It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon. Such a person is likely to be disappointed. It does not take much reading to discover that political scientists are quite conflicted. (One might take this review article to provide a decent snapshot of the relatively large academic literature on the subject.) There is a modest level of agreement about what populism is, but the most widely accepted definition is both superficial and misleading. That is inauspicious, as far as combating the forces of populism is concerned.

Most importantly, academics have not done a great job confronting the most confounding aspect of populism, which is that the more it gets criticized by intellectuals, the more powerful it becomes. As a result, most of us are still playing the same old game, with the same old strategies, without realizing that the metagame has changed.

It is not difficult to see where the academic discussion went wrong. An unfortunately large number of writers on populism were wrongfooted by the decision, made early on, to treat populism as a type of political ideology, along the lines of socialism or liberalism. This gave rise to an immediate puzzle, because populism seems to be compatible with a large number of other conventional political ideologies. In particular, it comes in both left-wing (e.g. Chavez) and right-wing (e.g. Bolsonaro) variants. So if populism is a political ideology, it’s a strange sort of ideology, because it doesn’t seem to exclude other views in the way that a conventional ideology does.

The most obvious alternative is to treat it as a strategy, used to gain specific advantage in a democratic electoral system. This is a more promising approach, but it also generates its own puzzles. If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? And if it’s just an electoral strategy, why do populists rule the way they do? For example, why are they so keen on undermining the rule of law (leading to conflict with the courts, attempts to limit judicial independence, etc.)?

The solution that many people have settled on is to accept a watered-down version of the first view, treating populism as an ideology, but only a “thin” one. The most commonly cited definition is from Cas Mudde:

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

The major problem with this definition stems from the fact that it needs to be so minimal, in order to accommodate the fact that populism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours, but as a result it is simply too minimal to explain many of the specific features of populist movements. For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)? Furthermore, reading the definition, it would seem as though the left should be able to get significant mileage out of populism, and yet throughout Europe the rise of populism has almost uniformly benefited the right.

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production. More specifically, it is a consequence of the distinction between what Daniel Kahneman referred to as “fast and slow” thinking.

The view that Kahneman was popularizing is known as dual-process theory in psychology. The idea, roughly, is that human beings are capable of two quite different styles of cognition. Daniel Dennett once described the conscious human mind, fabulously, as a “serial virtual machine implemented – inefficiently – on the parallel hardware provided by evolution.” The hardware/software analogy is not perfect, but it gets at an important truth. We have inherited a million-year old primate brain, the product of evolution, that contains a very large number of built-in modules, which allow us to perform complex computations in an effortless, lightning-fast way (e.g. recognizing faces, maintaining balance while walking, predicting the trajectories of moving objects, guesstimating the probability of events, and so on). We call the outputs of these cognitive processes “intuitions,” because we don’t really know how the answers get calculated, we just get presented with the results.

On top of this, we have a more evolutionarily recent system, which allows us to perform cognitively “decoupled” operations, such as mathematical, logical, hypothetical and strategic reasoning. This is basically a software system, in that it requires cultural inputs (such as language, writing systems, arabic numerals, matrices and graphs, etc.) in order to function well. Unfortunately, it differs from the intuitive system in that it is slow, effortful, and requires attention. (This is due to its “inefficient” implementation, on hardware that was never designed to support linear reasoning.) Because the operations of this “analytical system” are effortful, our standard mode of engagement with the world exhibits what Keith Stanovich calls “cognitive miserliness,” which means that we try to get through life as much as we can relying on intuition, and it’s only when that fails – when the limitations of that mode of problem-solving become manifest – that we switch to the more demanding, analytic style of processing. In other words, we spend most of our lives on cognitive autopilot, only thinking hard when we are forced to.

This is not such a problem when the two systems agree with one another. The problem is that they sometimes disagree. In particular, the intuitive systems, being a product of evolution, use a lot of quick-and-dirty tricks (i.e. heuristics) to solve problems, which work most of the time but not always. These systems are also, unfortunately, in most cases incapable of learning. As a result, even though they have bugs in them, we can’t actually debug them. Instead, the analytic system has to step in, suppress the intuitive response, and substitute the correct answer.

