"We live in an age of populism. It is about making a political revolution,"

Bernie Sanders once declared. But populism wears many faces.

"We are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,"

Trump proclaimed. Understanding this moment means understanding something we all too often take for granted.

"Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay. It's like incredible,"

Trump added with characteristic bombast.

Because there are many ways, as we'll see, that populism manifests. Populism is democracy—and as one scholar puts it, democracy's shadow. I want to explore why we live in this strange age of populism, ask where it came from, what it is, and what that means. Only by understanding these roots can we make sense of what would otherwise be bewilderingly diverse phenomena: national populism, economic populism, media populism, left and right populism. How does Bernie Sanders, for example, have anything in common with Viktor Orban or Nigel Farage? Even consumer brands have jumped on the trend and describe themselves as populist.

How can we make sense of all of this? As scholar Paul Taggart puts it, populist movements have systems of belief which are diffuse. They are inherently difficult to control and organize. They lack consistency, and their activity waxes and wanes with a bewildering frequency. Populism is a difficult, slippery concept.

And so, to not slip up, we'll have to go back to the founding of America, to the French Revolution. We'll think about the development and expansion of democracy. Then we'll look at some populist parties proper and populist leaders like Peron in Argentina. We'll go back to France to look at someone like Le Pen, take a detour to Fox News, examine consumer populism, and then bring it all together—just for you, the statistically median, hardworking, heartland, honest, salt-of-the-earth readers who are sick of the sponging, corrupt, parasitic elites.

The Roots of Populism

The recurring theme in populism, the central organizing feature, is the binary between the people versus the elites. This makes populism a difficult, slippery, somewhat all-encompassing, vague concept in some ways. Scholars disagree on what populism even is. Was Julius Caesar a populist? Robin Hood? The founding fathers? In some ways, all of them—yes. But modern populism, what we're really interested in today, only makes sense as part of modern democracy. The idea that the people, the demos, should rule.

"That we the people are sovereign. Until Johnson has finished, he has elected an entire government from top to bottom. That is, if a majority of the voters think the way he does about it,"

as one historical observer noted.

Professor Paul Taggart, a specialist in populism at the University of Sussex, explains this relationship between populism and democracy in his book Populism (Concepts in the Social Sciences). He states:

"The paradox is that populism is a functioning democracy. You can't have populism in a non-democratic system. Doesn't make any sense. That to me is quite interesting. It's a kind of recurrent episodic moment that comes up in democracies at different times for different reasons, but it can't exist in an authoritarian system because it doesn't make sense. You're not appealing to the people. You don't need populism—you've got other ways of operating."

This is why modern populism only makes sense after and in reference to the promises and ideals of the American and French revolutions. During the French Revolution, for example, the revolutionaries tried to enact Jacques Rousseau's idea of the General Will of the people. In the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789:

"The law is the expression of the general will."

This was key to the ideal of the French Revolution—the idea of the general will was expressed through a single unicameral legislative chamber to represent the people as a whole, undivided, democratically.

This was in contrast to Britain and America, both having a stronger division of powers between the executive, the upper and lower houses, and the judiciary. It's important—crucial, in fact—to understand that in Britain and America especially, the prevailing elite belief was skepticism about democracy, a fear of the mob, and a desire for stability as much as rule by reason and rule by the people. The upper houses, in particular, were meant for lords and aristocrats and elites to balance the more unruly lower houses. Remember, even after the American Revolution, not everyone could vote for the lower houses or was even eligible for office. In most European countries, this came slowly across the 19th century.

We already see this tension between what became democracy and constitutional or representative democracy—the promise of government of the people, by the people and for the people versus government with elite checks and balances in the name of the people, representing the people. Whether senators carefully selected by the parties themselves rather than through the vote, or judges with elite qualifications, or a president or a king with special powers—from the beginning, the tension is that: people versus elites.

Furthermore, in America, there was a debate between the Jeffersonians, who believed in a democratic, state-rights-oriented, agrarian, tight-knit (maybe some say idealistic) republic closer to ordinary self-governing people, and those like Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, advocating for a strong central government run by elites. These debates ran through almost every Western country during the enlightenment and into the 19th century. We have to remember that throughout the 19th century, full democracy only came very slowly and with great struggle. Historically, democracy is very new.

