Populism as a Constitutional Force in the United States
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Introduction
1It was a day that was almost the United States’ Reichstag Fire moment, or perhaps its Ides of March. Either way, the events of January 6, 2021 were (and still are) an indispensable lens through which the constitutional significance of contemporary American populism must be evaluated, defined, and weighed. For on January 6, 2021, a large group of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Participants carried arms ranging from handguns, assault rifles, homemade napalm, spears, and lacrosse sticks. Among their ranks were heavily armed members of far-right paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys—figures who would loom large in the subsequent criminal prosecutions. Five people, including members of the Capitol police officers, were killed in the resulting fracas. The orderly counting of Electoral College votes—part of the cumbersome process of certifying the results of presidential elections in the United States, and recognizing a new president—was almost derailed.
2The January 6, 2021 insurrection was, nevertheless, a distillate of American populism—as a graphic illustration of how it could shape, or shake, the orderly operation of constitutional institutions. It challenged a specific constitutional mechanism—the Electoral College envisaged by Article II—and also a more diffuse constitutional ideal—the idea of democratic choice followed by a peaceful transfer of political power—that underlies much of the 1787 constitutional text. It is useful to start a study of the connection between populism and American constitutionalism with the events of that day because they illustrate usefully the complex, multi-stranded dynamics of American populism in the wake of the Trump presidency. Specifically, by situating that day in its immediate context, and by relating it to the subsequent forms of political contestations observed in the 2022 midterm election campaigns, we can gain important perspective on the several levels at which populism operates. One is obviously the paramilitary groupings, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, present on January 6. Yet another, however, is a larger pool of diffuse support among ordinary voters for political violence and the lies used to justify it—also amply represented in the crowd that day. And a third is the echelon of political and media elites who have fed and fostered what seemingly is endogenous to the American public—and that seemingly bubbles up without prompting from the grassroots. These three levels—the violent fringe; the silent mass (albeit not majority) willing to tolerate, support, or even occasionally actively abet violence, and the political and media elites who are willing to abet these dynamics—do not exhaust the relevant actors. But they are among the most important, and so worthy of attention here. By examining their roles and their interactions in and around the January 6 insurrection, it is possible to grasp the potentiality and the risks of contemporary American populism more clearly.
3The political dynamics and ideological rhetoric falling under this rubric can provide a useful starting point for the analysis of ‘populism’ in the United States. They provoke, to be sure, a large suite of questions about that concept and its application to the American context. These relate to underlying causes, intellectual genealogies, and predictions of what is to come. I can’t cover all of that ground here. More modestly, the balance of this essay takes up one of the most elementary, perhaps foundational, of those questions for the academic study of populism generally. Specifically, this essay deploys the insights generated by a close study of the political movements manifested in the January 6 insurrection as a way to reflect on the appropriate (i.e., most useful in a pragmatic sense) definition of populism. As will become clear, I favor a definition of populism developed by the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller. While I have expressed this view in previous writings, the complex dynamics revealed by January 6 give additional force to the priority of Müller’s understanding of the term. Of course, this exercise in definitional clarification is not the end of the story. Far from it. But it does provide a necessary starting point for other inquiries into the contemporary American form of populism.
I. January 6, 2021 as a Populist Moment?
4The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a crossroads—and not just in the sense that it was a moment of choice for the nation and its constitutional practice. It was also a crossroads because it a moment at which several different forces—paramilitary, popular and demotic, and elite crossed paths. And it was a moment that seeded new kinds of claim-making and political activism. All of the above is plausibly labeled ‘populist’ in some sense—although I want to bracket for a moment what is meant by this term. I want rather to insist that the label ‘populist’ is apt in a loose and nontechnical sense: Whatever the social or political position of the various actors that crossed paths on January 6, they all in some way laid claim to the mantle of “the people” in an important and distinctive sense. Indeed, they did so in a way that has no easy parallel in contemporary American political culture.