To illustrate, one of the most famous “bugs” in our hardware occurs in the “intuitive physics” system that we use to predict ballistic trajectories. This system is great for catching baseballs and so forth, but it generates false predictions in some specific cases. The most well-known occurs when we consider an object that is already in motion being dropped. Our intuitive system predicts that it will go straight down, whereas in reality it will preserve forward momentum, and so will descend in an arc. This bug shows up often in children’s drawings, like the following, mildly anachronistic depiction of siege warfare, which my son drew when he was about eight years old:

Notice how he gets the arc of the rock thrown by the catapult correct, but the bomb being dropped by the airplane is wrong. The amazing thing is that each and every one of us is walking around with the exact same bug in our heads. The difference is that most adults (hopefully?) also have explicit knowledge of the correct answer, and so whenever our brains feed us the incorrect intuition, we consciously override that response and substitute the correct prediction. This cognitive override unfortunately requires both attention and effort, with the result that most people, if asked to draw the bomb trajectory correctly, would have to stop and think about it for a moment.

All of this may seem quite far removed from the world of politics, but it isn’t. Just as we have a lot of hardware routines dedicated to interpreting and predicting events in the physical world, we also have an enormous number dedicated to managing social interactions. The latter are also full of bugs. To make matters worse, while the basic rules of physical motion are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, the rules of human society have changed in radical ways. Because of this, many of the intuitive responses that we have to social situations, which were appropriate in small-scale societies, are completely inappropriate in large-scale societies. This means that life in the modern world imposes extremely onerous cognitive burdens on us all.

Take a concrete example. There is a well-known bug in our pattern-detection system that causes us to vastly overestimate the effectiveness of punishment at motivating behavioural change in others. Because we tend to punish unusually bad behaviour and to reward unusually good behaviour, regression to the mean dictates that punishment will more often be followed by better behaviour and reward by worse behaviour. This generates the impression that, not only was the punishment effective, but the reward was counterproductive. Many “common sense” ideas about incentivization (like “spare the rod, spoil the child”) are a direct result of this illusion.

Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.

It is not difficult to see how this difference in view creates a state of affairs that can, in turn, be exploited for political gain in a democracy. The expert view on punishment tends to percolate out, influencing the behaviour of educational elites (and others who are inclined to defer to expert opinion). This gives rise to a set of views and practices among those elites, such as permissive parenting, abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a less punitive approach to crime, and opposition to capital punishment, which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority. This in turn leads the broader public to think that certain persistent social problems, such as juvenile delinquency or urban disorder, are a consequence of various institutions (not just the criminal justice system, but schools and parents as well) having become insufficiently punitive. The solution, from their perspective, is an exercise of straightforward common sense – all we need to do is “get tough” with offenders. The resistance of elites to these obvious truths is a sign that there is something wrong with them (e.g. they have been seduced by “fancy theories,” become divorced from reality, etc.).

Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

This reservoir of discontent creates the opportunity that is exploited by populist politicians. Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites, and around institutions dominated by elites (e.g. traditional political parties), in order to tap into this fund of resentment, positioning oneself as the champion of the people. What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.

Seen from this perspective, it is not difficult to see why populism can be an effective political strategy, and why it has become dramatically more effective in the age of social media. As one can tell from the title of Kahneman’s book, a central feature of intuitive cognition is that it is “fast,” while analytical reasoning is “slow.” This means that an acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.

Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

This analysis explains why populism, despite being a mere strategy, also winds up having a characteristic ideological tone and content. The key is to see it as a political strategy that privileges a particular style of cognition.

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This privileging of intuitive (or System 1) cognition generates a set of diverse features that can be found in most populist movements. What follows is a non-exhaustive list:

1. Frustration with elites on specific issues. Crime is an ongoing source of frustration, in part because elites – even those who declare themselves “tough on crime” – believe that punishment should be imposed within a legal framework. This creates an opening for populist politicians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who empowered the police to carry out summary executions, and Donald Trump in the U.S. who explicitly authorized a return to “street justice” by urban police forces, and has used the U.S. military to carry out summary executions (so far only in international waters). There are other issues on which similar disagreements arise, with the most important at the moment being immigration and international trade. Economists, for instance, understand that a tariff on imports is equivalent to a tax on exports, but it is difficult to imagine more than 20% of the population being either willing or able to follow the chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion. Similarly, the fact that immigration does not create unemployment, because it increases both the supply and the demand for labour, is highly unintuitive, and yet leads elites to take a much more casual view about the labour-market effects of migration than the public does. (Elites then make things worse by moralizing this disagreement, suggesting that the public position must be motivated by racism. Thus they present themselves, not only as smarter, but as morally superior to the rest of society.)

