Why We Need a Different Populism

Michael W. Mehaffy

Those who are alarmed at the global advance of an authoritarian form of populism – and I am one of them – too often assume that the solution is straightforward: defend democracy, educate the public, and wait for passions to cool. Implicitly, the message becomes something like “let them eat democracy.” If people are angry, frightened, or alienated, the thinking goes, they simply need more civic instruction, better information, and stronger faith in existing democratic institutions. We need to return to the saner era before this one.

This response is not only inadequate – it is dangerous. Democracy itself is clearly under strain, and pretending otherwise only accelerates the very forces that authoritarian and nationalist populism exploits.

Democracy’s Old and Persistent Vulnerability

The vulnerability of democracy is hardly news. Over 2,500 years ago, Plato warned in The Republic that democracy, untethered from shared norms and institutional restraint, is especially susceptible to demagogues—those who flatter the public, inflame resentments, and promise protection in exchange for power. Democracy, he argued, can collapse not because it is rejected, but because it is manipulated.

History bears this out. Adolf Hitler did not seize power in opposition to democratic processes; he rose through them. Many of today’s authoritarian populists across the world are similarly elected. They do not arrive as enemies of democracy so much as its performers, skilled at channeling frustration into loyalty, and fear into obedience. They are what has been labeled “competitive authoritarians” (by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, back in 2002).

To acknowledge this is not to reject democracy. It is to recognize that democracy, as currently practiced, is overdue for reinvention and revitalization.

The Failure of Proceduralism

One of the central failures of modern democratic systems is the increasing reduction to procedure without substance – or with only the substance of those skilled at manipulation. Voting every few years, abstract rights divorced from lived experience, and remote institutions insulated from accountability do not, by themselves, produce legitimacy. When democratic participation feels thin, manipulative, and ineffective, people become cynical. They are primed to welcome alternatives – even bogus ones – that seem to promise immediacy, clarity, and force.

Authoritarian populists thrive in precisely this vacuum. They offer what procedural democracy no longer does: a sense of belonging, moral certainty, and direct action. The tragedy is that these promises are ultimately false. But the key lesson is that they succeed because they are emotionally compelling – and that is because the needs they address are real. The more we ignore this truth, the more we weaken our own response.

Getting Ahead of the Forces at Work

If those who wish to oppose authoritarian populism are serious, they must stop reacting defensively, and begin addressing the underlying drivers of its appeal proactively. This means recognizing that those to whom authoritarian populism appeals are not merely misinformed or prejudiced, but genuinely disoriented by rapid economic, cultural, and technological change, and by the erosion of familiar ways of life.

We must remember also that there is not only one form of authoritarian populism – although so-called “right-wing populism” is getting all the oxygen at the moment. Its hallmarks are opposition to immigration and minority populations, strong nationalism (often romanticized in the mythology of a glorious national past), and imposition of specific religious and cultural traditions, often through draconian laws. But we should not ignore the other form of authoritarian populism, sometimes termed “left-wing populism” (an equally simplistic term).  It emphasizes the redress of economic grievances and the promotion of egalitarian values, often enforced through similarly draconian laws, and often also at the expense of civil liberties. History has given us many examples of both populist forms.

Both forms are fed by the same human instincts: the existential sense of threat, and the impulsive instinct to control, at the most fundamental human level: the level of one’s own life, one’s community, and one’s traditions.        

A viable alternative must therefore affirm what contemporary elites have been reluctant to do: traditional communities, values, and ways of life, within their own largely autonomous spheres. This is not a “left” or “right” issue. Traditional communities are not simply obstacles to progress or residues of ignorance. They are the social infrastructures through which people make meaning, transmit norms, and care for one another.

Ignoring or dismissing these attachments does not make them disappear; it radicalizes them.

At the same time, affirming tradition cannot mean enforcing uniformity or intolerance. A pluralistic society depends on a shared agreement to coexist with, and even embrace, those who hold different values. This balance between rootedness and tolerance is not a contradiction. It is, in fact, one of the deepest of American ideals: that people can live with dignity and autonomy according to their own convictions, while respecting the equal dignity and autonomy of others.

But this is not an automatic condition; it takes effort to create and sustain. Moreover, it takes what the sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure”: local communities and neighborhoods, their gathering places, their formal and informal governance, and their capacity for autonomy and connection.

The journalist Thomas Friedman observed that all people feel the need to be “connected, protected and respected,” and that these needs must be provided within a healthy community and its healthy “operating system”. When these needs are not met – when the system breaks down, and no longer sustains these immediate values – people reflexively react, and as history shows, they are prone to embrace simplistic alternatives: nationalism, xenophobia, oppression, and the kind of authoritarianism that best serves corrupt demagogues, to the long-term detriment of everyone else.   

Beyond Authoritarianism and Naïve Liberalism

What is needed, then, is not a defense of the status quo, nor a retreat into nostalgia. Rather, we need a more grounded and realistic form of populism, and one that acknowledges human limits as well as human aspirations. Such a populism would reject the fantasy that centralized systems, whether bureaucratic or charismatic, can fully manage complex societies from above. It would also reject the equally naïve belief that abstract democratic forms, detached from social foundations, can sustain themselves indefinitely.

Instead, it would focus on rebuilding democracy from the bottom up: through local institutions and overlapping or “polycentric” forms of governance, and subsidiary or distributed institutions, that are able to give people real agency over the conditions of their daily lives. When people move beyond governance as only a “government” that is done to them – with their only option in response is a protest vote – and are able to experience governance as a responsive institution that they participate in meaningfully, then the appeal of authoritarian shortcuts diminishes.

A Harder, More Honest Path

This alternative path is harder than simply condemning populism, or celebrating democracy in the abstract. It will require a long-term commitment to restructuring our democratic institutions. In turn, it will require confronting uncomfortable truths: that liberal institutions have often failed; that cultural continuity matters; and that democracy without strong social foundations is fragile.

But it is also a more hopeful path. By taking seriously the human need for connection, protection, and respect—and by embedding those needs in institutions that operate at human scale—we can begin to articulate a form of populism that is neither authoritarian nor dismissive, neither reactionary nor utopian.

The choice before us is not between democracy and populism, but between a shallow democracy that feeds demagogues, and a deeper, reinvigorated democratic culture capable of sustaining pluralism without coercion. The future depends on whether we have the courage to embrace this alternative world – and to get to work building it.