How to Defeat Populism
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
This is the Modern Survival Guide, a blog I’ve been writing to document and explore elements of survival in the modern world. A couple of years ago I wrote an article about why populism is a bad political choice, and since then the USA has elected a textbook, full-throated populist to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. Great job, guys.
Obviously I am not a fan of populism, and to explain why in this context I’ll just briefly recap that other article: populism is bad because it promises things it can’t deliver, it delivers solutions that tend to create more problems than they solve, it scapegoats vulnerable populations, it idolizes “great leaders” to the detriment of good governmental processes (sometimes to the point that democracy fails), and it tends to turn negative emotions into harmful policies. Populism is bad, m’kay.
Populists win when the voting public gets seduced by emotional appeals and quick solutions to problems that may or may not correspond to actual reality. A core component of populism is ascribing the major problems of society to “those people,” inserting whomever the populist likes into those quote marks. For example, right-wing populists in the US like to hammer on trans people, gay people, immigrants, communists, or the more generic “liberals” as their bogeymen, while left-wing populists almost exclusively go after “the rich.”
When populists win, what you invariably get is a whole slew of policy proposals that actively make the nation worse while ignoring or outright denying the real problems that exist. For example: in the US right now, the new populist administration is preparing sweeping immigration crackdowns which will have… interesting… side effects for the US economy and US moral perception.
They have not publicly stated any intention to actually address the need for immigration and economic reform, which is the root cause of the US illegal immigrant shadow economy in the first place — we need more workers than are currently being let in, the immigration process as a whole is creaky and underfunded, and US employers have built our current economy around extremely low wages for the lowest rungs of the economic ladder to the extent that no US citizens want to work these jobs.
The new administration seemingly has no plans to deal with any of this, other than kicking out the illegal immigrants (and some of the legal ones, if they get their way) and hoping that everything else magically works itself out. This is not good government policy (because hope is not a strategy) and will inevitably do more harm than good.
This is just an example. There are tons of others from history that will immediately occur to anyone even passingly familiar with the subject. So, let’s move to the meat of this article — how in the heck do you stop populism?
This isn’t idle conjecture. Populism is VERY hard to stop once it gets rolling, because it feeds on emotions and it creates an alternative reality around the populist political movement and leader. Populist movements become cults, essentially, and once they gain momentum they’re basically unstoppable in the short term. Therefore, most strategies to stop populism are going to focus on either keeping populist rhetoric from getting a foothold in the first place, or riding out the worst of its excesses.
Broadly speaking, there are seven ways that I know of to stop a populist movement. None of them are immediate solutions, I am sorry to say, and worse yet, some of these don’t actually work once a populist government has gained power — by that point, it’s usually too late to do much other than hang on. I don’t claim that this is an exhaustive list, but these are:
- Education: Teach people about the dangers of populism early and often.
- Communication: Make sure that productive policies and politics have concise, catchy, informative communications strategies to compete with populist policies.
- Grassroots Activism: Build low-level networks and activism to broaden anti-populist messages at a personal, local level.
- Burnout: Populism has a lifespan — wait it out.
- Administrative Delay: Utilize institutions and key actors to delay or defuse populist policies until the populist loses interest and moves on.
- Sue: Populists often try to do blatantly illegal things, and tying them up in court can drag out the clock until they lose interest.
- Rebellion: When all else fails and the situation is dire, then sabotage, obstruct, and fight.
These are not simple subjects, and although I’ll do my best to summarize each point, people can and have written books on these topics. So, grab a drink and a snack and let’s dive in.
Education
Populism wins when people don’t know any better. That’s a very simplified statement, but it encompasses a whole slew of preconditions that have to exist before a populist can gain traction. Populism is a bit like a pimple on the skin of civil society; it pops up when there’s some infection bubbling away under the surface, and people get frustrated with the status quo because they don’t see change. After a while, a lot of people will seek any solution — especially one that is emotionally appealing — to get out of that bind.
Now, since we live in a post-truth environment, there’s a caveat here: sometimes, the problems that are prompting populist movements don’t actually exist, or actually exist in a very different reality than that presented by the populist leader and believed by their supporters. Even in cases where populists accurately represent a problem, quite often the solution they propose simply wouldn’t work and any reasonable person ought to be able to figure that out.
I’ll give two examples.
First, let’s look at the anti-trans rhetoric that is currently swirling around the toxic spaces of US politics. One of the Right’s big propaganda wins of the last twenty years has been the debate over trans women using women's restrooms. The US conservative wing has successfully presented this as a threat to women's safety, and it’s very difficult to have a discussion on this topic without this specter coming up.
