisor to Hugo Chávez, Podemos adopted a grassroots flavor by setting up a system of local organization via “circles”, regional assembly-like clubs that debate and produce policies which are then publicized by the party’s Citizen’s Council. Eerily, and maybe indicative of Podemos’s shaky moral foundations, the “circles” are inspired by Chávez’s “Bolivarian Circles”, barrio-based groups designed to promote patriotism and Chavista programs, which have since evolved into the darker colectivos, essentially armed biker gangs that intimidate and attack non-Chavistas.

Using the rhetoric of “the people” against la Casta, Podemos united a series of particular, middle-class movements born out of 15-M: the anti-eviction network PAH, defenders of the healthcare system, those concerned with public education. Podemos also cleverly targeted Spain’s nationalist movements, the question for Catalonian and Basque independence, promising the region’s referendums to vote on their status in what Podemos began calling Spain’s “plurinational nature”. Podemos became a party of rights and sovereignty, reinvigorating nationalist appeals, just like Chávez.

There’s a question of how deep this leftwing populism goes beyond messaging. Note that while Podemos looks spontaneous and locally mobilized, the real decision-making process wasn’t in fact democratic for very long. Once election season rolled around in 2015, Podemos adopted an “electoral war machine” model called Vistalegre, pushing the circles to the side in order to centralize the Podemos message for the general voting public. As IU politician Alberto Garzón described it, “Podemos uses the terminology of the indignados’s 15-M movement, but in practice it is a very typical party with a general secretary and a team who operate as his praetorian guard…Its economic program was drawn up by two people, not by an assembly.”

Fighting in the Clouds

Iglesias and Errejón see the Podemos failure in June differently. For Errejón, the moderate and strategic second-in-command, Podemos should have been working to absorb more middle-class votes, and temper its image and language to achieve a wider reach, to become transversal. Errejón sees Podemos in danger of being labelled as just “folkloric” and contrarian. “The PP wants a Podemos cornered in the left” he told an interviewer.

Iglesias believes that Podemos’s strength comes from its anti-establishment position. Backing down from radicalism would just turn Podemos into a second PSOE.

These trajectories clashed in the debate over what to do about Spain’s political deadlock after the first election. Errejón wanted Podemos to strike some compromise with the PSOE, allowing them to govern Spain with Podemos support. Iglesias wanted to defend the party’s anti-neoliberal line, and refused to cooperate with the Socialists, instead opting for a coalition with the communist IU.

For a party whose goal was always electoral victory, maintaining radical purity at the hands of a controlling Iglesias contributed to a fractured left, allowing the unpopular PP to hold onto power.

After the February election, Iglesias remains at the helm—it remains to be seen whether Podemos has hit its ceiling. Again, Garzon’s analysis is sharp: “Podemos wants to seduce doctors, civil servants, the unemployed, and people dying of hunger, with a discourse that’s vague enough to suit everyone. From an electoral point of view that’s very effective. But when it comes to making decisions, I don’t see how you can reach an agreement between the doctor, the civil servant, and the guy starving in the street.”

Comparing the US Left

There are takeaways here for the US experience with left populism, consolidated and organized by the Bernie-Warren base of the same frustrated middle-class youth. For one, they could learn a thing or two from Podemos’s media game—gifting the King of Spain a boxset of Game of Thrones DVDs is an excellent case study in subverting political norms in a non-preachy way. The fate of Podemos could also serve as a warning about balancing theoretical purity and votes. The recent fight for leadership of the Democratic Party, with the “anti-neoliberal” left pushing Keith Ellison, while the establishment backed former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, resembles the same symbolic gesticulating and fracturing of Podemos and the Spanish elections. Bernie and his followers, as always, chose to make the contest an “elites vs. the people” issue, even though Perez has a sterling progressive record.

Like Podemos, Bernie’s revolution was (is) an interesting experiment in populist logic, uniting feminist, blue-collar, middle-class and socialist interests behind a series of empty signifiers that took on vague spiritual and emotional connotations, including “revolution” and, I would argue, “single-payer”, “free college”, “neoliberal” and “Nordic model”. But also like Podemos, the Bernie cohort hit a voter ceiling, unable to transcend their “privileged student working at a local café” aesthetic—stubbornness on the part of both the neoliberals and the radicals keeps the left uncompetitive in the face of Trump’s leviathan populist machinery.

As a young progressive student, it can be disheartening. It’s unclear that the anti-capitalist strains running through both Podemos and the Democratic left can survive politically—neoliberalism (if it still means anything) is really effective. Far-left projects always seem to end in dictatorship, economic illiteracy and cult-of-personality–look at Chávez, look at Perón, Kirchner, Iglesias and even Bernie to an extent. It’s equally unclear that running a pure social rights or culture wars campaign works out either. But as disgraced PSOE leader Pedro Sanchez and Hillary Clinton can attest, moderation doesn’t sell well. In Laclauian terms, it feels like we’re grasping to build a chain of equivalences over too disparate a set of demands. We’re not winning the symbols/discourse game, our coalitions aren’t broad enough. It feels like there’s a need to better channel the anti-status-quo energy of populism towards a realistic, scalable policy platform, a need for a more sustainable local mobilization, a need for a sharper, resilient left internet, a more rebellious progressive press (less bogged down in Trump thinkpieces)—maybe some fresher, post-Laclau political theory.

^1. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason, Verso, New York: 2011. pg. 80-120.

^2. Kinsbury, Donald, “From Populism To Protagonism (and Back?) in Bolivarian Venezuela: Rethinking Ernesto Laclau’s on Populist Reason”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, September 2016.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.