For example, an important but now often overlooked debate during the enlightenment was about whether truth was self-evident and common sense—in Jefferson and Thomas Paine's words, accessible to all of the people all of the time, quite readily—or whether truth and reason were the preserve of an aristocracy, the priesthood, the enlightened intellectuals and philosophers, the educated. Maybe normal people could get to the truth with the right education or upbringing or training, but the masses of normal people would, if given the vote, for example, overthrow property rights, could be swayed by demagogues, were unable to restrain their base emotions and impulses.

Voltaire, for example, believed in the idiocy of the masses—that only the enlightened should rule—whereas Jefferson, when he said that we hold these truths to be self-evident, believed that ordinary people could govern a republic themselves, that you didn't need a strong government.

In a way, the history of the late 18th and 19th centuries was one of working out what these checks and balances meant. How much power should an executive have? How long should a term be? When could the people vote again, and in what ways? How easily can rules, particularly constitutional ones, be overturned? How much authority should an elite representative of the people have over the people themselves? And the big question: who are the people? How do they think? How do they come to their opinions?

Liberals and anarchists and socialists and fascists and many others all answered these questions and hundreds of other questions like them in many different ways.

What are often pointed to as the first populist movement came out of Russia in the 1860s, a movement called the Narodniki, meaning "to the people." They believed that intellectuals and modern students who wanted radical change should go to the people in the countryside—the peasants—and convince them to rise up against the Tsarist regime. They made use of printing and pamphlet-tearing, and had a dislike of abstract, intellectual, and lofty ideas, believing instead in Russian peasant communes as a site of true, authentic populist democracy.

The man who inspired the movement, Alexander Herzen, had a famous rallying cry:

"Go to the people! To the people! There was your place. You exiled from seats of learning, show that you will become fighters on behalf of the Russian people."

The movement ended up failing, ironically, because the peasantry proved to be much more prosaic, religious, conservative, and resistant to change than the Narodniki believed they'd be. But I find it fascinating because it foreshadows so much of contemporary populism.

In his book on populism, Taggart writes that a theme running throughout Herzen's life was that political life should not serve abstractions. Ideological abstractions were harmful and fundamentally destructive. Populism, in many different forms, has expressed a hostility towards theory, towards ideology, and towards intellectualism.

The Birth of Populism

In late 19th century America, a series of crashes and depressions, increasing inequality, and conflicts between unions and different powers and governments all gave birth to a genuinely grassroots, bottom-up movement which transformed into the first influential populist party, probably in the world: the People's Party of America. It survived for just 17 years between 1891 and 1908, but its legacy and influence outlasted it.

This was the period of robber barons, the growth of Wall Street, of Rockefeller, of oil and steel—the Gilded Age. But while what was seen as establishment East Coast elites were getting richer, many ordinary people, particularly farmers in the South, were getting poorer. In particular, farmers selling their produce in a new national market—this was the era of the growth of capitalism nationally—felt like they were being overcharged out of existence by the railroad monopolists.

The Texas Farmers Alliance formed in 1875 in protest. Droughts, railroad bankruptcies, overinvestment in crops, price gouging on the train lines, and high levels of debt all led to farmers organizing for change. They were in genuine crisis, and they joined with similar groups like the Knights of Labor.

Taggart writes that for farmers, the railroads and the eastern banking establishment were at the heart of a system that seemed to systematically cheat farmers and hold them in thrall to interests other than their own. The railroads, farmers reasoned, should offer an opportunity for farmers to sell their harvests widely. And yet the high cost of the railroads meant that the farmers felt themselves to be no better off.

Similar movements took off in other states, and they came together to form the People's Party. In 1892, the party called for a government-regulated paper currency and silver coinage to counter what they saw as the giant East Coast banking monopoly on gold, for progressive taxation, the nationalization or regulation of railroads, immigration restrictions and higher taxes on trusts, and stricter punishments for corporations breaking the law. They pushed for shorter working days, called for the abolishment of strike-breaking agencies, and for the direct democratic election of senators who, until 1913, were elected by the legislature of each state—the politicians of each state, rather than voted for by the people—emphasizing again that duality between a sovereign people's democracy and the kind of elite control America had inherited from Britain.

They were also not without their racism and nativism. Some were concerned with the plight of poor freed slaves; others in the party were avowed white nationalists. Some saw the establishment as part of a Rothschild-led Jewish conspiracy, while Chinese, Slavic, and Hungarian immigrants were often blamed for taking American jobs.

