Between “the people” and elites introduction

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Part IV
Chapter 15: Between “the People” and Elites Introduction
(pp 53-63)
Contributions to this collection thus far have explored the relationship between populism
and democracy, finding that debates regarding their commensurability have largely hinged on the
degree to which populist social mobilizations respect democratic pluralism and proceduralism.
We have seen that contributors to this collection have taken varying positions on whether

movements claiming to speak for “the people” against some elite forces/groups can be inclusive
and committed to democratic proceduralism. Some contributors have argued the antagonistic
dualism between “the people” and elites presents a sort of anti-democratic infection, described in
Part I as ressentiment. Part IV grapples with issues pertaining to “the people” and their
relationship to elites. Against the backdrop of these discussions, key questions addressed in this
section include:
• What assumptions about “the people” are built into expert and media representations
of populist mobilizations?
• How do discourses designated as populist construct the social relationships in which
they are located?
• What is the basis of “the people’s” common identification and their dis-identification
with elites?
Social discourses and speech acts directed at restoring popular sovereignty against so-
called elites typically get named populist by observers who aim to identify, represent, explain,
and predict these attempts at restoration. In the Introduction, we explained that “the people” have
historically been named and theorized by observers in relation to three major conceptual
frameworks: (1) as shared (cultural) identities rooted in beliefs and ways of life; (2) as a shared
economic class, illustrated by the idea of the plebs, marginalized in relation to elites; and (3) as a
collective political subject of a nation-state. Research perspectives vary in their approaches to
these views of “the people,” with some scholars delineating ideas of and about “the people” and
others studying social, economic, and/or psychological conditions and processes of identification
that constitute “the people” as such.

Although these views of “the people” are not exhaustive, they are particularly important
ones. Take for example the idea of “the people” as political subjects of nation states, a
conception of “the people” critical to nation-building and institutionalized in most national
constitutions. Ginsburg, Foti, and Rockmore (2014) assert that “the people” are legally inscribed
in national constitutions across the globe, most often in preambles invoking the “name of a
distinct people, either real or fictional, who are both the creators and subjects of the
constitutional order” (p. 306). As these authors point out, preambles quite literally write “the
people”: they “constitute autobiographical narratives, legitimating specific local actions,
historical moments, and organizations” (p. 303). Thus, the formal concept of a people, unified by
core constitutional values, history, and a shared vision for the future, is foundational to
contemporary concepts of nationhood, evidenced by the global ubiquity of references in
constitutional preambles and in the similarities in formal articulations within particular epochs.
However, although the juridical “we the people” inscribed in national constitutions
invokes popular sovereignty, it does so most often within a representative framework, wherein
the actual power of the people is limited, the extent of which is debated actively in constitutional
law circles around the world. There is then an important takeaway, and that is a certain juridical
undecidability about the power of “the people” as political subjects. The social relevance of this
constitutional undecidability is of course an outcome of specific speech acts, events, social
discourses and complex institutional and experiential conditions of possibility.
For some academic observers, populism names symbolic efforts to suture this political
undecidability regarding perceived limits of “the people’s” power by restoring popular
sovereignty. Canovan (2002) suggests this undecidability about the power of “the people” in fact
represents a democratic paradox because democratic processes of “bringing the people into

politics” impinge on understanding how power operates because its dispersions and circulations
are not transparent. The opaque circulations of decentered power work against coherent
conceptualizations of agency, leaving “the people feeling” disempowered (p. 26). Populists
mobilizations feed on this paradox.
Populism, as framed here, is an inevitable effect of pluralist democratic practice, yet is
also defined as a perceived rupture in collective sovereignty, with that rupture attributed (falsely
or authentically) to the effects of elite forces/groups working against idealized community and/or
national norms. This formula achieves meaning within historicized symbolic systems,
institutions, and experiences, inflecting populist objectives and means and therefore does not
necessarily preclude inclusive populist mobilizations. However, locating inclusive populism is
less easy when movements meeting its criteria self-consciously reject the label, seeing the
language of populism as antithetical to democracy (Elmgren, 2018).
This view of “the people” as a collective political subject aimed at restoring or
actualizing popular sovereignty is but one among those outlined here. “The people” are also
defined as a cultural unity and as a shared economic class. These populist constructs of “the
people” as unified by ideas and/or economic infrastructures and political institutions are troubled
in academic reflections because they are believed prone to immunological logics that seek to
purify “the people” by expelling difference, by expelling the other (elites). Can a people unified
by ideas and/or ways of being in the world tolerate difference?
Hypothetically, at least, the idea of a synthetic unity of “the people” that respects each in
its particularity can operate as a regulative ideal for a pluralist populism that defines itself
emergently through its inclusions, as discussed in Part II. Such a view of “the people” would, of
course, have normative boundaries because some values are simply incommensurable with

