The phrases “moral majority” and “silent majority” are associated in American political history with Jerry Falwell and Richard Nixon, respectively, who seem unlikely to be heroes of the Sunrise Movement, a leftist project that uses children to emotionally blackmail adults who agree with its climate action agenda. Yet when the Sunrise Movement recently confronted Dianne Feinstein to press her to sponsor Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s extreme Green New Deal, and shot a video of the exchange calibrated to go viral, it deployed the rhetoric of a silent moral majority exactly.
Feinstein pointed out that she legitimately represents an actual majority of her state, which elected her in a landslide. “I’ve gotten elected. I just ran. I was elected by almost a million vote plurality,” she patiently explained. But the activists’ leader didn’t see it that way, protesting inaccurately that “there is enormous popularity for this bill around the whole country.” Later: “Your constituents are asking you for this, and I really believe, and tens of thousands — millions — of people around the country are asking for this online.” Tens of thousands, millions … What’s the difference, when you’re making it up?
The exchange illuminates the difference between “popular” and “populism.”
Why do we have this -ism word, rather than just “popular?” Because populism isn’t just the politics of majoritarian appeal. It uses the rhetoric of majority and popularity, but it isn’t really concerned with numbers. According to scholar Jan-Werner Muller, populism is defined by its “claim to a moral monopoly of representation.” It’s not necessary to populists, Muller explains, to count actual opinions and determine that they represent a majority, since anyone who disagrees isn’t truly a member of the people. Populists don’t go in for “toleration” or “pluralism” or any of that stuff, since their opponents aren’t just wrong but illegitimate.
Every one of us feels our opinions are correct, sometimes urgently so, and someone who agrees needs to be put in charge. That’s just what it feels like to have an opinion. The democratic process is how pluralists maturely handle the fact that, scandalously, we don’t all have the same opinion. But populists such as the Sunrise Movement want to skip that process. In this sense, they are undemocratic. And in the worst sense of the word, they are childish.
