Why Populism and Authoritarianism Go Hand in Hand: Populism is not anti-elitism, it is raw majoritarianism exercised via a strongman (Shikha Dalmia, Aug 08, 2024, The UnPopulist)
Populism is one of the few concepts that can help us make sense of the “current tectonic shifts in the political landscape and public opinion almost everywhere in the West and beyond,” notes Karen Horn, a classical liberal scholar at Germany’s University of Erfurt. To understand what populism is, it is useful to understand what it is not since the literature on it often lumps many disparate figures and phenomena, some good, some bad, obscuring the core concept. But if we lose clarity on the term, we will risk “defining away a pervasive phenomenon,” Horn notes, undercutting our ability to comprehend the danger it poses.
For starters, populist movements are not popular uprisings like the one Mahatma Gandhi led against British colonial rule in India and Nelson Mandela against white apartheid in South Africa. There are surface similarities, for example both are led by charismatic figures commanding a mass following. But that does not make these uprisings the same as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).
One big difference is that a popular uprising is a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs. Populist movements, on the other hand, are aimed at a domestic “establishment” which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt—genuinely or allegedly.
Gandhi’s Quit India movement targeted a small—and alien—ruling power denying self-rule (and franchise) to an entire people. Some separatist movements, such as the one in Catalonia in Spain or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, are dubbed populist uprisings. Regardless of what one thinks of the justice of their demands, they are, however, more in the vein of anti-colonial struggles like Quit India given that they are directed against an “enemy without.”
Populist movements, by contrast, are a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule. However, the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it. So these movements are oriented against the “enemy within.” For example, Modi’s populist nationalism is directed against a secular elite that regards the majority Hindu population’s desire for a homogeneously Hindu India as anathema.
This last is a good example of why Populists turn to Authoritarianism: Indians generally do not support such homogeneity.