The People vs. Democracy?

Jan-Werner Mueller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. His latest book is What is Populism?

Mar 6, 2018 Jan-Werner Mueller, Project Syndicate

Are voters really so irrational and ill-informed that they make terrible choices, as the election result in Italy, the UK’s Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the US seem to suggest? If they are, as many liberals have come to believe, the obvious next step is to take even more decision-making power away from them.

PRINCETON – The election result in Italy, where populists and far-right parties topped the polls, following the twin disasters of Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s election in the United States, seems certain to harden a common liberal belief: the people brought these calamities on themselves. “Ordinary citizens,” according to this view, are so irrational and ill-informed that they make terrible choices. Some go a step further and attribute to them coherent preferences for anti-democratic leaders. Indeed, a new book asserts that the problem is one of The People vs. Democracy.

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The Fall of the President’s Men

 Elizabeth Drew is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

Nov 3, 2017 Elizabeth Drew, Project Syndicate

As US President Donald Trump leaves for a ten-day trip to Asia, he finds himself in perhaps the deepest trouble since his troubled presidency began. And as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation draws in more of his associates, he will have an even harder time than he has had up to now governing the country he was elected to serve.

WASHINGTON, DC – Like the rest of his fellow Americans, US President Donald Trump is learning that, when it comes to an investigation of a president and his team for criminal activities there’s a vast difference between the hypothetical and the actual. Trump received that lesson this week, with the indictment of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and of Manafort’s business partner, Rick Gates. More ominous still was the fact that a young foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, had reached a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and had been cooperating with investigators since early summer.

How Populists Win When They Lose

Jan-Werner Mueller

Jan-Werner Mueller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna. His latest book is What is Populism?

JUN 15, 2017 Project Syndicate

VIENNA – Today, it appears that every single election in Europe can be reduced to one central question: “Is it a win or a loss for populism?” Until the Netherlands’ election in March, a populist wave – or, as Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, put it, a “tsunami” – seemed irresistible. Now, however, the wave has suddenly receded: following Emmanuel Macron’s big wins in France’s presidential and legislative elections, we are supposedly living in a “post-populist moment.”

Unfortunately, this view of populism’s rise and fall merits the label often attached to populism itself: simplistic. The notion of an unstoppable wave took for granted that both the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the United States were triumphs for populism, rather than for establishment conservatives.

To be sure, both Farage and Trump are populists, but not because they criticize elites. After all, vigilance toward elites can in fact be a sign of democratic engagement. What distinguishes populists is their claim that they alone represent the “real people” or “the silent majority.” For populists, an election is never just about opposing policy views; it is about the personal corruption, immorality, and fundamental illegitimacy of all other contenders for power.

Theresa May’s Other Citizens of Nowhere

Jan-Werner Mueller

Jan-Werner Mueller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna. His latest book is What is Populism?

JUN 9, 2017 Project Syndicate

VIENNA– British Prime Minister Theresa May has, of her own volition, stripped her Conservative Party of its governing parliamentary majority by calling an early election. If she stays on as prime minister, she will also strip British citizens of the political and economic rights conferred by membership in the European Union. But May’s habit of stripping away people’s rights and powers is not new: for years, she has been normalizing the practice of stripping certain Britons of their citizenship altogether, even at the risk of rendering them stateless “citizens of nowhere.”

During the United Kingdom’s just-concluded election campaign, May promised to change or nullify any human-rights laws that “get in the way” of fighting terrorism. This is a credible threat: May herself has pioneered the practice of revoking individuals’ citizenship, usually in the name of national security, but sometimes as a form of symbolic punishment.

Depriving people of their citizenship is immoral – and ineffective. And it has a dark history. During the twentieth century, totalitarian states set records in denationalization: 1.5 million people in the Soviet Union alone were stripped of their citizenship.