Jan-Werner Müller is a political philosopher and historian of ideas who teaches at Princeton University. His 2016 book, What Is Populism?, managed to set the agenda for intelligent debate over the future of democracy during the first Trump administration. Conceptually precise, historically rich and politically acute, the book focuses on populism as a danger to democratic pluralism and thereby reveals why figures like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both sometimes labeled populist, have never been two sides of the same coin. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration I met with Müller over Zoom to ask how he understands populism now, and what lessons he thinks leftist and liberal intellectuals should draw from the past few years.
—Jonny Thakkar
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Jonny Thakkar: Populism is one of those terms that gets used as a shorthand for any number of different things. What do you take its core meaning to be?
Jan-Werner Müller: Populists are political leaders who claim that they and only they represent what they often refer to as “the real people” or “the silent majority.” That stance has two damaging consequences for democracy. One is that populists declare all other contenders for power to be fundamentally illegitimate, so that political disagreement is no longer just about policies or even about values; it’s about champions of the people versus enemies of the people. The other consequence is that populists suggest that everyone who does not fit their ultimately symbolic construction of the real people—or, for that matter, anybody who disagrees with the populist leader—might not truly belong to “the real people” at all. So not all citizens are automatically part of the people. What for me matters the most about populism is not anti-elitism but what I call anti-pluralism: the tendency always to exclude others, pretty obviously at the level of party politics, but less obviously, and more dangerously, at the level of the people themselves.
Now, when we look at the meaning of concepts, very often we reach for the history of particular words, and I’m aware that what I’m saying differs significantly from a kind of inherited political language in the United States and to some degree in other countries. I’m suggesting this usage as a way of trying to understand a particular phenomenon. Many disagree with this approach, of course. But if what you’re talking about when you use the word populism is just Main Street versus Wall Street, or basically social democracy, why not just say that—as opposed to potentially causing a lot of confusion, and quite possibly a lot of political harm, when all of a sudden [Donald] Trump, [Marine] Le Pen, [Viktor] Orbán, Bernie Sanders and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon all end up in the same basket? I think we can legitimately ask the question whether, ultimately, that notion of populism equals anti-establishment doesn’t impair our capacity for political judgment.
JT: Many people want to say that any politician who offers an easy solution to a complex problem or who makes a misleading promise is by definition a populist—but just to be clear, for you that doesn’t, in and of itself, make someone a populist. Could it better be described as demagogical?
JWM: Yes, I think we have a perfectly serviceable concept of the demagogue for that kind of stance. And I would add, maybe somewhat more controversially, that it is part of the role of professional politicians to find symbolic condensations that reduce complexity in order to communicate. Obviously that can go wrong in all kinds of ways, and we’re all allowed to criticize that, but it’d be strange to say that any such effort is automatically illegitimate.
JT: So the conflation of demagoguery and populism can serve a kind of ideological role in the sense of making it harder for us to actually grasp what’s really going on politically.
JWM: Yes, because for most people—although the U.S. and to some extent Latin America are exceptions here—populism is not a positive term. So once you stick that label on somebody, they’re going to have a problem. Of course, some do try to then turn it around, for instance Le Pen and Orbán, who said, Oh yes, if that means I’m for the people, of course I’m a populist.
JT: One of the things that’s coming out is that if you use the term populist in an expansive sense, then pretty much any successful politician is going to have to be a populist, i.e. somebody who’s going to simplify things so as to appeal to people. I wonder if it might be a fundamental structural possibility within democracy for a politician to lay claim to being the voice of the people and to begin defining the people in an exclusionary way.
JWM: The short answer is yes. As long as we have representative democracies, there’s no way of excluding the possibility of somebody appearing with a claim exclusively to represent the people. In fact, even in a direct democracy like ancient Athens—where not everyone is physically present—it is possible that somebody says, “I uniquely know what the popular will is.” Unfortunately, the tendency today is to buy the rhetoric of populist politicians far too easily and to mistake what a loud minority is saying for the views of a silent majority.
JT: That opens up into a broader question about democracy: What are we talking about when we’re talking about the will of the people? In any kind of election, it’s extremely rare that over 50 percent of the adult population have voted for the winning party or candidate given the way electoral systems work and how many people don’t vote. But even if that does happen, it’s still not the case that the people have spoken—51 percent of the people may have spoken. Not only that, but people vote for all sorts of reasons, and we don’t actually know what exactly they’re trying to communicate. Of course, we do surveys and then, typically, there’s some kind of process whereby the signals and the data get squished into a narrative about what actually happened. And that allows politicians to then say, The people have said this, the will of the people is this. But you might just be skeptical that there is a will of the people. And if you’re skeptical of that, you might start wondering how democracy is ever supposed to work.
JWM: I would suggest that there’s nothing wrong with talking about something like the will of the people as a contestable and ultimately fallible proposition. Of course, as many of our colleagues will also point out, democratic representation is not some kind of mechanical process where the system simply reproduces what’s already out there in society. It’s a creative process where leaders turn up and say, “Here are ideas or interests or identities which have been neglected, which are ignored, which deserve more representation,” etc. That is normal democratic contestation. The respect in which populists are going to differ from this is that they do not treat the will of the people as a fallible proposition involving the aggregation of different groups. Hence their tendency—not always, but very frequently—to deny election outcomes. Because from their point of view it can’t be that they don’t really speak for the people. So what they often do is take another look at that ominous notion of the silent majority, because, by definition, if they represent the silent majority and the majority is free to express itself, then they would win every election. If they don’t win, they turn around and say it must be that somebody or something silenced the majority.
