Delegitimisation Rather than Populism as the Challenge Posed by Anti-Democratic Actors

Next up in our AoIR 2023 session is the wonderful Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on understanding the processes that led to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt in the United States. She builds on an analysis of every Facebook and Twitter post and Facebook and Instagram ad by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and focusses here especially on Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election.

One of his key points of focus was on mail-in ballots (which were especially common in the 2020 election as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), questioning the validity of such ballots and claiming that these would allow non-citizens to vote or election officials to tamper with ballots. These attacks were present both in Trump’s own posts and in the ads run by his campaign, and contained many obviously false statements.

But do such attacks make Trump a populist? Is the problem here that he and other similar leaders (Bolsonaro in Brazil, Meloni in Italy) are engaging in populist politics? Is the problem here Trump’s juxtaposition of ‘good’ ordinary people and ‘bad’ elites? After all, all politics has elements of populism in it, as Laclau has pointed out; populism is a thin ideology as it is essentially a form of anti-institutional discourse aiming to win over a large swathe of the people. Then again, there are also pro-democratic populists, and Trump’s populist rhetoric is also authoritarian – so how do we distinguish the two?

The description as a populist does not properly address the role of disinformation in Trump’s rhetoric, and does not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate attacks against institutions; it does not point to when there may be genuine dangers for democracy. The better term here might therefore be delegitimisation; this is what Trump is centrally engaging in as he attacks democratic processes, institutions, and office-holders, and it exploits the political and media context in the United States with its currently weak political, party, and media institutions.

Calling out and combatting such delegitimising political actors may help us defend democracy: it may prevent them from getting elected as it helps us see them for what they are.