This interview is based on Alex Yates and Aurelien Mondon’s article ‘‘Get off your high horse and vote for us’: The anti-populist construction of the elite and the people’ published in BJPIR (2025).
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Could you tell us briefly what is the key argument in your recent article?
Anti-populism, a discourse which presents ‘populism’ as a serious threat to democracy, is often said to be demophobic. This means that it is sceptical, or even fearful, of the ‘the people’ and their role in political life.
Whilst my co-author and I agree with this claim, we argue it is too simplistic to say that anti-populism is equivalent to faith in the elite. Instead, we argue that anti-populism constructs its own sets of ‘people’s’ and ‘elites’. It constructs a ‘good’, ‘liberal’ ‘people’ who are hardworking, reasonable, and satisfied with representative democracy. This goes along with two ‘bad’ ‘people’s’: ‘the people’ of the ‘populist’ left, who are presented as spoiled children, and ‘the people’ of the ‘populist’ right who are portrayed as uneducated, yet whose far-right demands surrounding, for example, immigration are taken more seriously than left-wing redistributive demands. This corresponds to anti-populism’s two sets of political elites: ‘bad’ ‘populist’ political leaders who indulge ‘the people’ and ‘good’ anti-populist politicians who uphold the elitist liberal hegemony. We argue, therefore, that anti-populism is quintessentially post-democratic, as it has a democratic shell, which makes some reference to ‘the people’, but, ultimately, an elitist centre. One can say that anti-populism, then, aims at government for the people, but not necessarily of and by the people.
Your work is on anti-populism – could you tell us what you mean by it and why you think it is important in our current political moment?
I understand anti-populism as a conservative discourse. This is not to say that anti-populism has right-wing ideological content, per se, but that anti-populist discourse is fixated on preserving a desirable continuity between past, present, and future, which ‘populism’ supposedly interrupts. In other words, anti-populists are keen to return to a ‘pre-populist time’ when politics ‘made sense’ and was ‘nice and boring’. Fascinatingly, anti-populism doesn’t even need a genuinely populist competitor as it can merely use the ‘populist’ label to discredit any number of politicians or movements.
To my mind, there are three harmful consequences of anti-populist discourse for democracy. Firstly, anti-populism helps to mainstream the far right by euphemising them as merely ‘populist’, giving credence to the far right’s false claim that they speak for ‘the people’. Secondly, it constructs a false equivalence between the left and the far right, labelling both as dangerous ‘populists’, thus pre-empting the possibility of democratic renewal which the left may offer. Thirdly, anti-populism often seeks to delegitimise not only ‘populism’, but ‘the people’ as well. This demophobia is damaging for popular sovereignty, as democracy’s legitimising principle. Because of this fear of ‘the people’, anti-populism can quickly slide into a defence of oligarchy.
Is the concept of populism still useful?
I think so, but only when used with a great deal of caution. I would argue, for example, that it is of very limited use when discussing the contemporary far right, who can be much better understood through their core ideological components, such as racism, heterosexism, and authoritarianism.
Taking my cues from the work of Ernesto Laclau, I think that populism is key in understanding counterhegemonic politics. Ultimately, anti-establishment movements which seek to join disparate demands for, for example, better working conditions, improved public services, environmental justice and so on, are in the business of building a ‘people’ of some sort. In these reactionary and oligarchic times, this building of a ‘people’ to contest the status quo, I suggest, is one of the central tasks of contemporary emancipatory struggles.
Indeed, what makes populism so intriguing compared to other forms of class-essentialist left-wing politics, is its intersectional potential. As Laclau makes clear, in populist formations, the signifier which unifies ‘the people’ is empty: anyone could identify with it. A truly open concept of ‘the people’ could be precisely what is needed to account for the injustices produced by the intersections of race, class, gender etc., which are often marginalised.
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Alex Yates is a member of the RPRN and a first-year PhD student at the University of Bath with a research focus on anti-populism: discourses which seek to defend the status quo from contestation by demonising challenges to it as irresponsibly “populist”. As such, he is interested in two reactionary consequences of these discourses. Firstly, the ways in which they close down opportunities to contest neoliberal hegemony and, secondly, the euphamisation of far-right politics as merely “populist”. Within the Reactionary Politics Research Network he is hoping to explore how reaction operates at the core of the liberal-democratic mainstream.
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