Denis Muller – Enemies of Democracy: Populism and Scapegoating

Abstract

This chapter analyses the related concepts of populism and scapegoating, two phenomena that are antithetical to liberal democracy because of their divisive and exclusionary effects. It begins with a definition of populism that resonates powerfully in the third decade of the twenty-first century: “The claim to speak in the people’s place, in their name, and convey an undeniable shared truth on their behalf. In particular, populism claims to express the emotions of a people that feels beleaguered, diminished and lost. Its discourse is nostalgia for past power and wedded to a frantic defence of identity.” Diving more deeply into this state of mind, this chapter discusses a more revolutionary aspect of populism: the substitution of popular power for the power of institutions. Drawing on the work of Takis Pappas and Isaiah Berlin, it argues that this is a pre-democratic impulse, Hobbesian in its possibilities for society. Inimical to the basic precepts of post-War liberal democracy, it opens the way to the tyranny of the majority, weakening institutional checks and balances and permitting a doctrine in which the ends justify the means. It distinguishes the liberal democratic concept of “the people” from the populist concept, the liberal concept embracing the whole of a society but the populist embracing only a part of society, a part consisting of those in a less powerful and less economically secure condition in conflict with the rest. The accelerants energising the rise of populism are discussed by reference to the disadvantages and resentments explored in Chap. Scapegoating, as a tool for the propagation of populism, is explored in a discussion of its history and power in providing a means by which anxious and angry societies identify what they take to be a causal agent of their misfortunes and drive it out, culminating in a cathartic release in the aftermath of which a society imagines itself being healed. In the contemporary context, Muslims and immigrants become scapegoats.