D onalD E. P EasE American Democracy, Populist Imaginaries, and Donald Trump The idea for this volume emerged two years ago during the electoral insurrections when voters across Europe and the United States elected populist candidates to express their intense dissatisfaction with long-standing political arrangements and institutions� Milestone events included the 2016 UK vote to secede from the EU, the drastic increase of support for France’s National Front, the insurgence of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in Italy, the decisive victory of the populist ANO party in the Czech Republic’s October 2017 parliamentary elections, the decision by leaders of right-center parties in the Netherlands and Austria to embrace the policies of the far-right to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch and the October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections, the mutation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s version of “illiberal democracy” into the template of governance for Poland’s Law and Justice party, the elevation of the reactionary Alternative für Deutschland into the Bundestag, and, perhaps most significantly for the contributors to this volume, the 2016 U�S� election of Donald Trump� At once a rational rejection of establishment politics and an emotional backlash to a collective sense of disenfranchisement, populism announced its power as a galvanizing political force through this series of electoral revolts� Until recently populism was almost exclusively linked to the radical right� In the 1960s, the American historian Richard Hofstsadter famously dismissed populism as expressive of “the paranoid style” of American politics. Hofstadter situated populism in a political constellation comprised solely of right-wing extremists like Father Coughlin, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and members of the John Birch Society� Hofstadter’s analysis might be resuscitated to explain why Britain’s UKIP, the French Front National, and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland are enjoying record popularity. “Paranoid style” also describes the populist agendas of the right-wing populists who have gained control of political power in Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Switzerland, and on 11/ 9/ 2016, the United States� But the left-wing populists in Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza party have discredited the belief that populist sentiments can be restricted to reactionary right-wing partisans� What is perhaps most anomalous about populism is that the label applies equally to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders� Casting the 2008 Great Recession, the threat of globalization, and international trade as seedbeds, the political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and John B� Judis have recently argued that the global rise of populism on the right and the left is a central fact of contemporary politics� Populism cannot be 2 D onalD E. P EasE restricted to any particular social class or ideological framework, members of every populist movement share the belief in the people’s right to exercise greater control over their government than do the political elites� Whereas political commentators like Hofstadter denounce populism as a threat to democracy tout court, however, Müller and Judis describe its resurgence as a corrective to political contradictions internal to liberal democracy. Both theorists define liberal democracy as a structure of governance that values popular sovereignty and majority rule but that aims to avoid the emergence of the tyranny of the majority through institutions - an independent judiciary, a free press, regulatory agencies - commissioned to guarantee fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the protection of minorities� Populists on the right believe that the will of the people should trump minority rights as well as the liberal institutions that safeguard these rights� Populists on the left and the right believe that political elites have used liberal transnational institutions like the IMF, the World Bank to take important issues such as economic, monetary, and regulatory policies off the public agenda and assign them to agencies insulated from public scrutiny� At its core populism refers to the belief in the people’s right to exercise greater control over their government than do political elites� Populists divide society into two non-comparable and antagonistic factions “the commonsensical, right-minded people” and “the sophisticated, corrupt elite.” Mobilized by the conviction that direct action of the masses is the most effective political agency, populists aim to unite the uncorrupted people and against the corrupt elites� However, because populists on the right and the left embrace the democratic principles of popular sovereignty and majoritarian rule, they both must address the question, “Who are the people? ” When populists say “we,” what does “we” mean? Müller denounces as blatantly anti-democratic populists’ arrogation of the sole power to make good on democracy’s primary ideal of majoritarian rule� Since the chief purpose of democracy in all of its iterations presupposes pluralism, it follows, Müller argues, that populists who declare themselves a single, homogeneous, authentic people and who cast their political opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ have abrogated the responsibility to find amenable ways of living together as free, equal but also irreducibly diverse people� Judis concurs with Müller’s diagnosis of the anti-democratic tendencies of “the people” banded together in right-wing populism. However Judis draws a distinction between what he calls the “triadic” structure of right-wing populism and the dyadic structure of its left-wing iteration� Right-leaning populism is triadic in that it distinguishes “the people” from those perceived as political elites as well as from those groups perceived to be at the bottom of the social order who are included in the national community in the form of excluded minorities. Insofar as the “dyadic” composition of left-wing populism merely distinguishes “the people” from social and political elites, it can potentially include members of minority groups that right-wing populism American Democracy, Populist Imaginaries, and Donald Trump 3 constitutively excludes� Indeed by permitting the aggregation of demands of excluded minority groups, dyadic populism can also work as a corrective or what Ernesto Laclau calls a “democratization” of liberal democracy. These remarks suggest that U�S� populist movements cannot be understood apart from their relationships to American democratic cultures that they can either supplement, antagonize or, as in the recent example of Donald Trump, threaten to displace altogether� If that is the case, can the concept of American democratic culture that has historically distinguished the U�S� from other countries provide a framework for the interpretation and critique of contemporary American populisms? Have contemporary United States writers, artists and activists imagined modes of democratic sociality that constitute the precondition for yet are irreducible to extant populist imaginaries? How has the fracturing of the media infrastructure by which publics come into existence contributed to Donald Trump’s strain of populism? Do the modes of analysis devised to diagnose twentieth century populisms provide adequate frameworks to understand Trump’s movement? The disparate yet complementary perspectives from which its contributors engage these and related questions promise to enhance the explanatory potential of this volume of REAL� Works Cited Hofstadter, Richard� The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books� 2008� Judis, John B� The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports� 2016� Laclau, Ernesto� On Populist Reason� New York: Random House� 2018 Müller, Jan-Werner� What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press� 2016