Populism: A Definition Sought and Tested

Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen

This volume has presented accounts of rhetoric coming from seven highly
diverse political sources—but nevertheless sources that we believe readers
will agree offer their audiences instantiations of populist politics.
They are indeed a motley crew. Some of them, most would agree,
are consistently populist, while others are so in a perhaps more episodic
manner or in specific instances. They belong to different contemporary,
or nearly contemporary, political settings around the world, and they are,
undeniably, so diverse that they highlight, when seen together, the issue
of whether populism is in fact a clear, coherent, and usable concept. Even
so, we submit that that there will be broad agreement about predicating
“populism” of all these seven cases.
Given that, we reflect in this concluding chapter on two intercon-
nected questions set forth from the beginning: Considering the analyses
offered here, is it possible, despite all the diversity, to point to a common

C. Kock (B) · L. Villadsen

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen S, Denmark
e-mail: kock@hum.ku.dk
L. Villadsen
e-mail: lisas@hum.ku.dk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 217

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics
and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_9
218 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

denominator that justifies our referring to their subject matter as different

versions of populist rhetoric, and to their conclusions as having something
to say collectively about the relation between the categories “populism”
and “rhetoric”? Is there a red thread that connects them? And can it be
argued that this connecting thread pertains to the realm of rhetoric—so
that, in that sense, “populism” and “populist” are rhetorical predicates?
To present scholarship for considering these questions was our main moti-
vation for organizing this book, together with the hope to foster more
interdisciplinary cross-pollination in the study of populism as a discursive
phenomenon.

The Enormity and Elusiveness of Populism

Populism and populist rhetoric are now phenomena that perhaps more
than ever call for deepened understanding. If we accept the assumption
that the political leaders and movements whose rhetorics are analyzed in
this book are in fact valid examples of populism (thus for a while post-
poning the questions of how to define that contentious term, and of how
to relate the various manifestations of it to a core definition), then one
insight already strikes us as standing out: Rhetoric, no matter how that
term is defined, has been a central factor in the rise of populisms that
recent decades have seen across the world. Populist rhetors incite and
energize populist forces everywhere. And clearly the various populisms
do not, as sometimes asserted, or implied, solely result from under-
lying socio-economic and historical developments. To be sure, political
developments are in large part conditioned by such factors, but rhetoric
decidedly has significantly shaped, strengthened, and changed the populist
upheavals that we see. One recent and illustrative example is Donald
Trump. While his emergence as a political force and his rise to power
undoubtedly were conditioned by political and socio-economic condi-
tions that have been present in the United States, perhaps to some extent
unnoticed, for many decades or even centuries, Trump’s rhetoric has
without question motivated and exacerbated these factors and caused
massive social phenomena as, for example, a rise in hate crimes and the
widespread belief that the 2020 election in the United States was “rigged”
in disfavor of the people’s will—a belief that culminated in the attack by
protesters, partly armed and dangerous, on the US Capitol on January 6,
2021.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 219

Long before that, another example among many of how rhetoric has
helped cause major upheavals, is Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Without
the incendiary rhetoric coming from figures like Slobodan Milošević
and Radovan Karadžić, with vilification of former neighbors and active
creation of division and strife among population groups based on linking
ethnicity and alleged superior rights to the land, the civil war in that
region and its destruction of lives and property might not have come
about or taken the horrific course that it did. In the present volume, the
chapters on populist Brexit rhetoric, on the Italian notion of trasformismo
or on Viktor Orbán’s rhetorical populism in Hungary point to other
instances of how rhetoric has dramatically influenced a country’s polit-
ical destiny. It thus seems to us uncontroversial to claim that rhetoric, not
least populist rhetoric, is often a highly potent factor for political upheaval
and change in the world—sometimes for bad, but perhaps sometimes for
good.
Given that, it is an important challenge for rhetorical scholars to take
on the topic of populism, identify its workings, develop a vocabulary for
description and analysis, theorize its origin, appeal, and potential anti-
dote, and hopefully present such efforts in terms useful for neighboring
disciplines. Our hope for this book is to take the initial steps to offering
a meaningful rhetorical definition of populism.

Populism as a Rhetorical Notion

Defining populism as essentially an attribute of political rhetoric aligns
with views advanced by several recent scholars of populism, to the effect
that populism is not identifiable as a particular political agenda, and thus
that it cannot, for example, be placed anywhere on a traditional left–
right spectrum. There are leftist populisms and rightist populisms and
some that cannot even, with any plausibility, be placed on a continuum
between those two categories. These broadly recognized insights are also
demonstrated by the chapters in this book.
One authoritative example of scholars who point to rhetoric as the
dimension where the essential core of populism is found is a work of
two outstanding political scientists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart,
the monumental Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian
Populism (2019). Although their central concern is with empirical and
quantitative analysis, not rhetorical analysis, they declare at the outset:
“Populism is understood in this book minimally as a style of rhetoric
220 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

reflecting first-order principles about who should rule, claiming that legit-
imate power rests with ‘the people’ not the elites” (2019, 4; our italics);
and they explicitly find that “populism is a form of rhetoric” (14).
Marshaling a wealth of data, the two scholars’ overarching argument is
that it is “the combination of authoritarian values disguised by populist
rhetoric” that constitutes “potentially the most dangerous threat to liberal
democracy” (16). We would tend to agree with that position, and we
also agree with the way populism is here seen as a rhetorical predicate,
and as a separate one—one that correlates easily, but not necessarily, with
authoritarian values and which is still conceptually separate from them.
We also tend to agree with Ernesto Laclau, who opened his ground-
breaking On Populist Reason (2005) by pointedly telling other scholars
that “what is specific about populism—its defining dimension—has been
systematically avoided” (10: italics in the original). In commenting on
some of the influential scholarly characterizations of populism, and on
specific alleged instantiations of it, Laclau finds instead a bewildering
plethora of attributes that seem to have no common denominator and
are often contradictory of each other. It is not possible, he maintains,
to find a defining commonality between them on the level of their
respective political agendas or platforms. Rather, the defining dimen-
sion that unites instances of populism is a “political logic”. The logic
he sees is one where rhetorical operations connect a set of differential
“demands” existing in a population to an “equivalential chain” and sees
this as representing the will of an interpellated “people”—a people that is
pitted by populist rhetoric against a mighty oppressive force. The defining
features, according to Laclau, is thus talk of a “people”, identified and
united by the equivalential chain of demands (we might also say “agenda
items”), and of the alleged oppressive force. Common to variously consti-
tuted populisms is that the “people” in this logic is interpellated, i.e.,
constituted rhetorically.
In other words, Laclau’s way of stating this “defining dimension”
of populism is essentially a way of seeing populism as a rhetorical
phenomenon—even though he prefers to speak of political “logic” rather
than political rhetoric. Populism, he says, is a “performative act endowed
with a rationality of its own” (2005, 18); in other words, it is a commu-
nicative or rhetorical act. As we would do, he questions the distinction
between “rhetoric” and “ideology”. Explains Laclau: “Rhetoric is not
epiphenomenal vis-à-vis a self-contained conceptual structure, for no
conceptual structure finds its internal cohesion without appealing to
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 221