One of their organizing focuses—and this is interesting for the language that went through into later populist movements—was the idea of a "producer ethic," that America belonged to the people that produced things. One of their most influential leaders was a man called Ignatius Donnelly, an eccentric figure who verged between genuine radical democratic ideas and wild conspiracy theories and pseudo-archeology. He symbolized and spoke about the idea of the producer ethic in the People's Party, a kind of language, a kind of rhetoric that focuses on those who produce wealth.

"That wealth belongs to him who creates it,"

he said, contrasting the authentic producer and farmer with the money power of banks and robber barons.

One of the goals of the People's Party was to build a coalition between the disconnected farmers in the south and the industrial workers in the North, who had so often before been at loggerheads politically. Ignatius Donnelly's inaugural People's Party speech is worth reading in full as a textbook example of populist rhetoric. In front of a crowd of around 10,000, Donnelly rallied about how:

"the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few—the two great classes: tramps and millionaires."

He talks about conspiracies and restoring government to

"the hands of the plain people."

It's full of that basic populist organizing duality: plain people, producers, heartland, the many versus the few, the corrupt, the greedy, the elite. The speech was printed, distributed, and widely read across the country.

The People's Party was so successful that it quite quickly became national contenders in the 1892 and 1894 elections, gaining around 10% of the vote share and winning several seats in the House and the Senate. But after that the party struggled and slowly watered down their demands, while the Democratic Party became increasingly populist.

In 1896, the populist lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan became the Democratic nominee. Bryan was a master orator, just 36 years old and, like Lincoln before and Martin Luther King after, combined evangelical biblical language and zeal with themes of democracy, democratic promise, the ideals of America. Bryan admired Lincoln, who he said:

"made frequent use of biblical language and of illustrations drawn from holy writ to communicate democracy's dream."

He talked of:

"the farmer that goes forth in the morning and toils all day, and the miners who go down 1000 feet into the earth, who are business men, equal to the few financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world."

He rallied:

"We have petitioned and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked. When our calamity came, we beg no longer. We entreat no more. We petition no more. We defy them."

Many of the People's Party's members and supporters jumped ship to support Bryan, but the Republican William McKinley was supported by every newspaper outside of the South, the banking establishment, and was funded by industrialists with an unprecedented $3.5 million against Bryan's $300 to $500,000. Bryan was defeated three times between 1896 and 1908, when the People's Party disbanded. However, the ideas, the platform, and the tradition of this mainstream populism provided a foundation for the election of FDR and the New Deal later on.

Taggart writes that the populists served as markers of coming change. What's interesting about the People's Party is that they were originally dismissed as being kind of white, racist farmers who were just suffering grievance, but actually they were—you can see—collectivist as far as developing complex technocratic solutions to government. There was no leader associated with it whose bottom-up it was. It was grassroots. All those classic false assumptions about populism—people say it’s always about simplistic answers. No. In reality, it was deeply complex. Or they say it’s all about strong leaders. Not at first. In fact, they struggled to find any decent leader, yet still managed to hold power and shape the course of early 20th-century American politics.

In his book (The Populist Persuasion: An American History), historian Michael Kazin writes that despite their demise, the People's Party stood at a point of transition for populist language. A popular poem later eulogized the affectionately nicknamed "Boy Bryan." The anonymous poet waxed about the defeat of wheat by those _"with dollar signs upon their coats and diamond watch chains"_ and inbred landlords' stock. He talked about:

"the defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi, defeat of the young by the old and silly, defeat of tornadoes by the poison fat Supreme, defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream."

Bryan's famous Cross of Gold speech, another populist speech worth reading in full, ended with these lines:

"You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this cross of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

From Dictators to Populists

The crises and movements of the middle of the 20th century are, in many ways if not always, a response to the failures of the elites' liberal, representational, democratic, capitalist compromise. The Great Depression and the World Wars led to a new postwar consensus that provided a much bigger role for the state to support the welfare and needs of the common people. Democracy was deepened by women's suffrage and extending the vote to all men.

It seems like a triumphant story for democracy, but it's easy to forget that in 1941 there were only 11 parliamentary democracies in the world. It's easy to look back at the period as the triumph of liberal democracy, but representational democracy was close to crumbling everywhere, from the Soviet Union to fascism to populist leaders around the world. Parliamentary ideas were seen as failing, weak, slow, obstructing the will of the people rather than expressing it.

