Article by an MPIfG researcher

Colin Crouch: Post-Democracy and Populism. In: The Political Quarterly 90(S1), 124-137 (2019). Wiley-Blackwell
The original publication is available at the publisher’s web site: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12575

10. Post-Democracy and Populism

COLIN CROUCH

BRITISH DEMOCRACY reached an ugly moment on 3 November 2016, when the

Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, the country’s leading press representatives of
conservative opinion, devoted their front pages to displaying photographs of
three judges of the Supreme Court under the banner headlines, respectively,
‘Enemies of the people’ and ‘The judges vs the people’. The judges’ offence
had been to rule that Parliament had a right to have certain votes on the
process of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union (EU). In subse-
quent days some government ministers echoed the phrases, until the Home
Secretary, under pressure from judges, issued a statement stressing the
importance of the rule of law. However, the government itself continued in
the same spirit when it attempted later to rule that, because a majority in
the referendum on EU membership had voted to leave, none of the individ-
ual measures it would implement in order to revoke EU legislation—ranging
across virtually all fields of policy—needed to come to Parliament. The peo-
ple had spoken; government would interpret their will. Parliament, it
seemed, like the Supreme Court, was a potential enemy of that will.
This was a confrontation between two concepts of democracy: does it (as
in liberal democracy) denote a set of institutions that include expressions of
popular will, but which surround them with others that ensure elaboration
of that will, guarantee continued debate so that democracy can function
again at a future date, and even limit the powers of those who claim the
right to exercise the popular will? Or is it (as in populist democracy) the
direct, unmediated voice of a people expressed on a particular day? This
confrontation is by no means limited to the UK or to the Brexit debate, and
it is a very old theme in democratic theory. In practice, the countries that are
normally regarded as stable democracies have resolved the conflict in favour
of the former concept. So well established did it seem that in 1992, the US
political scientist Francis Fukuyama earned lasting renown for arguing that
in western liberal democracy, humankind had reached the summit of its
social evolution.1 That questioning the viability of liberal democracy is now
a live issue requires understanding. Equally intriguing is that fact that
attacks on it from the political right, more or less silent since the fall of the
Portuguese and Spanish fascist regimes in the 1970s, have returned to
prominence across large parts of the world. The Marxist left has long been
suspicious of liberal democracy, sometimes advocating the ‘people’s democ-
racy’ considered to have been achieved in the state socialist societies. Since
their collapse, the left had retreated into utopian dreaming, but has more
recently seen new opportunities in the waves of populism, even though
these are mainly being led from the right.

© The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
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 POST-DEMOCRACY AND POPULISM

A basic premise of liberal democracy is that, outside small communities,

the expression of popular will is highly problematic and has to be mediated
through representative institutions. There then arises the problem of the rela-
tionship between the people and the representatives whom they elect. The
latter are equipped with power, which they have many temptations to
abuse, ranging from simple corruption to the suppression of their opponents.
The day-to-day activities of parliament as a check on the executive, the rule
of law (to which governments must be subordinate), independent statistical
agencies and central banks, guarantees that open debate and the organisa-
tion of opposition will continue so that there can be future, seriously con-
tested elections, and rules about transparency and the prevention of
corruption all spring logically from the fact that there will always be poten-
tial conflicts of interest between governors and governed, and that the gov-
erned must retain the right to change their minds.
The populist challenge to liberal democracy is impatient with these inter-
mediary institutions. The people express a will, and elect a leader to execute
that will—no one sensibly maintains that a people comprising several mil-
lion persons can act without any mediation at all. Anything that moderates
or conditions the behaviour of that leader constitutes a frustration of the
people’s will. Populism thus requires total faith by the people in the leader.
This is its overwhelming defect. Institutions that might have protected the
people from betrayal, corruption, manipulation and ultimately repression by
the leader have been swept away in impatience with their apparent interfer-
ence in the popular will.
This lesson is now being unlearned in many different places. As the above
example shows, in the UK it is at the heart of the conflict over how democ-
racy deals with Brexit. In the United States Donald Trump has made use of
very similar themes of discontent with the functioning of institutions, mak-
ing allegations of corruption against the Establishment, while his own entou-
rage is riddled with nepotism. There was nothing about corruption in the
Brexit debate, but only three years previously, the Daily Telegraph had waged
a well-researched campaign against the misuse of expense accounts by Mem-
bers of Parliament. While this was thoroughly justified, it seemed odd, com-
ing from such an Establishment newspaper. Looking back now after the
Brexit debates, it seems to have been part of a wider pattern of undermining
parliamentary and some other institutions by the political right.
Populist movements expressing disgust with parliamentary democracy
can come from the right, the left or from nowhere easily recognisable. In the
French presidential elections of 2016, all major established parties were cast
aside while a populist of the centre, Emmanuel Macron, beat one from the
extreme right. In Hungary and Poland, nationalist rulers have increased their
popularity by denouncing the institutions of liberal democracy barely a
quarter of a century after their populations had celebrated ecstatically their
entry into that same political form. A new far-right anti-Islamic populist
group (Alternative f€ ur Deutschland) has become the third largest party in