rhetorical devices; we are no longer able to dismiss an ideological inter-

pellation as merely rhetorical” (2005, 12). As an example, Laclau, in
criticizing Minogue’s account (1969) of the American populists, says: “if
through rhetorical operations they managed to constitute broad popular
identities which cut across any sectors of the population, they actually
constituted populist subjects. And there is no point in dismissing them as
mere rhetoric. Far from being a parasite of ideology, rhetoric would actu-
ally be the anatomy of the ideological world” (2005, 12–13, emphasis in
the original). In short, certain conceptual entities central to an ideology
would not have existed without rhetoric to constitute them; in that sense
rhetoric is not a “mere” appendix to ideology, but its skeleton, or rather
its whole anatomy.
One approach to the definition of populism that may be consid-
ered vulnerable to the kind of criticism expressed here is Moffitt’s view
of populism as a “political style”. Moffitt does not talk about “mere”
rhetoric, and he expressly chooses to apply a broad understanding of
“style” by “moving beyond its purely communicative and rhetorical
elements, and emphasizing the performative, aesthetic and relational
elements of contemporary populism” (2016, 4). Above all, the populist
leader and rhetor is seen as a performer in this optic. This undoubt-
edly is a central aspect of many populisms in our time, and Moffitt
makes an important contribution by emphasizing their “intensely medi-
ated nature”—as well as, more generally, in his awareness of populism
as essentially a communicative phenomenon. But although he believes he
widens an unduly narrow notion of rhetoric by including “rhetoric” in his
broader concept of “style”, with its emphasis on media and performance,
the fact remains that style—like old, narrow notions of rhetoric—even
here seems conceived as separable from content, substance, and ideology.
Another scholar whose view resembles and anticipates the rhetorical
approach that we advocate is Pierre Ostiguy, whom we are pleased to
have represented in this book. In a number of writings he has made a
strong case for seeing populism as a communicative and performative
phenomenon, emphasizing what he calls its “flaunting of the low” as
opposed to the “high”. With this terminology, Ostiguy offered what has
been in many instances a very useful framework for analysis of populist
discourse, but also one that hardly captures all features and instantiations
of populist rhetoric.
What Laclau does in identifying rhetoric as the “anatomy” of the
political world aligns with what other scholars have done: They have,
222 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

regarding the contested notion of populism, laid that notion at the

doorstep of rhetorical theory and implicitly asked for its help in answering
the questions regarding its “defining dimension”. Only recently has this
challenge begun to be taken up in a broad and concerted effort. One
example of that is the collection Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetor-
ical and Democratic Challenge (van der Geest et al. 2020). Another
fresh example is Zarefsky and Mohammed (2020). The present collec-
tion also aims to be an example. Not that rhetoricians have not over
recent decades made valuable relevant contributions. An example that
has become a modern “classic” in rhetorical studies shows striking simi-
larities to Laclau’s approach: Maurice Charland’s notion of “constitutive
rhetoric”, which focuses on “rhetoric’s constitutive and ideological effect”
(1987, 147). Leaning on Althusser’s concept of interpellation (1971),
Charland shows, in the case of “Québécois” identity in Canada, how
a social group and its very identity as a subject is not just addressed,
but constituted by rhetoric—more specifically, by the rhetorical narra-
tive that builds it, requiring those interpellated by it to act in a specific
way to embody their identity. In short, “the position one embodies as a
subject is a rhetorical effect” (1987, 148). It is also worth noting that in
1970, when Althusser’s notion of interpellation was originally launched,
the rhetorician Edwin Black had introduced a closely related idea: the
“second persona”. The idea that discourse may work to shape or in fact
define the role, even the identity, of its addressee was clearly in the air,
with Black and Althusser as pioneers that probably knew nothing of each
other, and literary theory following close behind, as in, e.g., Iser (1972)
and Prince (1973).
An attempt, such as ours, to define populism as a rhetorical attribute,
and to present that attempt to scholars in other disciplines, calls for a clar-
ification of what the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical” refer to. We apply
a broader understanding than many scholars outside rhetoric itself who
have used these terms. As rhetoricians themselves understand the term
“rhetoric”, the rhetoric of a given artifact or political leader or movement
may be packed with ideology through and through. It is not as if there
are two separate layers: ideological content with rhetorical (or “stylistic”)
flourish on top. The distinction to be drawn should, we suggest as rhetori-
cians, make a different cut. It might be in place here to reiterate how some
of the key terms at issue are generally understood by rhetoricians, and to
suggest a clear and consistent terminological practice.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 223

Rhetoric and ideology are cognate terms, yet they are not the same.
Rhetoric is communication; ideology is beliefs and attitudes. Rhetoric
may contain, propagate, constitute, and shape ideology, and it is regularly
deployed to do that. As for beliefs and attitudes, beliefs are about states
of affairs in the world, whereas attitudes are evaluative stances toward
the world. With rhetoric one may seek to work on both in the minds of
others. When a rhetor makes statements that express and aim to propagate
an ideology, all of that is rhetoric; it is not as though part of the rhetor’s
statement is ideology, while the remaining, more superficial features make
up the rhetorical part. Rhetoric, by propagating beliefs and attitudes, may
aim to—and possibly succeed in—promoting an agenda. That agenda and
the actions that may result from it constitute the political part.
Our understanding is in keeping with the one that has been central in
the rhetorical tradition itself, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric onwards. Rhetoric
is public communication, in any modality and by any means, that aims to
influence the practical decisions and attitudes of all the rhetor’s addressees
and interlocutors. That gives the term a much broader content than
widespread uses of it, which tend to define rhetoric as “mere” verbal
adornment and other stylistic features. Rhetoric is everything a rhetor
does communicatively with the aim of obtaining others’ adherence to
a position. Rhetoric asserts or implies beliefs of what things are like in
the world, and it asserts or implies evaluative attitudes to them, i.e.,
outlooks regarding what is good and bad. By doing all this, rhetoric
promulgates and creates these beliefs and attitudes, it shapes, spreads, and
energizes them; in other words, it is a strong co-determinant of ideolo-
gies existing in a population, thereby promoting political agenda points
(what Laclau calls political “demands”) and political actions. This is some-
thing no rhetorician has ever doubted, but it may bear repetition, since
a widespread, tacit assumption in much political science, commentary,
and journalism—and among politicians themselves—is that what politi-
cians can do in their rhetoric and their agenda is merely to reflect and
mirror what is already there in the minds of the citizens they address.
They certainly mirror and reflect that, but the process works in the oppo-
site direction as well: Politicians spreading populist rhetoric undoubtedly
constitute, shape, and amplify beliefs and attitudes, they do not just reflect
them.
However, the way we will suggest formulating the “defining dimen-
sion” of populism rhetorically is not identical with Laclau’s. We suggest
a less complex notion—a minimal one, one might say. We point to one
224 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

rhetorical move or maneuver as the core of what may be meaningfully

termed populism. The apparatus of concepts presented by Laclau—the
“equivalential chain” of several “demands”, linked together by rhetor-
ical constructs in the form of “empty” or “floating” signifiers, the
social dichotomy between opposite camps established thereby—these are
certainly helpful in illuminating various historical phenomena, but we
would suggest looking at them as epiphenomena, as manifestations or
outgrowths that will often, but not always, be found to emerge from the
core, the original rhetorical “seed” of populism.

Populism: Toward a Rhetorical Definition

This core may be formulated as follows: Rhetors instantiate populism to
the extent that they assert or imply that they represent the unison people. To
the extent that citizens believe such claims (or implicatures), they have
adopted a populist ideology. The etymology of the term populism is worth
taking literally. Populist rhetoric is characterized by signifying, in some
way, that “the people” is a unified and unison entity, and that the rhetor
speaks on behalf of that entity.
In suggesting this as an essential and sufficient definition, we align with
and single out the first of the features mentioned by van der Geest et al.
as characteristic of populist leaders: they tend to be “acting and speaking
on behalf of the people” (2020, 3). It follows from this minimal defini-
tion that populism may occur in widely varying degrees and that it may
be intermittent, i.e., it may at times be strongly noticeable in a rhetoric
or movement, and at other times less so. It may be incipient or full-
fledged, sporadic, or massive. Any of the “typical” manifestations that
populist rhetoric is often found to have may perhaps better be seen as
epiphenomena that tend to occur rather than as “obligatory” features—
as shown, e.g., in Villadsen’s study (2020) of less typical specimens of
populist rhetoric from leaders of the Danish People’s Party.
To be sure, it is clear that rhetoric speaking in the name of a unison
people implies a natural and latent proclivity to become “illiberal” and
exclusionary, precluding and perhaps openly attacking pluralism. That this
is so is due to the plain fact that no alleged “people” can ever actu-
ally include every single individual or citizen in whose name it purports
to speak; such a claim belies diversity of all kinds, and there will always
be minority positions. As we discuss below, a populist rhetoric may deal
in diverse ways with this fact, ranging from a tacit pretense that the
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 225

