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Democratic Populism and Human Politics

rickenpatel

For four years now, I've been focused on studying and working with oppositions that have both succeeded and failed to counter elected authoritarian populism. I think the playbook for winning is becoming clear, and we're starting to rack those wins up - in Brazil, Poland, India, and more.


It's not a silver bullet, but one absolutely central play in the playbook is Democratic Populism. In this post I'm going to replicate a talk I've given on it including the slides from the deck, so imagine me speaking alongside each slide :).


First, the P word. Populism, if you listen the media or to many political scientists, is a bad thing. But the dictionary definition might be surprising:

Sounds pretty good, right? I've always thought of my work and activism as populist in this sense.


I also like hacking the word populism because it helps to acknowledge the mistake that I think many people have made/are making about it. When our global epidemic of populism first began showing up 10 years ago, I went through a series of comforting but false explanations for it:

The truth is, we actually cleaned up most fake news on social media, and the populists still won. They got outspent 3:1, 10:1, 100:1, and they still won. The entire legacy media was hounding them (that's why they're so good at social media) and they still won. Most importantly, when I took the time to truly listen to voters voting for them, they weren't evil or racist or stupid, they were just people who cared about their families and their future.


Authoritarian populists are always around, but typically pretty fringe - they win when they are appealing to voters.


So what does Democratic Populism look like?

Basically Democratic Populists respect democracy, listen to all voters (including those who support the other "side"). seek to serve not 51% of people but the large majority of people, and are willing to face conflict with various actors to do it.


All that's pretty powerful in my experience, but why did I include "Human Politics" alongside democratic populism? I notice that Democratic Populism is a strategy that any kind of person can adopt. But the successful democratic populists, the ones that tend to inspire others the most, embody a genuine spirit of public service, and that spirit leads to a few behaviours that really matter:



Political partisans tend to get caught in the "Us vs Them". They practice a kind of subtle and overt bigotry torwards those who think differently. Democratic Populists tend to be humanists in the sense of having time and consideration for any person. Their sincerity also tends to show up in how they communicate - not so much the robotic press release speech of traditional politics (largely driven by a desire to avoid offending various groups), and more just being honest and open with people about what they think and feel. This is sometimes easier for democratic populists because what they think and feel is often more aligned with most people. They don't tend to hide their true opinions, and voters can tell the difference.


There's an even stronger version of this approach that doesn't just go for a supermajority, but tries to transcend partisan politics to a significant degree, often stealing the best ideas or even the entire agenda of the other side. I call this Inclusive Populism:


India's Modi came from the far right, but stole the agenda of the far left and actually did a better job of executing it in many ways. He put a toilet in almost every home, gave every citizen a bank account, provided massive benefit programs such as food support and the equivalent of $6000 USD of free medical care per year to half a billion Indian citizens. Duterte in the Philippines is known for being nearly fascist about crime and drugs, but also brought in cash transfers to the poor, universal public healthcare, free college education, and a range of benefits for ordinary citizens.


This 'right wing strongman, left wing social welfare' formula is actually common historically. And while Trump and Bolsonaro didn't fully embrace it (yet) the populists that did could achieve hyperpopularity, with approval ratings in the 70-90% range, typically unheard of for ordinary democratic politicians. Try beating that with a narrow, ideological approach to politics.


So why then isn't Democratic Populism a no-brainer? Isn't this what every politician does? Well, no, and that's because it's really hard to do:

First, echo-chambers are incredibly seductive and powerful, and all of us, including and perhaps especially our political and civil society leaders, are in them. We are only as good as our information, and our information leads us to believe things about what voters want, what they're like, what's going on in the world, and what's right and wrong, that we'd change our minds about if we had better information. "Navel gazing" is a term I used at Avaaz to describe the way we focus on ourselves rather than the world - we just get preoccupied with concerns that are closer to us - like how we satisfy this staff member or that donor, rather than what most people want.


Democratic populism can also be hard because we have cherished values that aren't popular. I've found that I have to make a clear separation in my life between activism that is 'evangelical' - where I am trying to make certain ideas popular, and activism that is democratic, where I am seeking to hold power accountable to people. It can be a hard thing to separate when you're passionate, but it's crucial to understand the difference because it often doesn't serve your cause to force most people to share it - it's far more sustainable to persuade them to choose it.


Powerful lobbies are also a big constraint because Democratic Populism usually leads to pretty significant change, and change typically makes enemies. Such lobby groups might include shady back room characters, mainstream institutions, industry groups, special interests, or groups of aggrieved citizens.