JT: This is related to a question that I think people will have about the concept of populism as you want us to use it, which is, what is its relation to fascism? There’s a text from Mussolini and one of his allies, Giovanni Gentile, in which he says, I represent the people, the real people—and as against the liberal quantitative conception of the people that involves adding up numbers and votes and things like that, mine is a qualitative conception of the people that can’t be reduced to quantity, so I can never be outnumbered on this because I alone know what the real people is, and I alone represent the real people. And in his view that’s what it is to be a fascist. I’m generally skeptical of attempts to describe Trump and people like him as fascists, but there does seem to be some connection here.
JWM: Every fascist is a populist, but not every populist is a fascist. So yes, there is no doubt that historically, fascists in the Twenties and Thirties made the claim uniquely to represent the people. The position you described was basically also Carl Schmitt’s: there is this mechanical liberal thing where you have to count votes, and then there’s a mystical process where the people, through acclamation, can choose their true leader. That was very typical for that time, and even though the rhetoric has changed, we sometimes also see that basic operation today. But fascism also contains plenty of other elements, including racism, the total mobilization of society, the cult of death and eternal struggle to the death. There’s a reason why all fascist regimes eventually went to war, whereas plenty of other authoritarian regimes did all kinds of horrible things, but did not feel compelled to mobilize their societies and end up in mortal conflict on battlefields. So that’s the short version of what I think about this. Having said that, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask oneself whether fascism simply takes a different shape today. It’s true that very few young people today would say, Hey, I want to march up and down the streets in a uniform for ten hours, because that’s the best possible life. In other words, it’s always worth asking whether we need to think beyond a one-to-one comparison with, let’s say, 1934.
JT: On the other end of the political spectrum, is there such a thing as left populism? It’s easy to see how the notion of uniquely representing the people lends itself to the notion of a Volk or a kind of exclusionary, nativist logic. But at the same time, you might think of the hard left as speaking of the people as against an elite that stands against them and tries to oppress or exploit them.
JWM: Recall that, for me, populism does not simply equate with anti-elitism. All of us can criticize the powerful, and it would be strange if we said that doing so is a danger sign for democracy. It’s the anti-pluralism part that matters. So if somebody says, “I uniquely represent the socialist Bolivarian people,” as Chávez did, as Maduro does, I think that’s a pretty clear indication that left populism is at work. I think it’s also usually a red flag that populists treat their own political parties in an extremely autocratic manner. If you look around the world today on the right—be it Modi, be it Erdoğan, be it Orbán—all of them basically disallow internal pluralism on their side—not to speak of Trump and his transformation of the GOP into a kind of personality cult. And if you look at someone like Mélenchon in France, it’s also a sort of giveaway that he treats his own party in an extremely authoritarian manner. So yes, there can be left populism. But Bernie Sanders is not an example. As much as the New York Times has for a long time tried to equate Sanders and Trump as dangerous populists, Sanders has never said that somebody working on Wall Street is not a real American. He makes concrete criticisms of oligarchical tendencies in the political system; that’s very different.
JT: Let’s move to Trump in particular. What did you make of his electoral campaign this past year? Did you see him employing the same kinds of tropes as he did in 2016, or was there a change with respect to how he was constructing the notion of the people?
JWM: That’s a good, which is to say difficult, question. I think that one day when we have a better sense of this historical period, we might say yes, there was a shift from 2016 as a more obvious, let’s say, ethnic anti-pluralism, to an anti-pluralism that is closer to “if you don’t agree with my understanding of American greatness, and if you’re not part of this project, then I’m going to question your status, but I’m less concerned about what you look like and where your parents came from” and so on. That seems to me a plausible hypothesis. Whether it’s really true, I’m not sure at this point.
JT: There hasn’t been a Muslim ban yet—
JWM: Might well be coming. So that’s why I’m reluctant to commit to the view that somehow racism, Islamophobia and so on have disappeared from Trump’s vision.
JT: And Vance is very much on the nativist end of the spectrum—his speech at the convention was America is a nation, not an idea.
JWM: Many of us read the whole story about Haitian immigrants as signifying that basically it doesn’t matter whether you are here legally or not. It’s really about ascriptive characteristics, period. So although I know that some of our colleagues want to tell the story that Trump now wants a color-blind society, and that somehow support from Hispanics and African Americans proves that there’s a different vision, I would treat all that with a great deal of caution. In any case, it’s not like all these communities have really swung behind him. And, as you said earlier, people vote for all kinds of reasons. It’s certainly still anti-pluralism, as in: “If you don’t agree with me, you’re an enemy of the people,” which is not, you’ll be surprised to hear, a democratic stance.
JT: How do you think someone as patently individualistic as Donald Trump has managed to be the vector for this sort of intrinsically collective notion of a people? This is somebody who thinks you’re a sucker if you want to put your life at risk for your country, and yet, at the same time, he’s been able to mobilize and weaponize the notion of the people and the nation. Do you have a sense of how that conjunction happens?
JWM: I think there is no monocausal explanation. Different groups hear different things. There’s one very curious sort of stance, which is basically, look, we’re all cheating, right? You cheat, I cheat, be clever at it, and so on. And that’s kind of hard to square with certain more patriotic talk and things which, at least to some people, can sound more idealistic. But it’s a multidimensional offering, so to speak. And ultimately, going back to an earlier point, it’s not like seventy-plus million people are now entirely on board with this one person. Many people are simply going to vote for their party, and as everybody knows, the Republican establishment has basically communicated to people that Trumpism is what it means to be a good Republican in 2025. So all that has to be factored in. Also, not all of this is new: a real pioneer of things we’re seeing today was [former Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi, who had exactly the same attitude toward Italians, where he effectively said, Look, you know, I cheat at my taxes, you cheat at your taxes, everybody knows that’s the game. And then he had lots of other things on offer as well, including normalizing post-fascists and introducing a certain form of pop politics that made the spectacle central. So I think it’s important not to treat Trump as a uniquely important figure in this respect.