dissenting portion of the population exists at one end of a spectrum,

over allegations that it is much smaller than it is, or otherwise not to be
respected, through active rhetorical antagonism, to active physical exclu-
sion and persecution at the other end of the spectrum. Because there is
this range of populist strategies vis-à-vis dissent, we suggest it is concep-
tually preferable to consider the active antagonism against dissenters as
a non-obligatory and separate feature in some populisms, albeit a latent
one.
A prototypical example of populist rhetoric might be Donald Trump’s
inauguration speech from January 2017. It was strewn with passages
like the following, where he identified his policies and his presidency as
expressing the wish of “the people” as an undifferentiated, unison whole:
“January 20, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became
the rulers of this nation again”. As Zarefsky (2019) says, Trump’s claim
here is that he embodies the will of the people; he presents himself as the
agent of the unison people’s will. An equally contentious idea is, char-
acteristically, signified only by presupposition: the rule that went before
was not the people’s rule. Even if Trump’s presidency had not shown
other populist characteristics, the inauguration speech was pure populism.
Zarefsky, however, describes the rhetorical stance in this speech as “faux
populism” because any alleged enemy needs to be real, whereas here it is
just a rhetorical construction. We would question the distinction Zarefsky
operates here; to borrow Norris’s and Inglehart’s phrase, we still suggest
defining populism “minimally”; nothing more is required than that it
relies on one criterion: the core rhetorical attribute of claiming to speak
on behalf of a unified people. It is not required, for example, that an
alleged enemy be “real”, or that “real” and “constructed” enemies can
actually be distinguished, or even that the enemy be clearly named; it is
already populist rhetoric for a leader to pose as representing the unison
people, even without talking about an enemy.
Thus, we propose a “minimal” definition of populism that relies on just
one criterion. There are many additional features, rhetorical and other-
wise, which are somewhat characteristic of political phenomena widely
seen as instantiating populism, but none of these additional features is
present in every instance of populism. Also, we may see these features in
phenomena not considered populist. Avoiding this confounding slipperi-
ness of the concept of populism is, we believe, one advantage of defining
the concept minimally.
226 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

Still, it is plausible to assume that certain features tend to appear

more often in phenomena instantiating populism, and more markedly in
rhetoric that does exhibit the core attribute mentioned above. Zarefsky
and Mohammed (2020, 17) name a list of such features: positing deep
opposition between the “establishment” and the “people”, the emotion-
alization of discourse, the democratization of evidence, the normalization
of hyperbole, and a predilection for simple explanations for events. In
their article, these traits are well observed and well described; however,
we see them as frequent but not necessary traits in populism.
Proposing a minimal definition like ours is to say that we should not
understand populism as a “syndrome” of several attributes or “symp-
toms”. All attempted definitions that see the concept as a syndrome run
into difficulty, as Laclau has made clear, because some phenomena that
observers intuitively agree to consider populisms only exhibit some of
the symptoms—and some of the symptoms are found in phenomena that
we would not intuitively consider instances of populism. Then again,
some generally recognized instances of populism have marked features
that are not at all present in most other generally recognized instances of
it. Laclau names Margaret Canovan (e.g., 1981)—one of the most quoted
and respected scholars of populism—as an example of the conceptual
quandary caused by these problems. Her attempted remedy is to posit an
alleged typology of no less than seven varieties of populism, as historically
observed; but this typology, he notes, is hardly “worth the name” because
“it lacks any coherent criterion around which its distinctions are estab-
lished” (2005, 6); and neither does an appeal to Wittgenstein’s concept
of “family likeness” help avoid the confusion. It arises inevitably when
one tries to define populism as a coherent “bundle” or “syndrome” of
features. That is one reason why it may be preferable to see populism as
defined by one core feature or criterion.
The problems that theorists of populism run into when applying
a multi-feature definition to specific instances of what they consider
populism recall what the rhetorician Thomas Conley, in a skeptical essay
about genre theory and its explanatory power in rhetorical analysis,
humorously called “the Linnean blues”. In his Systema Naturae from
1735, the great Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) established
a universal classification system for living species. For example, he took,
as Conley relates, a species well known to him, the common coot, and
based his description of the genus on that species. However, “[w]hen
Linneaus later came to know other species that he considered congeneric
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 227

with the original species by their general appearance or the sum of their
characteristics, but which diverged from the characteristics of the genus as
originally stated in Systema Naturae, he put them in the same genus …,
leaving the original generic description as it was” (1986, 62). Hence the
blues: The elaborate categorization based on detailed descriptions proved
laden with problems in practical use. Similarly, when a rich, multi-feature
definition of the genus “populism” is applied to an undeniable species
of that genus, some of the original “defining” features are likely to be
missing and others will obtrude themselves instead, causing bouts of “the
Linnean blues”.
While a one-criterion approach to populism obviates much of the diffi-
culty caused by attempts to see populism as a coherent “syndrome”, it
does not imply that populism becomes a strictly binary attribute, i.e., an
“either-or” quality. As before, and perhaps even more so, it is necessary
to see populism as an attribute that may be present by degrees, ranging
from intermittent and episodic occurrences in the communication of a
rhetor or movement, to massive omnipresence. One artifact may contain
populist features and passages, another from the same source may not, or
it may even contradict or deny the core populist claim of speaking in the
name of the unison people.
Our core criterion also implies something else noted by some thinkers
and analysts, namely that populism as such is an attribute without a fixed
positive or negative valence. Populism is not per se a bad or dangerous
thing, nor a good thing. It may more appropriately be said that the
core attribute of populism is one whose presence should invite careful
inspection and reflection. There will be many cases where this attribute is
present in some degree, but where observers who wish to make a norma-
tive assessment might find that there is little cause for alarm and in fact
much plausibility for claims to be made in the name of “the people”.
Rhetors who presume to speak, and agents who mean to act, in the name
of “the people” may go down in history as having done good.
For example, by our definition the first words of the preamble to
the US Constitution, “We the People of the United States”, mark the
document as manifesting populism. The Founding Fathers here under-
took to express what they claimed to be the univocal will of the entire
people of the new nation, the United States—a rhetorical act for which
most later American citizens hold the Founding Fathers in high vener-
ation. Likewise, resistance movements in countries occupied by Nazi
Germany 1939–1945 tended to speak in the name of the univocal people
228 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

in each of their respective countries, and it was a plausible presumption

that they did so—even though there was, in a country like Norway, for
example, a segment of the population (a rather small one, the “Quis-
lings”) that supported Nazi rule; what such resistance forces did, in many
cases invoking the univocal people, has since been widely considered
praiseworthy, even though it involved destruction of life and property.
Yet resistance movements were, by the “minimal” criterion we suggest,
populist in at least some degree.
At the other end of a normative scale, the Nazi regime of the Third
Reich was also populist by our criterion, and massively so. It further had
several reprehensible features often found in populist regimes: autocracy,
violent oppression, massive mendacity in official propaganda, suspension
of the rule of law, of press freedom and free speech, murderous scape-
goating, and persecution of minorities leading to genocide. But the fact
remains that Nazism began with a powerful Austrian rhetor speaking in
the name of the univocal German people.
What, then, are the differences conceptually between a “good”
populism and an “evil” one? Two parts of an answer to that question
immediately present themselves. First, a populism is less “false” to the
extent that its claim to represent the unison people is nearly, even if not
completely, accurate; and its falsity becomes aggravated in so far as the
portion of the citizenry ostensibly constituting the “people” is smaller,
perhaps a narrow majority or even a minority. But of course, a second
factor has more weight: When what is done in the name of “the people”
is considered as done for the common good, and/or against what is
commonly considered evil, then it speaks for the populism in question as
“benign”; a populism promoting what the Third Reich did in the name
of the German “people” is to that extent “malignant”. Obviously, such
judgments unavoidably bind those who would judge to contestable and
subjective notions of good and evil. But since that is unavoidable, it is
better that it is made clear.
To sum up: An advantage of the minimal definition of populism
proposed here is that it makes a one-dimensional criterion and thus avoids
the crisscrossing of criteria that, as Laclau and others have complained,
leads to heterogeneous phenomena being jumbled together without
any clear criterion to unite them, or perhaps to attempts to subdivide
populisms into subtypes that have little more in common with each other
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 229

than each of them has with phenomena that are clearly not instantiations
of populism. We suggest it is preferable to define populism by one crite-
rion and to consider other attributes that often occur along with populism
as conceptually separate.

