There’s a manner and, I recommend, just one strategy to defend populism from a liberal viewpoint: it’s to reject the populist idea of “the individuals.”
Let the individuals be plural, that’s, a set of people. Let every particular person be acknowledged as having a proper to veto (at some contractual-constitutional stage) any prohibition or mandate he (or she, after all) doesn’t consent to. A fortiori, no subset of the individuals might use coercion towards the people in one other subset. It follows that the elite or the consultants (“they”) or the politicians themselves might not legitimately boss individuals round. If populism is thus characterised, it’s defendable from each an ethical and an financial viewpoint as it might coincide with (classical) liberalism. Liberalism is a couple of damaging veto proper of every particular person–no less than as formalized by James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay, however the paradigm runs deeper. Liberalism definitely and emphatically doesn’t assist an unrestricted constructive proper of some people, even a majority of them, to impose bans or mandates on people within the plural individuals.
That’s not how populism, in the usual which means of the phrase, is outlined and offered to the plenty, that’s, to a majority or a plurality of them. Populism requires the existence of “the individuals” singular (see, for instance, Cass Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Brief Introduction [Oxford University Press, 2017] for the academically accepted definition, which is near the one I assign to the populists). If “the individuals” (singular) doesn’t exist as such, then populism just isn’t attainable; it’s only a label that hides an interventionist, collectivist, and authoritarian ideology. (See my “The Impossibility of Populism,” The Impartial Evaluate, Summer time 2021.)
To be each internally constant and appropriate with liberalism, populism must take “the individuals” within the plural and liberal sense of “people,” with none extra deserving of energy over his fellows. It might not be “populism” anymore.
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The Individuals within the populist sense, as an organism, by DALL-E