JT: The thing that comes across very forcefully with Trump—to some extent, Berlusconi did this with his own legal struggles, but I don’t think it was quite as strong—is his appeal to victimhood and the way in which his wounded ego somehow stands in for the much more serious wounds of ordinary Americans. This notion of a wounded people seems to be quite critical to the history of populism. It’s not just that there are the true people of a country, and then there’s some elites, or some aliens, who need to be cast out to keep the purity and common sense of the true people. It’s also that the people has been aggrieved in some way that gives it cause for unquenchable resentment, and that somehow leads to this identification with the leader who represents that qualitative feeling of the wounded people.
JWM: Going back to your earlier question, one could say it’s not entirely new. Mussolini got a lot of mileage out of saying, Look, we Italians were screwed at the end of the First World War. Hitler did the same with the Treaty of Versailles. But then for them, it was also very important that at a certain point that sort of collective victimhood tipped over into a vision of heroism, which you don’t really get with contemporary populists. What you do get, and I entirely agree with you, is a certain technique of generating at least a superficial solidarity on the basis of a sense of shared victimhood in a specifically democratic context. The big claim, ultimately, is: How can it be that we are the majority and we should be in charge around here, and we are constantly sidelined and screwed and victimized and so on? Now, of course, in many cases they’re actually not the majority at all, but it’s a very powerful thing to tell people. And then it’s all the easier if you can keep pointing at minorities who supposedly are now acquiring illegitimate privileges.
JT: In his farewell address, Joe Biden referred to the rise of oligarchy in the United States, alluding to the strange way that business and tech elites have rallied around Trump, as the inauguration proved vividly. But many have observed that the alliance of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon can’t be too stable over the long term, given their different agendas and interests. What are your thoughts on what has brought those forces together and how their union might play out? Is that something that populism tends to in some way, or is it completely unrelated to the phenomenon of populism?
JWM: I would have thought that it’s a relatively contingent coalition of very different characters who do all have grievances. If you read what some Silicon Valley leaders are saying, along the lines of “I felt so victimized by the Biden administration”… I mean, [Marc] Andreessen even said, the Biden administration unleashed terrorism on Silicon Valley. You and I are guilty, because we are part of universities, and from about 2010 we supposedly started turning all these young people into communists who hate America. So all kinds of people also have stories about why the Democratic Party left them, they didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It’s just peculiar that the latest grand philosophical vision they have—and many of them do have grand visions because they keep writing op-eds and manifestos and so on—all seem strangely to align with their latest business model and their personal interests of one sort or another, be it crypto or be it “give me unclaimed territory like Greenland, because we can do great things with AI there,” etc. So I would be reluctant to say that just because it’s happening at the moment, we should somehow fit it into a conceptual scheme where populism plays a big role. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, sometimes it’s just better to keep these phenomena apart. Oligarchy is not new. Obviously, there are many oligarchs also in other democracies who are pushing the far right very strongly. Think of someone like [Vincent] Bolloré in France, who basically bought himself a media empire, and who was absolutely crucial to making [Éric] Zemmour a real player in French politics. So that’s not uniquely American. There is an important question for social scientists how oligarchs can use populism, why it resonates, etc. But I don’t see the value of baking oligarchy into the very concept of populism.
JT: One of the things I saw reading through your recent work is that you have a strong interest in Hungary and Orbán, to whom Trump and especially Vance have been looking as a model. As you point out, Orbán has combined populist politics that claims to be speaking for the silent majority with crony capitalism and distributes resources and government contracts to friends and allies while raising value-added tax on ordinary individuals. Is it too much to see a pattern there?
JWM: There is a certain playbook for autocratization now, and it is not difficult to copy. It’s not the same as populism, but there can be an elective affinity, in the sense that some of these actors start out by unleashing a certain type of cultural war that then is used to legitimate a concentration of power. Once you have the concentration of power, it becomes much easier to engage in a certain form of kleptocracy, and it’s been part of Orbán’s success that he basically leads his critics onto the territory of culture war. Now, that’s a misnomer in certain ways, because if we’re talking about, let’s say, the rights of sexual minorities, it’s not just “culture,” as if it was simply some sort of fluff, a matter of taste that doesn’t have real consequences for people. But it’s always been to Orbán’s advantage to essentially suggest to people, “Let’s talk about crazy liberals in Brussels who don’t like me because of LGBTQ+ issues,” as opposed to talking about kleptocratic autocracy.
JT: Is there anything you think we can learn here in America from the way that things have played out in Hungary?
JWM: This is a very large, complicated country, so to immediately transfer a lesson from a small, heavily centralized country where it was very easy to capture two or three institutions, and then it was basically game over for democracy, would be a mistake. Having said that, there is a kind of sequencing that I think one can productively think about, which is that you win an election, and although you don’t really have a mandate for fundamental change, you claim it anyway, then enough people fall in line for self-interested reasons that you can try to capture the relevant institutions, and you can also try to capture the major forms of legacy media and sometimes—I mean, this wasn’t the case with Orbán, of course—let’s say platforms as well, and then they will do your bidding and create an environment for the next election. So it becomes more and more likely that the next election is no longer going to be a fair one. Sometimes it’s not even free anymore, but the more typical thing to watch for is where the election is still free, in the sense that nobody stuffs the ballot boxes on Election Day, but it’s deeply unfair, because all sorts of resources and tricks are being used to make sure that you stay in power. I don’t think it’s crazy to think about that strategy as something that happened in Hungary and that we might be witnessing to some degree happening in the U.S. now.