Populism---Banal and Malignant

Another advantage of a “minimal” definition of the concept of populism
is that, as suggested above, it may be used to call an early warning—it
becomes a sort of canary in the coalmine, telling us that there is reason
to observe, study, and assess a phenomenon that may seem small and
innocuous, and which might remain so, but which has a potential for
morphing into rampant falsehood and malignity.
Our definition has much in common with the account of populism
proposed by Jan-Werner Müller, according to whom populism is by defi-
nition a malignant, anti-democratic phenomenon. His reasoning is that
rhetoric which purports to speak for the people, i.e., the unison and
entire people, must necessarily be a denial of pluralism and involve an
anti-democratic exclusion of dissenters: “The people must be extracted
from within the people”, as he has it (Müller 2017)—that is, only some
people are allowed to be part of “the people”, and others will have to
be excluded and denied membership of “the people”, perhaps cleansed
with coercion or violence. In other words, there is, in such an account,
always an enemy, a negative “other” (or several). Similarly, in Cas Mudde
and C. R. Kaltwasser’s accounts of populisms (2012, 2018), as indeed in
Laclau’s, it is a shared feature that any populism posits a virtuous people
confronting a powerful, reprehensible opponent.
Such a polarization is no doubt a potential entailment of rhetoric that
pretends to speak for the univocal people, but it should be noted that
polarizing rhetoric may occur without explicitly asserting and actually
executing exclusion; populist rhetoric in the “minimal” understanding of
the term may just ignore, minimize, or bypass the consideration that there
are some in the population in whose name it does not speak, and whom
it might want to ignore or exclude.
For example, it is common that leaders and movements who have won
an election or a referendum, or who perhaps have a lead in opinion polls,
adopt an exclusionary rhetoric to the effect that “the people” of their
country have chosen this or that, or want this or that—for example “the
Brits have chosen to leave the EU” (as a majority did by referendum in
230 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

2016) or “the Danes have rejected the Euro” (as a majority did in 2000).
Notice the definite plural article presupposing that all Brits or all Danes
have done these things; linguists such as Hawkins (1978) tend to say that
a phrase with definiteness presupposes that it refers to the totality of the
objects it identifies. Thus, minimal as the linguistic marker the is, it may
exemplify “embryonic” populism: The definite phrase “the people” means
all the people. This kind of rhetoric is common and is often not noticed
or questioned, but it is a kind of rhetoric that should call for comment
and be treated as a warning signal, however slight.
Indeed, it might be in place to define what we may call, with due refer-
ence to Michael Billig (1995), banal populism—the practice of rhetorically
assuming or presupposing the unanimity of one’s “people”, but in such
ways that this assumption or presupposition is out of focus because the
focus is on something else. If the focus is on a fresh opinion poll, or
on who has won a referendum, for example, then the practice of saying
that the Brits decided to leave the EU may go unnoticed. This practice is
common not only among politicians who have agendas to promote, but
also in the media, whose main motive may be to produce easily acces-
sible, enticing news. Nevertheless, the practice may rightly be termed
banal populism. It is banal in that it is rarely noticed and commented on,
but it is still populism by the criterion we have proposed, and it deserves
critical notice.
Our proposal for this single and minimal criterion of populism should
come with a caution. “Banal” populism, in the form of, for example,
the use of definite plural forms, presupposing that all individuals are
encompassed, may indeed be banal in the sense of being benign and not
deserving of alarm. What function is served by the words and phrases
we use cannot be determined on the basis of linguistic form alone. A
classic study in modern rhetoric is Carolyn Miller’s discussion of “genre
as social action” (1984). In that seminal paper, she argued that an utter-
ance should be seen as belonging to a genre on the grounds that it
performs a specific social action, not on the grounds of fixed formal
criteria in themselves. The utterance performs that action in virtue of a
mutual understanding between sources and addressees that such an action
is socially instituted and is performed by utterances having certain charac-
teristics—not in virtue of these characteristics alone. Similarly, discursive
features that are marks of populism rely on similar understandings in their
social context that they interactively rely on and help constitute.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 231

Populism vs. Pluralism

If rhetoric that pretends to speak on behalf of, and possibly to express
the will of, the univocal people is the core feature of populism, then it is
worthwhile to consider the alternative ways in which populist rhetoric and
ideology may deal with the fact that there are portions of the population
for whom the populist rhetoric manifestly does not speak.
These ways of dealing with dissensus may be placed on a scale. At
one end of a continuum is the simplest strategy: to ignore it. Leaders
using populist rhetoric may simply bypass or fail to mention it and have
nothing to say about the fact that dissenters exist. Rhetoric of this kind
has been common, e.g., in parties with an anti-immigration agenda that
work fully within the parliamentary system in their country; the Danish
People’s Party is an example. This party, like other similar parties seen
elsewhere, have at times received around 20% of the popular vote in elec-
tions, occasionally even more, yet it has always been a clear minority;
even so, some of their spokespersons have persisted in speaking as if their
agenda were the will of “the people”.
One step along the continuum is a strategy that recognizes the exis-
tence of dissenting citizens while at the same time persevering in speaking
on behalf of “the people”. An election or referendum where a populist
party or side participates will force it to accept that a sizable part of the
population, perhaps even a majority, is against it, and yet it may blithely
carry on as if it speaks for “all” citizens. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as
portrayed in Ostiguy’s chapter in the present volume, did this although
he very well knew that many Venezuelans were against him, and he did
not deny having lost a crucial referendum. The contradiction inherent
in this is simply not allowed to become a topic, and populist leaders who
traffic in tacit contradictions of this and other kinds are unlikely to be held
accountable for it by their supporters. They may also make use a vaguer,
more ambiguous language, for example expressions implying that their
agenda is “best” for the entire people, even if only some people expressly
endorse it. There is little doubt that rhetoric referring to the wishes and
demands of “the people” may be infectious and not only energize those
who already identify with it but also affect non-believers, lured by the
promise of belonging to that vaunted in-group, the “people”.
Somewhere along the continuum are positions where dissent or non-
agreement in some citizens is recognized as a fact, but where dissent
232 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

