The Somme tout/Le Devoir editions are publishing these days The thousand faces of populisma collective work under the direction of Antoine Char. This brings together around twenty texts and illustrations from the “En retrait” group, which brings together retired Quebec journalists. The following extract is taken from the text signed by Jean-Claude Bürger.
What is populism? There are notions whose existence we know empirically, but whose contours remain too vague to be defined.
When in 1964 the film The lovers, of Louis Malle, was accused of obscenity, Judge Potter Stewart, admitting his inability to give a definition of pornography, simply stated: “ I know it when I see it! » (Luckily, he hadn’t seen any in this film…)
This sentence remains one of the best known in the history of American Supreme Court judgments. However, we understand that in matters of justice, this explicitly open door to subjectivity can represent a danger.
The more or less candid observer of politics, whether journalist or academic, experiences the same kind of pitfall; fortunately, his judgments are easier to challenge than those of magistrates.
Moving concepts
The concepts of “right”, “center” and “left” are shifting, as is the meaning of the words that designate them. They vary over time and change depending on the country. Someone will be considered right-wing at a North American woke university, while he will be seen as a communist at an Opus Dei university in Latin America.
Fuzzy are the contours of populism and demagoguery, imprecise are those of authoritarianism. The notion of democracy, which is most often supposed to found the legitimacy of political attitudes, is itself far from achieving consensus.
All these words with often identical etymologies, whether they come from Greek or Latin, seem to describe different, sometimes opposing notions. We remember what we called popular democracies, which were however very far from being popular and were not democracies.
In short, if the gears were forged with the same degree of imprecision as the words of politics, the engines would not take us very far.
Control the media
However, dictatorships, fascisms and totalitarianisms, whether right-wing or left-wing, are easier to characterize. Journalists and opponents recognize them when they see them or experience them. They often pay the price.
One of the primary concerns of totalitarian regimes is to control the media. Newspapers are closed, journalists are muzzled, only those who agree to become propaganda tools survive professionally.
At the same time, we curb protests and lock up opponents. The police, the army and the courts are put at the service of the dictator and his supporters, they ensure order through threats and guarantee the sustainability of his power. When there are elections, only candidates dubbed by those in power are admitted.
There is broad consensus that these are undemocratic regimes.
Stereotypical speech
The parties which access totalitarian power, whether or not through elections, owe all their first successes to a stereotypical discourse: it appeals to the anger of the people against the institutions, denounces the betrayal of politicians, domination and the arrogance of elites who, depending on the case, can be intellectual, media, financial, scientific, etc., he most often denounces the other – the foreigner, the Black, the Jew, the Muslim, the immigrant… who face the problems of the moment are in turn presented as scapegoats.
This type of discourse also readily evokes conspiracies supported by false information, which do not always pay much attention to plausibility. Economic and social crises are fertile grounds for politicians who propose simple solutions to complicated problems. […]
If populism does not always lead to totalitarianism, it is always the first step.
When populists devote themselves to the worship of a leader, when they preach brutality and when they exercise it, populism changes its nature. It ceases to be just a discourse and becomes an insurrectional practice.
When violence is carried out by militias or organized groups, we then speak of fascism in reference to Mussolini’s fascism.
Recent history has seen the advent of an American president whose populism seemed to have the objective of transforming institutions and the electoral system to put them at his service. Never, even during the era of McCarthyism (1950-1954), did we feel the United States so close to falling into the camp of totalitarian systems of governance. […]