JT: You wrote a piece in 2018 about what we can learn from Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on principled pluralism. Is that something that you view as a plausible way for leftist intellectuals to respond to populism?
JWM: It’s very unpopular to say anything remotely positive about Cold War liberalism these days, so I preface what I’m going to say with something said by a declared anti-liberal of sorts, namely Adorno, who, if I can paraphrase more or less plausibly, basically said, Whatever is being defended can’t be saved. In other words, if you are in this entirely defensive mode, as opposed to trying to develop and deepen whatever you now need to defend, the game is already lost. And there is something to that thought. It is astonishing how many self-declared defenders of democracy today are always reacting, are always defensive. It’s not true that all of them are idealizing the past. They’re not all reactionary centrists. But there’s something to the accusation that it seems like you never get out of the reactive, defensive mode.
What does this mean concretely? Two things, I would say. One is that you need to think harder about how you deal with existing institutions. If you are playing the game of “we have to respect norms and go for bipartisanship,” and the other side is playing a different game, you have a problem. And if you still haven’t understood that in 2025, I think that’s a massive problem. But you also need to go beyond that. And the problem is, when one says this, it can sound very trite—but you do need to have a positive vision for democracy. And I think there have been voices who have been able to offer such visions. If you look at what happened in France last summer, it was noticeable how the New Popular Front was not simply about anti-fascist discourse; they also talked a lot about policies, and they deliberately emphasized a certain kind of decency. I’m not saying that empirically that explains why they did relatively well, and I am not an uncritical defender of the whole alliance, but I think it was an interesting example of basically not being limited to saying, Marine Le Pen is dangerous, is a fascist, etc.
JT: One of the things you point out in the piece on Cold War liberals was that they were responding to a fairly coherent creed and doctrine in Marxism, and that gave them something to criticize and attack, whereas populism is a much more shifting target—there’s no book to study and criticize!
JWM: On the one hand, you might say that populism is an easy target, in that you can simply say, No, you don’t represent a homogeneous “real people” or “the silent majority.” But that’s not enough, obviously. One also needs to ask: Why is this happening? Why does this kind of talk gain a certain traction? Well, all countries are unhappy in their own ways, and it’s always going to be imperative to look very carefully at the exact confluence of forces that promote populism. Some are going to be more clearly ideological. Some are going to be more about certain cultural practices. Some are going to be about moral shifts, some about material pressures. To say something blindingly obvious, the success of far-right populism in a number of countries is incomprehensible if one doesn’t think about patriarchy, if one doesn’t think about how a certain discourse gains traction by being at the same time both ideological and ironic and invested in certain forms of trolling. So this is indeed not about an exegesis of deep doctrines. This is much more about understanding a cultural context which enables certain forms of politics.
JT: You began with the concept of populism, and the importance of keeping our concepts clear: Let’s distinguish populism from demagoguery. Let’s distinguish it from nativism and fascism and oligarchy and so on. Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about, even if that involves regimenting our language relative to the variety of ways in which a term has been used in the past. There’s some benefit to that kind of conceptual clarity, and it’s a typical move from a political theorist to say that bringing conceptual clarity can enable political judgment. But it also seems true that one thing the academy has failed at, and that the J. D. Vance type of critique of the academy has a point about, is that there isn’t much study of conservative thought or right-wing thought of any kind. It’s not really central to what we do. Most political theorists are not actually reading the discourses and writings of aspiring populists or authoritarians or autocrats. As we’ve just said, there’s a difficulty there in that you might wonder, to what extent is there anything to study? They’re not Lenin, so they don’t write long programmatic treatises. But would you agree that academia hasn’t found much of a role for the student of right-wing illiberal thought?
JWM: I would distinguish between two issues. I don’t agree with the view that conservatives are the last minority that can be openly persecuted and maligned on campus, and we need affirmative action for them and so on. If the thought is that, yes, people should be critically questioning their own stances, then yes, there are very philosophically interesting anti-liberals out there and one should read them. And we should, of course, expose students to as many interesting, intellectually challenging views as possible, and then they will make up their own minds in one form or another. Having said that, I’m not sure that any of the interesting anti-liberal thinkers out there can plausibly be seen as powers behind the throne. The real influence may be coming from certain online personalities and so on, who, with the greatest respect, or maybe not respect, might not always be worth studying in great detail—I’d be hard-pressed to want to include them in a course on conservative political thought which I have sometimes taught. But is it worth engaging with somebody like Adrian Vermeule? Yes, of course. There also two versions of Vermeule, though: there is the highly sophisticated theorist of the administrative state and common-good constitutionalism, and then there is the online troll. It’s important to keep those two apart, but one can ask which one is really more important in terms of inspiring the American right these days. Long story short, if you wanted to have more Schmitt or de Maistre on your syllabus, by all means, I think that’s a good idea.
JT: I actually think this is quite a deep problem for political philosophers and political theorists in constructing syllabuses. We’re naturally inclined toward the intellectually impressive and the well-wrought, the thing that needs decoding or interpreting. But those ideas might not be the ones that are most operative in society. Intellectually interesting ideas might not be the ones that are the most powerful. And there is a way in which the institutions of academia are designed to put the cleverest students in front of the cleverest writings. And that could lead a whole profession to be missing some of the biggest developments of our own era. I guess it seems to me that you’re not like me in that respect—you’re not missing those developments, and I admire that.
JWM: If you think back, since I mentioned Adorno, to certain Frankfurt School figures who had some claim to being philosophers and sociologists at the same time, it’s difficult to do in a serious way, but I think there was and is a great advantage to that.