democracy, as Mouffe (2018) has helpfully mapped in her distinction between agonistic and
antagonistic discourses (see Part II), with antagonistic discourses championing values/practices
that are inconsistent with democracy. But is there a slippery slope between agonistic and
antagonistic populisms?
In Chapter 16: “The Social Psychology of Populism,” Paris Aslanidis examines social-
psychological dynamics that effectively homogenize in-groups, while demonizing out-groups,
such as elites. The effect of this homogenization is that boundaries are marked and policed,
creating fertile symbolic space for exploitation by populist entrepreneurs, historically referred to
as demagogues. Failures of “the people” to create more inclusive distinctions, to fall into the
infinite immunological attack against self, can be explained by a variety of forces, ranging from
social-psychological features to material conditions of scarcity and deprivation, as discussed in
Part III. One particularly salient explanatory frame for populists’ tendency to become
immunological concerns the public’s susceptibility to demagoguery, what Aslanidis refers to as
populist entrepreneurialism. The relationship between demagoguery, understood in various ways,
and populist mobilizations are a theme across Part IV contributions.
Concerns that the people constituting democratic publics can be controlled by autocrats
and/or demagogues are hardly new. In ancient Greek democracies, a demagogue was a leader of
the people (demos = people, agogos = leader), promising the restoration of popular sovereignty
(Simonton, 2019; Whedbee, 2004). Toward the end of the fifth century in Athens, demagoguery
was increasingly described as organized by the binary logic of “the people” versus the elite
(Simonton, 2019). The symbolic polarization contributed to subsequent stigmatization and a
loosening of connection to authentic restoration. For example, Gustainis (1990) defines a
demagogue “as one who habitually uses the hallmarks of demagoguery,” which are identified as

including self-interest, disregard for truth, and opportunism (pp. 155-156). Gustainis
characterizes demagoguery in relation to personal and emotional appeals; oversimplification;
specious argumentation with respect to reasoning and/or evidence; ad hominem attacks; anti-
intellectualism; and political pageantry. As illustrated here, demagoguery is today semantically
indistinguishable from sophism, largely disconnected from ethical underpinnings (e.g.,
restoration of popular sovereignty), and therefore tainted.
The moral tainting of demagoguery casts suspicion upon rhetors and discourses claiming
to speak for “the people,” Yet, ossified political apparatuses and institutional inequalities
produce the conditions of possibility for calls for reform. In Chapter 17: “Populist Corruption
Talk,” Robert Boatright, shows how “populist corruption talk” illustrates both reactionary and
restorative impulses by “the people” against crises in legitimacy that can take reformist or
revolutionary forms. According to Boatright, corruption talk aligns with hallmarks of
demagoguery, with the audience hook being the moral outrage associated with corruption.
Boatright focuses on distinguishing between corruption talk that seeks to “delegitimize or cast
out,” on the one hand, or to “modify behaviors and mend or repair shared enterprises, on the
other.” Boatright sees talk that expunges as revolutionary, while reform talk is consistent with
pluralist democratic politics and is therefore restorative, rooted in a basic faith in democratic
institutions. The preference for revolution or reform is contingent upon the degree of populist
faith in democratic institutions; although, ultimately, that faith in institutional resilience is itself
shaped by corruption talk. Boatright indirectly invokes the ancient ambivalence regarding
demagoguery’s capacities to threaten or invigorate democracy.
In Chapter 18: “Populism, Democracy, and the Ukrainian Uprisings of the Orange
Revolution and Euromaidan,” Barbara Wejnert also grapples with the democratic potential and

challenges of populist mobilizations as movements of “the people” embrace demagoguery
shaped by anti-democratic forms of power and social organization. Wejnert argues that the
binary logic of populist discourse, coupled with the demand for direct democracy, replace
commitments to pluralism and representative politics, leading to support for authoritarian
leadership and fueling logics of expulsion. Wejnert’s chapter illustrates the following paradox:
frustration with representative democratic processes can engender populist support for
authoritarianism, cloaked in restorative ideas about returning sovereignty to “the people.”
At a more pragmatic level, in Chapter 19: “Twenty-First Century American Populist
Movements,” David Meyer observes that populist efforts to enact full popular sovereignty face
fundamental organizational challenges, as illustrated by Occupy Wall Street’s failed efforts,
which impeded articulation of leadership and strategic objectives and thereby eroded the
movement’s capacities for change. Democracy is messy and the most direct forms of democratic
governance are often the most inefficient. Meyers’ chapter unpacks the challenges of organic
self-governance by and for “the people,” bringing into relief the seemingly irremediable gap
between idealizations and enactments of popular sovereignty.
Finally, in Chapter 20: “Crisis Government,” Camila Vergara examines revolutionary
populism affirming the idea of democratic restoration. Vergara has faith in organic leadership,
arguing that the populist leader intent on restoring collective sovereignty may be required to
effect changes to institutions whose level of corruption exceeds capacities of reform. Vergara
contends that exceptions to democratic rule are required in states of emergency to restore popular
sovereignty. What legitimizes this suspension is the restorative capacity to save democracy itself
by restoring “the people’s” sovereignty, but power once consolidated challenges subsequent
efforts to free its dispersions. Vegara’s argument hinges on the capacity of a sovereign power to

represent the plurality of “the people” and act on their behalf, ultimately in order to create a
better democracy. Yet, if a sovereign can authentically embody “the will of the people,” then
democracy itself loses its moral high ground as the best form of governance. Part IV explores
issues pertaining to “the people” and their relationship to elites. The case studies offered here
illustrate that demagogues and populist movements promising to restore “the will of the people”
face significant political and organizational challenges, even when inspired by grassroots and
pluralist mobilizations.
As researchers we should reflect critically upon our definitions and assumptions about the
relationships across populism, “the people,” and democracy. It turns out that populism is less a
“rallying call” than a category of social understanding. Thus, DeCleen, Glynos, and Mondon
(2018) argue for the importance of studying rhetoric about populism, asking “how it is invoked,
by whom and to what purpose and effect” (p. 649). Hence, we urge the reflexive critic to think
carefully about what gets designated as populist and why and by whom. Mapping the
particularities and complex developments of social mobilizations of “the people” and their
“others,” as well as the representations of those mobilizations, requires charting communications
and performances by multiple (individual and/or organizational) actors, including representations
offered by allegedly neutral observers, such as news reporters and academics.
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