5To see this, consider the various social forces—vectors or movements—that converged that day, only to then spill over into further political action over the next two years. Perhaps the most prominent, and superficially novel, part of the January 6 insurrection were the far-right militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. These groups, however, have been building an infrastructure of computer message boards from the early 1980s, such as Liberty Net, when they emerged out from the larger wave of military veterans returning from the Vietnam War with a sense of having been both defeated and betrayed.2 They were developing their own lexicon of symbols and arguments. And they were imagining a transnational movement that would racial nation that would unite white people across borders and would create, eventually, a white nation and a white world. As historians of far-right militias have demonstrated, these organizations have focused on the ideal of white power, and have long been openly anti-government, calling for an apocalyptic confrontation with everybody else, planning the assassination of people involved in the government, including judges and state troopers, and planning how to undermine infrastructure and currency to foment race war3. What happened on January 6 was simply a logical extension of threats and arguments that these groups had been making since the 1980s. The presence of such groups at the Capitol that January afternoon must be understood as a culmination (at least for now—we cannot rule out future violence) of historical trends that have been building steadily for more than three decades.
6A second element at work on that January day in 2021 was more widely popular and diffusely demotic as opposed to esoteric. A startling feature of the crowd that made its way from Trump rally near the White House, buoyed by the then-president’s promise that “We will never give up. We will never concede,” was not just its diversity, but its sheer ordinariness. That “We” was not comprised of hardcore paramilitary members. Nor was it made up of the socially marginal that are often drawn to political extremist groups on the right as a more general matter. Instead, amongst the seven hundred and thirteen people arrested criminally charged for those events in the calendar year that followed, a bare fourteen percent were affiliated with far-right militias. Of those for whom employment data was available, more than half are business owners or from white-collar occupations, including doctors, lawyers, architects, and accountants.4 Very few (only seven percent) were unemployed. This is again in stark contrast to the roughly quarter of militia groups who are without employment usually. A substantial number of the crowd in D.C., moreover, came from urban precincts that Joe Biden had convincingly won in 2020, although there were also some as well from rural districts that Donald Trump had carried. They were, in other words, a group of lawyers, professionals, and middle managers from the near suburbs, and not extremists up from their foxholes in the mesa. Rather than representing a socially and geographically isolated, the January 6 crowd formed a broad and surprisingly representative sample of the American voting public5. Startlingly, one belief that did unite them had its origins in French writing and thinking—this was the so-called “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that white Europeans (or Americans) are being overwhelmed by non-white migrants and their descendants.
7Rather than using visual signals of white power, the crowd that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 deployed a lexicon of symbols that sincerely and fiercely evinced the belief that they represented a true and uncorrupted essence of the American people. (Of course, this sincere belief is not inconsistent with a commitment to white supremacist views or a belief in the so-called great replacement—themes to which I will return in a moment) The crowd hence carried distinctive banners that invoked individual insurrectionists’ self-conception as members and representatives of a historically rooted, ‘real’ American polis mobilized against a corrupt and self-serving elite: The crowds’ flags expressed this belief that they acted in the name of a true, historically pedigreed American people. There was the three-percenter flag (a Roman number three wreathed in stars), which is an (erroneous) call back to the Revolutionary War, and the idea that only three percent of the public took up weapons against British tyranny. There was thus a Confederate flag with an assault rifle and the words Come and Take It superimposed, reflecting a view of the Confederacy as the party in the right during the Civil War of the 1860s. And there is the “Gadsden” flag, which was designed by the South Carolina Son of Liberty leader Christopher Gadsden (1724-1805). It has a striking yellow field with a coiled rattlesnake emblazoned upon it along with the words Don’t Tread on Me6.
8The January 6 insurrectionists, in other words, deliberately involved the social and political imaginary of a historically authenticated community of citizens protesting against the tyrannical and undemocratic exercise of political power. The distinctive feature of their movement, however, was the absence of any evidence that the presidential election of 2020 had in fact been “stolen” from Donald Trump. Theirs was an authentic articulation of the people paradoxically constructed upon a foundation of lies.
9Nor were the crowd that assembled at the Capitol, and then violently forced their way in, unique in their set of beliefs. Subsequent nationally representative opinion polls have suggested that the core beliefs motivating the insurrectionists were not isolated. According to one survey, at least ten million, and perhaps as many as thirty million, Americans believe that Joe Biden to be an illegitimate president, and justified the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency7. Different polling finds widespread support for the Great Replacement theory too. An October 2022 national poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, hence found that roughly one-third of Americans, including some two-thirds of Republicans, endorse one form or another of the tenets of the “Great Replacement” theory.8 The latter has become a staple of far-right thinking globally, spreading with viral speed since roughly 2012.9 It has been invoked not just in the mass-shooting of Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019. It was, more recently, been invoked by the shooter in a mass killing in Buffalo, NY, grocery store in May 2022. In the United States, the theory has been disseminated with great vigor by journalists on Fox News, most notably the commentator Tucker Carlson. In more ways than one, therefore, the January 6 insurrection reflects a larger social phenomenon that has the potential to alter the character and operation of American politics, and hence the operation of its constitutional institutions.
