Telos 195 (Summer 2021): Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Populism is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
After watching the images of the January 6 Capitol riot, many Americans concluded that right-wing populism threatens the basic rules of our constitutional order. In this view, the U.S. Constitution establishes a universal order that is detached from any particular orientation and provides the neutral ground upon which differences can be discussed, while populists upset the rules of discussion and destroy the basis of a common project. Consequently, since populism is at odds with the Constitution, the solution would be to try to reimpose a measure of rationality upon the unruly. Yet the nagging concern behind this perspective is not just the violation of rules but the suspicion that populism is ultimately motivated by racism and sexism. In this case, the real opposition would not be between constitutionalism and populism but between two understandings of the Constitution, that is, two conceptions of the character of the people, one egalitarian and the other racist. The difficulty is that the laws of a constitution cannot exist independently of a people with a specific history. Rules cannot be neutral but imply a perspective on the world, and the conflict between constitutionalism and populism may in fact be a symptom of a conflict between two factions within the people, each of which is attempting to establish itself as the proper representation of the will of the people as a whole.
While the rule of law and free elections are certainly essential aspects of a constitution based in popular sovereignty, establishing such practices cannot be accomplished without any regard for the history, traditions, and religions of the people. One of the fundamental transformations of the Constitution since the eighteenth century has been the extension of the scope of sovereignty from a limited aristocracy to all white males in the course of the revolution and then to all races and genders after the Civil War. Such developments depended on a long history of struggles that changed the character of the people. Yet this continuing expansion of sovereignty cannot simply be equated with increasing rationality, as the conflict over a possible extension of rights to children, and particularly the unborn, shows. The question of whether the unborn enjoy a right to life is part of a theological dispute that underlies the constitutional questions, and the outcome will depend upon the beliefs of the people.
If the definition of a constitution involves decisions between competing understandings of the essence of the people as defined by their beliefs, the relation between constitutionalism and populism is in fact more a matter of myth than of rationality. The primary issue would be the definition of the specific character of the people that distinguishes it from other peoples as well as from alternative self-understandings. Such a definition involves an interpretation of the history of the people that is grounded as much in myth as in fact. The advent of populism poses a threat to the legitimacy of a constitution because it indicates a conflict over the character of its mythic basis. Such conflict is playing itself out all over the world, and this issue of Telos addresses how the various global examples of populist unrest are manifestations of struggles on the level of myth, theology, and ideology to define a constitutional order.
Many of the essays in this issue came out of a 2019 conference in Berlin organized and funded by the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, and we are grateful for the support of both institutions in making this research possible. Paul Kahn’s essay from this conference describes a deterioration in the United States of the mythic foundations of the Constitution, arguing that the U.S. constitutional order is grounded in the belief that “the rule of law was the expression of popular sovereignty” but that the faith in this connection has been eroding. Originalism is a symptom of this development to the extent that it tries to replace judgments about law with a focus on the historical facts about founders’ intentions, even though these facts themselves are also subject to interpretive judgments. The broader problem, however, is a long-term decline in the belief that the laws and the Supreme Court are an expression of a greater morality as well as the people’s conception of its own identity. It is only by embodying the “citizen’s highest values” that the Constitution can become a simultaneously political and legal document that can provide the basis for a common project. Because the unity of the people depends on such shared values, the legitimacy of the Constitution is ultimately grounded in a collective faith. As Kahn argues, the role of the Supreme Court is not to deal in facts but in myth, and the crisis of constitutionalism consists in the deterioration of the myth of a collective national identity. Once the faith in the link between constitution and national identity declines, the Constitution no longer embodies “the political” as the underlying collective identity of the people but rather becomes a tool of “politics,” the constant disputes of party politics, and the result is a fragmentation of the people themselves into warring factions. In a stable democracy, there would be agreement about the political, that is, the fundamental values that unify the people, even though there might be disagreement about the proper means for attaining those agreed-upon collective goals. The worry today is that the key disagreements are not about such means but rather about the very definition of common values.
In his critique of originalism in constitutional theory, Aryeh Botwinick’s conference essay foregrounds the interpretive aspect of this mythic determination of the people, and he consequently situates originalism within a broader discussion of our relationship to texts and to sovereignty. Since originalism locates ultimate meaning in either the author’s intentions or the understanding of those intentions by the author’s contemporaries, it presumes to locate the meaning of the text in a particular time and place. Such an approach predetermines the question of the location of reality and truth. Botwinick offers instead a skepticist approach in which there can be no certain knowledge of the precise place of truth and the approach to truth must be rooted in the conflicting arguments that can be offered as ways to reach judgments. He rejects the originalist certainty about the place of truth as well as the kind of skepticism that would deny, rather than leave open, the possibility of God and of truth. Both approaches prejudge the situation in a way that curtails the continuing reflection and interpretive effort that would be essential for us to be able to maintain our faith, rather than a false certainty, in truth.
