Outing ‘the others’: Towards populist segmented orders

According to Cas Mudde (2004), we are witnessing a populist Zeitgeist in Europe, as populist movements, parties and policies not only gain political traction and influence but also increasingly set the political agendas and (contribute to) run governments. Nevertheless, the key preoccupation in the literature has been bottom-up in terms of how populists influence the political system, from the outside, so-to-speak. As Nadia Urbinati has rightly noted in her latest book Me the People, we need to pay more systematic attention to populists in power. In this paper, I follow up on Urbinati’s urge, to consider not only populism’s impact on the regime but on the polity as well. The argument is that if left unchecked right-wing populists will transform democratic states into socially segmented political systems, with clear lines of division between those citizens that are regime insiders and those that are regime outsiders. The point of departure is that populism when successful as a project of government entrenches itself as a segmented social and political order. That is because populism is about merecracy or the “power of the part” (2019:44). “Populism epitomizes not so much the claim of a “part” representing “the whole” … but instead, and much more radically, the claim to embody one part only – the “authentic” part, which, for this reason, deserves to rule for its own good against the excluded inauthentic part.” Segmentation is therefore a form of othering of those citizens and elites that populists do not deem to be part of their – partial and exclusionary – conception of the people. This is segmentation insofar as the political and legal arrangements are tailored to sustain the distinction between authentic and inauthentic citizens (the latter including the traditional establishment political class). Populist political leaders cater to ‘their’ self-defined political constituency (Trump’s fans); they take active measures to reduce the democratic and other rights of the excluded citizens; and they reconfigure the political and constitutional order to cement such divisions. Elections turn into acclamations of support for the populist leaders, not contestations over competing teams of leaders. Populist segmented political orders thus operate with two de facto categories of citizens and citizenships: authentic and loyal insiders and unauthentic and disloyal others (elites and other citizens). The paper will first outline a segmented political order along the lines presented above. Thereafter it will briefly survey the literature to consider to what extent we find such segmentation processes in those political regimes that are marked by the most pronounced populists in government (notably in Hungary and Poland). Finally, it will consider how best to ensure de-segmentation through democratic bouncing back processes.