As the Conservative leadership race draws to a close — the winner will be announced Saturday, Sept. 10 — the Liberal, Red Tory, liberal media narrative about frontrunner Pierre Poilievre is that he’s a “populist” and “populism” is a bad thing.
But defining populism as inherently bad is absurd. Those doing it either don’t understand what populism means or are deliberately misleading the public about what it is.
“Populism” is a political philosophy that divides society into “ordinary people” and “elites.” All political leaders in Canada today do this.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a populist. He promises to protect “the middle class” from corporate greed. His signature policy on climate change, he says, is to protect the public from corporate polluters.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is a populist. He says his job is to make the “ultra-rich” contribute their fair share in taxes in order to fund populist programs such as national child care, pharmacare and dental care.
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Poilievre is also a populist, except he defines the “elites” who work against “ordinary people” as Trudeau and Singh, arguing they are proponents of big government programs that inevitably lead to high taxation and government overreach into people’s daily lives.
This also illustrates the reality that populist ideas come from across the political spectrum.
There is a populism of the political left just as there is a populism of the political right.
The key test of populist political ideas is not which side of the political spectrum they come from, but whether the ideas themselves help create good public policy, improving the lives of ordinary people.
Left-wing populists argue the difference between them and right-wing populists is that their populism is based on “hope” and the expansion of social justice, while right-wing populism is based on “fear” and the contraction of social justice.
But as political scientists Yascha Mounk and Jordan Kyle concluded in their exhaustive study of global populism — What Populists Do to Democracies — “the data do not bear out this argument.”
“Since 1930, 13 right-wing populist governments have been elected; of these, five brought about significant democratic backsliding. Over the same time period, 15 left-wing populist governments were elected; of these, the same number, five, brought about significant democratic backsliding.”
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