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the German Bundestag. Two anti-Establishment parties now dominate the

Italian parliament, though one (La Lega) being from the far right and the
other (Movimento Cinque Stelle, M5S) of very indeterminate political colour,
they do not constitute a single movement.
In 2003, I described a process that I labelled post-democracy, whereby all
the institutions of liberal democracy survived and functioned, but where the
vital energy of the political system no longer rested within them, but had
disappeared into small private circles of economic and political elites.2 I did
not say we had arrived at such a point in the settled democracies, but that
we were on the road to it.3 For democracy to be flourishing, I argued, move-
ments emerging from the population at large, unprocessed by the elite’s
political managers, must from time to time to be able to give the system a
shock, raising new questions that the elite would sooner not discuss. I men-
tioned three movements that had been still capable of doing this in recent
years: feminism, environmentalism and xenophobic populism. What I did
not anticipate was that the lead would be taken by the last of these to a
massive extent. This raises two questions: why has xenophobic populism
become so dominant? Should one welcome it as a democratic irruption
against the complacency of liberal post-democracy, and if not, why not?

Why the popularity of xenophobic populism?

I identified two principal causes of post-democracy—neither anybody’s fault
and neither easily reversed. The first was the globalisation of the economy,
which took the most important issues of economic regulation beyond the
reach of national politics, the level at which democracy was usually best
established. The second was the decline of the social identities of class and
religion that had shaped the main party identities of twentieth-century
democracy. The reasons why the first of these would lead to a rejection of
contacts with ‘foreigners’ and a desire to hunker down into the nation state
are fairly clear. The role of the second is less obvious, but ultimately more
important.
Most people are not highly political and usually feel remote from what
goes on in parliaments and local council chambers. They will have a strong
political identity only if it relates clearly to a social identity that has meaning
for them. Historically this has been most likely to occur if the social identity
has been relevant to struggles over inclusion in and exclusion from citizen-
ship rights.4 For example, if one is a member of an established religion, one
might want to support policies to limit the rights of those of other religions
or none. If one is a member of a class excluded from political participation
by property qualifications, one is likely to support parties advocating the
rights of that class. Nearly all established liberal democracies have party sys-
tems based on struggles over these two key issues—class and religion—dating
back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (There are exceptions,