And perhaps most difficult, sometimes the biggest challenge is just people who don't agree with the supermajority on a given question. Democratic party politics is often coalition politics, an attempt to cobble together an alliance of issue groups, identity groups, and ideological constituencies. Keeping all of these happy simultaneously is often what empties politics of content, or prevents it from serving people effectively. Democratic Populists often vault over these concerns by basing themselves on transcending factors like charismatic leaders and common cause. But they also tend to be willing to challenge a faction head on when it demands to be chosen over most people. That's the key difference that makes them populist, and popular. More on that later.

Some of our biggest recent wins against authoritarian populists serve as decent examples of this approach. In addition to these there was a strong Democratic Populist strand to Rahul Gandhi's campaign in India in 2024, when he walked across India for 150 days straight for national unity and harmony in the face of the divisions brought by Hindu nationalism. I mentioned Poland in 1989 just as an example of how so many liberation movements historically have been democratically populist, uniting disparate factions around a common cause of freedom. It's an instructive and hopeful model for the cases where authoritarian populists have become the new establishment.


Perhaps the biggest outright victories of recent years over authoritarian populists have been in Brazil and Poland. In both cases I think Democratic Populism was central:



As you can see, these leaders each adopted highly popular narratives and policies, some of which energized their base, and some of which angered or disappointed them.


But all of our experience with fighting authoritarianism suggests that political parties cannot do it alone. You need strong civic movements to mobilize against authoritarian populists, to keep them on the defensive. Political parties' criticisms can be dismissed as just politics, but civil society can sometimes have more legitimacy - this is why authoritarians typically seek to shut down civic space, even when they're happy to let opposition parties continue to operate.


But the character of that civil society really matters. A crew of radicals who declare that moderate democrats are as bad as authoritarian populists are typically the midwives of fascism. It was the communists who ushered Hitler into power by refusing to support the liberal democrats in government. In the most resilient societies, a good portion of civil society is also Democratic Populist. Some examples:



At Avaaz we didn't have an ideological mission. We were explicitly Democratically Populist in that we campaigned when there was a gap between people and their government. We reached 70 million people on our email list - in many countries we had more subscribers than all the political parties combined, or any other civil society group. I think this was largely due to our Democratic Populist (and Human Politics) approach.


I like the Movement for Marriage Equality in the US as an example of a cause that wasn't popular at first (even Obama was only for civil unions in his first election) but that campaigned in a way that made it become popular. Not by beating up everyone for being homophobic (which of course they could have done) but by appealing to universal values like love, and conservative/libertarian arguments like whether the government should be able to tell you who you can marry. They saw massive attitudinal and legislative change in a short space of time. For me, this is a Democratically Populist style of civil society leadership, one that listens to and respects all people.


I also like March 8th, a very popular movement in Slovenia that played a major role in bringing down the authoritarian populist government there. Led by the wonderful and inspiring practitioner of human politics, Nika Kovac, they campaigned on issues that mattered to most people, like violence against women and water privatization.


I want to go a bit deeper into the Avaaz method, just to suggest a way for others to think about how you shape a Democratically Populist agenda. This was a framework for how we chose our campaigns:



I consciously designed this approach for Avaaz to insulate us against the personal biases and navel gazing that interfere with a Democratic Populist approach. We really questioned both whether people cared and how strongly, whether we actually could win something, and whether we were sure we had moral clarity. These challenges pushed us harder to make our campaigns better - smarter and more effective, more appealing and inspiring, more careful to take the morally clear position. And critically, as CEO, I was not the final decisionmaker. We'd use polling and testing, both of the public and of our membership, to tell us if we'd arrived at a good position and message, or if the people were sending us back to do better. We'd also decide among priorities that way, ensuring that the things we worked on were the things that people most cared about.


I think this approach holds tremendous promise for civil society and political parties. It's not for everyone, but it could make many of them better vessels of change.


But as discussed above, this approach involves many challenges. And at times when authoritarian populism is surging, one problem typically rises to critical levels. The fear, anger, and polarization brought by Authoritarian Populists tends to increase democratic radicalism.


Radicals tend to do everything to undermine a Democratic Populist approach. It's worth stressing that while these radicals are typically political extremists, the behaviours I mention above - of demonizing difference, smearing opponents, disrespecting voters, and opposing coalitions - can also apply to 'centrist radicals' who are viscerally opposed to those to the left and right of them. Radicalism is more a mindset than an issue position.


The problem of radicalism can be crippling, particularly in civil society. I watched in shock as US civil society came to a near complete halt from 2020 to 2021. Just as their country's democracy was threatened, just as the world faced massive threats like climate change, left wing radicals chose to spend nearly all their time attacking left wing moderates in what now seems to have been 2 years of pointless and destructive conflict that mostly ended up driving voters towards Trump.


