Populism is not an aberration in democratic politics. It is the symptom of the institutional trust deficit that democratic governance has accumulated and not addressed.
The Trust Deficit
The populist movements that have reshaped electoral politics across democratic countries in the past decade are not primarily the product of elite manipulation, misinformation, or the exploitation of cultural grievances by cynical politicians — though all of these contribute. They are primarily the symptom of genuine institutional trust deficits accumulated over decades in which democratic institutions have consistently failed to deliver the policy outcomes that the populations they govern expected from them. The working-class voter who supported populist candidates in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Hungary is not misled about the economic stagnation, the institutional unresponsiveness, and the sense of cultural marginalisation that have characterised their experience of democratic governance. They are making a rational assessment that the existing institutional framework has not served them well and that the populist challenger's promise to disrupt it is at least worth trying.
The institutional trust deficit that populism reveals is not equally distributed. It is concentrated among the populations that have been most consistently disappointed by the economic outcomes of democratic governance: the regions that have experienced sustained deindustrialisation without adequate replacement economic activity, the communities whose public services have been reduced by decades of austerity, and the populations whose cultural identity has been marginalised by the professional-class assumptions that have dominated democratic policy-making.
Populism reveals the institutional trust deficit that established democratic institutions have accumulated and not repaired. The response that defends the institutions without addressing the deficit they have produced is a response that misunderstands what it is responding to. The institutions worth defending are worth defending by making them work — not only by opposing the movements that have formed in response to their failures.
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