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principally the United States and Ireland, where parties are based on out-
comes of past civil wars, but these too were initially struggles over inclusion.)
Once the concept of universal adult citizenship was accepted, these identi-
ties survived as the representation of different interests within a system of
overall inclusion, usually as the basis of party organisation and identity. As
such, they became the central links between citizens and democracy. With
time, the original struggles became a memory of the struggles of past gener-
ations rather than an experienced reality. Then the class structure itself chan-
ged, with the decline of the occupations of the industrial society on which it
had been largely based. Religion too has declined in social significance (the
US is again an exception). Many, probably most, people in the contemporary
established democracies no longer have strong social clues to indicate a
political identity for them.
Two further social identities offer themselves as candidates for struggles
over inclusion and exclusion: gender and nation. The former is central to
much political conflict, but it is difficult for it to become the basis of party
identity, because such identities need to be rooted in communities, and men
and women do not form separate communities. Nation does not have this
handicap and is far more potent, being a social identity that people have
long been encouraged to feel strongly, and which has clear political implica-
tions. For a long time after the defeat of fascism in the Second World War,
mainstream politicians were careful not to exploit the dangerous possibilities
of these. This has changed. While class and religion have declined as moti-
vating forces for political participation, major movements of migrants and
refugees, with the added frisson of occasional acts of Islamic terrorism, have
raised the salience of appeals to apparently threatened national identities. If
one adds to this the feelings of loss of national control facilitated by globali-
sation, the rise of xenophobia as a major political force presents no mysteries
of understanding.
Setting the growing importance of nation against the declining salience of
class and religion may also enable us to explain some otherwise puzzling
features of the present situation. The advanced northern European welfare
states—the Nordic countries as well as the Netherlands, Austria—all have
major xenophobic populist movements, despite their wealth, low levels of
social insecurity and of inequality. (Germany is a different and more com-
plex case, because of its particular history of racist politics and its recent uni-
fication with a former communist state.) Portugal and Spain—relatively poor
(especially Portugal), with less developed welfare states, high levels of
inequality, recent victims of imposed austerity policies following the eurocri-
sis—lack such movements. It is possible to explain the paradox if one recalls
that these countries did not enter liberal democracy until the 1970s, three
decades later than the rest of western Europe. The hypothesis that political
identities based on struggles over inclusion around class and religion ‘wear
out’ over time should lead us to predict that these identities should be

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COLIN CROUCH

holding up better on the Iberian Peninsula than elsewhere in western Eur-

ope. Those struggles had been particularly harsh under the fascist regimes.
How then does one explain the particular virulence of xenophobia in cen-
tral and eastern Europe, where liberal democracy is even younger, barely a
quarter of a century old? Here one must remember the inversion of class
struggle that had occurred under state socialism. The working class was
deemed to be the leading class, but in reality, there was no political citizen-
ship for anyone outside a tiny elite of nomenklatura. Universal inclusion was
universal exclusion. It was therefore difficult for people in that part of the
world to relate to the political structures familiar in the West. For a few
years after 1990, it seemed that something like Christian and social demo-
cratic parties might become the basis of party systems, but these movements
fragmented. There was instead a plethora of small, transient parties, with an
occasionally larger movement based on a rich individual and his client
groups. Meanwhile, all the formal institutions of democracy were in place.
Democracy seemed very rapidly to become post-democracy.
Viktor Orban in Hungary was the first central European ruler to realise
that nationalist sentiment could provide a base for an enduring connection
between politicians and a mass public. As a linguistically distinct country
with various long-standing cultural minorities within its borders, Hungary
was a likely location for this discovery to be made. Orban has now been imi-
tated by similar movements in Poland, followed by the Czech and Slovak
Republics. A causus belli was provided in these cases by the EU’s attempt to
get the central European countries to help share the burden of refugees land-
ing on the coasts of Greece and Italy. Poland is the only one of these coun-
tries to have a potential religious basis for party division, and the prime
minister, Jarosław Kaczy nski, uses it, but by itself it is problematic. In west-
ern Europe, Catholic parties are strongly pro-European. Seeking a political
position largely hostile to European integration could not therefore be built
on religion alone, but required a strong nationalism. Like Orban, Kaczy nski
has admired the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, a major symbolic figure
for this new movement. Putin is post-democratic in using the formal institu-
tions of democracy, while ensuring that these institutions are void of con-
tent, but populist and very different from classic post-democrats in
appealing to xenophobic and traditionally conservative sentiments. At
Putin’s rallies banners depict himself with Trump and Marine Le Pen, the
leader of the French far-right populist Front National.
Nation was potentially available as an identity that could be used by any
party to refresh declining mass political attachments, but it has mainly been
carried by new movements. This does not mean that established parties have
not embraced it. Trump was the official candidate of the Republican party.
Brexit is now the policy of both the Conservative and Labour parties. In
€
Austria the established conservative Osterreichische €
Volkspartei (OVP)
turned itself into a populist anti-Islamic party. However, even these excep-
tions demonstrate the resistance of established parties to the xenophobic
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 POST-DEMOCRACY AND POPULISM

