Populism and Applied Political Philosophy

Two Case Studies

Current political affairs offer interesting, even if dramatic, instances of applied political philosophy problems. Reading the news today, I found at least two such problems, both related to populist politics – one concerns Meloni and Italy, and the other concerns Trump and the U.S. Consider them in turn.

Does the authority of the state over its citizens extend beyond its borders?  

Italy just passed a law banning surrogacy abroad for Italian citizens. A general agreement in political philosophy is that the state has a legitimate claim to coerce its citizens under some conditions.[1] Surrogacy is already banned in Italy, as it is in several other European countries (including France). The question here is not whether such a ban is justified and therefore if the state can legitimately coerce its citizens to enforce this ban. Let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that this is the case. That doesn’t imply that the state is legitimate to extend this ban to its citizens who are going abroad to seek surrogacy.

On the classical Weberian definition, the state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion within a given territory.[2] According to this definition, the authority of the state doesn’t extend beyond the borders of its territory. It implies that the legitimacy of the use of coercion is not grounded in the nationality of the individuals who are subjected to the authority of the state, but rather in the fact that individuals are within the borders of the territory over which the authority of the state is effective.

In most cases, this principle seems to be uncontroversial. Suppose you’re an American citizen from the state of New York where consumption of marijuana is legal and you’re flying to Paris for holidays. You pack your marijuana, assuming that as an American citizen living in the state of New York, you’re allowed to consume it. As it happens, while you’re enjoying your joint in the jardin des Tuileries, policemen stop you, confiscate your product, and give you a fine. Is it an illegitimate coercive action from the state? Intuitively, it is not, at least if we assume that the original ban is lawful and legitimate. There are of course difficult questions about the roots of legitimate coercion. Presumably, at least two conditions are necessary. First, the rule banning an action should be justified according to some criterion. Second, the procedure through which the rule is enforced should itself respond to specific requirements. If we suppose that this is the case here, then nothing seems to entail that the French state is wrongfully coercing the American citizen. In a way, by voluntarily stepping on French soil, the American citizen can be reasonably assumed to accept the rules that apply to this territory.

The surrogacy case is symmetric to the marijuana case. By stepping on the soil of a country where the state rules that some action is permitted (or at least not forbidden), a citizen should fall within the authority of the state ruling that country and therefore be permitted to act accordingly.[3] There is no obvious reason to oppose the symmetry. It is even less the case if we accept that there is a presumption in favor of liberty that transcends the authority of particular states. In the marijuana case, there is a restriction of freedom that may necessitate a particular justification. In the surrogacy case, there is no restriction, and therefore no reason is needed to justify this liberty. If you agree that the French is legitimate to ban marijuana smoking for American citizens on its soil, then you should also presumably accept that the U.S. state is legitimate in allowing Italian citizens to seek surrogacy on its soil.

Does it mean that Italian has no authority over its citizens abroad? At the least, it seems contradictory to assume that a citizen could be under the authority of two different states at the same time. The Weberian definition clearly rules out this possibility. Maybe there are justified exceptions. For instance, American citizens living abroad are required to pay taxes to the U.S. state. That seems to imply that American citizens are still under the authority of the American state, even if they don’t live on American soil. There are two possibilities here. Either this is an illegitimate obligation, or this obligation is grounded on a particular reason, e.g., that these citizens have benefitted from the public goods when they were living on American soil and should therefore continue to pay for them. In this case, a principle of reciprocity provides a reason for the U.S. to tax American citizens living abroad. Without taking a stance here on this specific issue, it’s not easy to see a similar reason in the surrogacy case. The ban is plainly based on what Rawlsians call a “comprehensive doctrine” that sees surrogacy as morally wrong. From a liberal point of view, it is doubtful that a state has any legitimacy to ban surrogacy for such reasons. But even from a non-liberal point of view, this ban seems completely illegitimate. Even if the Italian state wants to promote certain ways of life over others, its authority cannot extend over its borders. If the Italian state really wants its citizens to live by the values that it promotes, it should then simply forbid Italian citizens to leave the country. Once this is understood, we understand the authoritarian implications of the surrogacy ban.

How to deal with “unreasonable” persons in a liberal democracy?

