From a reader’s letter:
“Could you help me (us readers) to clarify the term “populism”, which is nowadays and daily used and, I think, often abused?
If a political party is labeled populist, it is meant negatively and is a pandering party.
But if a party is not populist, then is it not there for the people, its voters?”
Before I get to populism proper, let me digress on the method of analyzing the proposed problem. Let me recall something from philosophy. I make no secret of the view that the vast majority of philosophy is nothing but poor psychology, sociology, or neuroscience. Either those writings were written in a time when advanced research methods were not yet available. Or they are written by people self-absorbed and enamored with their own wisdom. They want to enjoy juggling words and don’t want to solve complicated problems.
However, within philosophy we also come across interesting schools. For example, what is sometimes called “analytic philosophy” and sometimes “logical positivism” – a group focused on analyzing very complicated problems around our thinking, language, approach to the world, etc. I occasionally mention the names Popper and Wittgenstein here (no, don’t worry, I won’t bother telling you about their swordfighting burrowers). This time I’ll recall Wittgenstein’s expression “language game.” The idea is that words and expressions are used within a clique in such a way that everyone understands them equally. So the goal of exploration is to understand how they understand it. It is not a search for some kind of true or correct meaning.
Staying with the comparison to the rules, we can take for example offside in football (offside). We can ask how UEFA defines offside in 2024, which situations are considered offside and which are not.
Or we could examine all the uses of the rule at different times and in different sports, draw up a sort of ideal offside based on that, and perhaps conclude by saying that UEFA in 2024 is using the term offside incorrectly.
So there are two different questions before us:
- In what sense do Liberal Democrats use the word populism?
- What was the historical meaning of the word populism?
I will deal with this tomorrow.