is seen as a sort of false or absent consciousness, a failure in these citi-

zens to realize or admit that they latently or secretly share the wishes
and the agenda of the believers. The populist rhetoric of Donald Trump
may be cited as an example of this; his innumerable dismissals of the
“fake news” media, those “enemies of the people”, who, along with
the “Dems”, have systematically misled an alleged minority of dissenting
citizens, exemplify this strategy; so does the similar rhetoric of the “Alter-
native für Deutschland”, which has hammered incessantly on the vile
“Lügenpresse”.
Hand in hand with such rhetorical practices we find another strategy
systematically used by Donald Trump and his loyalists: claims and impli-
cations to the effect that those who, for example, did not vote for Donald
Trump as president in 2020, even if they do exist, are a minority bene-
fiting from a huge system of conspiracy and fraud that “stole” Trump’s
“sacred landslide” victory.
At the other end of the continuum, we find rhetors and parties that
explicitly and aggressively deny dissenting citizens status as members of
the people; these dissenters are not accepted as “true” nationals although
they may formally be so. This is where we find populism as portrayed by
Müller’s definition—an explicit denial of pluralism and of recognition as
citizens for these individuals, potentially leading to exclusionary measures
like denial of formal citizenship, and potentially scapegoating, physical
exclusion and violent elimination.
An objection to the “minimal” definition we propose of populism’s
rhetorical core might be to claim that we cast far too wide a net: Any
political movement, using any kind of rhetoric, might be considered
populist by our criterion because any political movement purports to
do what is best for “the people”. But this misses the point. First, there
are many movements which openly declare themselves to appeal to one
specific segment or sector of the population, such as, e.g., the rural popu-
lation, industrial workers, etc.; they do not pretend that the policies they
propose are best for the entire people; they propose what they believe is
best for the class or sector they claim to represent. Secondly, even to say
or pretend that one’s policies are best for the entire people is not to say or
pretend that one represents the unison people, let alone that they are the
will of the entire people. For example, in various brands of Marxism it is
an assumption that even if one pretends to work for the best of the entire
people, large segments of the people do not understand what is best for
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 233

them, and they may even oppose it. Marxian theories of “false conscious-
ness”—a phrase introduced by Engels—have been used to undergird such
an ideology. With their privileged insight, such leaders—authoritarians
all—see themselves as justified in setting aside any ignorance or oppo-
sition in the population and also in altogether setting aside the rule of
law, the procedures of liberal democracy, the pretense of democracy, etc.
Another kind of non-populist belief in representing what is best for
the people—one which is in fact compatible with observance of the rules
of liberal democracy—consists in believing that although one believes to
know what is best for the people, others are known to have other beliefs,
and it is the right of these others to have these beliefs and to work for
them in observance of the rules of democracy. In short, a belief—asserted
or implied—that one’s movement has knowledge, perhaps privileged
knowledge, of what is “best” for the people, does not per se amount
to populism.
Another objection will see us as erring in the opposite direction, casting
a net that is far too small. In the case of Donald Trump, for example,
one could point out that whereas our definition applies well to some of
his rhetoric, such as his inauguration speech, a lot of his other rhetoric
strongly negates the notion of a univocal people and instead lashes out
vehemently at various nefarious segments of the American people such
as “the Dems” (and several others). By this token, Trump would be, at
most, an “on-and-off” populist, and it becomes impossible to say whether
the movement whose spearhead he is can be called a populism or not.
Trump’s rhetoric is a clear instance of a contradictory populism that
speaks on behalf of the American people and, almost in the same breath,
denounces dissenting Americans in the strongest terms—thus recognizing
their existence.
We think it better to acknowledge that populist and non-populist
attributes may co-exist in the same rhetor and movement, rather than
trying to subsume too many political rhetors and movements, each seen
in their entirety, under the same term. The result of that may be, in some
of Laclau’s opening words, that “conceptual apprehension is replaced
by appeals to a non-verbalized intuition, or by descriptive enumerations
of a variety of ‘relevant features’” accompanied by “a proliferation of
exceptions” (2005, 1). Nothing is wrong with saying that Trump and
“Trumpism” sometimes use a populist rhetoric, sometimes one of in-
group/out-group demagoguery, as theorized by Roberts-Miller (2005,
2019), and sometimes something else again. Also, populists may at times
234 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

resort to the rhetorical strategy of denying those who dissent their status
of belonging to the people in the “true” sense of the word—in which case
we have the belligerent, anti-democratic variety of populism described by
Müller’s definition. Such an “on-and-off” character of Trump’s populism
might instead signify that it is driven by other deep forces than any sincere
belief that this is the will of “the people” as such.

Seven Rhetorical Populisms

This book has brought together seven chapters on populist rhetoric in
various countries and recent historical contexts. The seven chapters repre-
sent different countries but also a diversity of scholarly backgrounds, as
described in our introductory chapter. The question now to be asked is
whether these very different accounts of different populist rhetorics lend
credibility to our proposal for a unifying minimal, rhetorical definition of
populism.
We argue that the answer to this question is affirmative; however, to
make that argument we need to return to the distinction made above
between a “core” attribute of populist rhetoric on the one hand, and on
the other hand a set of “epiphenomenal” rhetorical features often found
in populist rhetoric, but not in all populist rhetoric, and in many cases in
rhetoric and movements that we would not call populist. The seven mani-
festations of populist rhetoric, as discussed in the preceding chapters, do
not all exhibit the core attribute with equal clarity and in equally literal
forms, but they all exhibit some of the epiphenomenal characteristics, and
our contention will be that these epiphenomenal characteristics have a
strong correlation with the core attribute. That is, to find these charac-
teristics is more likely and more to be expected in rhetoric that is populist
by the core criterion than in rhetoric that is not; moreover, if the core
attribute is not very salient in the specific rhetoric studied in a chapter of
this book, it is still likely that the core attribute will nevertheless be found
elsewhere in the rhetoric of the leader or movement in question. The
breadth and diversity of populist rhetoric studied in these pages have the
advantage of raising our awareness of diverse manifestations of populism,
while at the same time preserving the advantage of allowing us to see all
these rhetorics as natural manifestations or outgrowths of a shared core—
one that may be more directly visible in some of the rhetorical artifacts
studied than in others.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 235

This dual awareness—that there is great diversity in populisms, but

also, if we apply a rhetorical lens, a common core—in turn allows scholars
and other observers to keep a watchful, educated eye for that inner core.
This we should do on the understanding that any explicit or implicit
pretense to speak for the univocal, entire people is in principle false—even
if it appears, in its specific instantiations, innocuous, fleeting, or otherwise
understandable—perhaps even praiseworthy.
Let us now consider the accounts of populist rhetoric offered in the
seven chapters in this book. We believe they help make our proposed
core definition plausible. Some of the chapters, as the reader will have
noticed, do not address or contribute to our minimal definition because
they pursue other insights and, in our estimate, contribute significantly to
the overall discussion this way. Nevertheless, we see them all as compatible
with our definition, which aims to single out the one “obligatory” and
distinctive feature of populism. They focus instead on original insights
of their own about additional, “non-obligatory” aspects of populism that
seem to have a strong and natural correlation with the core.

The United States: A Lost People

Paul Johnson’s chapter shows how the Republican National Committee’s
platform of July 2016—the year Donald Trump was elected president—
portrays the entire American people, as well as the nation as such, as fatally
and entirely “lost”. Not only is “the American people” as a univocal entity
the theme of the document; the platform is also in its entirety a statement
uttered as it were in the name of that univocal people. The phrase of
the Founding Fathers, “We the People”, is quoted, and the document
abounds in assertions like this: “Our most urgent task as a Party is to
restore the American people’s faith in their government”—presupposing
that the American people, as such and as a whole, has lost that faith.
Johnson leans on Freud’s analysis of the concept of “melancholia” as
opposed to “mourning” (Freud 1918). What this optic implies is that
the Republican party, rather than resorting to political action to redress
the iniquities that have allegedly been visited upon the nation, regresses
into a transfixed state of imagined existential despair—a despair that may
lead, and has led, to desperate positions and actions. Johnson leaves it
to readers to draw the obvious connection to Donald Trump’s notorious
speech on Jan 6, 2021, on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, where, among
other things, he once again accused an unspecified “they” of “defrauding
236 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

the people in a proper election”. He told his audience that “you’re the
real people, you’re the people that built this nation”, and he warned,
ominously, that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a
country anymore”.
Clearly a rhetoric that sees “the people” and/or “the country” as
entirely and utterly lost (or even “stolen”) is a rhetoric pretending to
speak on behalf of that entire people, its will, its desire and its hope to
come to life again. The most determined supporters of Donald Trump’s
presidency—in particular its last phase with its stream of unfounded claims
that the election was going to be “stolen” or had been stolen, leading
to the violent storming of the Capitol where lives were lost and leading
politicians’ lives were in imminent danger—clearly shows how a populist
rhetoric of “We are the whole and univocal people” may create, as an
outgrowth, a belief in its holders in an absolute right to set aside any
other norms and laws in attempting to promote their agenda.

