The P-Word
by Noam Lupu

Hardly a day goes by without the US or European media describing a political leader as populist. Last month, the New York Times described Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez as "populist and fiercely nationalistic." Two days later, the Financial Times called Argentina's president Néstor Kirchner a populist. Evo Morales, Bolivia's likely next president, is rarely mentioned without the populist adjective. And the media only recently seem to have given up the populist label for Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, well into his presidency.

Given the frequency of the term, though, it's surprising to realize that most of us would be hard-pressed to define it. Except to note a pejorative connotation. What's more, academics were hailing the "end of populism" back in the mid-'90s, before Chávez, Kirchner or Lula were even elected.

So what exactly defines a populist? Webster's online dictionary defines it as either "a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people" or "a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people." But if that's the case, then how come the vast majority of populists seem to reside south of the Rio Grande? President Bush certainly claims to represent the common people. Tony Blair and even Angela Merkel would undoubtedly call themselves believers in the virtues of common people. But neither the names of the US president nor those of his western European counterparts are preceded with the populist epithet in the mainstream media.

The reason could be the nuanced differences between Latin American political leaders and other politicians. Many of history's great populists were Latin. Argentina's Juan Perón famously untucked his shirt and declared himself the voice of the worker. In the pouring rain, Ecuador's José Velasco Ibarra told throngs of poor people he would bring about a "national resurrection," accusing the ruling class of "staining the national honor." Bush and Merkel don't come close in either public speaking or public spectacle. But neither do Kirchner or Lula. Perón and Ibarra ruled in the '40s and '50s, when live oratory was the norm and charisma won public support. After all, FDR was pretty charismatic and not a shabby orator.

On policy, it would be difficult to find similarities between today's Latin American leaders and their populist predecessors. Perón was a nationalist dictator who allied himself with the Axis powers and tried to set up a corporatist state on the Mussolini model, kicking out American and British businesses. Velasco was a mercurial egomaniac who drove his economy into the ground to finance the schemes of his associates. Meanwhile, Kirchner and Lula are left-of-center, democratically elected leaders who so far have proved themselves relatively pro-market. In fact, even Chávez and Morales — who talk the talk of socialist revolution — have yet to affect any Perón-style expropriations.

Latin America scholars who use the p-word (or, even less instructively, the term neo-populist) to describe today's leaders often point to their political rhetoric. Populists, they argue, win support by painting themselves as crusaders in a battle of "us" against "them." For Perón and Velasco, it was the workers versus the oligarchs, and their nations versus the Pax Americana. For today's leaders, it is again the poor against the ruling establishment, and everyone against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US. Kirchner famously won a game of chicken with Argentina's bondholders. Chávez perennially claims to be a target for assassination by the CIA. Lula is, after all, the leader of Brazil's Workers' Party.

But Bush's rhetoric, at least since Sept. 11, 2001, has been all about "us" versus "them." We're in a global war on terror, he tells us, fighting "evildoers" who want to "destroy our way of life." And it seems everything the Bush administration wants to do is sold to the public as a vital part of this war. If we pull out of Iraq, the terrorists win. If we squabble over the definition of torture, the terrorists win. Vice President Dick Cheney even insinuated during the 2004 campaign that if we elect John Kerry, the terrorists win.

Even during the 2000 campaign, Bush billed himself as the outsider candidate, looking to represent common folks in establishment Washington. He bought a ranch in Texas and gathered the press for photo-ops as he built a fence or chopped some wood. But Bush is not alone in this. On the 2004 campaign trail, John Edwards' stump speech prominently featured lines about the "two Americas," with Edwards of course representing the downtrodden America against the well-to-do.

So if the us/them rhetoric is not unique to populists, and if today's so-called populists lack both the oratorical, personalistic flair and extreme policy positions of their predecessors, what does the New York Times mean when it calls someone a populist?

When you think about it, the only thing leaders like Chávez, Lula, Kirchner and Morales have in common is that they're popular and broadly left-leaning. But by calling them populists, the mainstream media simply come off as alarmist. For an Anglo-American audience, words like populist are frightening, recalling their own rowdy agrarian and reform movements in the 19th century. And they of course bring to mind the Peróns and Velascos of the mid-20th century: authoritarian, extremist and sometimes even communist.

That kind of condescension toward everything south of the border is nothing new, but it's no less reprehensible for being an old trope in new clothes. It may well be an innocent attempt by mainstream outlets to find a term to describe what seems like a new regional trend in Latin America. But falling back on the p-word appeals only to the basest of prejudices.

E-mail Noam Lupu at noam at flakmag dot com.