2. Collective action problems. Populists have never met a collective action problem that they did not feel inclined to make worse (e.g. climate change). That’s because, whenever something bad happens, there is an impulse to blame some other person, but in a collective action problem, the bad effects that you suffer genuinely are the fault of the other person! The catch is that the situation is symmetric — the bad effects they are suffering are your fault. Getting out of the situation therefore requires the cognitive insight that you must both stop, and that you must refrain from free-riding despite the incentives. Intuition, on the other hand, suggests that the correct response is to punish the other person, and since the best way to do this is typically by defecting, the intuitive response is just a formula for transforming a collective action problem into a race to the bottom. This is why civilizations collapse into barbarism and not the other way around.

3. Communication style. A very prominent feature of populist politicians is their speaking style, which has an unscripted, stream-of-consciousness quality (e.g. see Hugo Chavez’s Aló Presidente TV show, which one could also, totally imagine Trump doing). This is important precisely because it is the opposite of the self-controlled, calculated speaking style favored by mainstream politicians (which the French have the perfect term for: langue de bois). This is why populist politicians are perceived, by a large segment of the population, as being more “honest,” even when everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which it is said. Often this is because they themselves employ the controlled speaking style, and so are not bothered by others using it. And yet it is perfectly clear, when listening to Donald Trump, that what he is saying is exactly what he is thinking. Indeed, he obviously lacks the verbal self-inhibition required to speak in any other way. This is what leads people to trust him – especially if they are relying on intuitive cues, rather than analytic evaluation, to determine trustworthiness. (The use of vulgarity is another common tactic of populist politicians, to demonstrate their lack of verbal inhibition. Traditional politicians sometimes try to imitate this, without success, because they fail to realize that it is not the vulgarity, but rather the disinhibition, that achieves the important communicative effect.)

4. Illiberalism. Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.” The same feat of abstraction is involved in many other liberal protections. For example, populists often complain about lawyers “defending criminals.” It requires a cognitively decoupled representation to see that lawyers defend people who are accused of a crime, and even if many of these people are in fact criminals, one cannot describe them as such until after that determination has been made, through a procedure that requires legal representation. Similarly, populists find conflict of interest rules extremely difficult to follow, because these rules are typically designed to avoid putting people into situations in which their judgment might be improperly influenced. This hypothetical construct is unavailable to intuition, creating a strong desire to permit the behaviour so long as it is not actually bad.

5. Conspiracy theory. Many people have wondered why populists are so drawn to conspiracy theories, or “conspiracist” thinking. Again, this is a straightforward consequence of the privileging of intuitive thought. The natural bias of the human mind is toward belief in conspiracy theories, through a combination of apophenia, hyperactive agency-detection, and confirmation bias. Rational suspicion is achieved through the subsequent imposition of explicit test procedures, designed to eliminate false positives. In other words, it requires active suppression of conspiracist thoughts. To the extent that populists reject the style of cognition involved in that override, they open themselves up to a variety of irrational thought-patterns. When criticized by elites, many are inclined to double down on the conspiracism, because the cognitive style being pressed upon them is precisely what they hate most about elites.

This is just a quick list; there is much more that could be added. In particular, I have not said much about left-wing populism – why it works, in the select cases in which it has worked, but why it is unlikely to work in wealthy democratic societies today. For those who are interested, I wrote a book about this about a decade ago. There I focused on explaining the rise of “common sense conservatism,” not populism specifically. It was unfortunately published before Trump was elected and so became dated rather quickly. I contemplated producing an updated edition, but decided it would be too much work. The book does however contain significant elaboration of all the claims made above, for those who are interested in using dual-process psychology as an analytical framework to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of populism.