wave. Trump emerged as an outsider within Republican ranks, not initially

favoured by the establishment. Brexit is ostensibly about a legal and eco-
nomic question of membership of an international organisation and only sec-
ondarily (though powerfully) about nationalist resentment of foreigners. The
€
OVP undertook its anti-Islamic turn only after it had been beaten into third
€
place in Austrian politics by the Osterreichische Freiheitspartei, itself a long-
standing but outsider, post-Nazi party.
Established conservative, liberal, Christian and social democratic parties
had become accustomed to relating to voters through professional media
campaigns, confident that they could shape elections through top-down
communication. Further, they had nearly all been complicit in the neoliberal
policies that had led to the combined menace of unregulated, irresponsible
global finance and declining public services that burst open in the financial
crisis of 2008. It was therefore left to new invaders to articulate discontent—
a discontent that was then mainly targeted, not at deregulated finance and a
deteriorating public realm, but at an incoherent combination of old political
elites, immigrants of various kinds but especially Muslims, and international
organisations.

Populism as a problem
If, as I argued in Post-Democracy, democracy expresses itself in disruptive
challenges emerging from the citizenry and challenging the complacency of
elites, I have to welcome the initial appearance of these various movements
as refreshments for democracy. There is, however, a separate question
whether the continued presence of a movement on the scene maintains that
refreshment.
To consider this, we need to become more precise about what we mean
by ‘populist’ movements. At its most general, the term refers to movements
that are not contained within established political parties and which have
themselves weakly structured, inchoate organisations. When they first
appear, they do not behave in ways that follow the rules (formal and infor-
mal) of political conduct, but operate as the voice of their supporters, who
are in general political outsiders, having neither experience of nor respect for
such rules. Populist movements burst uninvited, loudly and rudely, into a
room where groups of people are having polite conversations.
Beyond that point, we need to differentiate. The populist mode of politics
contains three possibilities for future development, which can run into each
other or can go in different directions. First, populism may simply be the
form taken by a new movement when it bursts on to the scene. Newcomers
who lack prior invitations cannot enter a room without disturbance, and
how is change in political representation to take place without the occasional
arrival of the uninvited? If an existing system of representation is wearing
out, standing for social structures and issues of the past, renewal is bound to
take forms disturbing to the parties of that system—the people already in