This is one of the most intricate and vexing issues for political liberalism. In principle, we may want all the rules that govern our lives to be properly justified to us. This is particularly true of the rules that the state enforces on us, using coercion if needed. John Rawls in particular links the legitimacy of state coercion to the fact that state institutions and the laws they enforce are publicly justified. This is what he calls the “principle of legitimacy:”

“our exercise of political power is fully proper when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason.”[4]

Behind the legitimacy principle, lurks another key notion in the Rawlsian framework, the idea of public reason. Basically, the legitimate use of coercion is grounded in the fact that it is related to laws and procedures that reasonable citizens may be expected to accept in a context where the reasons and arguments brought in support or against laws and procedures are recognized as compatible with the principle that persons are free and equal. In other words, public justification and therefore political legitimacy are only concerned with the views of reasonable persons, i.e., those persons who broadly accept the constitutive principles of political liberalism.

Rawls sees the idea of public reason as a regulatory principle that should guide the way we frame our public debates, especially between officials (in the parliament for instance) and in the relationship between officials and citizens.[5] Reasonable persons in the Rawlsian sense endorse the idea of public reason and behave accordingly in the appropriate political context. Reasonable citizens in particular recognize that they have a duty of civility. They should not insult political opponents. They should not purposefully bring to the public debate reasons and arguments which they know entail the negation that all persons are free and equal. Persons who disregard these demands are unreasonable. On a strict Rawlsian reading, their views are irrelevant to determining whether state coercion is legitimate. They should still be respected as persons (a reasonable person still sees unreasonable persons as morally free and equal beings) but they should not be permitted to have any say in the public justification of principles and rules.

The biggest test of the Rawlsian conception is what we should do when an unreasonable person takes office or is on the verge of doing so. This is the current situation in the U.S. As the New York Times notes today, Donald Trump now doesn’t hesitate to call his political opponents “enemies” and to threaten them accordingly if he wins the elections.[6] Trump is the Rawlsian archetype of the unreasonable person, not (only) because of his views but because his behavior displays the negation of the very idea of public reason. Trump embraces a conception of politics as a war where everything is permitted, from lying to threatening.  What a Rawlsian should do with such a person?

The Rawlsian philosopher Dreben Burton once wrote “What do you say to an Adolf Hitler? The answer is nothing. You shoot him.”[7] And indeed, this is (almost) what happened to Trump some weeks ago. Gently provoking when it is written in an obscure academic article, this kind of proposal is obviously problematic in real political life. All commentators agreed that it would have been a disaster had Trump been killed. Not only because Trump is a human being that has the same rights and must be respected as a person as everybody else. But also because that would have definitively ended the age of political civility and precipitated us into the age of bellicose politics. Trump would have posthumously won. The idea of public reason would have been terminated for good.

Now, that doesn’t help to answer the question asked above. What we have here is a nice – if dramatic – instance of what Joshua Cherniss calls the “liberal predicament.”[8] There have been recent interesting proposals about how to deal with unreasonable persons within the Rawlsian literature. Baldwin Wong suggests for instance that we could engage with unreasonable persons through conjectures to help them reach, by themselves, the kind of reasonable conclusions that fit with the idea of public reason.[9] However, people like Trump are not just unreasonable persons. They are unreasonable persons with a lot of de facto (and maybe soon, de jure) political power who have no patience in engaging in conjectures with reasonable persons. So maybe we should target Trump’s voters. The past few years suggest that that doesn’t work either. So much for the idea of public reason.

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[1] Libertarians disagree, obviously. But this is not the point here.

[2] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2004).

[3] We may of course imagine that the state does not grant the same rights and liberties to foreigners than to its citizens. But this is not the case with respect to surrogacy.

[4] John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 137.

[5] See John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review 64, no. 3 (1997): 765–807.

[6] The French newspaper has a very similar article today: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/10/17/l-extremisme-final-de-donald-trump-a-l-approche-de-la-presidentielle-americaine_6353941_3232.html

[7] Dreben Burton, "On Rawls and Political Liberalism." In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman (2003), p. 329.

[8] Joshua L. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021).

[9] Baldwin Wong, “Is It Sectarian for a Rawlsian State to Coerce Nozick? – On Political Liberalism and the Sectarian Critique,” Philosophia 51, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 367–87.