What on earth is populism?

When political vocabulary becomes ambiguous, meaningless or downright misleading, the problem isn’t with the vocabulary. It’s with the politics.

In fact, such lexical mayhem is a sure sign of a rapidly widening gulf separating politics from reality. It’s also a sign of glossocracy, a tyranny using language as a mechanism for exerting control.

Any tyranny uses words mendaciously for, if used in their real meaning, they lose their sharp edge as weapons of crowd control.

For example, the word ‘Democratic’ prominently figures in the nomenclature of some of the bloodiest tyrannies in history, such as North Korea. Ditto the word ‘People’s’ that tends to designate countries where the people in question are enslaved.

Closer to home, ‘liberal’ means illiberal; ‘diversity’ means conformity or, better still, uniformity; ‘justice’ (variously prefaced) means injustice; ‘progressive’ means regressive; ‘equality’ means inequality, ‘fairness’ means unfairness and so on. But the word that particularly fascinates me is ‘populism’.

Generally speaking, new words are coined when the existing ones prove inadequate to the task of denoting inchoate political concepts. But this dread word, populism, seems to denote nothing of any substance at all.

The word isn’t new, but only recently did it begin to gain wide currency. It probably originated in the 19^th century, when the left-wing People’s, or Populist, Party was active in the US. The term then fell into disuse, only to come back in recent times.

Its etymology suggests seeking popularity by a broad appeal to the masses, in which meaning populism seems indistinguishable from democracy. Populus means the same in Latin as demos in Greek. Hence the two terms borrow their roots from classical languages to signify something so similar as to be the same.

The second part of democracy implies not just appeal to the people but actual self-government by them. Yet we all know that’s just a figure of speech, don’t we? People in democracies don’t govern themselves. They merely elect those who do the governing in their name.

Democracy and populism thus mean the same thing in essence: appeal to the people, called either demos or populus. However, if they are identical in meaning, you’d think one of them would become redundant and fall by the wayside. Yet they both have a job to do.

For words don’t just have a semantic denotation. They also have an emotional connotation, there to convey the user’s feelings, rather than the actual meaning.

Since emotions are boundless, applying them to semantics opens up a whole new glossocratic field. And the bucketful of emotional colouring thrown at the word populism in modern democracies is mostly dark.

Democracy, especially when modified by liberal, is widely accepted as not just a virtuous political system but, according to a particularly inane strain of thought, the only possible one. Populism, however, gets nothing but bad press.

This, though we’ve established that the Latin and the Greek here converge to convey exactly the same meaning, at least in democratic countries. Populism in non-democratic countries usually serves to denote the method by which nasty characters like Hitler, Mussolini or Péron rise to power.

But what does it mean here? What job does it do that democracy can’t do?

First, the word clearly doesn’t attach to any specific set of beliefs. The populist tag has been borne in recent times by such disparate characters as Trump, Farage, Palin, Netanyahu, Zemmour, Le Pen, Zeman, Ocasio-Cortez, Tsipras, Orbàn, Berlusconi, Wilders, Walesa and even, God save us all, Boris Johnson.

If you go down this impromptu incomplete list, you’ll see that it covers the whole political spectrum from right to left and everything in between. So I must repeat the question in the title. What on earth is populism?

Clearly, its domain in Western democracies isn’t denotation but connotation. Or else it has to do with style, not with substance.

The connotation is these days strictly negative. Yes, democratic politicians seem to be saying, we and the populists try to affect the voting pattern of the same electorate in essentially the same way. But somehow the populists’ way is wrong, unfair.

How so? Well, you see, they treat with disdain all the shibboleths of the ruling elite, even if they themselves belong to it, as most do. They court mass support by talking to the masses directly, over the elite’s heads and in a crude language the masses are likely to understand.

Populists adopt for their nefarious purposes the folksy bonhomie of a bloke next door, a pint in one hand, a fag in the other, a four-letter word on his lips. I’m one of you, a populist seems to be saying, even if I went to a fancy school, have billions in the bank and a mile from my gate to the door.

Populists, in other words, are traitors to their class, or rather coterie. Hence the word is strictly pejorative in modern usage, used by the right to put down the left or, more usually, vice versa.

But if it’s merely a term of abuse, it trespasses on the territory already densely populated by thousands of derogatory epithets, differing from most of them by being lazy and unspecific.

What could be lazier than using the same word to lump together, say, Trump, Ocasio-Cortez and Johnson? I’d happily describe all of them in uncomplimentary terms, but not the same ones.

I may, for example, call Trump a loudmouthed vulgarian, Ocasio-Cortez an aspiring Bolshevik and Johnson a chameleonic lightweight, thus focusing on the salient, and unsavoury, characteristic of each one. But I’d give them all the courtesy of keeping them apart.

All things considered, populism is a parasite non-word, at least in any democratic context. Thus it has no right to exist.