5-Star Movement leader Beppe Grillo shows a poster in Italian reading "Out of the euro, 50,000 signatures already collected in a weekend", December 2014. Domenico Stinellis/Press Association. All rights reserved.In much current usage populism is seen as alien to, or as the antithesis of liberal democracy, a symptom of endemic crisis (Grahame Thompson, Brexit and the rise of populism openDemocracy, 21 July 2016). Yet liberal democratic political forms are inherently bound up with populisms of various kinds, and this is a normal state of affairs. This is not to downplay populism or – in some, indeed many, cases – the threat it poses to the integrity of liberal democracy, but it must be seen as porously interwoven with liberal democratic political forms. We need to understand how – empirically – democracy, liberalism and populism operate together and at times against each other.
What we are seeing today with Brexit, Trump and all the rest is not so much the growth of some kind of homogenous if amorphous wave of populism but a crisis of liberal democracy in which the populist side of democracy seems increasingly opposed to its liberal side. Democracy, of course, has always been torn in this respect. Political philosophers are used to the idea that liberalism and democracy represent an uneasy partnership. There is no particular reason for the demos to be liberal; on the contrary, the demos can be brutal, reactionary and exclusionary. Liberalism is merely the good conscience of democracy. Enlightenment political theory – Montesquieu, Hume – regarded the populace as intemperate and emotional; government was to provide moderation from these tendencies. Indeed moderation here meant not some kind of middle ground but something more like a system of counter-balances against enthusiasm or extremism, whether of peoples or princes.
Modern liberalism has inherited this idea in the form of representative government, the division of powers and the rule of law. The principle of representation is, however, perhaps the most crucial of liberal principles. It moderates power, limits the passions of the demos, prevents despotism. Yet, it is also about channelling the multiple wills of the populace, and so promoting democracy. As the philosopher Judith Shklar argued, liberalism and democracy are not necessarily joined at the hip, but they are at least in some kind of marriage of convenience. And indeed one can far more easily imagine a democracy without liberalism than a liberalism without democracy.