From some angles, populists and fascists started looking similar. Both had forceful, charismatic leaders speaking for the people. Both were against establishment elites, checks and balances, existing laws and judiciaries. Both often championed a maligned national people, national identity, and both often excluded and sometimes killed—and at least marginalized—those outside of that national community. And both, in many places, became increasingly authoritarian when they got into power.

In his book comparing fascism and populism in the postwar period, Federico Finkelstein says that quite unlike fascists, populists most often play the democratic game and will eventually cede power after losing an election. He calls populism:

"an authoritarian form of democracy that tends to challenge but not destroy democracy."

Take another populist figure: Huey Long, the so-called dictator of Louisiana who was governor and senator in the late 1920s. He was a divisive figure because he was a populist who genuinely redistributed wealth to the poor, and an authoritarian who centralized power, intimidated and spied on opponents, and interfered with the judiciary.

In South America, charismatic figures have frequently drawn on populist rhetoric and imagery against an incumbent elite that have then been often criticized for democratic backsliding once in power. The list of populist figures in South American history is long, but the first populist to govern an entire country was Juan Peron in 1940s Argentina.

"Since the moon, Bolivar led independence movements liberating South America from the Spanish Empire,"

as one broadcaster noted, there has been a recurring tradition of charismatic leaders fighting against incumbent elites perceived to be draining South America of its rich resources and economic potential.

In the 1940s, Argentina was going through an economic crisis. In 1943, the army, including Peron, overthrew the government in a coup. Peron had been inspired by Mussolini mobilizing the labor movement in Italy to seize power. Peron was genuinely radical, developing and industrializing the country, which was at the time very agricultural, and redistributing resources to the poor. With his wife Evita, he deepened and strengthened the rights of workers and indigenous Argentineans.

So what makes Peron a populist? Well, first, despite his policies, his rhetoric wasn't directed at, say, the working class, nor was he an ideological or intellectual thinker, a Marxist, say. Nor was he a technocrat focusing on rights or law or bureaucracy, technocratic liberal government. Instead, his focus was the Argentinean people, expressed as an organic whole, a multi-class, Catholic, almost mystical group in the heartland of Argentina. He was anti-elite, targeting Argentina's wealthy landowners.

On the one hand, populism comes from that enlightenment inheritance of free and equal before the law, at the very least. But it could also be said to rise out of the romantic and volkisch movements. And so it doesn't start necessarily from philosophy, from writing or logic or reason or carefully thought through propositions or ideas from intellectualism. Instead, it often starts from an organic, felt sense of a people, a nation.

Peron captured this when he said:

"Peronism isn't learned, it's felt or not felt."

And it was felt through Peron himself. He and Evita were both charismatic, almost saintly figures who were embodiments of the nation. But he became repressive, curtailing freedom of speech, manipulating the law to get reelected, preventing opponents access to the media, and using a so-called "law of disrespect" to censor criticism of his policies.

Like the Italian fascists he was inspired by, Peron concentrated political power through himself as the embodiment of Argentina itself. Roger Cohen of The New York Times writes that:

"Argentina invented its own political philosophy, a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musicality, mournful irresponsibility and repression."

Peron and similar populist South American leaders of the period, along with people like Huey Long and the ambiguous affinity many populists began having with fascism, represented a break in the history of populism. To many, it seemed to be proof of the view that went all the way back to ancient Greece and Plato and Aristotle—that democracy was vulnerable to demagoguery.

A similar figure from the period, even more extreme, was Father Coughlin, who used a new technology—the radio broadcast—with fiery populist rhetoric to support both the nationalization of key industries in support of "ordinary Americans" and to promote anti-Semitism in support of Nazi Germany and Mussolini to 30 million Americans. Some at the time thought he was the most influential figure in American life.

But with the end of World War Two and the building of welfare states and new deals across Europe and America, populists were mainly held at the sidelines of politics. But as this postwar consensus began to strain in the 70s, a new type of what you could maybe call "populism lite" entered.

The Conservative Populist Style

You could broadly argue that in the pre-war period, the populist claim was that the government elites were doing too little for the people. But in the postwar period, as the government elites took a more active role in economic and social life, a shift happened. Populists began to protest that government elites weren't doing too little—they were doing too much.

In a way, the postwar New Deal consensus was inspired by a populist movement that transformed into an elite establishment status quo. The populist complaint about small government became a populist revolt against big government.

