There are ways to defend populism from a liberal perspective, and the only way I suggest is to reject the populist concept of “the people.”
Let people be a plurality, a collection of individuals. Recognize that each individual has the right to veto (at the contract constitutional level) any prohibitions or orders with which he (of course she) does not agree. By definition, no subset of the people can exercise coercion against individuals from another subset. Therefore, it follows that neither elites, experts (“they”), nor politicians themselves legitimately coerce people. When populism is characterized in this way, it is consistent with (classical) liberalism and therefore defensible from both moral and economic points of view. Liberalism, at least as formulated by James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay, is about the negative veto power of each individual, but the paradigm is deeper. Liberalism certainly and emphatically does not support the unlimited positive right of some individuals, even the majority, to impose prohibitions and orders on individuals within a plurality of people.
It is not about how populism in the standard sense of the word is defined and marketed to the masses, the majority or majority. Populism requires the existence of a singular “people” (see, for example, Cass Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction) [Oxford University Press, 2017] (This is the academically accepted definition and is close to the definition I have assigned to populists). If “the people” (singular) itself does not exist, there can be no populism. It is just a label to hide an interventionist, collectivist, authoritarian ideology. (See my “The Impossibility of Populism,” The Independent Review, Summer 2021.)
In order for populism to be internally consistent and compatible with liberalism, it must incorporate the plurality of “individuals” and “the people” in the liberal sense, and no one is more deserving of power over their fellow citizens. . It’s no longer “populism.”
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People as organisms in a populist sense, by DALL-E