10A third strand of what happened on January 6 is perhaps so obvious that it is easy to overlook. It was, of course, speech by the then-president that catalyzed the attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the weeks and months before the November vote, moreover, President Trump had used his bully pulpit and his social-media accounts to sow doubts about the integrity of any electoral result that did not yield his victory. It should not need repeating that Trump lost the popular vote in 2020 by more than six million, and lost the Electoral College vote by a convincing margin. Beyond his verbal incitement on January 6, and his related refusal to call up adequate forces to defend the U.S. Capitol after its attack, Trump spent the weeks after the 2020 poll exploiting pressure points in the complex U.S. system for selecting presidents. Designed in 1787 and then modified after a deadlocked election in 1800 (with the Twelfth Amendment), the national system for selecting presidents places front-line authority with state rather than federal authorities for counting and then certifying state-level poll results. These are then aggregated using a complex formula into a national result at the Capitol. Trump identified potential weaknesses in several states’ certification processes, where he could exercise undue influence. For instance, he summoned Michigan Republican leaders to the Oval Office even as his allies floated the idea of appointing pro-Trump electors from the state (which Joe Biden had carried by more than 150,000 votes). He also prompted an onslaught from the right against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger after the latter declined to affirm Mr. Trump’s false claims of ballot tampering.10
11Yet despite all this, it would be a profound mistake to see Trump as the sole elite actor who promoted the false narrative of election loss that motivated the violence of January 6. After the events of that day, 147 members of Congress—all Republican—voted not to certify the 2020 election results despite the absence of any credible evidence of significant fraud or substantial reason to believe that Trump had in fact won. Note well that these votes were cast from the Capitol that had just been violently attacked, and in part sacked. At the same time, the CEO of the Blackstone private equity group, Stephen Schwarzman, urged business leaders in private meetings to give Trump leeway to challenge the election result.11 And the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also actively lobbied officials on and around January 6 to deny the lawful and accurate counting of election results so that Donald Trump could remain president.12 Recall, furthermore, that leading commentators on the right have been responsible for pushing out the Great Replacement theory that bubbles under the surface of election-related violence in the United States. Media as well as financial and political elites, in other words, play a central role in creating and sustaining the ideological matrix that enables popular violence against democratic institutions. Nor did these elites lose their nerve, or change tack, when actual violence erupted on January 6.
12The depth, endurance, and perhaps the limits of this populist movement came into crisp focus during the campaign for the 2022 American midterms. In this election cycle, all seats in the House of Representatives, many seats in the Senate, several state governorships, and many other state and local offices were up for grabs. The historical trend in midterm (i.e., non-presidential) election cycles is for the party of the president to lose a substantial number of federal elections (in House and Senate seats in particular). This is especially so when voters are generally dissatisfied with the state of the country. Indeed, in the run-up to the 2022 election, opinion polls suggested that roughly 80 percent of people were dissatisfied with how politicians generally should have been performing.
13It was in this context that actors who accepted the key claims of the January 6 insurrectionists—the illegitimacy of the Biden presidency and the “big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—came be embraced by primary electorates on the Republican side of the aisle. According to the news service CNN, by the summer of 2022, there were twelve Republican nominees for the elected position of ‘secretary of state’—a position charged with managing the running of elections—who had questioned or tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In addition, there were 22 Republican nominees for governor, and also 19 Republican nominees for the US Senate who rejected, questioned, tried to overturn, or else refused to affirm, the 2020 election results.13 There is a circulation of false ideas and pernicious beliefs, in other words, between candidates and a broader public that enable and license an oppositional, even violent stance in relation to government. This stance echoes—and as the January 6 events show, can build upon—the arguments and claims offered within the far-right militia ecosystem. The latter’s ideology, in other words, can diffuse into the mainstream even if the groups themselves remain somewhat marginalized.
14These candidates, moreover, received a substantial amount of financial support. It is here that the powerful role of political elites again comes into view. In the United States, political campaigns are largely funded through private donations. A complex and evolving legal landscape means that much of that money is not given directly by individuals to candidates, but instead channeled through various corporate vehicles, such as Political Action Committees or PACs. The use of these vehicles means that the sources of support for seemingly prominent candidates can be obscure. Nevertheless, it is clear that candidates who picked up and ran with the January 6 insurrectionists’ claims were well-supported.
