The Perils of Populism

Introduction

SARAH TOBIAS AND ARLENE STEIN

Populism is an approach to politics that pits the people against the elite. Whether understood as an ideology (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017), a strategy (Weyland 2018; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2005, 2018), or a set of performances (Moffitt 2016), populism is a rebuke to established ways of doing politics and often to established political parties too. It is neither inherently left nor right in its orientation. Though there have been left-wing movements of a populist bent, in recent years a right-wing populism that combines nationalism and xenophobia has been ascendant. In Britain, for example, a majority of voters embraced Brexit, which champions the nation-state against regional and global cooperation. In Brazil, Far-Right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won a landslide victory in the 2018 presidential election, after campaigning with the slogan Brazil above everything, God above everyone (quoted in Fishman 2018). And in the United States, businessman Donald Trump swept into the highest public office by promising to challenge elite corruption and restore white Christian supremacy.

It is not as though democratic systems had been working effectively. Over the past several decades, political and economic elites have weakened the social welfare functions of states, substituting in their place a market-based neoliberalism. Neoliberalism seeks to reconfigure the polity in all its dimensions: economic, political, social, and cultural. Neoliberal states act in ways that are centaur-like, uplifting and ‘liberating’ those who already hold cultural and economic capital, but increasingly castigatory and restrictive toward those who suffer from economic insecurity, according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2012, 74). In such environments, characterized by a go-it-alone ethos on the one hand, and increasing inequality on the other, right-wing populism has gained a foothold.

Populism, according to political theorist Cas Mudde, is an illiberal democratic response to growing undemocratic liberalism (2021). Rather than encouraging democratic debate, a better representative system, and economic redistribution, it often emboldens authoritarian leaders who have much more in common with the corrupt elite than with the people writ large. Even so, these leaders frequently claim to represent the people—by which they mean those segments of the population that authoritarian leaders selectively rate as good or worthy, true patriots, or bearers of common sense. The power of authoritarian leaders depends on their capacity to divide the polity. They tend to be more than willing to trample on minority rights. As Brazil’s Bolsonaro so succinctly puts it, The law must exist to defend the majorities. Minorities must fit in or simply disappear! (quoted in Fishman 2018). Demonizing minority communities helps these leaders fuel social polarization, racism, and violence, and spread the belief that society is facing crises that these leaders (and they alone) can fix.

Once in office, populist leaders consolidate power by sowing popular distrust of scientists, journalists, and others that complex societies depend on in order to function effectively. Witness former U.S. president Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to discredit the media and popularize the term fake news. This is a contemporary form of post-truth politics. Post-truth was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 international word of the year, defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief (Oxford Languages 2016). The impact of post-truth politics is heightened on social media, as populists flood platforms like Facebook and Twitter with misinformation dissembling as facts. Social media, with its ability to communicate through sound bites and at lightning speed, has also proved a reliable way for populist leaders and their supporters to provoke violence against demonized minorities, immigrants, and stigmatized others. So, while there may be some very good reasons for the emergence of popular discontent, populist movements, especially on the Right, can be exceedingly dangerous.

One may ask what this has to do with gender and feminism. A great deal, it turns out. Gender shapes how the powerful mobilize, how social issues are framed, and whose narratives—and lives—count. Gender intersects with race, sexuality, nationality, and class in generating support for, as well as resistance toward, social and political movements. Rage against the political system is frequently articulated in gendered terms as a defense of hegemonic masculinity, reinforcing gender binaries and hierarchies and punishing those who transgress them. Feminist scholars and activists and others who challenge gender-based discrimination and promote social justice find themselves at odds with the repressive priorities of right-wing populists. Consequently, they have been at the helm of many recent efforts to contest authoritarian populism and reinvigorate democracy, as seen in the global groundswell catalyzed by the 2017 Women’s March.

Gender and Right-Wing Populism

Gender has been a central aspect of right-wing populism, though it is not always explicitly stated. Many right-wing populist movements call for women’s return to traditional roles as wives, homemakers, and mothers. They see women as producers of the nation whose role is conceived largely in terms of maintaining traditional households, raising children, and supporting their breadwinner husbands. Historically, within right-wing populist movements, women play key roles supporting these notions of gender hierarchy, such as among the extreme right (Blee 2008). A related literature considers the role of men in defending versions of hegemonic masculinity that position them as protectors of the family (Kimmel 2017).

Calling for the preservation of gender hierarchies, contemporary right-wing populist movements around the world embrace the heteronormative nuclear family and attack reproductive rights, sex education, and LGBTQ rights. Animating such politics is a belief in essentialized understandings of sex, which conflate sex and gender. In the United States, since the 1970s, many formations of right-wing populisms include religious fundamentalisms based in evangelical Protestantism and conservative Catholicism, which have waged varied culture wars against abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ rights (Hunter 1992; Stein 2001). They cast gay people, supporters of women’s abortion rights, and proponents of sexual education as immoral individuals who challenge the natural dichotomy of the sexes and the authority of fathers. They charge that an underserving elite class exerts an outsized influence on and manipulates the state and its institutions in order to carry out their liberal agenda. And they use affect and the emotions, such as anger, shame, and rage, to amplify their message and to gain adherents.

