The Populist Protocol and its Liberal Rivals: How to Bridge a Polarized Polity?

Gayil Talshir

Is the 2024 election of a Republican House, Senate, President and administration, together with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court in the US in and of itself translates into democratic backsliding? Surely not. But should this lack of checks facilitate a concentration of powers in the hands of the president and structural changes will thereby be imposed - we may be looking at a slippery slope. Once democratic backsliding is rolling down a slippery slope, it may well be too late to stop a regime change from liberal democracy to an autocratic self-defined popular democracy. It may still technically have a free election, but with no effective checks and balances and with no prioritizing individual rights, such a regime may no longer be a democracy at all.

Given the incremental erosion of liberal democracy by systemic micro assaults pointed to by Khaitan (2019), how are we to distinguish between incidental changes and systemic ones? In particular, what are the red alerts before going down the slippery slope which begins with ‘reforms’ and ends up with a regime coup d’etat or a dictatorial drift (Grzegorz Ekiert and Noah Dasanaike, 2024) beyond which a regime is no longer a democracy?

We argue that the key to detecting both a drift and a danger of backsliding all the way into illiberal democracy is the systemic package of structural changes. Populism in Power (Urbinati, 2019) focuses on ruling rightwing parties which legitimately rose into power but abused their domination to attempt a regime change. The rulers of these countries – Orban in Hungary, Trump in the US, Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel – act as members of a club, sharing a worldview but also the same protocol of structural changes.

The Populist Protocol consists of fundamental changes trying to subordinate the judicial system to the political one, attempting to control public media, pushing for changes in the election rules and delegitimizing both official actors like the civil service, the judges, the attorney general and the opposition but also civil society critical actors like civil rights organizations and democratic NGOs.

In this paper, the Populist Protocol is examined between backsliding Democracy and a Dictatorial Drift. It analyzes the ideological chasm between national populism and liberalism and asks how to go beyond a struggle to stop the erosion of democracy by suggesting an updated vision of liberal democracy.