15Consider just the twelve election-denying secretary of state candidates. These are normally low-profile races, which attract little attention or outside financing. Yet as of November 7, 2022, election-denying candidates for these offices had collectively raised more than $ 15.7 million for their campaigns. Much of this came from out of state actors. In many cases, they had spent substantially more than their Democratic opponents, including in states such as Arizona and Indiana where the general election was considered to be a competitive one. In part, these funds came from former President Donald Trump’s Save America PAC. Some came from the ultra-wealthy—people such as Patrick Byrne. He was the founder and former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, and was one of the leading figures in the election denier movement. Other funds came from Richard Uihlein, an ultra-wealthy Illinois-based businessman and founder of shipping supply company Uline. In addition, these candidates benefited from large numbers of small-dollar donors14. It is not possible to know whether any or all of these candidates would have been viable in the absence of big-money donors such as Save America PAC, Byrne, or Uihlein.
16At the same time, the rhetoric of election denial in respect to the 2020 elections originated with Trump, and it is highly unlikely that any of these candidates would have articulated the same roster of complaints in the absence of Trump’s distinctive posturing and extravagant falsehoods about his election loss. But the interesting and relevant point to underscore here is that when they got onto the ballot for the general elections, candidates who aligned themselves explicitly with the substantive goals and beliefs of the January 6 insurrection garnered a good deal of support from both political elites and also from the ‘grassroots,’ i.e., from rank-and-file voters interested in politics. While it is difficult to discern whether this support was because of their stance on the 2020 election, it is telling that this stance did not seem to limit or impose a substantial friction on such popular support.
17The connections between the violence of January 6 and the political dynamics of the 2022 midterm elections were once again graphically illustrated on October 28, 2022. In the middle of the night, a man wielding a hammer broke into the San Francisco home of Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi apparently with the intent of kidnapping or otherwise harming her. While the Speaker of the House was not home, her husband Paul Pelosi was. The intruder, a Canadian man called David DuPage, eventually struck and seriously injured Mr. Pelosi. After he had been apprehended and questioned by the police, he explained that his aim had been to break Speaker Pelosi’s kneecaps because she was the “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party.”15 That is, DuPage’s attack was premised on the same account of political virtues and vices that animated the January 6 insurrection. It is also telling that in the wake of the Pelosi attack, many elected Republican politicians took to social media to circulate lies about the attack—seeking, for example, to insinuate falsely (and, at least potentially, under U.S. law, libelously) that David DuPage had been a male prostitute invited in by Paul Pelosi. Among those spreading libels of this kind were Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and right-of-center media commentators such as Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson16.
18Note well here the overlap with those that promote the Great Replacement theory: It is the same media elites that are driving conceptually separate elements of this ideological formation. That is, powerful individuals aligned with a political movement that was itself associated on multiple occasions with the use of extralegal violence for explicitly political ends to avenge a non-existent, fallacious political wrong, repeatedly turned to baselines and harmful lies as a means to deflect any responsibility on their movement’s part for the harms of such violence. The Pelosi attack and its aftermath, in other words, crisply demonstrate the close and intricate connections between political lies and political violence. Indeed, it is worth noting further the racist threads in the January 6 rioters, who were united by concerns about the so-called Great Replacement, and the homophobic tenor of the lies told in relation to the Pelosi attack. Violence and lies in stark derogation of one’s responsibilities as a citizen, let alone as an elected official sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution, are implicitly underwritten by (and perhaps justified implicitly as) a fear of a racialized and sexualized ‘other’ that poses an imaginary threat to the health and well-being of the people.
19One final point is worth making here: The movement described here simply has no counterpart on the other side of the political spectrum. No doubt, there are false beliefs, paranoid tendencies, and biased beliefs at work on the American left. Yet there is no parallel to the complex entangling of right-of-center elites, masses, media, and fringe groups that came to a head on January 6, 2021. Certainly, the campaign mounted by Sen. Bernie Saunders for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and the associated array of groups on the democratic-socialist left cannot claim either the popular support or marshal the same sort of rhetoric. However much support social supports have in isolation, the term “socialism” has little resonance for the American electorate. To the contrary, it works now as a term of unlimited opprobrium. More generally, the bitter lessons of the interwar period—during which European socialist parties lost ground to nationalist and ultimate fascist political formations who made appeals on the basis of blood, nation, and empire—bear repeating and remembering today. In short, if what I have described above is indeed fairly ranked as populism, it has a politically asymmetrical form. It is found only on the political right in the United States at least.