The postwar consensus brought far-reaching welfare states, social security and health care, wider scope for government intervention in the economy, and the redistribution of large inequalities of wealth through progressive taxation. And in many Western European countries, the nationalization of key industries. This expansion of the state meant one thing: an increase in elites to manage the new system.

The postwar period was also characterized by larger bureaucracies, more management, lobbyists, bigger militaries, and more government officials from clerks to distribute welfare to the CEOs of military contractors at the head of what Eisenhower warned of as the military-industrial complex.

As Taggart explains:

"Democracy and modernity have a complicated relationship. You get kind of a system with modernity of progress and technology and regulation, bigger bureaucracies, and you get gatekeepers, you get elites between direct, unmediated democratic connection with things and people. And then you get all this growth of modernity, and with it you get new elite figures to manage the system in the name of democracy."

For various economic, cultural, and social reasons—from inflation and low growth to oil shocks and protests at the Vietnam War and strikes—this consensus began to fracture and break down and be challenged in the 1970s and through into the 1980s.

The kind of unexpected populist reversal happened. It was assumed that the postwar consensus was a coalition of liberals and the working class, that state intervention was on behalf of that working class. But conservatives, first in America, discovered that there was a constituency of working class voters who believed that they didn't need the state, that the elitist state actually represented the lazy scroungers on welfare and the snobbish liberal elite from universities who wished to enforce their ideas about gay rights, abortion, the church—so-called family issues—upon them against their will.

There was a constituency of voters who believed they were hardworking, honest, heartland, Christian America, and that the sanctimonious elites had become too powerful and were sticking their noses in where they weren't welcome.

A figure who most epitomizes this change is the conservative politician Pat Buchanan, who in 1975 said that:

"if there was a role for the Republican Party, it's to be the party of the working class, not the welfare class, to champion the cause of producers and taxpayers of the private sector threatened by the government sector, of the millions who carry most of the cost of government and share least in its beneficiaries."

He also believed in building a sea wall to keep out immigrants, and called homosexuality unnatural and AIDS retribution for it. Buchanan, in other words, was key in discovering a conservative populism based around an organic idea of conservative family values, hardworking and against welfare and handouts, against the incumbent established elite.

Buchanan advised Nixon, and Nixon's team coined the highly influential and evocative term "the Silent Majority" to refer to this new bloc of voters. Nixon said:

"Americans should listen to the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They're good people, they're decent people, they work and they save and they pay taxes and they care."

In Buchanan and Nixon's vision, political messaging should aim squarely at that middle constituency of hardworking, in-work, churchgoing, non-elite, honest, heartland, pure Americans who were—and this was a genius turn of phrase—the silent majority, implying a forceful opposite elite that were lying, forcing their values on ordinary, quiet Americans.

Kazin writes that:

"a consuming desire to cleanse sinful institutions led them to chastise judges who forbade school prayer but authorized abortions, television executives whose productions smashed sexual taboos, and school authorities who promoted an agnostic stance towards moral questions."

These were the so-called family issues that government overreach was trying to challenge, mold, control, and a silent majority who were unrepresented and just getting on with their lives, and that Nixon was there to defend.

It's probably the most important turning point for understanding our modern moment. Ironically, though, Nixon, especially by today's standards, was pretty much a liberal. Buchanan called him

"the least ideological statesman I ever encountered."

His success was much more reliant on messaging than on policy.

The famous 1969 book by Joe McGinniss, "The Selling of the Presidency," points to what Nixon represents for the history of populism and even for the history of democracy: the mainstreaming of populist rhetoric and the true coming of age of television PR campaigning with campaign ads and soundbites. Messaging became everything. How you looked became more important. Executives and PR teams were hired. Polling and data slowly became relied on more and more. The machine got bigger, ironically, in the service of a democratic ideal, a democratic aspiration.

And this move was most obviously illustrated by a Hollywood actor becoming the president of the United States. In their own ways, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were both populist figures—you could say populist lite. Reagan's claim to be cutting the size of government was pitched in a populist style because increasingly, from Roosevelt's fireside chats and JFK's affable, approachable style, TV, as Peggy Noonan once said, was the presidency.

Reagan was inspired by Roosevelt's affable, down-to-earth, conversational style. He knew that it was about image and presence. The journalist Lou Cannon said that:

"when Reagan spoke, ordinary Americans did not have to make the mental translation usually required for conservative Republican speakers. He undermined the New Deal in its own vernacular."

