What is the definition of populism? What are the common threads that tie together populist movements? Does populism work? The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder spoke with Carmen Medina, a former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, about how she defines and evaluates populism, and how, in some ways, it’s related to anarchism.
The Cipher Brief: What is populism? How do you define it?
Carmen Medina: I took a course in college called modern ideologies, but it did not include populism. It talked about fascism, Marxism, but not populism. The interesting thing about populism is that populists rarely call themselves populists. If you’re a communist, you call yourself a communist. If you’re a social democrat or a Christian democrat, you call yourself that. But it’s kind of rare in history to find parties that actually call themselves populists.
Populism is a term that others use to describe a movement – and usually they mean it in a pejorative way. Populism is also one of those things that is context-dependent. That means populism can be a party of the left or a party of the right. It’s easy to say that they tend to have an anti-globalization or anti-liberalism or anti-capitalism slant, but there’s populism on the right as well. For example, Hitler made quite a significant point of courting the German industrialists, and Argentina’s [former President] Carlos Menem, who’s also labeled a populist, adopted neo-liberal policies.
A definition that’s kind of accepted is that populism is a movement where the common people, which usually means the non-elite and often means the working class, feel they are being taken advantage of by the elite structure of society, and they begin to become a more effective political and social force around that idea to seek redress. And you know what, they’re always right. I’m going to be sort of cynical and say that the people who make it in society – the 1 percent – do, whether intentionally or unintentionally, take advantage of large segments of the population because they’re better informed or more sophisticated in the ways of power.
A common thread that unites populists is the wisdom of the common folk. I’m putting that in the most positive way. The other thing you could say is it’s an anti-intellectual movement. But really it’s the idea that the political system, once it gets self-replicating, tends to not pay a lot of attention to the wisdom of the common folk.
As much as I can tell, populism rarely exists without a charismatic leader, which makes me somewhat suspicious of it. Right after WWII, Juan Perón in Argentina – and particularly his wife Eva Perón, who was definitely seen as someone who understood the common people because she was one – led a very prototypical populist movement, “Descamisado,” or The Shirtless Ones.
The Nazis were also seen as a populist movement, obviously associated with a charismatic leader. The list goes on. But that connection with the charismatic leader leads to a chicken-or-egg question – which comes first, the mobilizing feeling of being taken advantage of by the elites or the charismatic person who mobilizes that feeling for his or her own advantage?
TCB: Why if, as you said, with a lot of these movements, their basic ideas are right – that they are being taken advantage of in the global economy by the 1 percent – does the word “populism” have such a negative connotation?
Medina: The cynical part of me says that the reason why they don’t like to be called populists is that the people who don’t want to be called that are the leaders of the populist movements, and the leaders are just as elite, in their own way, as the people they’re criticizing. Secretly, they’re thinking to themselves, no wait, I’m an elite too!
I thought you were going to ask, if they’re right that they are being taken advantage of, then why does populism seem to ebb and flow? There are periods when it flares up. One of the things that happened socially in Germany in the 1920s is you had all of these former soldiers who left the military and had nothing to do. This is always a flash point – a potentially problematic inflection point for societies. It happened in the U.S. too in the 1920s and ‘30s – the veterans were really upset, and it’s happening in the U.S. now.
I wonder if in the modern era, one of the reasons why populism flares up is because you’ve got this problem of male unemployment, which is often caused by a winding down of military activity.
TCB: Could you apply that same line of thinking to the coming cyber age?
Medina: That was the thought that was in the back of my mind as I was listening myself talk about this. If people are right about the challenge to work from cyber going forward, then you would have this same issue. Populism doesn’t seem to emerge in periods of full employment. Maybe that’s because the people who are being taken advantage of by the system don’t feel they are being taken advantage of when they have good jobs. But as soon as there’s some stress on society, then they notice. Why is it that during periods of economic stress, it’s the working class that is hurt the most? Because they have the most marginal jobs, less savings, and they don’t come from wealthy families, so there’s no personal safety net around them.