Jan-Werner Müller is a political philosopher and historian of ideas who teaches at Princeton University. His 2016 book, What Is Populism?, managed to set the agenda for intelligent debate over the future of democracy during the first Trump administration. Conceptually precise, historically rich and politically acute, the book focuses on populism as a danger to democratic pluralism and thereby reveals why figures like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both sometimes labeled populist, have never been two sides of the same coin. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration I met with Müller over Zoom to ask how he understands populism now, and what lessons he thinks leftist and liberal intellectuals should draw from the past few years.
—Jonny Thakkar
●
Jonny Thakkar: Populism is one of those terms that gets used as a shorthand for any number of different things. What do you take its core meaning to be?
Jan-Werner Müller: Populists are political leaders who claim that they and only they represent what they often refer to as “the real people” or “the silent majority.” That stance has two damaging consequences for democracy. One is that populists declare all other contenders for power to be fundamentally illegitimate, so that political disagreement is no longer just about policies or even about values; it’s about champions of the people versus enemies of the people. The other consequence is that populists suggest that everyone who does not fit their ultimately symbolic construction of the real people—or, for that matter, anybody who disagrees with the populist leader—might not truly belong to “the real people” at all. So not all citizens are automatically part of the people. What for me matters the most about populism is not anti-elitism but what I call anti-pluralism: the tendency always to exclude others, pretty obviously at the level of party politics, but less obviously, and more dangerously, at the level of the people themselves.
Now, when we look at the meaning of concepts, very often we reach for the history of particular words, and I’m aware that what I’m saying differs significantly from a kind of inherited political language in the United States and to some degree in other countries. I’m suggesting this usage as a way of trying to understand a particular phenomenon. Many disagree with this approach, of course. But if what you’re talking about when you use the word populism is just Main Street versus Wall Street, or basically social democracy, why not just say that—as opposed to potentially causing a lot of confusion, and quite possibly a lot of political harm, when all of a sudden [Donald] Trump, [Marine] Le Pen, [Viktor] Orbán, Bernie Sanders and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon all end up in the same basket? I think we can legitimately ask the question whether, ultimately, that notion of populism equals anti-establishment doesn’t impair our capacity for political judgment.
JT: Many people want to say that any politician who offers an easy solution to a complex problem or who makes a misleading promise is by definition a populist—but just to be clear, for you that doesn’t, in and of itself, make someone a populist. Could it better be described as demagogical?
JWM: Yes, I think we have a perfectly serviceable concept of the demagogue for that kind of stance. And I would add, maybe somewhat more controversially, that it is part of the role of professional politicians to find symbolic condensations that reduce complexity in order to communicate. Obviously that can go wrong in all kinds of ways, and we’re all allowed to criticize that, but it’d be strange to say that any such effort is automatically illegitimate.
JT: So the conflation of demagoguery and populism can serve a kind of ideological role in the sense of making it harder for us to actually grasp what’s really going on politically.
JWM: Yes, because for most people—although the U.S. and to some extent Latin America are exceptions here—populism is not a positive term. So once you stick that label on somebody, they’re going to have a problem. Of course, some do try to then turn it around, for instance Le Pen and Orbán, who said, Oh yes, if that means I’m for the people, of course I’m a populist.
JT: One of the things that’s coming out is that if you use the term populist in an expansive sense, then pretty much any successful politician is going to have to be a populist, i.e. somebody who’s going to simplify things so as to appeal to people. I wonder if it might be a fundamental structural possibility within democracy for a politician to lay claim to being the voice of the people and to begin defining the people in an exclusionary way.
JWM: The short answer is yes. As long as we have representative democracies, there’s no way of excluding the possibility of somebody appearing with a claim exclusively to represent the people. In fact, even in a direct democracy like ancient Athens—where not everyone is physically present—it is possible that somebody says, “I uniquely know what the popular will is.” Unfortunately, the tendency today is to buy the rhetoric of populist politicians far too easily and to mistake what a loud minority is saying for the views of a silent majority.
JT: That opens up into a broader question about democracy: What are we talking about when we’re talking about the will of the people? In any kind of election, it’s extremely rare that over 50 percent of the adult population have voted for the winning party or candidate given the way electoral systems work and how many people don’t vote. But even if that does happen, it’s still not the case that the people have spoken—51 percent of the people may have spoken. Not only that, but people vote for all sorts of reasons, and we don’t actually know what exactly they’re trying to communicate. Of course, we do surveys and then, typically, there’s some kind of process whereby the signals and the data get squished into a narrative about what actually happened. And that allows politicians to then say, The people have said this, the will of the people is this. But you might just be skeptical that there is a will of the people. And if you’re skeptical of that, you might start wondering how democracy is ever supposed to work.
JWM: I would suggest that there’s nothing wrong with talking about something like the will of the people as a contestable and ultimately fallible proposition. Of course, as many of our colleagues will also point out, democratic representation is not some kind of mechanical process where the system simply reproduces what’s already out there in society. It’s a creative process where leaders turn up and say, “Here are ideas or interests or identities which have been neglected, which are ignored, which deserve more representation,” etc. That is normal democratic contestation. The respect in which populists are going to differ from this is that they do not treat the will of the people as a fallible proposition involving the aggregation of different groups. Hence their tendency—not always, but very frequently—to deny election outcomes. Because from their point of view it can’t be that they don’t really speak for the people. So what they often do is take another look at that ominous notion of the silent majority, because, by definition, if they represent the silent majority and the majority is free to express itself, then they would win every election. If they don’t win, they turn around and say it must be that somebody or something silenced the majority.