In the case of parties, Levitsky and Ziblatt in their book "How Democracies Die" identify radical takeover of parties as the principal way in which this happens. They advocate for parties and political systems to play a 'gatekeeping' role to firmly keep radicals at bay. The reason is not just to prevent radicalization, as this might just make the party unelectable. The reason is that democracies typically die through "cumulative extremism" in which the radicalization of each side prompts the radicalization of the other in a vicious spiral, eviscerating the democratic center and ultimately leaving voters with a choice between two tyrants. In our last two big periods of democratic backsliding - the 20s and 30s in Europe and the 60s and 70s in Latin America, Communism and Fascism fed each other in this vicious anti-democratic spiral.


Given the importance of this challenge, I wanted to offer a framework for how to deal with the threat posed by Democratic Radicalism to Democratic Populism. I faced this constantly at Avaaz, where I was lobbied fiercely by activist groups (some even sent death threats!), threatened with smear campaigns, and where 'staff capture' by the ideological biases of our team or board was an ongoing risk to our democratic and human politics DNA. I've also learned by watching how authoritarian inclusive populists successfully manage this problem (because they have all the same issues with their radicals). Here's some possible principles:



I notice that for movements, like for Jedi in Star Wars, "your focus determines your reality". If you can focus on the things that electrify your base AND reach across the wide swathe of most voters, that does a lot of the work. Even this approach however, will never satisfy all the radicals, so you also have to gate-keep and redefine your base to be one that can be consistent with democratic integrity. The single issue radicals that are pushing unpopular causes just often need to be not at the table.


Radicals are an important part of the democratic ecosystem however. They often play an essential role in determining what will be the mainstream, moderate politics of tomorrow. As an environmentalist, I have huge respect for how 'green fringe freaks' like Greenpeace took an issue out of the wilderness in the 70s and 80s and into the mainstream. So it's also important to understand how you don't want to be at war with radicals, just compete with them, AND when they're right, they can provide the vision for good ideas that, with the right democratic populist leadership, can reach across the political spectrum. So make sure to listen carefully, and give them real wins when they're on to something important.


When they're just wrong, or when the society just isn't ready for their ideas, you also need to be firm and disappoint them. This is typically the big problem the center left and center right have with authoritarian populism, they're often not good at saying no, or fighting back to win in these cases.


A fudge that I notice many authoritarian populists make is they feed symbolic wins to their radical bases - stuff that won't anger most people but are highly celebrated by extremists. I think of Modi touching the feet of a radical Hindu nationalist Member of Parliament for example.


Actually achieving democratic populist success breeds a lot of consent. Radicals will want to be part of something that can win (though they'll also seek to capture it).


And lastly, I see democrats all the time just coming clean with radicals that their ideas aren't popular and they need to take a back seat if they want their 'side' to win elections. Trump was just honest in explaining to his base that he'd been with them for a long time on abortion, but now he would not only not support an abortion ban, but veto one if it passed, because he wanted to win the election.



I think the answers to this vary a lot by the place, though there are many issues that cross borders. With my Avaaz glasses on I look at the world today and see an enormous number of those 'killer campaigns' that I mentioned earlier. Just as an illustration - here's some suggestions:


People in many countries are exhausted by polarization today, it splits families, communities, workplaces. 70% of Americans didn't want either Trump or Biden to run. And Anticorruption is the huge prize - if you can show where a regime has sold out for money, you have a powerful democratic populist campaign. I will refrain from explaining all of these but you get the idea.


Sometimes I find people get the wrong idea about Democratic Populism, so let me clarify...



And while I think 80% of the battle is just making sure people feel you're showing up for them and the issues that affect their lives, people also want big picture vision and direction, optimism and hope. Authoritarian Populists recently are using the term "Golden Age" a lot, so I thought I'd take a minute to suggest a few more ambitious big picture vision ideas that might, rooted in the right kind of Democratic Populism, inspire:



Maybe the last misconception I should clear up is that Democratic Populism and Human Politics are NOT the silver bullet for authoritarian populism...



Democratic populism is mostly about substance (though Human Politics is also about communication), but politics is about a lot more than that. The countries that have beaten authoritarians tend to have fielded powerful civil society movements, had charismatic or at least compelling democratic leaders, and done a great job on social media and with their narrative and message. And even if they've done all those things, they've still needed the civic space - freedom of speech and assembly - to operate, and free and fair elections to actually win.


I've framed a lot of this on 'how we win' or how we beat authoritarian populism. But I've been a fan of democratic, human politics long before the authoritarian populists came along. I just think it's the healthiest, most effective way to do politics and activism - it moves us forward together, while respecting the power of people to shape and set the direction of travel. I think it's an essential part of a good, healthy society, of the kind of politics people want and deserve. So if the current threat to democracy breeds more Human Politics, then it will have left us stronger.

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