The reality, of course, is that there have been practically no examples ever of trans women assaulting other women in a women’s restroom.¹ This populist screed is pure fiction. But it feels truthy to the populist adherents, because they have been told over and over that trans women are disgusting perverts, or mentally deranged, or both. And if you don’t know any better, and that’s all you hear… well, the outcome is historically obvious. We start getting bathroom bans and laws that eat up the political oxygen in the room and prevent discussion on more important, real problems.
On the flip side, let’s look at the arch-liberal populist chant of “eat the rich,” which pops up constantly whenever the national debt debate comes up. The perennial claim is that we’re in debt because of tax cuts to the wealthy, and we must reverse these cuts to get out of the national debt cycle.
To be fair, there is some truth here. Yes, we should tax the rich more, and yes, that would bring in additional tax revenue provided that we concurrently close a whole slew of loopholes in the tax code and also implement some controls on moving money around for tax avoidance purposes. These are all very un-sexy topics that don’t get a lot of traction. But no, it’s not possible to erase the national debt solely by taxing the rich. It’s a much harder conversation than that, which I have explored at length in other articles.²
Again — any reasonable person who knows how things work and can effectively do their own research (which is a very fraught-with-peril topic that I have also explored at some length³) can very quickly look at both of these populist claims and go, “Yeah, that’s not gonna work.” But here’s the catch. You can’t do this retroactively. Once people have dug in their heels on a populist position, it is extremely unlikely that they are going to change their minds.⁴
Therefore, the only way education works is if it is done in advance. This is something that should be covered in high school, and to be fair some US civics classes in some states probably do a pretty good job at this. This is also a topic that the media, in my opinion, has a responsibility to regularly cover. And of course, education is a major fiefdom of state and federal governments, who share some responsibility to ensure that citizens understand the dangers of unhelpful political ideologies.
It’s a shame that so many state governments, and the current incoming US federal administration, are wedded to populism from the word go. It’s equally shameful that populism tends to be profitable for the media. This is a bit of a hiccup to the ability of education to combat future populism, but this won’t always be the case. It is always a good idea to seize the moment when the government is run by sane people to implement as many policies as possible to keep it that way. That statement doesn’t just apply to anti-populist education, by the way.
Communication
Populists win partly because they have catchy, simple slogans. “Eject the illegals,” “Protect our children,” “Tax the rich,” etc. Populist policy proposals are by definition broad, poorly defined, tug-on-the-emotions ideas. Now here’s the thing: you are never going to win against a populist by handing the common voter an article like this one. That’s a self-burn, but it’s true. Populist opponents need simple, catchy slogans too.
It’s important to realize that the average person manifestly does not care about politics. They don’t understand politics, they don’t want to understand politics, and they basically just want their life to be pretty much like it was yesterday, but a bit better. They don’t like change, they don’t want to be told that things are different, they don’t want disruptions in their lives. The average person loves a simply policy proposal, because it means they don’t have to do anything complicated, like thinking, when deciding whether or not to support it.
This is why “Protect the children!” is a classic, obvious hallmark of an incoming terrible policy proposal. I cringe whenever I hear any version of that slogan. The average person hears that siren call, and their brain operation seems to go as follows:
I want to protect children -> They say they’re going to protect children -> If I don’t support this I’m not protecting children -> I will support this thing.
No actual consideration of the policy proposal typically occurs, which is the only reason I’ve been able to come with to explain why voters are typical so darn surprised when populist proposals fall directly on their faces. For reference, see Brexit. Just all of it. One of the classic examples of people not knowing what the hell they just voted for, because they had been captured by a very good communications strategy.
Note that this may cross over to propaganda, but it doesn’t have to. The bottom line is that simple communications are effective, and handing the average voter an itemized policy proposal white paper very much is not.
Therefore, when combatting populism it is critically important to have a communications strategy that focuses on simple, catchy, slogan-based messaging. If at all possible, using the exact same slogan as the populist can be helpful. If they say they are saving the children, you had better damn well say you are saving the children. If they say they are protecting women, that should be your opening line at every speech. Use the dark side against itself here, or lose the messaging war.
But above all, every effort should be made to distill every single policy proposal down into a five-second sound bite for the consumption of the voting public. Never, ever assume that the average voter is going to actually understand anything you are proposing to do. As George Carlin famously said, imagine the average person. Now realize that 50% of the population is dumber than that. Like it or not, that’s your target audience. If you’re not speaking on their level, you’re going to lose.