JT: This is related to a question that I think people will have about the concept of populism as you want us to use it, which is, what is its relation to fascism? There’s a text from Mussolini and one of his allies, Giovanni Gentile, in which he says, I represent the people, the real people—and as against the liberal quantitative conception of the people that involves adding up numbers and votes and things like that, mine is a qualitative conception of the people that can’t be reduced to quantity, so I can never be outnumbered on this because I alone know what the real people is, and I alone represent the real people. And in his view that’s what it is to be a fascist. I’m generally skeptical of attempts to describe Trump and people like him as fascists, but there does seem to be some connection here.
JWM: Every fascist is a populist, but not every populist is a fascist. So yes, there is no doubt that historically, fascists in the Twenties and Thirties made the claim uniquely to represent the people. The position you described was basically also Carl Schmitt’s: there is this mechanical liberal thing where you have to count votes, and then there’s a mystical process where the people, through acclamation, can choose their true leader. That was very typical for that time, and even though the rhetoric has changed, we sometimes also see that basic operation today. But fascism also contains plenty of other elements, including racism, the total mobilization of society, the cult of death and eternal struggle to the death. There’s a reason why all fascist regimes eventually went to war, whereas plenty of other authoritarian regimes did all kinds of horrible things, but did not feel compelled to mobilize their societies and end up in mortal conflict on battlefields. So that’s the short version of what I think about this. Having said that, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask oneself whether fascism simply takes a different shape today. It’s true that very few young people today would say, Hey, I want to march up and down the streets in a uniform for ten hours, because that’s the best possible life. In other words, it’s always worth asking whether we need to think beyond a one-to-one comparison with, let’s say, 1934.
JT: On the other end of the political spectrum, is there such a thing as left populism? It’s easy to see how the notion of uniquely representing the people lends itself to the notion of a Volk or a kind of exclusionary, nativist logic. But at the same time, you might think of the hard left as speaking of the people as against an elite that stands against them and tries to oppress or exploit them.
JWM: Recall that, for me, populism does not simply equate with anti-elitism. All of us can criticize the powerful, and it would be strange if we said that doing so is a danger sign for democracy. It’s the anti-pluralism part that matters. So if somebody says, “I uniquely represent the socialist Bolivarian people,” as Chávez did, as Maduro does, I think that’s a pretty clear indication that left populism is at work. I think it’s also usually a red flag that populists treat their own political parties in an extremely autocratic manner. If you look around the world today on the right—be it Modi, be it Erdoğan, be it Orbán—all of them basically disallow internal pluralism on their side—not to speak of Trump and his transformation of the GOP into a kind of personality cult. And if you look at someone like Mélenchon in France, it’s also a sort of giveaway that he treats his own party in an extremely authoritarian manner. So yes, there can be left populism. But Bernie Sanders is not an example. As much as the New York Times has for a long time tried to equate Sanders and Trump as dangerous populists, Sanders has never said that somebody working on Wall Street is not a real American. He makes concrete criticisms of oligarchical tendencies in the political system; that’s very different.
JT: Let’s move to Trump in particular. What did you make of his electoral campaign this past year? Did you see him employing the same kinds of tropes as he did in 2016, or was there a change with respect to how he was constructing the notion of the people?
JWM: That’s a good, which is to say difficult, question. I think that one day when we have a better sense of this historical period, we might say yes, there was a shift from 2016 as a more obvious, let’s say, ethnic anti-pluralism, to an anti-pluralism that is closer to “if you don’t agree with my understanding of American greatness, and if you’re not part of this project, then I’m going to question your status, but I’m less concerned about what you look like and where your parents came from” and so on. That seems to me a plausible hypothesis. Whether it’s really true, I’m not sure at this point.
JT: There hasn’t been a Muslim ban yet—
JWM: Might well be coming. So that’s why I’m reluctant to commit to the view that somehow racism, Islamophobia and so on have disappeared from Trump’s vision.
JT: And Vance is very much on the nativist end of the spectrum—his speech at the convention was America is a nation, not an idea.
JWM: Many of us read the whole story about Haitian immigrants as signifying that basically it doesn’t matter whether you are here legally or not. It’s really about ascriptive characteristics, period. So although I know that some of our colleagues want to tell the story that Trump now wants a color-blind society, and that somehow support from Hispanics and African Americans proves that there’s a different vision, I would treat all that with a great deal of caution. In any case, it’s not like all these communities have really swung behind him. And, as you said earlier, people vote for all kinds of reasons. It’s certainly still anti-pluralism, as in: “If you don’t agree with me, you’re an enemy of the people,” which is not, you’ll be surprised to hear, a democratic stance.
JT: How do you think someone as patently individualistic as Donald Trump has managed to be the vector for this sort of intrinsically collective notion of a people? This is somebody who thinks you’re a sucker if you want to put your life at risk for your country, and yet, at the same time, he’s been able to mobilize and weaponize the notion of the people and the nation. Do you have a sense of how that conjunction happens?
JWM: I think there is no monocausal explanation. Different groups hear different things. There’s one very curious sort of stance, which is basically, look, we’re all cheating, right? You cheat, I cheat, be clever at it, and so on. And that’s kind of hard to square with certain more patriotic talk and things which, at least to some people, can sound more idealistic. But it’s a multidimensional offering, so to speak. And ultimately, going back to an earlier point, it’s not like seventy-plus million people are now entirely on board with this one person. Many people are simply going to vote for their party, and as everybody knows, the Republican establishment has basically communicated to people that Trumpism is what it means to be a good Republican in 2025. So all that has to be factored in. Also, not all of this is new: a real pioneer of things we’re seeing today was [former Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi, who had exactly the same attitude toward Italians, where he effectively said, Look, you know, I cheat at my taxes, you cheat at your taxes, everybody knows that’s the game. And then he had lots of other things on offer as well, including normalizing post-fascists and introducing a certain form of pop politics that made the spectacle central. So I think it’s important not to treat Trump as a uniquely important figure in this respect.
