What Is Populism?

The term “populism”, increasingly heard in society, seems to be used as a synonym for demagoguery. It is applied indiscriminately to governments, political regimes, forms of State, personalities or economic policies.

It’s a term we constantly hear about and always in a pejorative tone. However, we see that before being a word commonly used in media and political discussions, it was an academic term with different nuances.

In this article, we’ll look at the origins and prospects of populism. We will also study the main characteristics of Latin American populism, given its relevance.

Perspectives of a populist government

Despite the difficulties in arriving at a systematic conceptualization of the term, we can consider three perspectives:

• Populism as an ideology. Ideology that separates society into two antagonistic groups – the people, pure and true, and the elite, corrupt. Under this concept of populism, one can understand the reasons why the term can be used to define such diverse policies.
• Populism as a discursive style. This perspective argues that populism is a style of discourse. A rhetoric that sees politics as an ethics and morality between the people and the oligarchy. The language used by those who claim to speak on behalf of the people: “we” (the people) and “them” (the elite).
• Populism as a political strategy. This is the most common perspective. Populism here refers to the application of certain economic policies (for example, the redistribution of income or the nationalization of companies). Likewise, populism is also a mode of political organization, in which a leader exercises power with the support of his followers, usually belonging to marginalized sectors.

term origin

As we were saying, this term had academic usage before its common or popular usage. It was first used in the late 19th century to name a stage in the development of the socialist movement in Russia.

This term was used to describe the anti-intellectualist wave, a belief that socialist militants must learn from the people before they can be their guides.

A few years later, Russian Marxists began to use the term in a pejorative sense to refer to socialists who thought that the main subjects of the revolution were the peasants and that the socialist society of the future should be built on rural communes.

Thus, in the international socialist movement, “populism” began to be used to designate a movement that opposed the upper classes, but which, unlike Marxism, identified itself with the peasantry and was nationalist.

On the other hand, and with no apparent connection with Russian usage, the term began to be used in the United States to refer to the ephemeral People’s Party, which emerged supported mainly by poor farmers with anti-elitist and progressive ideas.

Thus, we see that, in both cases, the term referred to a rural movement with anti-intellectualist tendencies.

However, in the 1960s and 1970s, other scholars took up the term in a different, albeit connected, sense. Thus, “populism” was used to name a series of reformist movements in the Third World (Argentina’s Peronism, Brazil’s Varguismo and Mexico’s Cardenismo).

Here, the distinguishing feature was the type of leadership: personal more than institutional, one more than plural, and emotional more than rational.

This is how the academic world stopped using the concept of “populism” to define peasant movements and started to use it to designate a broad ideological and political phenomenon. In the 1970s, populism was already a movement that threatened democracy, always with a negative connotation.

Latin American populism

Latin American populism has always been recognized for its inclusive character. In particular, there are three elements that define this characteristic:

• Popular sovereignty. After the United States and Haiti, Latin America is the first area of ​​decolonization. The idea of ​​nation arises, then, building national communities where before there were colonies led by white elites. This is how Latin American populism was built on an original idea of ​​popular sovereignty.

• State weakness. Widely recognized. A historical weakness that made it difficult to fulfill populist promises and their materialization into rights. Populist cycles come together based on promises of unfulfilled rights.
• The populist reaction. Latin American populisms emerge as a reaction to the limitations of the systems that precede them, in a context of inequalities, instability and political volatility. Thus, the promise of populism has a material and symbolic basis, intending to give voice and vote to the dispossessed.

We saw how the term populism evolved, acquiring a negative connotation that it did not have at the beginning.

Thus, the term went from being, in principle, a recognition of ignorance and the need for learning for those who intend to govern to refer to certain political movements that intend to win the people’s sympathy with their proposals, regardless of whether their proposals are better or not for the people.