If a common theme in populism is a distrust of elites, this attitude takes different forms. Antonio Lecuna describes how the development of Chavismo in Venezuela has followed a populist schema that has been repeated several times in Latin America in different countries. This version of populism promotes radical democracy and social welfare policies, as opposed to liberal democracy and free market mechanisms. Lecuna describes how this recurring populist dynamic in South America has continually led to crises. By nationalizing industries to maintain state-owned enterprises and restricting imports to reduce foreign competition, populist governments push up costs for consumer products. At the same time, government spending on social programs and the promotion of higher wages for workers both boost overall demand. The resulting combination of rising costs and heightened demand leads to inflation, which the government can only keep in check by imposing price controls financed by government subsidies. But such manipulations of the market create opportunities for corruption as well as gradually worsening inflation, as the subsidies deplete government resources, and the government must borrow money and devalue the currency to maintain the subsidies. On the level of constitutional structures, the focus on radical democracy ends up creating a strong executive, which, in the attempt to promote collective structures, diminishes individual rights. Consequently, the situation of Venezuela today, with pervasive corruption, hyperinflation, and authoritarian restrictions on individual rights, is the result of the unabated development of the typical Latin American populist logic. Supposedly populist policies have in fact shifted more and more power to the government, further entrenching an elite class of administrators. Yet the solution for Lecuna is not to reject the populist distrust of elites. Rather, he proposes implementing a more truly populist agenda that would diffuse rather than centralize power. He suggests, for instance, that a universal basic income could distribute the proceeds of oil and gas revenues directly to the people rather than using these revenues to support dysfunctional government structures.
Matthias Schwartz’s conference contribution also describes competing forms of populism in his discussion of Ukrainian politics. On the one hand, President Petro Poroshenko mobilized populist sentiment by emphasizing nationalist opposition to Russia along with a pro-Western stance on politics and economics. However, he lost the 2019 presidential election to Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian, who played the role of a history teacher who becomes president in a popular TV series, Servant of the People. The TV series and Zelensky represent an alternative form of populism that criticizes both the state and popular protest movements as equally corrupt and manipulative. “Every large gathering of people is depicted as a crowd that is ordered and paid for.” By undermining the idea of representational forms of popular identity, Servant of the People depicts the nuclear family as the “highest form of companionship,” in which “individual responsibility and personal commitment,” rather than ideological ideas about economics or political enemies, become the primary values. The TV series and the presidency itself focus on uncovering petty greed and corruption at both the institutional and the family level in order to promote this ethic of individual responsibility. As both a media strategy focused on digital forms of communication and a political movement that emphasizes family rather than organized political groups, Zelensky’s form of populism presents an alternative to a nationalist populism.
Though Germany has had an understandable tendency since World War II to downplay expressions of nationalism, Russell Berman’s conference essay indicates that the affirmation of national identity is inseparable from a project of democratization in Germany, whose main challenge has been the dissolution of class boundaries in the expansion of political rights to the entire population. Berman considers the development of German nationalism by analyzing the way in which Theodor Fontane’s 1878 novel Before the Storm establishes an egalitarian notion of German national identity by imagining political identity along national rather than class-based lines. In its retelling of the story of the birth of German nationalism during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, the novel consistently undermines the heroic and triumphalist elements. Rather than celebrating heroes, the novel’s plot focuses on a variety of characters from different classes and contexts. In this literary constitution of the nation, national identity becomes the vehicle for establishing equality.
In contrast to the downplaying of nationalism in the Ukraine and Germany, the Chinese government has been promoting cultural self-confidence as a way to reconceive its ideological foundation. Huimin Jin cites recent speeches by Xi Jinping to indicate that the Chinese Communist Party has shifted its rhetoric to emphasize the value of Chinese cultural self-confidence as the basis for national unity, gradually replacing an emphasis on politics, economy, and socialist ideology. This shift indicates that the government recognizes both a deterioration in the legitimacy of socialist ideology and the importance of culture for maintaining its power. In addition to establishing an alternative to a focus on socialism as the motivating ideology for defining national identity, the Party’s approach sets itself against more extreme nationalists in China, who promote cultural self-confidence in order to support an increasing Chinese dominance within a world of “clashing civilizations.” Jin’s response is to emphasize that each culture will have its own trajectory but that such trajectories will be determined by relationships with other cultures. He offers a model of “correspondence in differences” as a way of thinking about relationships between cultures that might reduce conflict and argues that Xi’s approach seeks to build dialogue between cultures by emphasizing a common “fate community of mankind.” Yet focusing on such “correspondence in differences” risks trivializing the grave divides that underlie continuing conflicts. Xi’s invocation of harmony across the divide between authoritarianism and liberal democracy is in fact more chilling than reassuring, making even the Capitol rioters look endearing in the openness of their antagonism and revealing as a sign of stability the U.S. ability to countenance disagreement within its borders.
