174 CHAPTER 8
some standard of authenticity . This authenticity derives from the moral identity of the people, giving populism a distinctively moralistic character. The ‘real’ people are taken to be righteous, pure and fully unified, a homogeneous entity that is both innocent and entirely trustworthy. Second, although the people are viewed as the sole reliable source of political wisdom, this wisdom is not, strictly speaking, a product of active political engagement on the part of the people themselves. Rather, it arises through a process of populist agitation that awakens the people to their ‘true’ convictions and beliefs. In this sense, populist ideology bears the influence of Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). This is because populists conceive the people’s will as the indivisible collective will of the entire community, as opposed to the actual views of living and breathing human beings. The people’s will is therefore a construct rather than an empirical fact. It is, thus, not uncommon for populists to treat elections and voting as an unreliable guide to the voice of the people. During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, for example, Donald Trump persistently refused to commit himself to accepting the election result should he be defeated, claiming that such an outcome would not be legitimate. The elite Populism is deeply critical of the elite or the establishment . Populism therefore clashes sharply with all forms of normative elitism. As with the people, populists take the elite to be a single, homogeneous force, unified by a shared moral character. Whereas the people are righteous and morally pure, the elite are thoroughly corrupt and morally
debased, making them the ‘enemy of the people’. The corruption that resides in the heart of the elite is manifest in its determination to subdue, exploit and manipulate the people. However, populists are typically more eager to condemn the elite as corrupt than they are to explain the source of its corruption. Thus, although populists may appear to share with liberals the belief that power and corruption are intrinsically linked, they cannot accept that the elite are ‘made’ corrupt by the experience of holding political power, for this would be irreconcilable with the emphasis populists customarily place on leadership. Similarly, populists must reject the liberal belief that corruption ultimately stems from the egoism that resides within all individuals, as this would call the people’s intrinsic moral purity into question.
Authenticity: The quality of being real or genuine. Homogeneity: The quality of uniformity, in which all parts of an entity or structure are the same or similar. Establishment: A term, often used loosely, that refers to a collection of people that exercises control over society by virtue of their entrenched institutional power.
KEY CONCEPT ELITISM
socialism and democracy on the grounds that elite rule is an inevitable (and usually desirable) feature of social existence. Normative elitists emphasize the personal, moral and intellectual superiority of the elite over masses, the elite, in effect, being ‘the highest’, ‘the best’ or ‘the excellent’. Modern elitists advance a social-scientific analysis of elite rule that is typically based on the assumption that it can and should be overthrown.
Elitism is, broadly, a belief in, or practice of, rule by an elite or minority. However, there are at least three different types of elitist. Classical elitists – examples including Vilfredo Pareto (1884–1923), Gaetano Mosca (1857–1941) and Robert Michels (1876–1936) – criticize egalitarian beliefs such as
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