Italy: The People’s Rollercoaster Captain

Pamela Pietrucci’s chapter on voltagabbana (“turncoating”) and
trasformismo in populist leaders in Italy zooms in on il leader of the Lega,
Matteo Salvini. Salvini, we may note at first, passes our core criterion of
populism with flying colors, as well as probably all the other conceptions
of populism advanced by scholars in the field. Claims to the effect that
he, or his party, represents the people of Italy, not just some people in
Italy, are a staple feature of his rhetoric. For example, in a great rally
on the Piazza San Giovanni in Rome on October 19, 2019, which drew
200,000 participants according to Lega sources (c. 50,000 according to
the police), the key message he delivered, in perfect “populese”, was:
“Noi siamo il popolo contro le élite”—“we are the people against the
elites”. The posts from the Lega on social media systematically assert that
“the people is with him!” (“Il popolo è con lui!”) The people is one
singular body, standing in unison behind him.
Rather than belaboring what is obvious, Pietrucci’s chapter illuminates
a much less noticed feature that seems to come naturally in Salvini and
other successful populists of our time. The status as the potent leader of
a united people that Salvini, like other similar figures, has conferred on
himself, seems to lead to an opportunistic preference for saying what-
ever he reckons will consolidate that imagined power. Apparently for that
reason, Salvini’s rhetoric regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, which took a
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 237

horrifying toll in Italy, has been what Pietrucci calls a “rollercoaster” of

sometimes abrupt and often confusing and hard-to-track opinion shifts,
in short order occupying opposite sides of the spectrum in relation to
policy issues.
The vacillation may perhaps be seen as a natural, while not obligatory,
aspect of populist “leadership” insofar as it may reflect a wish to embrace
an imagined univocal people’s will. If a populist leader like Salvini, who
likes to refer to himself as “the Captain”, senses a diversity or change in
what many people want on a given issue, that leader may try to obfus-
cate and gloss over that discord by expressing both or all the discordant
views—however, it may be done in diverse contexts, to diverse audiences,
and in ways that are blurred and ambiguous. By having covered the range
of views on an issue, the leader may project an illusion of embracing and
representing the entire, concordant people.
Another possible explanation of Salvini’s pandemic zigzag may be that
if the populist leader senses a swing in the popular sentiment about an
issue and quickly reacts by choosing to where the majority seems to be
going, or the way the opinion is trending, then that leader may seem, to
the superficial glance, to be leading, not following, the popular sentiment,
and to represent what “the people” in its entirety wants.
Both ways, the voltagabbana behavior may be seen as strategies to blur
any sense of discord in the population, thereby supporting the picture of
a unison people. A leader who sends contradictory messages on a major
current issue, such as the corona pandemic, may conceivably do so to
signal, by this equivocation, that he or she is the leader of the entire
people, representing its united will, not a leader of one segment whose
will contradicts that of other segments.
That the equivocal messaging is actually understood in this way by the
population might, on the face of it, appear implausible. But if we consider
the example of Donald Trump, it seems clear that a large share of the
US population felt he was dealing appropriately, competently and in the
interest of the whole people with the Covid-19 threat by taking the few
half-hearted measures against it that he did, then at one time declaring
himself a “wartime president” in the battle and otherwise playing down
the pandemic and resisting or omitting effective measures throughout the
last months of his presidency. So, in the eyes of a populist leader’s popular
base, voltagabbana behavior is quite compatible with, in fact perhaps
conducive to, being the agent of the univocal people’s will.
238 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

Be that as it may, the ambiguity and contradictoriness of populist

leaders on critical issues, as evident in Donald Trump, may, as Pietrucci
emphasizes, clearly help exempt them from responsibility in the eyes of
followers for any of their public positions and statements. Further, it may
have the potential to induce in followers a focus on the leaders them-
selves at the expense of specific issues and specific policies on these issues;
followers who are already focused on their great leader may tend to see
that leader as superhuman and in possession of insight, strength, and lead-
ership qualities beyond what ordinary people can comprehend. This may
lead to an unconditional devotion to the leader: the capitano (Salvini)
or the “larger-than-life president” (Trump). Astoundingly, after Donald
Trump had recovered from Covid-19, helped by massive intervention at
a cutting-edge hospital, a supporter quipped that this was less of a matter
of Trump recovering from his meeting with Covid-19 than of Covid-19
recovering from its meeting with Trump.
Since populism’s essential definition, as we see it, is the claim to repre-
sent the unison people, and since the specific content of that people’s will
is not specified, a populism may easily slide toward a belief in the uncon-
ditional sovereignty of the chosen one. The leader becomes a savior to be
implicitly obeyed and a holder of magical powers. The following unex-
pressed chain of reasoning becomes natural: “We are the people—We
have a unison will—We have a chosen one to lead us in executing that
will—Our will is whatever that chosen leader directs”. At the end of this
line of reasoning we find such slogans from the Third Reich as “Ein Volk,
ein Reich, ein Führer” and “Führer, befehl, wir folgen!”

The United Kingdom: A People Finding Itself in Brexit

The same summer that saw the nomination of Donald Trump for pres-
ident and the publication of the Republican platform discussed in Paul
Johnson’s chapter had also seen the referendum on EU membership in
the United Kingdom. The victory of the “Leave” side was a surprise to
many, only to be topped in November of that year by Trump’s elec-
tion as president. Both events speak to the power of populist rhetoric
in mobilizing, swaying, and shaping public opinion. As Alan Finlayson’s
chapter shows, Brexit rhetoric was populist by more than one of the
current conceptual definitions. It proposed the existence of a “people”—
a univocal people—prevented from living its true identity. The Leave
campaign posited a blockage between the demand or will of “the people”,
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 239

and, as Finlayson shows, it was not only the will of “the people” that was
allegedly being blocked by the EU, it was the will of you, the true, noble,
and quintessential Brit.
This rhetoric has much in common with the “melancholic” Republican
vision of the “lost” American people described by Johnson. Finlayson’s
chapter points to the way the Brexit movement’s rhetoric was apt
to confer a feeling of a noble, full, heroic identity to followers, and
conversely to portray opponents as morally deficient and inferior indi-
viduals, driven by despicable motives. We are not far from Müller’s
conception of populist rhetoric that “extracts” the true people from the
population, leaving behind the remainders (in the United Kingdom the
Remainers ) the same way that a butterfly casts off its empty cocoon and
becomes what it truly is. The entire Leave conception was built on the
idea of one true people finally realizing its selfhood and its unison will.
Also, when one reads the chapter, it becomes clear how digital media
materially transform rhetorical situations. The chapter illuminates in
concrete detail the ways in which social media specifically afford aspiring
populist leaders uniquely powerful means to create a strong leader-
ship ethos, and, in a symbiotic relationship, confer a noble identity on
followers. In this finding we may also have touched on a key to a certain
cult-like aspect of populism; it promises to make sense of things for people
and to help them find themselves.

