Populism is defined as a concern with the interests of the common people; democracy is a political system in which the people rule. So, populism and democracy should go well together, right? Perhaps not — perhaps the two can actually conflict, which raises interesting questions for American politics. This is especially problematic when the populism takes the form of religious populism instead of traditional economic populism. Religious populism can be a mask for religious privilege.
The Winter 2005 Wilson Quarterly had a piece arguing that the Democratic Party in America has been losing in part because of a failure to be populist enough:
Modern conservatism, [historian Alan Brinkley, the provost of Columbia University, observes in The American Prospect (Dec. 2004)], is “a populist phenomenon, drawing heavily from the lower middle class, the working class, and perhaps above all, the once-Democratic South.” To win those voters back, Democrats “need to turn much of their attention away from culture and back toward class.” They must deliver more forcefully “a clear economic message” about such issues as health care, corporate malfeasance, and workers’ rights.
Class has much more importance in American politics and society than most people realize. Americans like to think that they have left class behind, becoming a classless society, but that is not true. Appealing to class, or populism, may not be the answer to Democrats’ political problems because Democrats have been hitting economic issues for years without a lot of success.
The problem is, people who might be helped by the Democrats' economic policies are more interested in voting to promote the Republicans' cultural and religious policies. To put it another way, the Democrats' economic populism is less appealing than the Republicans' religious populism. That's one reason, I think, why some liberal evangelical Christians keep pushing to get Democrats to adopt the language and ideas of religious populism.
I also think this would be a serious mistake because the religious populism which is so successful for the Republicans is contrary to the principles of liberalism — not just "liberalism" in the sense of the Democratic Party, but also "liberalism" in the sense of liberal government.
The Wilson Quarterly also cites the article “The Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism” by John Lukacs, from The Chronicle Review (Dec. 10, 2004):
“When it came to the formation of the democracies of the West, the concepts of liberalism and democracy, while not inseparable, were surely complementary, with the emphasis on the former. Among the founders of the American republic were serious men who were more dubious about democracy than about liberty. They certainly did not believe in—indeed, they feared—populism; populism that, unlike a century ago, has now become (and not only in the United States) the political instrument of ‘conservatives,’ of so-called men of the ‘Right.’ It is significant that in Europe, too, the appeal of the term ‘liberal’ has declined, while ‘democratic’ is the adopted name of a variety of parties, many of them not only antiliberal but also extreme right-wing nationalist.”
“Yes, democracy is the rule of the majority; but there liberalism must enter. Majority rule must be tempered by the rights of minorities and of individual men and women; but when that temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing else than populism. More precisely: Then it is nationalist populism. It may be that the degeneration of liberal democracy to populism will be the fundamental problem of the future.”
Populism isn’t bad, but populism untempered by the values of liberal democracy is not only bad, but is arguably just the route taken by those states which have descended into vicious, violent fascism. That is particularly true when it comes to conservative appeals to religious populism. Conservatives aren’t themselves fascists, but fascism has been a consequence of conservatives seeking to expand their base of power by incorporating populist ideologies or movements into their system.
The liberal, democratic West defeated fascism once, but the danger of fascism has not disappeared. Some of the most serious fascist threats usually come from within liberal democracies, not from outside them, and are typically carried along by the masses. Only a serious commitment to basic democratic principles rather than to mere majoritarianism or demagogic, religious populism can help us avoid those threats.