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the room, engaged in polite conversation. Naturally, these resent the intru-
sion and stigmatise the newcomers as populists, meaning movements that
have no overall programme or roots in society, but just exploit any available
discontents in order to advance their own position. If populist movements
are something better than that and represent not rootlessness but interests
that have been neglected, they will eventually become parties with structures
and programmes; they will ‘settle down’ and take their place in the room,
behaving like everyone else.
However, this is in itself ambiguous. It might mean that the movements
stop behaving in ways that threaten the rules of behaviour that prevent
abuse of power; but it might mean that they adopt practices that they had
criticised during their earlier phase. For example, the German Green party,
originally a disruptive outsider, eventually became part of governing coali-
tions. Some of its leaders later became lobbyists for motor industry and
energy corporations. In Italy, M5S draws much of its energy from attacks on
the corruption that is rife in Italian public life. It became a major force in
local politics in 2016 when its candidates won mayoral elections in Rome
and Turin. Within months, both mayors were involved in corruption scan-
dals around public contracts.
A second possibility is that populist movements do not seek to become
the ‘new normal’ in a renewed party system, but want to continue con-
fronting established politics with a different way of doing public business,
one less institutionalised and bearing the direct voice of the people. Strictly
speaking, populist movements have no fixed substantive policy agenda, but
follow what ‘the people’ demand. Oddly for movements that despise formal
procedures, they represent a procedural form of politics; it is the way in
which the voice of the people is heard that matters to them, not the content
of that voice. M5S has until now been a fairly pure form of that approach. It
has been clearly driven by discontent with how the Italian political elite
behaves; its policies on actual issues are formed through crowd-sourcing.
The question of breaking with formal rules and, in particular, impatience
with intermediary institutions that check the exercise of democratically
elected power, brings us to the third question of the direction in which
populism moves, and to the core issue of whether its continuity makes the
same contribution to democracy as its initial irruption. On the one hand,
the notion of direct people power is always a sleight of hand. There are
always leaders whose job it is to interpret the people’s will, and whom the
advocates of populism have to view as the incorruptible, unmediated voice
of the people. This was well analysed by Yves Meny and Yves Surel in
their prescient 2001 study of populism, when the current resurgence was in
its infancy.5 Populist movements, they argued, always required a charis-
matic leader in whom total trust was placed, as populism is intolerant of
intermediary institutions. This requires a na€ıve view of the perfection of the
human nature of leaders. On the other hand, established elites and wealthy
interests are usually in a good position to make those institutions work for
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them. They own the property that under a system of private ownership
provides protection from the power of the state; can afford to take cases
through law courts; can afford to own and control the means of mass com-
munication.
Human history is replete with cases where central power is grasped by
individuals and small groups speaking in the name of the people to chal-
lenge the institutionalised rule of wealthy families and organisations, often
but not necessarily going on to become dictators oppressing the people who
supported them in the first place. The original Greek tyranoi were leaders of
people whose interests were excluded from consideration in polities domi-
nated by aristocratic interests. Having no formal possibilities for representing
these interests, they used extra-institutional means, like mercenary soldiers,
to do so. Sometimes they then used those means to support their personal
positions against everyone else in the society, giving birth to our modern
understanding of the word tyrant as a ruler necessarily oppressive and
vicious—a change in the meaning that was first engineered by Plato. The
French and Russian revolutions echoed that ambiguity in more recent cen-
turies. But the problems faced by tyranoi in trying to represent those without
means of representation were real.
The most prominent modern example of a successful populist leader was
Huey Long, governor of Louisiana during the 1930s. He burst on to the
political scene, taking over the state Democratic party at the head of groups
outside the party’s normal power structures, introduced the most radically
egalitarian public policies ever seen in the US, and was confronted by the
might of the oil companies, who tried to use the law to stop him taxing their
activities. To consolidate his power base, he used political clientelism in
appointing people to jobs throughout the public administration and inter-
fered in the appointment of judges. He was assassinated by the son-in-law
of a judge whom he was trying to dismiss from his post. Whether he would
have dispensed with elections, had he been head of a national rather than a
US-state level government, we shall never know. As it was, Long remained
within democratic frameworks and abused power no more than many more
orthodox politicians. He was certainly a tyrant in the pre-Platonic sense;
whether he deserves the later twist to its meaning is difficult to determine.
Similar ambiguities surround the recent cases of the ‘pink wave’ of Latin
American leaders elected during the early years of this century: most promi-
nently Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), but also Evo Morales (Bolivia), Daniel
Ortega (Nicaragua) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador). Each pursued policies of
egalitarian redistribution, encountered strong opposition from displaced
wealthy elites, elites usually supported by the US, and each rode roughshod
over checks and balances on the exercise of power, including the rule of law.
On the other hand, and unlike the right-wing dictators whom the US had
often maintained in power in Latin America, they never abolished elections.
These examples all concern essentially left-oriented forms of populism, tar-
geting wealthy national (sometimes international) elites and championing

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redistributive policies. Some of the currently important populist movements