20To summarize then, the January 6, 2021 insurrection provides a useful lens for present purposes because it allows us to take a snapshot of a distinctive ideological formation on the American political right. This formation is characterized by a blending of elite, popular, and paramilitary strands. All of these share (to greater or lesser degrees) a racialized understanding of national identity, and threats to national identity, and also a fallacious belief that there is a (Democratic) political elite that has used “a pack of lies” to steal political power from the true people. The connection between these two conspiratorial, even paranoid, fantasies also run deep.
21The theaters in which this political formation advances its agenda are several and varied: Beyond the performative and political violence of January 6, its effects can be felt in the media—in the social-media platforms that are legatees of Liberty Net, as well as in cable news on channels like Fox—and the sphere of organized politics. Its agenda and its effects, moreover, are properly called ‘constitutional’ on multiple grounds. On the one hand, it is a movement that has a distinctive understanding of how the American nation should be constituted. On the other hand, this movement (for that term is also appropriate) brings to bear pressure on weak joints in the American constitutional system as a way of reshaping that system. The most obvious of these is the counting of Electoral College votes after the November 2020 election. But the aggressive campaign to install election-denying secretaries of states can be understood as a tactic to exploit the decentralized ‘federalism’ structure of American politics as a means of derailing democratic choice. The involvement of a Supreme Court Justice’s wife in election-denial efforts, moreover, gestures toward a more complex set of dynamics involving judicial actors who have, in subtle ways, abetted this movement over time by affirming its baseless fears about election fraud and pandering to white fears about the zero-sum nature of racial justice claims.17
II. Theorizing American Populism After Trump
22This ‘snapshot’ of the forces arrayed on, and channeled through the events of, January 6 offers a distinctive window onto American populism. More abstractly, and of scholarly interest, I will argue here that it suggests some reasons to prefer one definition of populism over others. For the term ‘populism’ is not a natural kind. It is a term of art used by political scientists and political theorists as a means of identifying a distinctive modality of politics, and a specific kind of political formation. But there is substantial disagreement about what the term “populism” ought to mean. The American case study can help here because it provides something of a litmus test. For if the movement that I have described in the first section of this piece is not ranked as populism, then it is hard to know what should be.
23The question then is whether there is an operative definition of populism that captures the core of the January 6 movement as described above, while at the same time excluding other forms of political mobilization within a democratic frame. There are a number of leading definitions of populism offered in the scholarly literature, An examination of these various definitions in light of the January 6 events provides a way of considering how to define populism in a useful way given the present political conjunction. That is, we can start with the movement around January 6 as a core case of populism, and then test various definitions in light of whether they can accommodate it. Populism, on this view, should be viewed as a term that is useful insofar as it characterizes our present conjunction. The question then is how best to capture that moment.
24There are four definitions of populism that are presently in circulation in American legal academia.18 I will spend most time on the one I think most useful. In turning to the three others, I will explain why I think their insights more limited (or else redundant of the first’s). Finally, I will consider what is omitted from the definition that I have elevated.
25First, in an important book entitled “What is Populism?”, the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller sets forth a succinct and generalizable account of the basic internal logic of populism as a strategy for both mobilizing public sentiment and also deploying the levers of state power.19 He defines populism as a coherent political strategy based on a “moralistic imagination of politics” as a Manichean confrontation between a morally purified “people” and a corrupt and irremediable “elite”. On this view, populism as a “set of distinct claims . . . [with] an inner logic” pitched first in general terms, and then defined in terms of an enumeration of specific traits. Pitched at this abstract level, Müller defines populism as “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified . . . people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” Populism for Müller then is less a matter of policy preferences, and more a question of the guiding assumptions about how democracy can and should work, and how leaders can and should relate to the people. Hence, populist asserts a “moralized antipluralism” predicated on the claim that “they, and they alone, represent the people.” Any other electoral option or policy choice is illegitimate and perhaps futile. By implication, there is always an element of the polity that “can be dismissed as immoral and not properly a part of the people at all.” In addition, the populist has a “noninstitutionalized notion of ‘the people’”. This means that the populist asserts or assumes that there is a singular and morally privileged understanding or will that has not been manifest through the formal structures of democratic choice. Müller quotes Peron’s assertion that “the political leader is the one who does what the people want” as an instance of such a claim of immanent and noninstitutionalized popular will. This claim impinges on democratic accountability. Whereas on the ordinary understanding of democracy the actions of a specific coalition or leader are always amenable to critique as misleading or unlawful, it is never possible to launch a parallel challenge against a populist leader. At the same time, Müller insists that his account of populism is consistent with constitutionalism insofar as a populist government is still able to articulate its constitutional vision in the form of a written constitution.
