History’s Postscript: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
A quarter-century ago, a virtually unknown State Department official published an article in a neoconservative policy journal. The title of the piece as well as its author would go on to acquire global fame—or perhaps notoriety. Critics did not hesitate to dismiss Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” Strobe Talbott, for instance, called it “the beginning of nonsense.”
Yet the article, and the subsequent book that grew out of it, was often misinterpreted and misconstrued. Contrary to what has often been alleged, Fukuyama had not predicted anything like the end of all conflict. Rather, he had asserted that only liberal democracy was capable of fulfilling basic human aspirations for freedom and dignity. This claim has not been so obviously disproven today. The few self-proclaimed ideological alternatives to democracy, whether the Chinese Dream articulated by Chinese leader Xi Jinping or the Eurasianism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, do not exercise anything like the global attraction that fascism and communism enjoyed during the 20th century.
But this does not mean that all is well with the state of democracy. Democracy has a serious rival today that actually lays claim to many of the values democrats themselves endorse: populism.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also an anti-pluralist form of politics. And despite the optimistic notions of many liberals, populist parties are not just protest parties that always prove incapable of governing. Populist regimes have recently been consolidated in Hungary, Turkey and to some degree Russia, among other countries. These regimes are often supported by what political observers since Aristotle have liked to think of as the social backbone of democracies: the rising middle class. Fukuyama himself recently affirmed the belief that “middle-class societies . . . are the bedrock of democracy,” but they can just as easily be the bedrock of populism.
Populist rabble-rousers today rely on middle classes who increasingly feel like—and are portrayed as—threatened minorities. Less obviously, populist regimes try to create their own middle class and equate it with the “true” people as such. These regimes typically weaken checks and balances, colonize the state, crush independent civil society and almost always prove highly corrupt. But all of the above tactics, even corruption, can be presented as benefiting a regime’s protected middle class, and hence do not obviously discredit a populist government.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/14562/history-s-postscript-the-populist-threat-to-liberal-democracy#
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