The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy

Populism is no longer considered a disease of the developing world. In recent decades it has spread throughout Europe and North America, while maintaining its grip on its historical stronghold, Latin America. Populism now represents the biggest threat to the survival of liberal democracy. However, confusion about what it means prevails, even among academics. Unlike communism, which attacked democracy frontally and sometimes violently, populism works from within by appealing to negative emotions that weaken society’s cultural antibodies. In any of its ideological variants, it proposes simplistic, arbitrary and costless measures to overcome society’s structural problems that end up damaging the economy and weakening the rule of law. This essay outlines the main elements of a conceptual framework that can be useful to analyze the roots of modern populism, understand how it chooses its ideology and predict how it will likely evolve. It also draws parallels with threats to liberal democracy during the interwar period and extracts insights from the contemporary interpretation provided by two leading intellectuals: Joseph A. Schumpeter and Friedrich A. Hayek.