26Second, John Judis defines populism in terms of “the conflictual relationship between” a “people” and an “elite”. The problem with this definition is its breadth. Unlike Müller’s definition, Judis’s encompasses a range of political actors who have in some way juxtaposed themselves against an extant power structure. A religious order like the Amish can be anti-elitist in this sense, but hardly populist. At its margins, Judis’s conceptualization also seems to sweep in any and all parties that position themselves in an adverse relationship to political incumbents. It is not hard to imagine that this might capture virtually all insurgent political movements at some moment in time. So defined, Judis’s populism is an immense category with little resolving power. Certainly, it does not cast much light on the events of January 6.20
27Third, Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser define populism as “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”21 Going beyond Müller’s definition, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser introduce additional new criteria. This includes include the idea that a populist movement insists on being “homogenous”, “antagonistic”, “pure”, and a manifestation of the “general will”. The latter concept derives from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s well-known theorization of the social contract. It introduces substantial new complications in the modern context, such as the question of the precise institutional setting through which the general will is realized. To the extent that its other supplementary terms go beyond Müller’s account, it is not clear whether they add much of substance for explaining or understanding the movement described above. Moreover, the binary structure of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s approach does not quite capture the complexity of the U.S. situation.
28Finally, Ernesto Laclau understands populism as arising from unsatisfied demands by marginalized and frustrated members of the polity, demands articulated in a process of mobilization that terminates in “that moment of crystallization that constitutes the ‘people’.” Laclau’s concept of populism is synonymous with the political, which in turn seems to exclude “sedimented social forms which have blurred the traces of their original political institution.”22 The net result is Laclau’s populism comes to stand in for all that is fluid, contingent, and subject to contestation. It is hence a floating signifier that either can come to stand for the vindication of human rights (or totalitarianism), or else seems necessary for the vindication of popular sovereignty. This account of populism, however, cannot explain the elite elements of the January 6 movement. It is also hard to pin down as a reference to specific political formations. It hence cannot easily be translated from theory into a unit of practical political analysis.
29Of these definitions, in short, Müller’s definition provides the most perspicacious framing of the January 6 movement. In particular, he emphasis on populism as a “moralistic imagination of politics” as a Manichean confrontation between a morally purified “people” and a corrupt and irremediable “elite”. Both the idea of a morally pure people and a corrupt elite, of course, play foundational roles in the rhetoric of the January 6 movement and its legatees. Also of great use is Müller’s notion of populism as a “moralized antipluralism”—that is, the belief that—as a matter of first principles—one’s political opponents are not entitled to political power. The widespread belief in election fraud and the illegitimacy of Joe Biden’s assumption of the presidency is a form of moralized antipluralism, albeit amplified to an unusually explicit degree. Indeed, given the absolute lack of evidence that Trump was cheated out of the presidency in 2020, it is hard to see how the certainty with which that belief appears to be held can be explained without invoking an a priori belief in one’s side moral bona fides. That is, the belief in a false empirical fact (Trump won in 2020) is motivated and explained by a belief in a moral premise—i.e., that we are in the right and they are in the moral wrong.
30To be sure, Müller’s definition does not highlight the racially charged strands (whether explicit or not) of the January 6 movement. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the symbolic resources marshalled by the insurrectionists demonstrated that racial identity (white power) does not need to play an explicit role in the way that a populist movement expresses itself, or publicly understands itself. On the other hand, there is a risk that suppressing the common (if unexpressed) element of racial antagonism that underpins the movement obscures its vital psychological grounds. This seems to me the most important limitation of Müller’s approach, at least so far as a U.S. application goes. There are profound historical reasons, rooted in the postwar dynamic of decolonization and the rise of a new form of neoliberal globalization, for the centrality of race as an index of alterity (and in particular to foreignness understood in national terms). Müller’s approach has a deracinated quality that skips too quickly over this necessary historical context. But the same is true of the other definitions I have set forth here. So it is not clear Müller’s is any worse for this gap.