Adam Webb’s contribution from the conference also suggests that the mythic aspects of political rhetoric are perhaps essential for the success of supranational institutions. He cites Walter Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified constitution and the efficient constitution in order to argue that supranational institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations suffer from a failure to establish the dignified aspect of their constitutions, which includes both traditional elements, such as religion and ritual, as well as tools of sovereignty, such as aristocracy and violence. The tendency of the EU and the UN to have bureaucratic rather than charismatic leaders is a result of the lack of an underlying people that would be the audience for a magnificent or heroic representation of political unity. This lack of an identifiable community allows supranational institutions to be dominated by new class elites, who are generally appointed based on technocratic competence and consequently alienated from religious traditions as well as a cosmic order of legitimacy. Lacking both a “constituent power from below” and a “counterweight from outside,” global elites will never be able to conjure up the global demos that would be necessary to legitimate global governance. In attempting to imagine an alternative path to a dignified constitution, Webb suggests that it would require the establishment of a new global myth of the cosmos that the new class itself would be incapable of constructing.
In contrast to a realist approach that reduces international relations to issues of power, Luis Valenzuela-Vermehren argues that ideas provide the framework within which power expresses itself on both the domestic and the international levels. A particular ideology will establish a vision of human nature that provides the basis for a social and political agenda. States then exercise power in order to expand the reach of their ideology and the structures that it implies because they consider the expansion of the ideology to be a necessary way of both protecting its attendant structures domestically and expanding the benefits of this ideology to the rest of the world. The “reason of state” leads to a “reason of system,” in which the development of an ideology within a state, such as Spain’s Renaissance humanism, establishes the conceptual basis for a particular international order, in this case the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire. International politics must then be understood as a competition between different ideologies, each of which is attempting to expand its reach as a basis for international order.
In our special forum on the changing character of the public sphere, Tim Luke, Jay Gupta, and Mark Kelly share a vision of the public sphere in which people with diverging perspectives can engage in debate and discussion in order to arrive at a consensus for decision-making. But for different reasons they conclude that the rise of social media has led to a bifurcation of the public sphere that reproduces the divided character of national identity.
Tim Luke describes how the utopian promise of a democratization of the public sphere in the internet age has revealed itself as the continuation of culture industry processes. Instead of expanding the terms of debate, the new media have created echo chambers of mystification that have been tailored by algorithms to encase each individual user within her own preconceptions. If thought has become a commodity and facts have been subordinated to agendas, the public sphere no longer exists as a unified space for discussion. Meanwhile, traditional media news has become a kind of infotainment that is dominated by experts who disempower the viewers. Neither traditional nor new media offer any true alternatives to the culture industry’s degradation of the public sphere. Rather than empowering people with information or avenues for political action, traditional and new media confine them within existing power structures.
Jay Gupta is similarly pessimistic when he describes how truth for Trump and his voters has receded in favor of “bullshit” as the basis for rhetoric, which is to say that there is no longer any regard for standards of truth, as long as what is said supports one’s perspective. Gupta indicates that this disregard for truth is linked, in spite of a right-wing rhetoric of democracy, to a declining respect for democratic structures such as the rule of law and the authority of elections. Gupta suggests that it is often the poor and the powerless who lack respect for truth and that this attitude will only increase with Trump voters’ “retreat into relatively low visibility at the discursive margins of society.”
Mark Kelly, by contrast, argues that this retreat is the result of an active suppression of right-wing views by the gatekeepers of both traditional and new media. He describes how the internet and social media have caused a disruption of the public sphere that has threatened to shift power away from entrenched media companies by allowing a plethora of new voices to broadcast their views. The resulting change in the parameters of public discourse led to Trump’s 2016 election victory, but the reaction of the media companies has been to form an alliance with “the Democratic Party establishment, the national security state, and the U.S. haute bourgeoisie” in a kind of counterinsurgency effort to suppress the voices that dissent from their center-left agenda. Since 2016, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as well as traditional media companies, with the exception of Fox News and the New York Post, have acted in concert with their political allies to suppress right-wing voices, including President Trump himself, in order to reestablish their total dominance over the public sphere. For Kelly, this alliance has been founded upon an ideology that contends that right-wing populism is fundamentally violent, racist, and sexist, and therefore poses a threat to democracy itself. The pervasive censorship of the public sphere has been accomplished in the name of protecting democracy from dangerous voices, resulting in a shift of political power toward the new media companies that are now in control of the public sphere.
Finally, Gabriel Noah Brahm describes a similar curtailment of political debate in his review of two recent books by Cary Nelson on the influence of anti-Israel academics at U.S. and Palestinian universities. Nelson shows how U.S. academics use misinformation to support their attacks on the existence of Israel. Meanwhile, Palestinian universities have created an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and violence to maintain a strictly anti-Zionist attitude on their campuses.