Like Nixon, Reagan talked of:

"a quiet, unselfish devotion to our families, our neighbors, and our nation. We the people, we the people tell the government what to do."

In a similar move in the UK, Thatcher used the language of populists to cut taxes, deregulate and denationalize industries, and try to curb the size of government in the name of ordinary, hardworking, middle-class, middle England taxpayers. In the hands of Reagan and Thatcher, the people, the citizen, the public became the taxpayer.

One writer notes that Thatcherite populism combines:

"the resonant themes of organic Toryism—nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism—with the aggressive themes of a revived neoliberalism: self-interest, competitive individualism and anti-statism."

All of this marked a seismic shift in the political axis and set the foundations of the national populist movements that were around the corner. Kazin writes that it was

"a remarkable shift: vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change, rather than to promote it."

From Globalization to National Populists

But that shift was about to change again. If Reagan and Thatcher marked the end of the New Deal elites, they were themselves about to become symbols of a new elite that a new generation of populists would rally against: the global elite.

As the world became more connected and more mobile, as the EU grew, neoliberal free trade became the default aspiration for many countries in the West. But if people and capital flowed more freely around the world, populists on the right protested the former—the free movement of people—while populists on the left protested the latter—the free movement of capital. But sometimes both combined, and in their own ways, both were a response to globalization.

In France, the National Front's slogan was "France for the French," initially led by the more overtly racist and anti-Semitic Jean-Marie Le Pen, protesting immigration from Algeria. Le Pen's daughter, Marine Le Pen, aimed to reform the party and distance it from its more controversial views, and tried to move it into the mainstream. Renamed National Rally in 2018, it opposes immigration and the Islamization of France, but also advocates for policies seen as on the left traditionally: pledging to scrap income tax for workers under 30 years old, increase child support, and raise the state pension.

Like Nixon's idea of a silent majority, National Rally portrays itself as the voice of the forgotten—that's a word they use, "the forgotten"—against the globalist elites. In 2022, Le Pen secured just over 40% of the vote in the second round of the presidential election, and in the legislative elections, National Rally won 89 seats, up from eight previously. In the most recent elections in 2024, National Rally grew again, winning 142 seats.

In Germany, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) supports a significant reduction in immigration, including from other EU states, and proposes a program of "re-migration"—deportations from Germany, especially of criminals or asylum seekers who originate in countries where the security situation has improved. Like the National Rally, AfD also supports some left-wing policies around increases in pensions and the minimum wage.

In the 2021 election, their political fortunes declined slightly, slipping to 83 seats in the Bundestag with 10.4% of the vote. Since 2022, the AfD position in the opinion polls had been hovering between 15 and 25%, but in the 2025 election they came in second, winning 21% of the vote and 152 seats out of a total of 630, compared with the winning conservative CDU with 29% and 208 seats.

Although the German "firewall" is a convention or strategy—it's not actually legislated—that stops mainstream parties from working in coalitions with the far right, others have criticized this as undemocratic and clearly not working, and the AfD themselves have pointed to this as being undemocratic in a lot of their campaigning.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban's policies and rhetoric became increasingly populist across the 2000s. Much of his policy agenda has focused on immigration as a threat to Hungarian culture and society, despite the level of immigration to Hungary being relatively low compared to much of Western Europe. Under Orban's leadership, Hungary has constructed fences along its southern borders and has refused to comply with EU immigration quotas.

In his second term as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2014, Orban introduced economic reforms such as nationalizing pensions and introduced a scheme to offer extra credit to small and medium businesses, which helped spur Hungary's economic recovery. Orban also became increasingly illiberal, introducing constitutional changes and democratic backsliding that strengthened the executive branch of government—in other words, him—and electoral reforms that favored his own party. He stacked the Constitutional Court with loyalists and curtailed its jurisdiction and gerrymandered electoral districts in their favor. He's undermined press freedom through a combination of regulation, censorship, and economic pressure on media outlets.

He consistently portrays himself as the defender of ordinary Hungarians against internal enemy elites. His targeting of groups such as migrants, the EU bureaucracy, and liberal NGOs frames them as threats to Hungary's national sovereignty and traditional values.

In other countries, populism has been on the rise in different forms, in different ways. As Taggart says, it's chameleon-like. In Turkey, Erdogan's populism against entrenched liberal, EU-facing elites took an Islamic character. In Italy, populists have become so varied and so common that some have called the entire political system a populist one.

