Populism and collectivism are often used interchangeably, but are they really the same? And what does it mean when a candidate runs as a populist or a collectivist?
Populism rests on a simple idea: that the people legitimately hold power and that whatever is popular should be decided. That is where it stops. It’s a theory that suggests that popularity equals legitimacy, an answer to who should rule, and nothing more. The problem is that this type of legitimacy, by itself, has no guardrails. The theory breaks down the moment a popular idea turns out to be harmful. The clearest example is the antebellum South and slavery. It was popular among the powerful, and it was a moral catastrophe anyway. Being popular made it legal. Being popular did not make it right.
Collectivism answers a different question. It is not about who decides, but about who a society is organized to serve. And here we have to be precise, because collectivism comes in more than one form. A society can organize around shared welfare, where the community succeeds when its members are secure and provided for. Or it can organize around identity, defining the group by who belongs and who doesn’t. The first kind is inclusive: its measure is whether everyone is lifted. The second is exclusive: it always produces an out-group. Slavery was collectivism of a kind. It served its in-group at the expense of those it cast out. A collectivism that raises one group by holding another down is not a competing theory of good. It’s the failure of one.
So the two ideas answer two questions. Populism asks who should rule. Collectivism asks who the government should serve. We would like to believe what is popular is also good, but populism is a theory of legitimacy, and collectivism is a theory of good, and a theory of good has to answer, good for whom? A candidate can hold either, both, or neither, and the combination is what is on the ballot.
In America, we hold that power comes from the people. That is populism. But the tradition does not stop there. “We the People” opens the Constitution, and Lincoln later described government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” pointing beyond legitimacy toward purpose. That is the collectivist half of the American idea.
My argument is that you rarely find a candidate outside the left who embraces both halves. A populist alone offers only one. Populism supplies legitimacy but no destination. Cut off from the common good, popularity can approve cruelty, as the South showed. An independent or Republican populist tends to stop there, leaving the good to the market or answering it with the collectivism of national identity.
A Democrat who is both populist and collectivist closes the gap. They ground power in the people and aim it toward shared welfare. That is the fuller vision, and the inclusive one.
Chance Marshall is a project manager, the District 33 legislative chair for the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee and the president of the Bonneville County Young Democrats.