31A countervailing consideration is the fluidity with which populist movements can move from ideological mobilizations along racial or implicitly racial grounds to ones focused on other dimensions of identity. In the United States, for example, sexual preference and trans identity have become since 2020 important margins along which populist movements can generate social friction and anxiety. Until the 2020s, moreover, it might have been thought that anti-Semitism had been banished from the domain of formal politics. Yet in the 2022 election campaign, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania engaged in (only lightly camouflaged) anti-Jewish rhetoric.23 Trump’s flirtations with virulently anti-Semitic figures such as Nick Fuentes also would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Another important dynamic that an explicitly racialized definition of populism would struggle with concerns the appeal of allied political parties (i.e., the Republican party) among Latino voters.24 Müller’s definition, that is, has the benefit of plasticity in respect to racial dynamics. It hence the ability to accommodate such shifts in the terms of existential animosity offered by populists. To be sure, an important scholarly question is when and how such shifts in the relevant species of populist alterity occur, and what constrains them. But that seems to follow from, not precede, efforts at definition.
32I do not offer a view here on whether the account, and associated definition, of American populism is generalizable to Europe or other contexts. It is possible to imagine arguments on both sides here. On the one hand, the American history of slavery and Jim Crow provides a distinctively fertile context for the racist subtext of contemporary populism.25 On the other hand, the American populist movement has formal connections and shared intellectual heritage with European political formations that are also plausibly described as populist.26 Among the most successful of these are Fidesz in Hungary and the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland. Both came to power on the basis of election campaigns raging against elites and promising a fresh start for the disempowered or excluded. Both then implemented a wide array of constitutional and legal changes that have dramatically tamped down on the feasibility of political competition and the associated rotation in power.27 Elsewhere in Europe, right-of-center parties have not secured solid parliamentary footing by cultivating a fear of Muslims and an aversion to immigration, and have even drifted away from that rhetoric. Indeed, in some instances avowedly populist movements seem to have given way to more centrist and technocratic tendencies. In the United Kingdom, for example, a populist movement waved the same anti-elite and anti-immigration flags to secure exit from the European Union. Unlike its Polish and Hungarian counterparts, which have effectively consolidated power in ways that render electoral displacement unlikely, the British populist U.K. Independence Party fell into a disarray after the Brexit vote—although anti-immigrant sentiment still plays an oversize role in British politics. And the xenophobic wing of the Conservative Party suffered a serious setback with the collapse of Liz Truss’s government in late 2022, and her replacement with the technocratic Rishi Sunak—the U.K.’s first non-white prime minister.
Conclusion: The Future of American Populism
33In the 2022 midterms, Republican candidates that denied the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election did not fare well in competitive races. Indeed, in all the pivotal states in likely Electoral College ties—including Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada—those candidates did not prevail in key secretary of state and gubernatorial races. Hence, out of the thirty-six gubernatorial races on the ballot in 2022, seven out of the twenty election-denying candidates tunning were elected to office. Of those, six are incumbents, and just one—in Alaska—was newly elected. In regard to secretary of state races, only two out of the ten election deniers who ran for office won in 2022. Both of these wins, in Indiana and in Wyoming, were in states that are unlikely to be competitive in 2024 when it comes to the presidential race. Moreover, despite some rumblings from defeated candidates, such as Arizona’s Kari Lake, there was no serious effort to derail the 2022 election results in the way that Trump and allies tried to derail the counting of Electoral College votes in late 2020.28 In effect, election denial was a sufficient drag on candidates in marginal races to be outcome determinative. Where a race was not competitive, the Republican electorate did not turn against candidates because of their position on the 2020 election.
34So is the threat to democratic rule from American populism now abates? Hardly. The multi-stranded nature of American populism provides a powerful reason to think that it is far too soon to write an obituary for that movement. The defeat of one elite element of that movement—i.e., the slate of candidates running in marginal or contestable seats in 2022—does not mean that the other strands of the movement have been disabled or defeated. For one thing, the wealthy donors and media elites that have supported populist tropes will continue to provide a platform for ideas such as the false claim of election fraud and the racist myth of the great replacement. With those ideas still in circulation, and the present infrastructure of donors such as Uihlein and Flynn still able to give, there is no reason to think that the high levels of support for populist ideas within the electorate will abate. The structural conditions of those ideas, after all, remain in place. And as long as support for the ideas that animated the January 6 insurrection is concentrated within the segment of the Republican electorate that votes in primaries, there is no reason to anticipate that populist candidates—as this essay has used the term—will continue to emerge and, occasionally, win even contestable elections. Populism may not have won this round. But that does not mean it will lose the war—or forego its ultimate prize of drastic, anti-democratic constitutional change in the United States.
