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‘Populism without the people’: fascists, caesarists, and democrats in Nadia Urbinati’s Me the People

The 2010s were not an easy decade for liberalism. Kicked off the by 2008 credit crash, the decennium liquidated classical parties across Europe and emancipated technocrats across the world, culminating in the annus horribilis of 2016 in which Donald Trump Jr. and the Brexit campaign both won their respective victories. ‘Populism’ has steadily emerged as the master signifier for the decade, now plastered on figures from Trump to Salvini to Iglesias to Mélenchon. Unsurprisingly, liberal output on this moment has been as effusive as overheated, often swerving between alarmism and complacent consultancy; as the Hungarian philosopher Gaspar Miklos Tamas concluded in 2017: ‘Populism means “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I was asked to talk about it nonetheless”’. Nadia Urbinati’s work constitutes one of the rare liberal attempts to grapple with the new populist phenomenon on its own terms. Me the People thereby completes an oeuvre stretching back to the mid-1990s. Rather than dismissing it as a mere pathology or existential enemy, her work tries to reckon with populism as an ideology, movement, and organisational form intimately and intricately connected to democracy itself. Unlike major populism theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, John B. Judis, or Chantal Mouffe, Urbinati is a well-known populism sceptic. Like Mouffe, she does not deny linkages between populism and the democratic imaginary, placing populism and democracy on a single scalar continuum. Me the People remains insistent that ‘populism’ is not simply an enemy, antagonist or alternative to modern representative government. Rather, Urbinati insists on seeing the phenomenon as a peculiar ‘democratic parasite’ – a phenomenon that lives off the same logics and mechanisms as representative democracy, but perverts them into an increasingly undemocratic direction, turning democracy onto itself. As Urbinati shows, contemporary populism invariably starts with a set of premises intrinsic to contemporary representative democracies – majority rule, delegation, popular sovereignty, electoral authorisation – and radicalises them into an increasingly authoritarian direction, negating democracy’s relativistic bent. Here Urbinati links up her definition with existing ‘ideational’ trends in populism scholarship, which cast it as a ‘thin ideology’: ‘having no foundations of its own’, she claims, ‘populism develops from within the democratic institutions it transforms’, but ‘never wholly replaces’ those institutions themselves. Populism comes into view as ‘the extreme border of constitutional democracy’. Countering a long-standing deficit in the field, Urbinati’s book also forms part of a recent wave of scholarship that has sought to grant populism studies proper historical depth. This has mainly involved discussions in the history of political thought, a field where the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, Urbinati, and Federico Finchelstein has proven particularly prominent. To all these scholars, the most suitable historical precedents for the current discussion on populism are nineteenth-century debates on Bonapartism and authoritarian democracy, later rechannelled through the work of Carl Schmitt. In these cases, a strong leader unified an atomised population against a narrow, liberal bloc. This Bonapartist populism was the outcome of a specific historical trajectory reaching back