Populism in politics

Populism has been defined as a “political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” In this approach, the politician divides the world into two irreducibly antagonistic groups – a corrupt elite and the people who the populist leader identifies with and whose “cause” they promote. Populists not only claim that they represent the people but also claim that they alone can represent the people. In this way, other political formations are, by definition, illegitimate standpoints, and as such, their positions on issues can be dismissed out of hand.
One of the phenomena playing out in modern politics has been the rise in populism as a mobilising tool in the US, Europe and the global south. While populism can be said to have been a feature of democratic politics from the beginning – as “we the people” in the present, it has taken an anti-ideological thrust that rejects the old liberal premises and order and adopts a view of political action that stresses actions to change that order root and branch. During the last election campaign, we saw one of the new parties, “We Invest in Nationhood” (WIN), led by a US-sanctioned billionaire, deploy a populist rhetoric that revelled in the vernacular of its self-defined “scrapehead” base and Amerindians in the interior, who he touted as the new Guyanese “everyman”.
While some may scoff and snicker at the “scrapeheads” demeanour and articulations, the African American intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a sobering perspective from the American experience, from which we should substitute “scrapeheads” for blue-collar whites. “To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.”
US Vice President JD Vance – who started out as an extreme Trump critic but became a believer – in his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” captured the American working-class zeitgeist that embraces Trump. He said this of the latter’s populist approach to politics: “Many in the US and abroad marvel that a showy billionaire could inspire such allegiance among relatively poor voters. Yet in style and tone, Trump reminds blue-collar workers of themselves. Gone are the poll-tested and consultant-approved political lines, replaced with a backslapping swashbuckler unafraid of saying what’s on his mind. The elites of DC and NY see an offensive madman, blowing through decades of political convention with his every word. His voters, on the other hand, see a man who’s refreshingly relatable, who talks about politics and policy as if he were sitting around the dinner table.”
Today’s populist appeals, such as WIN’s, emphasise “the people” versus “the elite” to bypass the conventional decorum of that which was standard in modern politics. It can resort to ‘crude, bad manners’ and to constant evocations of threats, crises and breakdowns in the social order that must be addressed forcibly in the name of the “people”. The rule of law and its forms are seen as fetters to the needs of the people, so it can be bypassed with impunity. In this, contemporary far-right populism has been favoured by the shift from old media to new media and the constant hunger for conflict and spectacle.
Herein lies the danger of populist politics in a society such as ours that has been riven by ethnic differences and differential development that were exploited by political elites from the Opposition, such as Burnham and his PNC, beginning from the start of our political mobilisation in the 1950s. Our politics cannot define a party such as the PPP, which has secured a democratic majority from all groups in the society, as an “elite” that is contraposed to “the people”.
The PPP has called for all Guyanese to see ourselves as all part of “One Guyana” – even though we may belong to different ethnicities and, indeed, different parties. This is an inclusive rather than an exclusive populism.