There is a big difference between a private media outlet deciding to support some idea or politician, on the one hand, and state media controlled by the government and supported by taxpayers, on the other. Arguably, Fox News has become somewhat less servile since de la Torre wrote those lines in 2018. Chávez and Correa strangled the private media “by manipulating the subsidies for the price of paper”; thanks to the remaining degree of free enterprise in the United States, this method of control has been closed to American populist rulers — so far.
In order not to be constrained by laws, “populist presidents packed the courts and institutions of accountability with loyal followers,” de la Torre writes. Like other dictators, populist rulers cannot succeed without a servile press and obedient judges.
Only when democratic institutions are strong and “a complex civil society” exists are populist regimes unable to destroy liberal democracy. For that reason, writes de la Torre, Morales, Correa, and Chávez destroyed democracy, while it survived under Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and the Syriza party in Greece. For the same reason, European countries seem to have (thus far) “restrained the undemocratic impulses of right-wing populist parties.” However, Narenda Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil may succeed in crushing liberal democracy in their countries. The jury is still out on whether American democracy — or, more exactly, “the American Republic,” to acknowledge the fear of democracy expressed in the Federalist Papers and in the deeds of the Founders — will survive the populism of Trump and of the left-wing populists who will likely follow him.
Contrary to what de la Torre seems to imply, however, institutions have not been very effective at restraining the undemocratic impulses of left-wing populist parties. He apparently does not see how unlimited democracy can undermine the institutions protecting individual liberty.
Populism as unlimited democracy: One great feature of de la Torre’s book is its description of how current populism is not that different from the populism that developed in South America in the 1930s and 1940s as well as in Europe more recently. The author quotes sociologist Talcott Parsons about the similarities between 19th-century American agrarian populism and 20th-century McCarthyism, the latter understood as populism of the right. In passing, one would have wished de la Torre had spent more time discussing American populism in the late 19th century.
Latin American populism viewed democracy as largely realized in “the quasi-liturgical incorporation of common people through mass rallies.” In Zambia, Sata “transformed government officials and the rank and file of his own party into sycophants who tried to show greater loyalty than their colleagues.” In his administration, President Trump surrounded himself with courtiers such as chief of staff Mark Meadows, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, economic adviser Peter Navarro, and health care policy adviser Scott Atlas. Before Trump, Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador “transformed political rallies into spectacles of transgression.” For example, Bucaram “said that one of his rivals had watery sperm, and of another that he had no balls.”
The major drawback of Populisms: A Quick Immersion lies in its analytical framework, derived from a leftist-idealist conception of politics. De la Torre sees democracy as exclusively founded on pluralism, majoritarian power, and the rule of law. He seems to think that the “public sphere” is a panacea for the ensuing conflict between individual liberty and the majority’s power. He believes that more (democratic) politics is the solution to populism instead of its main source. All this constitutes a constant illusion of the left.
While he neglects the strong populist tendencies that have appeared in parts of the United States’ Democratic Party (and that, historically, were already visible when the party had a large constituency of white segregationists), de la Torre presents “Tea Party organizations” as precursors of right-wing populism. He states that “conservatives and libertarians coexisted in these organizations,” which is not false, although we now see that the coexistence was an equivocal one and that libertarian fellow travelers bet on a bad horse.
The author blames Fox News for presenting the United States as a country where “illegal immigrants, criminals, and badly behaving people of color are overrunning America.” This unsourced quote, which the reader will likely attribute to Fox News, is in fact an interpretation by Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol and her former student Vanessa Williamson in a book critical of both the Tea Party and Fox News. To be fair to de la Torre, his book eschews footnotes altogether, no doubt to make it more accessible, but this is not without danger.
It is true that Trump “has disfigured and eroded democracy,” but left-wing populism is also a clear and present danger. De la Torre is often carried away by his distaste for Trump. In contrast, he considers Sen. Bernie Sanders (D–VT) as a “light populist” and does not mention other would-be populist rulers on the American left such as Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY). The next U.S. populist president may be “on the left,” which will simply mean that a different set of individuals will be deemed “the people.”
In reality, democracy is always on the verge of elected tyranny and what de la Torre identifies as “competitive authoritarianism,” which points to the danger represented by populism. To his credit, he ends his book by warning “democrats and progressives” and “the left” to “be wary of being seduced by populism.” He should reflect on the conditions under which democracy can be reconciled with individual liberty.
Unrealistic promises: Does he have the right analytical framework and vocabulary? De la Torre argues that the “neoliberal model” explains popular resistance as if political regimes had been characterized by anything resembling laissez-faire capitalism. It is ludicrous to claim that the Trump administration has been “committed to the unregulated market.” (See “The Trump Economy,” Spring 2020.) He credits left-wing populism for criticizing “the reduction of citizens to consumers,” oblivious to the fact that many individuals, especially among the poor, would rather have the influence of consumers on their suppliers than the illusionary power of a citizen on Leviathan.
It is arguably this sort of approach that, over the past decades, has led to the unrealistic promises of democratic demagogues against whom populist demagogues bid up the stakes by making ever more impossible promises to the populace. Populism is a monster begotten by democracy or, at any rate, by the sort of impossible democracy de la Torre is after. Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father), the long term-president of France’s National Front party (now rechristened National Rally and led by Marine) declared, “I, and only I, incarnate democracy.”
De la Torre does mention a crucial danger even in the so-called communal form of populist ideal as defended by Bolivian intellectuals: “individual rights are subordinated to collective rights.” He quotes one of those intellectuals, Felix Patzi, who wrote that in “the indigenous communities, democratic rules do not apply, but a form of authoritarianism based on consensus.” It is not clear what this consensual authoritarianism can be, except that some people are bullied to “consent” to some majority or minority.
Missing economic analysis: Many of de la Torre’s contradictions may be attributable to the fact that his economic analysis is skimpy if not nonexistent. He reviews sociological and political theories of populism but does not consider economic theories that show the impossibility of the populist “will of the people.” He would have benefited from considering social choice theory as initiated by Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and presented to political scientists in William Riker’s 1982 classic Liberalism Against Populism. It is precisely because “the people” are not homogeneous that the “will of the people” is nonsensical, that populism is a chimera, and that a strong leader is deemed necessary to substitute for “the (imaginary) people.”
Precisely for this reason, populism cannot avoid defining “the people” as only a faction of people (plural) and exciting this faction against foreign and domestic enemies. No surprise, then, that once in power, populists “attempt to transform a diverse population into the image of the people that is held by the leader.” One does not make this social omelet without breaking individual eggs.
Although de la Torre does not seem to be aware of public choice theory (another branch of economics), he inadvertently provides hints of its relevance to understanding populism. The relation between the populist ruler and his followers is partly based on clientelism: the former buys the support of the latter with special favors. Think about farmers and large manufacturers under Trump, although he only partly compensated for the loss his trade wars inflicted on most of them.
Conclusion: Here is a well-kept secret: We are not obliged to choose between two sorts of totalitarian democracy — between, on one hand, the populist version where an elected ruler imposes a nonexistent “will of the people” on some of the people and, on the other hand, the philosopher-king version where a minority of intellectuals and experts impose their values, lifestyles, and diktats on the majority or a minority of individuals. We are not obliged to choose between a left-wing and right-wing populism or, if we prefer this terminology, to choose between socialism and fascism.
The well-kept secret is that another alternative exists, one that covers a large spectrum of classical liberal or libertarian systems designed to prevent tyranny rather than to create nirvana on earth, to give liberty back to the people viewed as individuals instead of power to an imagined homogeneous people.
Populisms: A Quick Immersion would have been more enlightening if it had revealed that secret.
