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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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.