JT: The thing that comes across very forcefully with Trump—to some extent, Berlusconi did this with his own legal struggles, but I don’t think it was quite as strong—is his appeal to victimhood and the way in which his wounded ego somehow stands in for the much more serious wounds of ordinary Americans. This notion of a wounded people seems to be quite critical to the history of populism. It’s not just that there are the true people of a country, and then there’s some elites, or some aliens, who need to be cast out to keep the purity and common sense of the true people. It’s also that the people has been aggrieved in some way that gives it cause for unquenchable resentment, and that somehow leads to this identification with the leader who represents that qualitative feeling of the wounded people.
JWM: Going back to your earlier question, one could say it’s not entirely new. Mussolini got a lot of mileage out of saying, Look, we Italians were screwed at the end of the First World War. Hitler did the same with the Treaty of Versailles. But then for them, it was also very important that at a certain point that sort of collective victimhood tipped over into a vision of heroism, which you don’t really get with contemporary populists. What you do get, and I entirely agree with you, is a certain technique of generating at least a superficial solidarity on the basis of a sense of shared victimhood in a specifically democratic context. The big claim, ultimately, is: How can it be that we are the majority and we should be in charge around here, and we are constantly sidelined and screwed and victimized and so on? Now, of course, in many cases they’re actually not the majority at all, but it’s a very powerful thing to tell people. And then it’s all the easier if you can keep pointing at minorities who supposedly are now acquiring illegitimate privileges.
JT: In his farewell address, Joe Biden referred to the rise of oligarchy in the United States, alluding to the strange way that business and tech elites have rallied around Trump, as the inauguration proved vividly. But many have observed that the alliance of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon can’t be too stable over the long term, given their different agendas and interests. What are your thoughts on what has brought those forces together and how their union might play out? Is that something that populism tends to in some way, or is it completely unrelated to the phenomenon of populism?
JWM: I would have thought that it’s a relatively contingent coalition of very different characters who do all have grievances. If you read what some Silicon Valley leaders are saying, along the lines of “I felt so victimized by the Biden administration”… I mean, [Marc] Andreessen even said, the Biden administration unleashed terrorism on Silicon Valley. You and I are guilty, because we are part of universities, and from about 2010 we supposedly started turning all these young people into communists who hate America. So all kinds of people also have stories about why the Democratic Party left them, they didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It’s just peculiar that the latest grand philosophical vision they have—and many of them do have grand visions because they keep writing op-eds and manifestos and so on—all seem strangely to align with their latest business model and their personal interests of one sort or another, be it crypto or be it “give me unclaimed territory like Greenland, because we can do great things with AI there,” etc. So I would be reluctant to say that just because it’s happening at the moment, we should somehow fit it into a conceptual scheme where populism plays a big role. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, sometimes it’s just better to keep these phenomena apart. Oligarchy is not new. Obviously, there are many oligarchs also in other democracies who are pushing the far right very strongly. Think of someone like [Vincent] Bolloré in France, who basically bought himself a media empire, and who was absolutely crucial to making [Éric] Zemmour a real player in French politics. So that’s not uniquely American. There is an important question for social scientists how oligarchs can use populism, why it resonates, etc. But I don’t see the value of baking oligarchy into the very concept of populism.
JT: One of the things I saw reading through your recent work is that you have a strong interest in Hungary and Orbán, to whom Trump and especially Vance have been looking as a model. As you point out, Orbán has combined populist politics that claims to be speaking for the silent majority with crony capitalism and distributes resources and government contracts to friends and allies while raising value-added tax on ordinary individuals. Is it too much to see a pattern there?
JWM: There is a certain playbook for autocratization now, and it is not difficult to copy. It’s not the same as populism, but there can be an elective affinity, in the sense that some of these actors start out by unleashing a certain type of cultural war that then is used to legitimate a concentration of power. Once you have the concentration of power, it becomes much easier to engage in a certain form of kleptocracy, and it’s been part of Orbán’s success that he basically leads his critics onto the territory of culture war. Now, that’s a misnomer in certain ways, because if we’re talking about, let’s say, the rights of sexual minorities, it’s not just “culture,” as if it was simply some sort of fluff, a matter of taste that doesn’t have real consequences for people. But it’s always been to Orbán’s advantage to essentially suggest to people, “Let’s talk about crazy liberals in Brussels who don’t like me because of LGBTQ+ issues,” as opposed to talking about kleptocratic autocracy.
JT: Is there anything you think we can learn here in America from the way that things have played out in Hungary?
JWM: This is a very large, complicated country, so to immediately transfer a lesson from a small, heavily centralized country where it was very easy to capture two or three institutions, and then it was basically game over for democracy, would be a mistake. Having said that, there is a kind of sequencing that I think one can productively think about, which is that you win an election, and although you don’t really have a mandate for fundamental change, you claim it anyway, then enough people fall in line for self-interested reasons that you can try to capture the relevant institutions, and you can also try to capture the major forms of legacy media and sometimes—I mean, this wasn’t the case with Orbán, of course—let’s say platforms as well, and then they will do your bidding and create an environment for the next election. So it becomes more and more likely that the next election is no longer going to be a fair one. Sometimes it’s not even free anymore, but the more typical thing to watch for is where the election is still free, in the sense that nobody stuffs the ballot boxes on Election Day, but it’s deeply unfair, because all sorts of resources and tricks are being used to make sure that you stay in power. I don’t think it’s crazy to think about that strategy as something that happened in Hungary and that we might be witnessing to some degree happening in the U.S. now.
