Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses ed. by Gerald L. Neuman (review)

We are living through an age of epochal crisis. The challenges we face, the specters which haunt us (to paraphrase Marx and Engels), take a multitude of different forms. The litany of specters which confront us include: the existential threat of climate change and environmental destruction; rising socio-economic inequalities across the world; a renewed focus upon the unresolved injustices of structural racism; increased opposition amongst some religious communities (and others) to the rule of law based upon purportedly secular ideals; a growing frustration amongst some sections of society with the failures of elected politicians to deliver on their promises; an associated widespread impatience with democracy itself; a rising aversion in some quarters to multiculturalism and an increased tribalism within even long-established liberal capitalist societies; a growing dispositional moral righteousness that eschews appeals for compromise and mutual respect amongst differing communities; an identity politicking which consigns groups of people to friend-or-foe politically adversarial relationships played out over poorly regulated social media platforms; and a growing backlash against one of the most distinctive projects of Modernity: human rights. As if all of that was not enough to keep us awake at night, we are now having to come to terms with the horror of a global pandemic of historic proportions, which has itself further highlighted and intensified many of the other above-mentioned pathologies of our age.

One phenomenon that connects many of the above-mentioned specters that face us is "populism". Populism has quickly become one of the keywords of our age. Despite the term's overt appeal to "the people," populism has quickly developed into one of the most divisive of phenomena. The divisive force of populism is a direct consequence of the successful (and unsuccessful) electoral campaigns waged by many self-declared populists within both long-established and transitional electoral democracies in recent years. For many of its enthusiastic supporters, populism appears to speak directly to the interests, concerns, fears, and resentments of many liberal politicians and parties who have allegedly, created, ignored, and denigrated. For many of its supporters, populism appears to offer the type of political options and choices which liberal "elites" managed to exclude from the ticket or consign to the margins for so long. For some, populism offers the apparent freedom to celebrate nativist traditions and publicly express opinions which liberals had often declared to be politically taboo, impolite, prejudiced, and in a word, "deplorable."

In the more protected (which some populists want to dismiss as "elitist") sphere of academia, populism is mostly construed as an entirely pathological force. As one prominent academic authority on populism has written, "political scientists have been tempted to treat more recent populist movements as pathological symptoms of some social disease rather than political phenomena to be understood on their own terms."¹ Academic depictions of the post-2016 outbreak of populism, such as the influential study by Jan-Werner Muller, unequivocally reject populism's democratic credentials.² Muller exemplifies a wider academic dismissal of populism through his insistence that populism typically embraces a nativist form of identity politics which is hostile towards minority communities and the political, cultural, and legal elites who offer rights-based protection towards such groups. For Muller (and a great many others) the manifest anti-pluralism of populism constitutes a profound threat to democracy; rather than a true expression of the ideal of popular sovereignty, which populists invoke in their appeal to the "people". The depiction of populism as undemocratic by virtue of its illiberal character draws upon a lengthy tradition of liberal, rights-based political theory that identifies majoritarianism as posing one of the greatest internal threats to upholding a liberal democratic political and legal order within modern, diverse societies. Rights have, of course, enjoyed pride of place in this long-standing attempt to tame the effects of collective irrationality. In this way, attacks upon the constitutionally enshrined rights of minorities have provided rights defenders...