George Rebane

During this election season we’re going to be hearing a lot about populism and the populist positions that certain candidates on both sides will be taking.  What the heck is populism anyway?  When you google populism you get over one million hits that help illuminate (obfuscate?) this term – everything from esoteric definitions from the academics to historical citations as to its occurrence during various bygone political campaigns.  The notion and term definitely appears to be of American origin, probably because we have led the world in political diversity and in holding wide-open, free-swinging elections.

I was going to wordsmith a definition of populism according to my lights, but then I ran into a well-written one on Wikipedia that sounds about right, and that I believe will serve most of us.

Populism is the use of discourses, ideas or policies which try to appeal to "the people" by setting up a dichotomy between "the people" and "the elite". This populist appeal to "the people" has often been associated with an emotional appeal to identities, including national, class, ethnic and regional ones.

This suggests that candidates who are populists or use populistic arguments often chase opinion polls and/or the votes of people who are most prone to emotional appeals.  The definite implication here is that the politician who uses populist arguments has at best a malleable political philosophy or at worst is unprincipled – it pays for us to find out how long he’s been with the message that we hear today.   The overarching goal is to get elected no matter what the message du jour has to be.  The second implication is that the populist politician is playing to the electorate’s “dumbth” (term coined by the late Steve Allen) the effectiveness of which tactic was recently corroborated and reported in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan.  Exciting times.