Ancillary #4 — Populism

I chose the topic of populism for my debate. Throughout the articles that I read, starting from the CQ background to “Could Populism Actually Be Good for Democracy?” by James Miller , I found that each article clearly defined the term “populism”; for example, the “us vs them” in the CQ context article, the “ordinary vs elite” in “Populism Endangers Democracy”, and the clarification of different types of populist in Miller’s essay all served to contextualize populism.

Specifically, I agreed with Miller’s clarification of left-wing and right-wing populism, where left-wing wished to control bigger business and provide more opportunities for the “ordinary” people based on governmental restrictions (all three papers mentioned Bernie Sanders and his self-defined democratic socialist); on the other hand, the right-wing targeted more on racial groups and minorities, where some right-wing populists may explicitly define “ordinary people” as the working-class whites, promoting the belief of “white nationalism”.

I did not necessarily disagree with any approaches or concepts mentioned in the three articles, but after reading them, I felt like there may be a lack of information on both sides of the debate: the advantages of populism and the potential risks. From my perspective, all five articles spent a majority of the time debating whether populism hurts democracy, but not many authors touched upon the clear advantages and promises of populism.

Since the right-wing tended to focus on racial classification, many authors argued that their culturalist and conservative senses clearly manifested a deeply authoritarian mindset; as a result, these beliefs ultimately encourage people under this category to construct and reinforce threat and danger to the public. At the same time, these perspectives also carried out a sense of cynicism to many people in the working-class, and the fact that the targeted group — the so-called “ordinary” working-class whites — represented nearly 40% of the population exacerbated the issue at hand, so I definitely found these authors’ arguments convincing.

Based on the given articles and information, additionally, I would like to highlight an argument made in Miller’s essay, “Could populism actually be good in democracy?”. Miller stated that “current affairs may seem especially bleak, but fears about democracy are nothing new”. Unlike the other passages, Miller confirmed that each transition of power represented a possible change to democracy. Throughout his argument, Miller provided pieces of historical evidence and concluded that it was only “at the end of the 18th century that democracy reappeared as a modern political ideal” after the French Revolution. His analysis reflected the notion that the democratic project, or the whole entire principle of democracy, both ancient and modern, was “inherently unstable”.