Technopopulism as the New Logic of Democratic Politics

• Book: Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics. By Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti.

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Review

George Hoare:

"A distinction between populism (as the rule of the people) and technocracy (as the rule of experts) is at this point a common one in political analysis. In broad terms, it came to the fore in commentaries on the wave of political movements that emerged around 2016, centrally Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The distinction particularly seemed to appeal to those who saw themselves sitting towards the top of the meritocratic pyramid because it offered a thinly-veiled criticism of populist voters, who were framed as a danger to democratic norms.

In Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics, political scientists Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti argue not only that this “populism vs. technocracy” dichotomy does not help us make sense of contemporary political reality but also that their paradoxical fusion—technopopulism—is the logic that underlies all democratic politics today. Specifically, they claim that political projects of the last 30 years (in Western Europe and America in particular) have been increasingly characterized by the synthesis of appeals to the people and appeals to expertise.

The book presents three “cases” of technopopulism: the party, the leader, and the strategy to mobilize the electoral base. Britain’s New Labour is the archetype of the technopopulist party: moving “beyond Left and Right”, in guru Anthony Giddens’ influential formulation, and looking to present non-ideological “good” policies, New Labour drew heavily on the use of pollster expertise to map the preferences of the British electorate, as detailed in Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy. At the same time, Tony Blair deliberately lent on the language of “the people” in his political appeals; as Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti remind us, Blair described Princess Diana—at the time of her death in 1997—as “the people’s princess”, and her funeral as “a people’s funeral.” The Millennium Dome project was referred to by Blair as “the people’s dome”, and the cause of European integration in the UK was an attempt to link up with “the people’s Europe” (43). New Labour, for Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti, is thus an amalgam of appeals to popular objects and identities, and deeply technocratic tropes.

If New Labour is a case of “technopopulism through the party”, then France’s Emmanuel Macron is the exemplary technopopulist leader. While Blair was a figure of technopopulist transformation of the existing British Labour Party, Macron emerged outside of the established political vehicles of the Fifth Republic. Macron’s self-presentation as a “people’s problem solver”—similar to Trump’s presentation of himself as a dealmaker—is clearly grounded in a sort of practical, political expertise. In Macron’s case, this knowledge of how to get things done is blended with a direct appeal to the populace and the personalization of his En Marche party around his own brand. As Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti put it, with Macron the technopopulist synthesis “occurs in the person of Macron himself, who is presented as an embodiment of the French people’s aspiration for political change while also construed as a competent and effective ‘doer’, possessing the necessary dynamism and expertise to deliver good policies” (5).

Finally, Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) is the key example of a technopopulist mobilization strategy, which seeks to move the “citizen-expert” from below. M5S attempts to use digital organizing methods as a way to crowd-source expertise and harness the electorate’s “collective intelligence”. As Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti draw out, this form of technopopulism includes a characteristic appeal to popular expertise as legitimating the technopopulist project: “To portray one’s political project or platform as validated by ‘common sense’ effectively amounts to saying that it is: a) objectively true, or at least eminently reasonable; and b) already agreed upon by all ordinary people” (77). For the technopopulist, then, the idea that ordinary people possess a diffuse competence which can be harnessed by technology legitimates their political project. Through this mobilization it is the people themselves who become technocratically empowered.

As these examples illustrate, Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti make the case for technopopulism as a blending of political tendencies that are often taken to be opposed."

(https://damagemag.com/2021/03/26/the-age-of-technopopulism/)