Grassroots Activism
A huge component of a populist victory lies in their ground game. Populists do not exist in a vacuum. Like every other politician, they have surrogates and lieutenants who go forth into the world to spread the Good News that “If we just got God back into schools, the nation would heal,” or whatever. These people write articles, make YouTube and TikTok videos, give news interviews, go on talk radio and podcasts, and go door-to-door.
Populists tend to have rather a lot of these people, both because some of them are captured by the message and because there are always a lot of people who see opportunity in a populist victory. See: Elon Musk.
Any organization seeking to counteract populism before it really gets traction needs to have and maintain a solid grassroots activist network. Note that I’m not saying that this has to be a national organization. If you don’t like populism, starting a neighborhood network to go to protests or attend local political meetings is a perfectly valid thing to do.
Populist politics often boils down to who can shout the most simplified, truthy-sounding policy proposals the fastest. Grassroots activism helps immensely with this by amplifying messaging at the local level.
Burnout
Populism has a shelf life. The big problems with populist policies — that they typically don’t address real problems accurate or well, and that they tend to create more problems than they solve — don’t go away when a populist wins. They just start to fester. In general, so long as democratic institutions are intact, populists get voted out just about as fast as they get voted in.
Therefore, a perfectly valid tactic for combatting populism is to simply wait it out and prepare for the inevitable burnout phase.
Remember, the average voter doesn’t really care about, understand, or follow politics — they just want their life to not change too much, and to change for the better in increments at a reasonable pace. If their life gets worse, for any reason, they tend to pull the eject lever for whoever is currently in power.
When the populist fails to deliver their promises, or even just if the economy takes a hit, or if something bad happens that the populist isn’t able to deal with, the standard response is for the voters to remove them from office. More as a knee-jerk reaction than from any considered political, economic, logical, or ideological stance, but still, it happens and can be reasonably predicted.
Administrative Delay
Populists are, almost by definition, very rarely the adults in the room when it comes to actually implementing policy. That’s because the policies they want to implement are usually stupid. As a general rule, the people who actually staff civil service agencies around the world are not entirely stupid, and at least some of them can be counted on to actually be patriotic citizens who are in their careers because they want to improve their nations.
The current Republican Party stance is to refer to such people as the “deep state,” because these are people who actually control what goes on at the day-to-day level of government action, very frequently understand how policies actually impact the public, and therefore are disinclined to see some know-nothing yahoo come along and blow it all up. Such people are well-positioned to obstruct populist policy implementations by simply delaying actions.
This is a LOT easier to do than it might seem, because every government on Earth exists by creating and utilizing internal policies, standards of practice, standard operating procedures, and workflows. Bureaucracy, in all its glory and horror, is an inescapable fact of life. People who understand the bureaucracy know how to get things done. People who don’t get stymied. All anyone in any given government agency has to do to hold up a populist policy is simply play the bureaucratic game badly.
There are endless ways to do this. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few:
- Writing and awarding bad contracts, or awarding contracts to known poor-performers to ensure that policy implementation fails or flops
- “Losing” documentation or orders within the chain of command
- Snarling new initiatives in budget red tape
- Writing or implementing poor standards of practice or poorly-written guidance to make it difficult to understand or implement a new policy or regulation
- Waging intra- or inter-agency jurisdiction battles to obfuscate who actually is supposed to do something
- Sabotaging or creatively interpreting data reporting
- Returning policy or implementation documents for comments in an endless loop
- Malicious compliance
And so on and so forth. If a bureaucrat wants to ruin your day, they are generally quite capable of doing so. Now, obviously, something like this isn’t going to survive very well in the face of someone from on-high in the populist’s administration taking a personal interest, but I would imagine that the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases would fly below the radar and simply get chalked up to “government inefficiency.”
So, what happens if the populist responds by simply firing large numbers of government employees? That works for a while, but if it goes on long enough the government stops doing its job. The nation slowly slides off a cliff. You end up with a failed state, i.e., a state in which the government cannot govern. THESE ARE VERY BAD THINGS. But ultimately, from a certain point of view, this is the type of outcome that gets the populist removed. Remember — the voting public only cares if their lives are better or worse. Whoever is in charge gets the blame either way.
If the nation is headed for failed-state status anyway, accelerating the collapse may be the “best” way out.
Sue
Populist candidates promise the moon, and quite often at least try to keep their campaign promises — even when such promises are horrible or illegal. While dismantling the legal system is often part of the populist playbook, this is not always the case, and in any event attempting such a thing takes time and political capital. While the legal system still exists, even if only nominally, lawsuits can be an effective method of tying up the populist agenda.