TCB: Are there alternatives to express frustration with economic oppression in a mass way that don’t lead to some of the risks associated with populism, like racism and nationalism?
Medina: You could say the Occupy Movement, which was not racist and not particularly violent, falls into that category. So that was, in a sense, a positive populist movement. But it also didn’t have a plan, and it didn’t have a dominant leader.
TCB: Was it successful for achieving what it wanted?
Medina: Not really.
Sometimes, I think that populism is really emotionalism in politics. It’s a word we use when what we’re really describing is a political period when emotions are driving the choices that the electorate makes more than a rational discussion of issues.
There was a recent survey of Trump voters, and what Trump voters believe to be facts is pretty amazing. They believe that unemployment increased during the Barack Obama Administration, for example. They believe all these things that are objectively not true. So perhaps a clear way to think about this phenomenon of populism is to realize it’s emotionalism.
I believe there’s a worldwide conspiracy for the preservation of mediocrity, which is another way of saying there’s a worldwide conspiracy for the preservation of elites – and we’re all co-conspirators. What do the political parties do during a normal political system? They use code language, or stand-in issues, to appeal to the common folk to have emotional resonance with those voters. But when conditions get to the point where emotions are very raw, and people are really hurting, that kind of pandering by the established elites doesn’t work anymore. And if somebody steps forward, like Hugo Chavéz or Donald Trump, and speaks directly to the concerns these people have, they’re going to get their support.
TCB: So you’re describing populism as basically normal politics on steroids? In the sense that populism isn’t fundamentally different from any other form of political ideology, which is the way that we humans organize ourselves, but rather it’s an exaggeration of normal politics.
Medina: Spot on. And then the second point I’ve been thinking about is that my favorite political philosophy is anarchism. I’ve always been really attracted to the argument of anarchists, the nonviolent camp. The argument they make – and I think it’s a cousin of populism – is that if we were left to our own devices, if we could just be on this planet and there were no power structures, people would find a way to get along peacefully. The reason why we’re not able to get along peacefully is because we have created all these power structures. It’s kind of like if you build it, they will come. If you build a power structure, people will fight over it. But if left to their own devices, people would never need to build power structures. The nonviolent anarchists yearn for a process, that would take centuries, where we would begin to self-organize and do what we need to do together without having to create power structures.
One of my great hopes for the internet, for digital technology, is that if only the anarchists had had an internet they might have been able to achieve more. What is the mechanism we use to self-organize? The Internet offers that capability more so than anything we’ve ever created.
The connection between anarchism and populism is that the anarchists and the populists are both saying we don’t need no elites, we don’t want your kind here anymore. We think we would be a happier, healthier, and better society if we didn’t have that.
TCB: Can the flip side not also be true – that the complete eradication of power structures could produce complete anarchy, in the negative sense of the word?
Medina: You’re absolutely right. I’ve always believed that government is what we humans created when we realized that we needed some mechanism to deal with issues of public concern that were bigger than what just a small family or tribe could resolve. One way you can think of government is that it’s the institution we created to mediate an unresolvable tension between the common folk and the elite.
If you believe each person has different skills and aptitudes, then even in a society with no power structures, differences in outcomes would emerge, and then resentment would begin to build around those differences. Either people would take to the streets to resolve it – then you would have an anarchical, Hobbesian state – or they would create government to mediate it.
I’ve always wanted to look into the history of America’s expansion into the Western territories. If you think about it, it was anarchic in the sense that tens of thousands of people moved to new land, claimed their 40-acre lots, and started living there. The existing governance structure was really thin. You didn’t start getting any kind of effective central government until the railroad and the telegraph came along. These were self-organizing communities. How violent were they? I don’t know. But I’ve always thought maybe that’s an interesting proof point for anarchy – the settling of the American West.