Germany: “Not Against Its Own People but for It”

Like Finlaysons’s chapter, the study by Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and
Dietmar Till explains the political and rhetorical context of a populist
movement, the party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), illuminating
its rhetorical styles and strategy with a special focus on its use of social
media and the resultant effectiveness of the AfD strategy. In Germany
as in the United Kingdom, part of the story of the success of populist
rhetoric is the inability of the mainstream parties to recognize how social
media change everything. The AfD adapts to that and, like Leave rhetoric
in the United Kingdom and the “Lega” in Italy, designs rhetoric for
digital circulation.
Another commonality—also clearly connected with populist rhetoric’s
use of social media—is the status of the speaker as a heroic truth-teller
or “parrhesiast”. One might again hypothesize, in the case of the United
Kingdom as well as the United States, that a key to the cult-like aspect
240 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

of some populisms is the way its rhetoric promises to make people find
themselves. In a sense, Björn Höcke—one of the highly adept AfD rhetors
that the three authors write about—presents a framework for his audience
to absolve themselves of guilt or shame, suggesting that such feelings are
imposed up on them by dishonest and self-interested enemies of “the
people”.
A key piece of evidence is Höcke’s speech in Dresden on January
17, 2017, at an event organized by the youth organization of the AfD.
It is an unusually clever reversal of meaning that Höcke performs here
in his reference to how the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was placed as
a unique “monument of shame into the heart of the people’s capital”
(“ein Denkmal der Schande in das Herz seiner Hauptstadt”). As when
Shakespeare’s Mark Antony speaks of Brutus as an “honourable man”, the
audience may at first take this phrase to express respect, in Höcke’s case
for the remorse shown by the German nation after World War II; but we
gradually find that his intended meaning is rather, with ambiguous irony,
to mark the monument as a shameful act of self-contempt by the German
people. In a sense Höcke presents a narrative whose ultimate promise is
absolution of the German people from guilt and shame.
This is possible because underneath the AfD rhetoric, as powered
by social media, we again find the core notion of the united, univocal
German people. For example, Höcke declares that “our beloved people”
is deeply divided—which is not an admission that there is disagreement
within the German population about immigration and other issues, but
instead a claim that “the people” is “threatened by falling birth-rates
and immigration”—a roundabout way of activating the “displacement”
theory, which sees a homogeneous, united people helplessly diminished
and finally extinct. Höcke expresses his longing for the AfD to lead a
government in policies that are “not against its own people but for it”,
and he asserts that “our spiritual state, our mental condition is still that of
a totally defeated people”. Whether defeated or hoping to achieve victory
at last, “we” Germans are all as one in this. He castigates celebrated
speeches by two past German presidents in ways that cause his audience
to heckle, condemning these men as “traitors to the people” (“Volksver-
räter”), and toward the end, is interrupted by cries from the audience of
“We are the people!”
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 241

Greece: The Morally Virtuous People

Sophia Hatzisavvidou’s chapter considers the rhetoric used by the Greek
leftist party Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, at the time when Syriza
was in government and sought to resist the austerity measures taken
by the EU in response to Greece’s economic predicament following
the 2008 financial crisis. Let us note, in passing, that this example,
together with Pierre Ostiguy’s chapter on the rhetoric of Venezuela’s
Hugo Chávez, clearly demonstrates that populism may just as well be
found in leftist as in rightist leaders and movements.
Hatzisavvidou shows how Syriza rhetoric portrayed “the people” of
Greece as “a single political agent”; it referred systematically to “the
people” as a unison entity and did what it could to “locate ‘the people’
within the exigence as virtuous agents who pursued a just and honourable
vision”. Tsipras, we hear, further invoked one sovereign and united people
as “agent of certain moral virtues”. Syriza’s central message was “United
people, undefeated people”. Arguably, the government promised Greeks a
kind of redemption, a longed-for opportunity to feel pride. Hatzisavvidou
criticizes this rhetorical strategy mainly on strategic grounds, arguing that
the left-wing populist government chose a problematic course in postu-
lating absolute moral superiority in the name of “the people”: When
Tsipras and Syriza, invoking the unison Greek people, sought to justify
its demands by a categorical moral principle of alleged absolute validity—
one that was capable of outweighing all other considerations—they were
guilty of an overreach that did not and could not succeed in practice, but
was bound for defeat and surrender.
Appeals to some “absolute” authority or justification may be of a moral
nature, but they may also invoke principles of other kinds, such as, for
example, religion or national identity. They are typical epiphenomena or
outgrowths of the “core” populist claim of speaking for the entire and
univocal people. “Absolutism”, understood as an appeal to some absolute
“warrant”, in Stephen Toulmin’s sense of the term (1958)—a warrant
that irrefutably trumps every other consideration—may also be found in
historical and political phenomena that are not populist; an example is the
absolute sovereign right claimed by the Catholic church in the Middle
Ages to set aside, in the actions of the Inquisition, all other consider-
ations in the name of the faith. The sentence “The end sanctifies the
means”, misleadingly ascribed to the Jesuits, encapsulates the appeal to
such an absolute justification. A modern version of this thought is the
242 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

German jurist Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the “sovereignty” of the state

to initiate a state of exception—key concepts in his “political theology”
(2005, original 1922).
The Greek example in Hatzisavvidou’s chapter does not, we should
note, show that appeal to moral principles is per se out of place in
political actions and negotiations; rather, it shows that no appeal to any
consideration should in principle be advanced as an absolute and categor-
ical warrant. Moral warrants are of course often of relevance in political
deliberation and negotiation; but what matters, strategically as well as
philosophically, is that other warrants may just as relevantly be invoked,
stating other, countervailing moral principles or principles belonging to
non-moral but perhaps equally relevant dimensions.

Revenge of a Victimized People: Hungary’s Orbán

There can be little argument as to whether the regime of Hungary’s
“Fidesz” party under its long-time leader Viktor Orbán is a textbook
instance of populism. That is indubitable on any definition of populism,
including the minimal one that we have proposed here. The rhetoric of
Orbán, his party and the state apparatus that they have built with great
efficiency is permeated with the omnipresent notion that they represent
the unison Hungarian people, indeed they are the Hungarian people.
This is true of the whole range of their communication efforts for internal
as well as for external uses. A landslide victory for Fidesz in the 2010
elections resulted from a campaign in which Orbán and his part had
hammered on the need for “a government and governing which again
turns towards the people”. The delegates that Fidesz was able to send
to the European Parliament were hailed by Orbán as a sign that the
Hungarian people wanted delegates who would “represent the interest
of the Hungarian people in Brussels and not the interest of Brussels in
Hungary”. The list of declarations which pretended in this way to speak
for “the people of Hungary” could be extended endlessly.
The chapter by Miklós Sükösd is an essay by an author who was once
personally acquainted with Orbán and was among the earliest witnesses
to his mastery of infectious, polarizing rhetoric. Sükösd was there when
Orbán, an unknown law student, sprang into instantaneous fame and
became a political figure by delivering a highly mediatized key speech
in June 1989, boldly calling on behalf of the Hungarian people for the
withdrawal of Soviet troops.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 243

As touched on in the introduction, two takeaways in particular remain

with readers of Sükösd’s essay: First, that Orbán knew from this very
moment about the effect that “old-school” speechmaking can have, in
particular of course when amplified by a range of media controlled by the
speaker; second, that there was a deep susceptibility in the Hungarian
people for speechmaking and other forms of rhetoric that continually
plays on and amplifies a widespread feeling in the audience of having
forever been suppressed, humiliated, and betrayed. Consequently, all the
factors that may, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as threat-
ening to subject the Hungarian people to such victimage again will be
relentlessly portrayed in the vilest colors. These threats dominate Orbán’s
discourse to such an extent that the presupposed total unanimity and
consubstantiality of the Hungarian “people” will tend to fly under the
radar. Orbán’s astounding success in exploiting these mechanisms make
Hungary, as Sükösd has it, “a successful laboratory of populism”.