It’s worth remembering that populists are almost always on the clock. They have to deliver on some of the things that they promised, as the only reason they came to power in the first place was that people were desperate. Desperate people want results. Failure to deliver those results can and will harm the populist’s popularity given sufficient time, and drag some of the downsides of their plans out into the open for the public to look at.
A good example of this was the massive, multi-state lawsuit that emerged from Donald Trump’s attempt to build his famous border wall (the one Mexico was supposed to pay for). The lawsuit stalled action on several fronts while also putting the issue, and all of its warts, front-and-center in a media spotlight for years. Most populist plans are not going to survive that kind of attention, because most populist plans are stupid.
There’s also the off chance that the courts might try to flex their muscles and actually rule against the populist, which can happen in cases where the rule of law isn’t quite dead, and in cases where it is dead but the court system is trying to resuscitate itself.
The main downside of lawsuits is that they are expensive. This is typically an action taken by NGOs, cities, states, or super-empowered individuals (read: benevolent rich people) who have the resources to engage lawyers for a long time.
Rebellion
Speaking of failed states, let’s talk about rebellions. It’s worth noting that in the vast majority of historical cases rebellions produced worse outcomes than simply riding out a bad government.⁵ But… there are very notable exceptions.
“Rebellion” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and runs the gamut from civil disobedience to insurrections to armed uprisings. It should generally be considered the option of last resort, because see previous statement about rebellions usually producing bad outcomes, not to mention, you know, the whole thing about violence rarely being the best option.
That being said, sometimes it’s time to man the barricades and dust off the guillotine. When should you consider that? When your or your fellow citizens’ fundamental human rights are being violated by your government, and this is a policy rather than a violation of law. When the rule of law has been suspended. When you have no more voice, and no more representation. That’s when. And then you roll your dice and take your chances.
There is no such thing as “it can’t happen here.” Remember that.
Summing Up: Populism is Usually Worth Resisting
To be entirely fair, some populists are reasonably harmless. These are rare cases where populists in an otherwise prosperous, safe country invent a relatively benign bogeyman to rail against. The vast majority of populist candidates and populist governments can be reasonably expected to make things worse. Populism is usually worth resisting.
We’re entering an interesting time in the world where populist right-wing candidates are on the rise and coming into power in several countries, most notably the USA. This isn’t a piece of idle speculation or academic interest, and people are going to need to pick a side in the coming years.
If you find yourself with a destructive populist government coming into power (that is, one that explicitly has set itself to destroying some useful aspect of your society), it is your job as a citizen to look around and determine what you’re going to do about it. You don’t get points for sitting on the sidelines when they start putting people in camps.
By the same token, if the populist movement is running into obvious walls, and shows no signs of getting smarter, it’s not worth your time to do much more than point, laugh, and vote for a better candidate the next time around.
Some consequences of any given populist gaining power can be predicted in advance; some can’t. But in general, the nice thing about populists is that they clearly tell you exactly what they are going to do. Even if it’s horrible. Even if it’s illegal or immoral. Because the people who form their base of support want to do those things. When people tell you who they are, believe them, and then pick your method of resistance. Anyone can be an educator. Anyone can be a communicator or a grassroots activist. Not everyone can participate in attempts at lawsuits or administrative delays, but if you are someone who can, these are things to seriously consider and prepare for.
As for rebellions… we shouldn’t hope for that or really expect that this is going to be a viable option in the vast majority of cases. Most of the time, populism will burn itself out naturally. But sometimes this simply isn’t the case.
One of the big problems with populism is that populist leaders so often tap into the worst emotions to fuel their support, and bad emotions lead to bad actions. When populists start talking about rounding up “degenerates” or those deemed racially/ethnically/socially/religiously inferior, believe them. Act accordingly. You modern survival may very well depend on it.
¹Incidents of trans people committing any sort of sexual assault are comparatively rare, with incidents of sexual assault particularly in a bathroom being almost entirely nonexistent. On the flip side, trans people are several times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault than cisgender people.
²Like this one
³I wrote an article a while back on how to do your own research, and you can find it here
⁴To be fair, there are mixed academic results in this space. Some researchers do think that it’s possible to educate people out of populist ideas. Others, however, find almost the exact opposite, that populist supporters are just naturally more receptive to conspiracy theories and other non-realistic ideas.
⁵There’s a fair amount of research on both the economic and political side-effects of civil war, and this is an example of what I would consider a normal finding: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1574001306020230