The new millennium has seen the rise of a global rightward turn (Graff, Kapur, Walters 2019) for whom gender politics is central. It is animated by a defense against gender ideology. This movement began in Europe and Latin America, as conservative Catholic activists sought to discredit gender studies programs and scholars of gender, whom they accused of being ideological, pseudoreligious, and propagating pseudoscience (Corredor 2019). Antigenderism unites various strands of the Right and offers a powerful new language for nationalist sentiment (Graff 2014). Antigender advocates argue that feminist and queer notions of gender threaten a presumed natural social order, promote homosexuality, and induce gender confusion. They use secular and faith-based arguments to assert that efforts to question the essential nature of gender and sexuality are unscientific, indeed dangerous.

The attack on so-called gender ideology informs campaigns that focus on transgender children, particularly in the United States, raising questions about whether individuals are capable of clearly articulating their desires and choices for medical technologies, such as puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones (Meadow 2018). These right-wing campaigns also targeted individuals’ right to claim new gender identities without undergoing body modifications, and to occupy public spaces on that basis.

Writing of common features of right-wing populisms in the contemporary European context, Dietze and Roth (2020) note that populism is not only concerned with gender as an issue itself but also with gender as a meta-language for negotiating different conditions of inequality and power in the context of current struggles over hegemony, and over resources forged by neoliberalism (8). Observers note that neoliberalism exacerbates the inequalities that feed white working and middle-class anxieties, making populist appeals attractive. Indeed, struggles against the very notion of gender became a symbolic glue for a spectrum of reactionary forces—authoritarian and ethnonationalist (Kováts and Põim, 2015).

White nationalists in the United States and Europe are obsessed with fears of white genocide, the imagined biological extinction of the white race, which they attribute to immigration growth among Black and Brown people, as well as to gender and sexual liberalism, which they believe is depressing white birthrates. They claim that Jews, especially Jewish elites in education and government, play a pivotal role in orchestrating this existential threat. The growing influence of the alt-right, propelled in large part by social media, has meant that racist ideas such as these, which previously lurked in the shadows of the unspeakable, writes historian Alexandra Minna Stern, have migrated into everyday discourse, becoming imaginable and utterable (2019, 8). Leaders such as Donald Trump offered an additional impetus, making voicing such ideas more permissible.

This set the stage for battles against critical race theory, a body of literature which argued that white supremacy of the past lives on in the laws and societal rules of the present. Elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, proclaimed one spokesman (Wallace-Wells 2021). Again, as in all populist campaigns, elites are the problem. For conservatives, critical race theory and gender theories represent elite worldviews that are anathema to the status quo and threaten white Christian supremacy.

Both gender identity and critical race theory teach that hierarchies of race and gender are not natural. They are humanmade social arrangements, which are therefore malleable. Much as it once targeted Marxism and the movements inspired by it, now right-wing populists battle critical race and gender thought, stoking fears of a great nefarious conspiracy to take over the culture. The figure of the innocent, vulnerable child who is the unwitting victim of liberal indoctrination, has come to symbolize national purity, and at times racial purity (Gill Peterson 2021; Stern 2019). These are battles about the nature of social differences, whose lives deserve to be protected, and who should make decisions about those lives and allocate resources to protect them. They are struggles over cultural power.

Populism, Gender, and Political Power

Of course, populism is a struggle for political power too. Some scholars differentiate between populism as a social movement that pressures government to change policy and practice, and populism as a movement aspiring to exercise power in the name of the people. Thus Hirschmann suggests the importance of differentiating between popular protest movements, which are attempts to get government to change its ways—to change its laws, to change its interpretation of those laws, to change its practices, and populist movements, which constitute efforts to exercise power … extra-governmentally (2021). The Trump supporters who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the aftermath of the 2020 election to riot at the U.S. Capitol are in the latter category. This group was predominantly white and male and sought to to threaten, intimidate, and silence all those who got in its way. Their violent actions were both racialized and gendered assertions of political power: the expression of a distorted version of white masculinity that resents the perceived loss of position if racial and sexual equality are established (Hirschmann 2021). They were galvanized to act through an understanding of popular sovereignty, the notion that the people are the fundamental source of authority in modern politics (Grattan 2014, 180).

This notion of popular sovereignty is intrinsic to both democracy and populism. It has prompted some scholars, such as Laclau and Mouffe, to equate left-wing populism with the concept of radical democracy. These scholars consider left-wing populism to be democracy at its best, because the will of the people is constructed through the people’s direct mobilization and consent. It is also politics at its best, because it employs only discursive devices and the art of persuasion (Urbinati 2019, 117). Some advocates of left-wing populism argue that its success is measured by its capacity to nurture respect for pluralism and egalitarianism, a mindset fostered by the practice of grassroots politics (Grattan 2014, 182). Left-wing populists have sought to mobilize across race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality to pursue justice—including for women and LGBTQ people—on a global scale (Roth 2018). Yet, although left-wing populism encourages inclusion and experiments with horizontality (Grattan 2014, 197), it may still exclude groups situated at society’s margins. Grattan observes that progressive Bernie Sanders initially ignored issues of racial justice in his 2016 campaign for democratic presidential nominee. It took repeated confrontations with Black Lives Matter activists for him to question his campaign’s material and affective attachments to whiteness (2020, 137). Similarly, McKean (2016) cautions that it is too easy for left-wing populists to treat the people as homogeneous rather than equal; a tendency toward homogeneity reinforces the othering of those who are perennially and structurally