JT: You wrote a piece in 2018 about what we can learn from Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on principled pluralism. Is that something that you view as a plausible way for leftist intellectuals to respond to populism?
JWM: It’s very unpopular to say anything remotely positive about Cold War liberalism these days, so I preface what I’m going to say with something said by a declared anti-liberal of sorts, namely Adorno, who, if I can paraphrase more or less plausibly, basically said, Whatever is being defended can’t be saved. In other words, if you are in this entirely defensive mode, as opposed to trying to develop and deepen whatever you now need to defend, the game is already lost. And there is something to that thought. It is astonishing how many self-declared defenders of democracy today are always reacting, are always defensive. It’s not true that all of them are idealizing the past. They’re not all reactionary centrists. But there’s something to the accusation that it seems like you never get out of the reactive, defensive mode.
What does this mean concretely? Two things, I would say. One is that you need to think harder about how you deal with existing institutions. If you are playing the game of “we have to respect norms and go for bipartisanship,” and the other side is playing a different game, you have a problem. And if you still haven’t understood that in 2025, I think that’s a massive problem. But you also need to go beyond that. And the problem is, when one says this, it can sound very trite—but you do need to have a positive vision for democracy. And I think there have been voices who have been able to offer such visions. If you look at what happened in France last summer, it was noticeable how the New Popular Front was not simply about anti-fascist discourse; they also talked a lot about policies, and they deliberately emphasized a certain kind of decency. I’m not saying that empirically that explains why they did relatively well, and I am not an uncritical defender of the whole alliance, but I think it was an interesting example of basically not being limited to saying, Marine Le Pen is dangerous, is a fascist, etc.
JT: One of the things you point out in the piece on Cold War liberals was that they were responding to a fairly coherent creed and doctrine in Marxism, and that gave them something to criticize and attack, whereas populism is a much more shifting target—there’s no book to study and criticize!
JWM: On the one hand, you might say that populism is an easy target, in that you can simply say, No, you don’t represent a homogeneous “real people” or “the silent majority.” But that’s not enough, obviously. One also needs to ask: Why is this happening? Why does this kind of talk gain a certain traction? Well, all countries are unhappy in their own ways, and it’s always going to be imperative to look very carefully at the exact confluence of forces that promote populism. Some are going to be more clearly ideological. Some are going to be more about certain cultural practices. Some are going to be about moral shifts, some about material pressures. To say something blindingly obvious, the success of far-right populism in a number of countries is incomprehensible if one doesn’t think about patriarchy, if one doesn’t think about how a certain discourse gains traction by being at the same time both ideological and ironic and invested in certain forms of trolling. So this is indeed not about an exegesis of deep doctrines. This is much more about understanding a cultural context which enables certain forms of politics.
JT: You began with the concept of populism, and the importance of keeping our concepts clear: Let’s distinguish populism from demagoguery. Let’s distinguish it from nativism and fascism and oligarchy and so on. Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about, even if that involves regimenting our language relative to the variety of ways in which a term has been used in the past. There’s some benefit to that kind of conceptual clarity, and it’s a typical move from a political theorist to say that bringing conceptual clarity can enable political judgment. But it also seems true that one thing the academy has failed at, and that the J. D. Vance type of critique of the academy has a point about, is that there isn’t much study of conservative thought or right-wing thought of any kind. It’s not really central to what we do. Most political theorists are not actually reading the discourses and writings of aspiring populists or authoritarians or autocrats. As we’ve just said, there’s a difficulty there in that you might wonder, to what extent is there anything to study? They’re not Lenin, so they don’t write long programmatic treatises. But would you agree that academia hasn’t found much of a role for the student of right-wing illiberal thought?
JWM: I would distinguish between two issues. I don’t agree with the view that conservatives are the last minority that can be openly persecuted and maligned on campus, and we need affirmative action for them and so on. If the thought is that, yes, people should be critically questioning their own stances, then yes, there are very philosophically interesting anti-liberals out there and one should read them. And we should, of course, expose students to as many interesting, intellectually challenging views as possible, and then they will make up their own minds in one form or another. Having said that, I’m not sure that any of the interesting anti-liberal thinkers out there can plausibly be seen as powers behind the throne. The real influence may be coming from certain online personalities and so on, who, with the greatest respect, or maybe not respect, might not always be worth studying in great detail—I’d be hard-pressed to want to include them in a course on conservative political thought which I have sometimes taught. But is it worth engaging with somebody like Adrian Vermeule? Yes, of course. There also two versions of Vermeule, though: there is the highly sophisticated theorist of the administrative state and common-good constitutionalism, and then there is the online troll. It’s important to keep those two apart, but one can ask which one is really more important in terms of inspiring the American right these days. Long story short, if you wanted to have more Schmitt or de Maistre on your syllabus, by all means, I think that’s a good idea.
JT: I actually think this is quite a deep problem for political philosophers and political theorists in constructing syllabuses. We’re naturally inclined toward the intellectually impressive and the well-wrought, the thing that needs decoding or interpreting. But those ideas might not be the ones that are most operative in society. Intellectually interesting ideas might not be the ones that are the most powerful. And there is a way in which the institutions of academia are designed to put the cleverest students in front of the cleverest writings. And that could lead a whole profession to be missing some of the biggest developments of our own era. I guess it seems to me that you’re not like me in that respect—you’re not missing those developments, and I admire that.
JWM: If you think back, since I mentioned Adorno, to certain Frankfurt School figures who had some claim to being philosophers and sociologists at the same time, it’s difficult to do in a serious way, but I think there was and is a great advantage to that.
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