Venezuela: “Chávez, It’s a People”

The second example in this book of populism from the left is that of
Venezuela’s onetime leader, Hugo Chávez, whose rhetoric is studied in
Pierre Ostiguy’s chapter. Ostiguy, who has already published extensively
on populism, with a main focus on its Latin American manifestations,
chooses in his analysis to follow what he calls an inductive approach. This
basically accords with the approach we have taken in editing this book:
We have, essentially, said: “Let’s take a broad and diverse selection of
sources that intuitively and indubitably qualify as populist; let’s then ask
a diverse handful of knowledgeable scholars to write about their rhetoric
without setting any conditions; then let’s see what they find and take it
from there.” Such a method can also be called exploratory, and Ostiguy,
in inductively exploring an “emblematic” populist leader, Chávez, finds
himself in pronounced opposition to several of the most current defini-
tions of populism—as does Laclau, as we saw at the beginning of the
present chapter.
But neither will a Laclau-style, “Essex School” account capture the
populist essence of Chávez. The Venezuelan leader blatantly contradicts,
as Ostiguy points out, a priori formulae that mainly seem relevant to
right-wing populists in Europe. Some of the alleged classic hallmarks of
populism are conspicuous by their absence in Chávez, but other eye-
opening features emerge. Among the most striking is the way Chávez’
244 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

torrent of communication seems to have been one continuous ad-lib stage

performance. One effect of it was clearly to establish a particular bond or
relationship between himself and his people. It is a bond of nothing less
than mutual love—a notion that is notably scarce in most other varieties
of populist rhetoric. Not only are Chávez and his “people” in a love rela-
tionship, they merge and become one entity: Chávez is the people, the
people is Chávez.
This seems to be the truly distinctive character of his particular
populism, and it is also one that fully aligns with the minimal “defini-
tion” we have proposed. Chávez is an emblematic populist because in his
boundless rhetoric he not only speaks for the Venezuelan “people” as if it
were a unison entity; more than that, the people and he are one and the
same. This loving relationship is not in principle an ideological one, as
love relationships generally are not, but Ostiguy interestingly highlights
how it becomes imbued, in one mind-boggling maneuver, with the legacy
of the liberator Simón Bolívar, with revolutionary socialism (a notion that
would do doubt have alienated Bolívar), and with the religious fervor of
devoted followers of Christ.
Chávez died in office in 2013, but there is much in his brand of
populism and the popular following it found that we may see as foreshad-
owing Donald Trump and “Trumpism”. Little understood by academic
analysts and enemies of Trump, the bond between him and his base of
fervent believers is to a large extent one of love—at least in the way his
followers see him, even if observers may see his frequent declarations of
love for those followers as meaning, more precisely, that he loves their love
of him. Even so, the forces that fueled the love of so many Venezuelans
for Chávez may tell us something about Trump loyalists’ love of Trump.

Populism as a Rhetorical Artifice

We have asked whether the different accounts found in this book of
different populist rhetorics lend credibility to our proposal for a unifying,
rhetorical definition of populism. It is a “minimal”, i.e., “one-feature”,
definition according to which populism is most meaningful predicated,
not of ideology or of political actions, but of rhetoric in which it is claimed
or implied that the source speaks for the unison “people” of the polity
addressed.
We suggest that the studies constituting this book do confer such
credibility. However, to do that we need to return to the distinction
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 245

made above between a “core” attribute of populist rhetoric on the one

hand, and on the other hand a set of “epiphenomenal” rhetorical features
often found in populist rhetoric—but also in many cases in rhetoric and
movements that we would not call populist, and not in all populist
rhetoric.
The seven manifestations of populist rhetoric, as discussed in the seven
chapters, do not all exhibit the core attribute with equal clarity and in
equally literal forms, but they all exhibit some of the epiphenomenal
characteristics, and our contention will be that these epiphenomenal char-
acteristics have a strong correlation with the core attribute. That is, to find
these characteristics is more likely and more to be expected in rhetoric
that is populist by the core criterion than in rhetoric that is not. More-
over, even if the core attribute is not very salient in the specific rhetoric
studied in a chapter of this book, we contend that the core attribute will
nevertheless be found elsewhere in the rhetoric of the leader or movement
in question.
The breadth and diversity of populist rhetoric studied in these pages
have the advantage of raising our awareness of diverse manifestations of
populism, while at the same time preserving the advantage of allowing
us to see all these rhetorics as natural manifestations or outgrowths of
a shared core—one that may be more directly visible in some of the
rhetorical artifacts studied than in others.
This dual awareness—that there is great diversity, politically and rhetor-
ically, in populisms, but also, if we apply a rhetorical lens, a common
core—in turn allows scholars and other observers to look out with a
careful eye for that inner core. This we should do on the understanding
that any explicit or implicit pretense in a democratic society to speak
for the entire people—even if it appears, in its specific instantiations,
innocuous, fleeting, or otherwise understandable, perhaps even praise-
worthy—is in principle false. “The people” of a polity is always a rhetor-
ical construct, an artifice, an “imagined community”, in the famous phrase
coined by Anderson (1983). Rhetoricians, being aware of this, should
make that insight a banal and ever-present one in the public sphere.
Populism, even in its embryonic form—“banal” populism—should always
be viewed, by scholars and the general citizenry alike, with a rhetorical
awareness and with vigilance.
246 C. KOCK AND L. VILLADSEN

References
Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, 121–176. Original ed. “Idéologie et appareils
idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recherche).” La Pensée 151, juin 1970.
Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. Los Angeles: Sage.
Black, E. 1970. The Second Persona. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56(2), 109–
119.
Canovan, M. 1981. Populism. London: Junction.
Charland, M. 1987. Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebe-
cois. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73(2), 133–150.
Conley, T. 1986. The Linnaean Blues: Thoughts on the Genre Approach. In
Form, Genre and the Study of Popular Discourse, eds. Herbert W. Simons and
Aram A. Aghazarian, 59–78. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Freud, S. (1918). “II. Trauer und Melancholie”. Internationale Zeitschrift für
Psychoanalyse, 4(6), 288-301. In Gesammelte Werke. Chronologisch geordnet,
hrsg. v. Anna Freud et al. London: Imago, 1946; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1991, 8. Aufl. Bd. 10, 428–446.
Hawkins, J. A. 1978. Definiteness and Indefiniteness: A Study in Reference and
Grammaticality Prediction. London: Croom Helm, and Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press.
Iser, W. 1972. Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von
Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2),
151–167.
Minogue, K. 1969. Populism as a Political Movement. In Populism: Its Meaning
and National Characteristics, eds. Ghit, a Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, 197–
211. New York: Macmillan.
Moffitt, B. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and
Representation. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Mudde, C., and C. R. Kaltwasser, eds. 2012. Populism in Europe and the Amer-
icas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mudde, C., and C. R. Kaltwasser. 2018. Studying Populism in Compara-
tive Perspective: Reflections on the Contemporary and Future Research
Agenda. Comparative Political Studies, 51(13), 1667–1693.
Müller, J.-W. 2017. What Is Populism? Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Norris, P., and R. Inglehart. 2019. Cultural Bachlash: Trump, Brexit, and
Authorian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 POPULISM: A DEFINITION SOUGHT AND TESTED 247

Prince, G. 1973. Introduction à l’étude du narrataire. Poétique, 14, 178–

196. Trans., and rpt. as “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” In
Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P.
Tompkins. 1980. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Roberts-Miller, P. 2005. Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical
Rhetoric. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(3), 459–476.
Roberts-Miller, P. 2019. Rhetoric and Demagoguery. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press.
Schmitt, C. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toulmin, S. E. 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
van der Geest, I., H. Jansen, and B. van Klink. 2020. Vox Populi: Populism as a
Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Villadsen, L. S. 2020. Low Style the High Way: Rhetorical Mainstreaming of
Populism. In Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge,
eds. I. van der Geest, H. Jansen, and B. van Klink, 143–159.
Zarefsky, D. 2019. Ideological Conservatism vs. Faux Populism in Donald
Trump’s Inaugural Address. In Networking Argument, ed. Carol Winkler,
77–82. London: Routledge.
Zarefsky, D., and D. Mohammed. 2020. The Rhetorical Stance of Populism.
In Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge, eds. I. van
der Geest, H. Jansen, and B. van Klink, 17–28. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publishing.