belong to this camp: Syriza in Greece, Podemos Unidos in Spain, France
Insoumise, possibly M5S. The only one so far in power, Syriza, has done
nothing to threaten democratic institutions or the rule of law. But far more
prominent today is right-wing populism. Since by definition the political
right supports established elites, especially national ones, it has to define its
enemies in terms other than wealth and power. One of the most readily
available forms of this are ethnic minorities, other countries, external institu-
tions, foreigners in general. Rightist populism is therefore likely to be xeno-
phobic. Meny and Surel listed hostility to immigrants alongside the existence
of charismatic leaders as a defining characteristic of populism, a term which
they confined to the rightist form.
The recent greater salience of ‘foreigner’ than class issues therefore helps
explain why the political right has been in a better position to make use of
discontent over the 2008 financial crisis, even though this was ostensibly a
class issue, and therefore why the majority of new populist movements are
on the right. There are exceptions. The only important centrist populist
movement, Macron’s En Marche, far from using xenophobia, is explicitly
cosmopolitan. On the left, Syriza, Podemos Unidos and the Bernie Sanders
movement in the US have avoided all use of immigration in their cam-
paigns, though M5S, France Insoumise and the Labour party of Jeremy Cor-
byn have been more ambiguous.
There is an asymmetry in the relationship to established politics of rightist
(xenophobic) and leftist (class-based) populism. As seen from the above
examples from the Americas, leftist populism runs into an immediate con-
frontation with powerful interests. Although rightist populism criticises
established elites, it then deflects the criticism towards foreigners, internal
and external, letting the local elite off the hook, as it were. Elites under seri-
ous threat are therefore likely to accept rightist populists as the best of a bad
job. This was astoundingly the case when Paul von Hindenburg, as presi-
dent of Germany, appointed Adolf Hitler to be Chancellor in 1933, following
elections in which the Nazi party’s support had declined. The Weimar
Republic was extremely unstable, and had Hitler the rightist populist not
been appointed, the leftist Communist party might have been the next to
threaten a takeover. Similarly, in 1922 the King of Italy called Benito Mus-
solini to form a government following his not particularly impressive March
on Rome, to avert the risk of a communist challenge.
Donald Trump is not a fascist, though formally similar processes were at
work when the Establishment of the Republican party decided to support
him as its presidential candidate and subsequently to sustain him in office,
despite his decidedly anti-Establishment stance. He turned popular rage at
stagnating living standards, which might have focused on the banks and US
capitalism in general, against Muslims and Mexicans.
While right-wing, xenophobic populism raises less of a threat to estab-
lished interests than its leftist variety, it does threaten those institutions that
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surround democracy and protect citizens from their elected rulers. This hap-
pens because of the fundamental drive behind most examples of populism
of all kinds, which is a belief in the inherent rightness of their cause and the
rejection of all opponents as illegitimate. This was well analysed by Meny
and Surel, and more recently by Jan-Werner M€ uller.6 The charismatic leader
of a populist movement claims to speak for ‘the people’. There is always a
definite article here, leaving no scope for minorities. Those who do not share
the majority view are therefore hostile to the people and have no democratic
rights. All intermediate institutions that might stand in the way of, or mod-
ify the expression of the people’s will are likewise anti-democratic enemies.
Given that the people’s will is singular and straightforward, it needs only
one representative, the charismatic leader. There is no need for parliamen-
tary or other debate. The people’s will is revealed in a singular vote or ple-
biscite, after which all interpretation of its nuances is left to the leader and
those entrusted by him or her. There may be subsequent general elections
(as in state socialist regimes) or referenda on specific issues (as practised by
Francisco Franco in Spain), but only after all organised opposition has been
declared illegal, liquidated or (as in contemporary Russia) considerably
handicapped by bans and arrests.
The regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were pure examples of right-
ist xenophobic populism. Those of the Soviet Union and its allies were cases
of leftist populism, though eventually Stalin added hostility to Jews and var-
ious other types of foreigner to the initially class-oriented line. Today’s
instances are moderate in comparison, and it is important not to over-stress
similarities between them and today. Institutions are better grounded and
better able to be defended. It is therefore important to make an estimate of
the strength of the threat that neither under-estimates nor exaggerates.
For example, in Hungary Orban has used a nationalistic, anti-European,
anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric to justify changing the constitution to
subordinate the law courts to political control, dominating state broadcasting
media and purging many public offices of persons supporting opposition
parties. However, this was done through parliamentary means. Orban’s
Fidesz party had achieved a two-thirds majority, which under the country’s
constitution (similarly to that of many other countries) permitted constitu-
tional change. In Poland, a similar rhetoric has been used to justify subordi-
nating law courts to political control. This is, however, being done without
parliamentary authority to make constitutional change, which is why the
European Union is sanctioning Poland but not Hungary for its actions. In
western Europe, xenophobic parties that have in the past held government
office (Austria, the Netherlands), or hold it today (Austria again, Finland,
Norway) have been as junior members of coalitions or support a minority
centre-right government without holding office (Denmark). They therefore
lack any power to pursue institutional destruction.
In the US and UK, we certainly observe populist attacks on institutions,
but with limited effect. Trump has vilified various bodies, ranging from law

