On Pre-Populism

Regularly generalizing about blocks of millions of people can soften your worldview up for narcissistic populists

"Thinking" by Miroslav Vajdić is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The dangers of populism are a recurring theme of Sharpen Your Axe. This week’s column will look at some attitudes that sit upstream of populism. We could call this pre-populism.

Let’s begin by looking at the attacks on the US on 11th September 2001. When the smoke cleared it emerged that 19 out of 20 attackers were from Saudi Arabia (95%). Bayesians would warn us that we can generalize about the Saudi origin of the attackers, but should be very wary about generalizing about the nature of Saudi Arabia from the attack. The country had a population of 21.2m in 2001, so the 19 attackers represented just 0.00009% of the Saudi population.

Pre-populists often generalize in both directions. In this case, the attackers are taken to represent something toxic and rotten in Saudi culture, even though the vast majority of the kingom’s citizens are perfectly peaceful and law abiding.

Of course, once the judgement call is made that certain people are the true representatives of a particular culture, pre-populists are able to dismiss other people as unrepresentative. For example, pre-populists who are drawn to big, sweeping statements on Saudi culture will rarely mention women’s rights activist Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi as one of its representatives.

We could call these pre-populist judgement calls the representative fallacy. Cultures are seen as static monoliths that endure through time. Pre-populists decide if these cultures are good or bad and then claim that certain people represent them, while others don’t.

One of the best examples I have seen came in 2017 when close to a million people took to the streets of Barcelona to protest against the Catalan independence movement. Separatists actively sought out photographs of a handful of people with far-right symbols on the fringes of the demonstration. They were said to be true representatives of the movement, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people literally chanting that they weren’t fascists.

George Orwell spotted the pre-populist tendency back in the 1940s when he wrote his insightful essay on nationalism. He defined nationalism as the assumption “that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.” He also said that nationalists identify themselves with a single nation or unit, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

Of course, the reality on the ground tends to be much messier than the generalizers would have you believe. No culture is wholly good or wholly bad. Any group consisting of millions of people will be complex and even contradictory. There will be exceptions to every trend, not to mention backlashes and rebellions. New generations will do things differently from their parents and grandparents. Meanwhile, emigration and immigration will also change old ways of doing things, as will new technologies.

We can see this clearly if we look back on Ancient Greece. Thousands of years later, it is easy to generalize about the Greeks and the centrality of philosophy to their thought. However, any Athenian contemporary of Socrates would have thought you were quite mad if you said the philosopher represented something essential about the culture of the city-state. He was considered so rebellious that he was put to death!

The danger of making sweeping generalizations about cultures and their alleged representatives is that when you do this regularly you will find narcissists waiting. Narcissists often feel that they represent something essential about the culture of their countries, unlike other members of the elite. If you have already bought into pre-populism, it will be easy for narcissistic leaders to sell you populist narratives about “the real people.” The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism?

Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence

Marlene Wind’s Tribalization of Europe

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.