Notes de bas de page
2 There is surely an interesting parallel between the returning Vietnam soldiers, who drifted to the far-right in the United States, and at least some of the far-right nationalists, settlers, military officers, and demobilized Paras who departed Algeria after 1962, and then returned to France. The stories are not, of course, parallel in every detail—and of course, those who embraced violence were surely a small minority in both cases—and yet the similarities in world-view and ensuing political formations are striking enough to warrant comment.
3 K. Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2018.
4 R. Pape, “The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are” Foreign Policy, Jan. 6, 2022.
5 I do not mean, of course, that the crowd that day was representative in terms of race, ethnicity, or gender.
6 On this symbology of that day, A. Z. Huq, “On the Origins of Republican Violence”, Brennan Center for Justice, June 29, 2021.
7 Pape, “The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are”, op. cit.
8 M. Aikten, “UMass poll: Significant numbers support ‘great replacement’ theory on immigration”, Boston.com, Oct. 31, 2022.
9 A. Z. Huq, “ Illiberalism and Islam”, in A. Sajó, S. Holmes and R. Uitz (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism., London, Routledge, 2021.
10 A. Burns, “Trump Stress-Tested the Election System, and the Cracks Showed”, N.Y. Times, Nov. 20, 2020.
11 J. Sleeper, “Corporate Capitol and Trump's coup: Will business elites take a stand?”, Salon, Nov. 20, 2020.
12 L. Broadwater, S. Lai, “Ginni Thomas Denies Discussing Election Subversion Efforts With Her Husband”, N.Y. Times, Sept. 29, 2022. While Ginni Thomas has testified under oath to the Special Committee of the House of Representatives investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, it remains unknown whether and what role Clarence Thomas may have played in and around the same movement.
13 D. Dale, “How 2020 election deniers did in their 2022 midterm races”, CNN, Nov. 23, 2022.
14 A. Ratliff, J. Zhong, M. Beckel, and N. Upadhyaya, “Who’s Bankrolling Election Deniers?”, Issue One, Oct. 6, 2022.
15 K. Browning, G. Thrush, and T. Arango, “Intruder Wanted to Break Speaker Pelosi’s Kneecaps, Federal Complaint Says, ” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2022.
16 A. Karni, M. Khurana and S.A. Thompson, “How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack”, New York Times, Nov. 5, 2022.
17 I develop this point in other work. A.Z. Huq, “The Counter-Democratic Difficulty”, Northwestern University Law Review, forthcoming 2023, and A.Z. Huq, “The Supreme Court and the Dynamics of Democratic Backsliding ”, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 699(1), 2022, p. 50.
18 The following draws on a discussion in A.Z. Huq, “The People versus the Constitution”, Michigan Law Review Vol. 166, 2017, p. 1123. To be clear, I do not think these are the only possible ways of defining populism (consider Chantal Mouffe’s work, for example)—but these seem to be the most influence in U.S. legal scholarship.
19 J.W. Müller, What is populism?, London, Penguin UK, 2017.
20 J.B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016.
21 C. Mudde and C. R. Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.
22 E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, New York: Verso, 2007.
23 K. Glueck, “Mastriano’s Attacks on Jewish School Set Off Outcry Over Antisemitic Signaling”, N.Y. Times, Oct. 10, 2022.
24 J. Medina, “A Vexing Question for Democrats: What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?”, N.Y. Times, Oct 8, 2021.
25 A. Jardina and R. Mickey, “White Racial Solidarity and Opposition to American Democracy”, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 699(1), 2022, p. 79–89
26 B.R. Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right., London, Penguin UK, 2020.
27 This is documented in detail in T. Ginsburg and A. Z. Huq, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018.
28 G. Bedekovics and A. Maciolek, “Election Deniers Lost Key Races for Federal and State Offices in the 2022 Midterm Elections”, Center for American Progress, Nov. 20, 2022. That said, of this writing litigation has commenced in Arizona in respect to the secretary of state race.
Auteur
-
Aziz Z. Huq
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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