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courts to the security services. He has also made political appointments to

the Supreme Court, but that has long been a vulnerable point in the US Con-
stitution, a right exercised by all presidents. The Court derives its indepen-
dence, despite the political nature of its appointments, through the fact that
judges serve for life and cannot be removed, weakening the impact that any
one president can have. However, towards the end of President Obama’s
term of office a Republican-dominated Congress refused to permit him to fill
a vacant place on the court, in the eventually successful hope that there
would soon be a Republican president. This would not have happened in
earlier decades, but no one sees any risk that Trump will try to prevent
future elections or have any power to hobble the Democratic opposition.
Brexit bears many of the hallmarks of xenophobic populism. Its campaign
was targeted against internal (immigrant) and external (EU) foreigners. It
was a plebiscite with decidedly anti-parliamentary overtones. The defeated
minority, although large (48 per cent) is expected to surrender the usual
democratic right to continue debating, and with the conversion of the
Labour party to support leaving the UK, the minority has no major political
voice. The rhetorical attack on claims that Parliament should submit the pro-
cess to scrutiny, and the stigmatisation of the Supreme Court as ‘enemies of
the people’ for saying that Parliament should have this role, is pure pop-
ulism. Equally, so is the doctrine that the people had their right to speak on
the day of the referendum; any right to vote on the issue again would be
hostile to the people’s will, as that will is defined as an almost sacred event
happening on one day alone.
However, the British case is odd in that the populism is limited to this
one issue—though it is an issue with important implications for virtually
every field of policy. There is to date no hint that the intolerance of debate
and opposition will be used to delegitimise political disagreement in general
and no threat to future elections. Several leading advocates of Brexit have
said that, outside the EU, the UK can become the ‘Singapore of the Atlantic’,
but by this they refer to that island’s weak welfare state, high level of
inequality and low level of labour rights rather than to the highly flawed
nature of its democracy. A further oddity is that, since the demise of the
populist party, UKIP, the leadership of British right-wing populism is in the
hands of core Conservative politicians and the editors of the Daily Mail and
Daily Telegraph, both bastions of the Conservative Establishment. Somewhat
like the Trump phenomenon, though through different means, Brexit repre-
sents a kind of palace coup populism from within the Establishment.
Recent developments in social media demonstrate the potentiality of such
or even false populism. An early development in the US was the Tea Party
movement founded around 2009. It is a mass populist movement supporting
most policies associated with US conservative Republicans. It styles itself a
grassroots movement, and gives the impression of resources pouring into it
from masses of little individuals, who shape its agenda, while in reality it is
heavily funded by a small number of billionaires who control its policies.
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This has led its critics to style it an ‘Astroturf’ movement. However, by 2016
the Tea Party seemed to be an exponent of outmoded technologies. Today, if
one has the resources (which means if one is part of a very exclusive elite of
the very rich) one can develop complex technologies that send out social
media messages that have the appearance of coming spontaneously from
masses of individuals, whereas in fact they come from one manipulative
source. People are more likely to believe that an event has taken place, or
that a view is sound, if it seems to come to their personal social media site
from many different points than if it comes from just one. At the time of
writing details are emerging of the role of a US billionaire, Robert Mercer,
who through various channels funds Cambridge Analytica, a technology
firm that specialises in this kind of centralised message crowding. Mercer is
very close to Trump, and Cambridge Analytica was active in both the
Trump and Brexit campaigns.
Ironically, this kind of manipulative artificiality was very much part of
my vision of politics under post-democracy, but it is being practised by
those claiming to be the populist challengers to Establishments. Rightist pop-
ulism appears not as an antidote to post-democracy, but an extreme exten-
sion of it.

