Home/Recent kwiples > Headlines >

Populism, populists

Monday 2nd of March 2026

Left-wing populists say It is this lack of an agonistic confrontation, not the fact of representation, which deprives the citizen of a voice. The remedy does not lie in abolishing representation but in making our institutions more representative. This is indeed the objective of a left populist strategy. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Left-wing populists say A left populist strategy aims at federating the democratic demands into a collective will to construct a ‘we,’ a ‘people’ confronting a common adversary: the oligarchy. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Left-wing populists say Let a thousand flowers bloom © 2017 Kwiple.com
Left-wing populists say Populism is about valuing the greater good more than the ability of the individual to do and have whatever he wants while never being asked to give up anything. My political philosophy at its core is that everybody's better off … when everybody's better off. John Fetterman, Democracy, No. 44, Spring 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Left-wing populists say To partake in a ‘we’ of radical democratic citizens does not preclude participation in a variety of other ‘we's’. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Left-wing populists say Working people need as much populism as they can get: effective taxes on the superrich; universal health care, parental leave, and free university education; restoring the right to organize unions and livable wages; financial regulation and post office banking; and democratic access to the ballot and outlawing the purchase of the political process by corporations and billionaires. Charles Postel, Democracy, No. 44, Spring 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Pluto-populism This [GOP sycophancy] is no accident. It is the logical outcome of the political and economic strategy of the “pluto-populist”. Mr Trump is a natural outcome of the strategic goal of the donor class – tax cuts and deregulation.  To achieve this end, they have to convince a large proportion of the population to vote against its economic interests by focusing on culture and identity.  This strategy has worked and will continue to work: Mr Trump may have gone; Trumpism has not. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, December 22, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Populism The hardest thing to convey about the Trump phenomenon, especially to intellectuals, trained to think in terms of philosophical doctrines, is how secondary the content of it has become. European populism is about something.  American populism is, to an amazing extent, about someone. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Back in 2016, some of us had to sit through sermons about the need to “listen” to “legitimate grievances” against “broken capitalism”. Perhaps, at one stage, populism really was a howl for a fairer economy. That stage passed a while ago. It is now a tribalist game. In retrospect, Johnson and Trump should never have been bunched with Putin and Erdoğan under the “strongman” tag. They converge on tactics — rule-breaking, institutional subversion — but the difference in substance is unbridgeable. The eastern demagogues are nationalists.  If the western ones have an -ism, it is nihilism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Before it is anything else — divisive, inept, sometimes perceptive and necessary — populism is exhausting. It generates too much noise and scandal in government for all but the most news-hungry citizens to bear for long. … It would be nice to think that Americans were making a Jeffersonian statement about the importance of civic standards when they evicted [Trump] from the White House in 2020. “Enough, already,” was more like it. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism The best definition of populist government, I think, is passing laws you know won’t work, to solve a problem that you don't really think exists, because it polls well. Stephen Bush, Financial Times, April 1, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Cultural change and the economic decline of the working classes increased disaffection. But the financial crisis opened the door to a populist surge. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, June 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism Demagogues don't arise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now. Voters get to decide what the country's problems are. Political elites have to devise solutions to those problems. If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones. David Frum, The Atlantic, April 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Populism A final and I believe valid ethical objection to the theory of populist democracy is that it postulates only two goals to be maximized — political equality and popular sovereignty. Yet no one, except perhaps a fanatic, wishes to maximize two goals at the expense of all others. … Political equality and popular sovereignty are not absolute goals; we must ask ourselves how much leisure, privacy, consensus, stability, income, security, progress, status and probably many other goals we are prepared to forego for an additional increment of political equality. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populism Five years since the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, it is still not understood how much populism boils down to antic rebellion rather than (the initial theory) economic grievance or (much more a leftwing thing) doctrinal belief. This is to some extent a movement of laughing cavaliers. Violence is not their wish, but nor do they recognise it as a plausible and unintended outcome of their doings. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 7, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism The global race to vaccinate is having a use beyond the narrowly medical. It is delineating two populisms that my trade likes to group into a Nationalist International. The first kind is serious about the business of government. “Authoritarian” in the roundest sense, it turns the brawn of the state on social ills, real or perceived, not just political rivals. … President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil embodies [the other populism], as do the US Republicans, some of whom took until last week to commend the vaccine to their voters. This is populism as cussed and near anarchic defiance of received opinion. It is ruthless in the pursuit of power but lax to the point of dereliction in its exercise. … Distinguish these … as Old World and New World … or as “heavy” and “light”, but distinguish them. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism How can nativist populists be beaten? Before anyone dismisses the label as meaningless, let’s define it.  Populists divide the world into a “pure people” and a “corrupt elite”, says Cas Mudde. Nativists add the notion that “the people” are the majority ethnic group: Hindus in India, whites in the US. … Anti-populists need to tell a new version of the people-versus-elite story, but casting  themselves as the heroes. For American Demo- crats opposing Trump, that story should be: everyone in this country is born equal; we all belong here and we support democracy. … The strongest political value available to anti-populists is decency. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, April 11, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism I sense that, while many voters really mean it, some are just restless and want to feel their juices bubble. I have known (and stopped knowing) lots of once-temperate people who have been carried off on the giddy ride in recent years. Their dopamine hit seems to come from the drama itself, not the content of the creed. The trouble is that it is no less dangerous for that. … Time to fathom the boredom of the prosperous dissenter. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 22, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Populism In explaining the populist vote in many countries, the inequality of attention is at least as important as economic inequality. Timohty Garten Ash, New York Review of Books, December 12, 2017  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism In some countries, populists cherish the grandeur and dignity of the state. In the US, they can hardly bring themselves to fund the Internal Revenue Service adequately. Even Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis — the able Trump, by repute — barred public and commercial premises from demanding proof of Covid-19 vaccination. You need not oppose him to see the differ- ence with the conventional authoritarian impulse. Picture a dystopia extrapolated from US populism in 2021. It is not a super state you see. It is a failed one. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism It is not an ideology, but a political logic — a way of thinking about politics. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism It should now be clear that western populism is not, in the end, about  very much. Don't waste any more time rationalising it as a backlash against inequality, “neoliberalism” and other things that you yourself don't like. If tangible grievances once spurred this movement, they have since given way to tribal feeling as an end in itself. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Leftwing populists chamption the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom or middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Leftwing populism is dyadic. Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon a group. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism  Of course, it is parochially Anglo-American of me to talk of disciplined populism as a novelty. Hungary has known it under Viktor Orbán  and Poland under the Law and Justice Party. Xi Jinping has been practising it on an awesome scale for a decade. The oldest democracies have been able to nurse the hope that, if you are a populist, you must also be too venal and inept to last in office and so the system is self-righting. Liberals elsewhere have learnt the hard way that this is too neat, too Whiggish. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 12, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Populism … populist campaigns and parties … often function as warning signs of political crisis. … they have won only under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are times when people see the prevailing political norm –put forward, preserved and defended by the leading segments in the country– as being at odds with their own hopes, fears, and concerns. John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism Populist parties that do not do so well at the polls have to face an obvious contradiction: How can it be the case that the populists are the people's only morally legitimate representatives and yet fail to gain overwhelming majorities at the ballot box? Jan-Werner Müller, Democracy Rules © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism Populist politics exploits the double-ness of comedy — the way that  “only a joke” can easily become “no joke” —  to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 21, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism Post-Reagan Republicans reached out to the base by campaigning on cultural issues, while legislating for the upper 1 per cent. That is “pluto-populism”. … Pluto-populism is highly politically effective. But it works by making the base ever angrier and more desperate. That is playing with political fire. The republic may survive Mr Trump. But what comes after? Martin Wolf, Financial Times, May 2, 2017 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populism Put another way, fascism is about winning and doing. Populism is about losing, and cocking a snook at the winners. As a movement, it is at its happiest as a large minority of the electorate:  enough to sustain its own media ecosystem, provide earning opportunities for grifters and perhaps sway the official policy of the day. But not enough to have to govern. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism The question is  no longer whether America's populist left is rising. It is who will lead it.  Edward Luce, Financial Times, June 22, 2017, following defeats of establishment Democrats in four special congressional elections to fill seats vacated by Republicans who left to join Trump's adminisration © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism Remember the motto of the Indiginados in Spain: ‘We have a vote but we do not have a voice.’ Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populism Stable democracy is incompatible with a belief that fellow citizens are “enemies of the people”. We must recognise and address the anger that causes populism. But populism is an enemy of good government and even of democracy. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, June 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populism  They endlessly retell the story of the people  against the elite — an echo of Marx’s account of “proletarians” and “capitalists”. …  The thing to grasp about the populist story is  that it’s just that: a story, laden with values. It’s not a collection of facts or policies. That means it cannot be defeated by rival facts or policies. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, April 11, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism  … this is a movement that lives on spectacle. This is why, among other reasons, it was always daft to compare the likes of Johnson and Trump with the strongmen of the 1930s. What obsessed Mussolini and Franco was control of the governmental machine (with the view to, you know, doing things), not just the circus of politics. Whatever an interwar dictator was upon attaining power, he wasn't the dog that caught the car. He had all too clear a plan for the vehicle. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism This is the liberal nightmare: not that populists abolish democracy to remain in power, but that they perform well enough not to have to. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 23, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism This picture is very different from the 1930s, when rising populism in countries such as Germany went hand-in-hand with a deep economic recession. And it consequently raises a crucial – little discussed – question: if the western world has seen populism jump when economic times are good, what on earth will happen when the next recession hits? Is it possible that those levels of support for populism could spiral even higher? Or is it a mistake to presume that populism is “just” about economics – or that some- thing can be “fixed” by mere growth? Gillian Tett, Financial Times, August 1, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populism Traditional gender roles are under challenge, leading many men to fear a loss of power and status. That fear is visible in the misogynistic tone of populist movements in the US, Brazil, the Philippines, Italy and elsewhere. Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, October 1, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populism What does he think Trump has that the others lacked, I ask? The short answer is that Trump understood that that America's “aspirational” working class had become “desperational”. Edward Luce, from his interview with Anthony Scaramucci © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populist leaders Notice how many populist leaders are what might be called relative  outsiders. Privileged by almost all standards, these people feel shut out of what they regard as the true in-crowd. Nigel Farage: a former stockbroker, but also a non-graduate and much-mocked seven-time loser of elections to parliament. Boris Johnson: Etonian and Oxonian but neither posh nor rich. Marine Le Pen: a dynast, but not one who passed through France’s top school for technocrats. And then the ultimate case in point: Donald Trump, an outer-borough arriviste, ridiculed by the smart set for his ghastly taste and paprika tan. Janan Ganesh, Financial Time, August 22, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populists This, far more than Mr Trump, is the liberal nightmare: a populist agenda in the hands of insiders. As long as it was wild cards and eccentrics who espoused these views – Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, was a droll example – they were more or less containable. Lacking the guile to navigate Washing- ton's checks and balances, populists would be, as Mr Trump now seems, in office but not in power. The trouble starts when those with institutional knowledge embrace the same programme. Janan Ganesh, Financial Time, July 8, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Populists say The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. Preamble to the 1892 People's Party platform, written by Ignatious Donnelly © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say It's not just the political system that's rigged. It's the whole economy. It's rigged by the big donors who want to keep down wages, fire our workers, and sell their products back in the U.S. with absolutely no consequences for them. It's rigged against you, the American people. Donald Trump © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation. Donald Trump, to whom “the people” means only his family, entrouage, appointees, and the 27% of eligible voters who voted for him, which was 4% less than those who voted against him © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say The only important thing is the unification of the people — because the other people don't mean anything. Donald Trump, equating his supporters with the people and opponents with enemies of the people © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution. … That's the will of the people. What is a constitution anyway? They're the product of the people, the people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish the Constitution if they want to. George Wallace © 2018 Kwiple.com
Populists say Reduce politics to us vs. them © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say We have a silent majority that's no longer so silent. It's now the loud, noisy majority, and we're going to be heard. Donald Trump © 2017 Kwiple.com
Populists say Will you stand with the people … by the side of the other wealth producers of the nation … or will you stand facing them, and from the plutocratic ranks fire a ballot in support of the old parties and their policies of disorganization, despotism and death? Tom Watson © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populism Poland's ruling Law and Justice party lured Donald Trump to speak in Warsaw by promising him a rapturous rally, to which paid supporters were bussed in from provincial areas to chant “theives” and “traitors” at opposition party members and “Donald Trump!” and “USA!” throughout his speech praising Poland's support for Western values, and, at a press conference afterwards, joking about its supression of the press July 6, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populists say Elites and the poor can't keep mooching off us © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populists say For us real Americans, everything; for the others, the law © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populists say Go home; you're not wanted here © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populists say The modern structure of the German State is a higher form of democracy in which, by virtue of the people's mandate, the government is exercised authori- tatively while there is no possibility for parliamentary interference, to obliterate and render ineffective the execution of the nation's will. Joseph Goebells, 1933 © 2019 Kwiple.com
 
Right-wing populists say Who cares about sexist piggery? Feminazis and elites? Killjoys? © 2017 Kwiple.com