As our federal elected representatives prepare to once again convene in Ottawa next week, a recent interaction in my neighbourhood may serve as a harbinger for the exhausting political discourse headed our way.
Several weeks ago, my neighbours congregated in our several-hundred-strong Whatsapp group to celebrate a rare win for sanity as the Ontario government announced our local, publicly-funded drug den would be closing. In the ensuing discussion, one person shared her view that while the announcement was an important step in the direction of public safety, the motivation for it was likely driven more by a desire to woo voters than to keep us safe.
What if it was? Why is that somehow bad? Good policy and good politics aren’t mutually exclusive and indeed are arguably regularly fully aligned in a democracy. Moreover, the notion politicians should ignore the will of their constituents is an odd expectation. Her comment has stuck with me, reverberating as an example of the success of fear-mongering by our pundit class, as they ominously warn of our “recent trend towards populism.”
My neighbour’s comment isn’t just grating because it reflects the lazy tendency to use “populism” as a vague and trite catch-all smear against popular conservatives broadly (which it is), but because it speaks to a deeper problem.
These same politicians and pundits who decry the supposed “trend towards populism” are actually arguing something much more mendacious than a simple partisan slur. The argument they are making is, at its core, an argument against democracy.
Representative democracy rests on the idea that each voter casts a ballot for the member who best represents their views and will vigorously advocate for their interests. Voters have never delegated their ultimate authority over the policies that govern them to an omnipotent class of experts, academics, pundits, politicians, or anyone else. If the politicians they elect do a poor job, before too long voters have the right to fire them and give those jobs to people who will do what they want, within the bounds of the law.
This is not to say that all populism is good, or even innocuous. When used merely as a weathervane, absent principle, it amounts to a weak and ambiguous divination, bound to confound and annoy over time. But when aligned with solid first principles, the populism we hear so often derided amounts to a harmless recognition that voters, and their views, matter most in policy making.
There are any number of pressing issues that clearly matter to voters, that despite being legitimate, have been deemed too gauche or déclassé to be considered by our elite political class. At its best, populism simply recognizes that voters have a much wider field of legitimate issues to consider than many would like to acknowledge. As Cas Mudde, an academic who focuses on populism has put it, “populism brings to the fore issues that large parts of the population care about, but that the political elites want to avoid discussing.”