Conclusion
The initial irruption of populism within a society may well invigorate its
democracy, bringing neglected issues to the table and putting established
parties and elites on their mettle. However, unless it rapidly changes its
character to accept restraining institutions, its continued presence can threa-
ten democracy. Democracy requires the protection of the people from poten-
tial manipulation by their leaders. It endangers itself if it is deemed to justify
political control over the law and other intermediary bodies. Also, there
must always be another election, and opposition and government parties
alike must have the right to go on debating and using political resources in
preparation for that moment, and those that come after. Today’s minority
may become tomorrow’s majority, which also means that majorities must
beware how they treat minorities, as that may be their position in a few
years’ time. This expectation of a changing balance of power is the best safe-
guard we have that those currently with power will not abuse it. The ten-
dency of populist movements to regard themselves as the perfect and final
manifestation of democracy renders them as its enemies.
But the deficiencies in democratic institutions revealed by the rise of pop-
ulism remain. It is essential that rallying calls to oppose populism do not
lapse into defences of corruption, of the plutocratic capture of government,
of party systems that do not represent society’s most important divisions.
Rude invaders must be welcome, provided they accept that they themselves
must become subject to constraints that safeguard democracy’s future. That
itself will partly depend on whether new, or radically reshaped old, parties

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can locate themselves within rooted interests within the social structure, with
which they are engaged in genuine two-way communication, not a post-
democratic, manipulative, top-down use of social media that pretends to
speak for a ‘people’ defined so vaguely that it can be held to want whatever
the leaders decide it wants.
But are post-industrial, post-religious, post-modern societies capable of
producing such rooted interests, or are we just a mass of loosely attached
individuals blown around by confusing blasts? The political right has pro-
duced an answer to that question: rootedness in nation, though many mod-
erate conservatives and liberals will be in despair at that outcome. Do the
left and centre have anything of similar strength to offer, roots in deeply felt
social identities? Cosmopolitan liberalism by itself risks failing to have the
courage of its lack of convictions. Debate on the left and centre must now
turn to this search.
I have space here to offer just one possibility. I have written elsewhere
that, just as the original labour movement was essentially a male phe-
nomenon that interpreted the problems of all working people through the
eyes of ‘breadwinner’ men, in post-industrial society, many of the problems
of such people may be best articulated by women.7 They experience more
keenly issues of work–life balance, of precariousness in the labour market,
of deficiencies of care services, of the manipulation of consumers, though
these are problems that men share too. They are found in large numbers
working in the public and care services that embody the main challenges to
both neoliberal and intolerant world views. This is unlikely to mean the for-
mation of women’s parties, and in any case the hope is that women will
become the spokespeople of many men too. It does require a strong civil
society surrounding formal politics with other forms of representation,
including organisations that express women’s continuing experience of vari-
ous kinds of exclusion and the development of political agendas to counter
them.
There is perhaps a further element. Much about rightist populism is very
macho: from the male swaggering of leaders like Putin and Trump to the
violent fringe that attaches to most xenophobic movements. Is it fanciful to
see in the very recent widespread resurgence of feminism a reaction against
that ugly face of masculine politics? We were all taken by surprise that,
when a popular reaction against 2008 occurred, it took the form of xenopho-
bia rather than a class critique. Perhaps the events of International Women’s
Day on 8 March 2018 were in turn an unexpected reaction against rightist
populism.

Notes
1 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.
2 C. Crouch, Postdemocrazia, Bari/Rome, Laterza, 2003. Published in English in 2004
as Post-Democracy, Cambridge, Polity.

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3 I was writing some years before the financial crisis of 2008 saw saving the banks
from their earlier irresponsibility accorded the highest priority in public policy;
before the eurocrisis saw elected governments displaced in order to pursue strate-
gies of bank rescue. I tried to incorporate some of their implications in ‘The march
towards post-democracy, ten years on’, The Political Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 1, 2016,
pp. 71–75.
4 For a more detailed exposition, see C. Crouch, ‘Globalization, nationalism and the
changing axes of political identity’, in W. Outhwaite, ed., Brexit: Sociological Per-
spectives, London, Anthem, 2017, pp. 101–110; and C. Crouch, ‘Neoliberalism,
nationalism and the decline of political traditions’, The Political Quarterly, vol. 88,
no. 2, 2017, pp. 221–229.
5 Y. Meny and Y. Surel, Populismo e democrazia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001.
6 J.-W. M€ uller, Was ist Populismus, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2016; published in English as
What is Populism?, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania University Press, 2018.
7 Op cit, fn 4, ‘Neoliberalism, Nationalism and the Decline of Political Traditions’.

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