Trump, of course, fits the populist mold, but is also focused on China. Boris Johnson in the UK straddled the line between populist and liberal elite, becoming a somewhat—I think—hesitant populist figure. And it's notable that in the period of national populism, left populists like Corbyn and Sanders broke through somewhat, especially in the political conversation, but ultimately they haven't been as successful as populists on the right.

Our Age of Populism

So as we get to today, is it true to say that we live in an age of populism? Almost every major country has a populist movement. Populism is the dominant style on the internet. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein Brothers, Russell Brand, Elon Musk and many others are, in their own ways, all populists. Fox News, TV news, the tabloid papers are all populist, too.

As far back as 1970, Time magazine's Person of the Year went to middle-class Americans. By the 1980s, even Hewlett-Packard (HP) was calling their new printer "quite populist, the perfect printer for the masses." And the clothing chain Banana Republic had "men's 100% cotton twill, populist pants steeped in grassroots sensibility and the simple, good sense of solid workmanship. No-nonsense pants for the individual and every man."

So what accounts for this shift? Well, Manuel Anselmi writes that:

"populism is no longer an extreme hypothesis in the democratic game. No longer a deviation, an anomaly, a degeneration, or a pathology of democracy, as it was often defined in the past. Populism today is, to all intents and purposes, a highly probable option of democracy."

But again, why is this? I think that if you look especially across the 20th century and even the end of the 19th century, it becomes easier and easier to reach people directly. The role of gatekeepers diminishes, and the techniques of persuasion—of printing, of media—have gotten more refined. Both Clinton and Blair, for example, were known for being seen with their ties loosened, their jackets off, their sleeves rolled up in a way politicians hadn't before. And obviously, this was carefully calculated for a very specific historical reason.

Nixon famously hired a team that included Fox News founder Roger Ailes to produce campaign ads. Ailes himself then leaned heavily on psychological ideas about sensationalism and graphics, and slick presenters and iconography and American flags and populist talking points when he started Fox News.

For all of this, as newspaper printing presses improved with steam printing presses, then electric printing presses, the tabloids could print millions of cheap working-class newspapers and distribute them more efficiently than radio and television, and cable meant more and more could get their message out more and more effectively. The measure of success shifted more towards speaking to this increase in popular appeal.

Populists have been adept at sidestepping traditional media and political institutions—the establishment—and getting their message out in a new, different way. National populists have been front runners in turning to blogs, then podcasts and social media, YouTube. Before that, the National Front relied on pamphlets. Right-wing populists in 1960s America even made pioneering use of direct mail to reach the people directly.

Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in selling conservative viewpoints by direct mail, said:

"Liberals have had control not only of all three branches of government, but of the major universities, the three major networks, the biggest newspapers, the news weeklies and Hollywood. So our communication has had to begin at the grassroots level by reaching individuals outside the channels of organized public opinion. Fortunately, a whole new technique has become available just in time. Direct mail backed by computer science, has allowed us to bypass all the media controlled by our adversaries."

In my correspondence with Professor Taggart, I raised the idea that we might be living in a new age of populism. He was skeptical of that notion, pointing out that while disinformation—what we used to call propaganda—feels pervasive today, echo chambers are not a new phenomenon. In the past, people were already confined to the perspectives of the newspapers they chose to read. To him, the differences now are more a matter of scale than of kind. He suggested that while the digital age amplifies these dynamics, it doesn’t necessarily represent an entirely new political era.

Reflecting on this, I acknowledged that upheavals have always been part of history. The Second World War might seem like the last great rupture, followed by a relatively stable period until the neoliberal turn and the collapse of the postwar consensus. But, as I thought about it more deeply, even that perception is misleading. The decades after the war saw decolonization, the shift of global power from Britain to the United States, and constant crises around the world. Perhaps politics has never truly been stable—it has always been dynamic, cyclical, and in flux.

Taggart emphasized this point, noting that what we often remember as “stability,” such as the postwar settlement, was in fact a continuous, iterative process. Politics was always about renegotiating who the winners and losers were, pushing the rules at the margins, and shifting the boundaries of the Overton window. He stressed that politics is fascinating precisely because of this complexity. Predictions are almost impossible, since unexpected shocks—like the Covid-19 pandemic or Donald Trump’s rise—can disrupt the system in unforeseen ways.

For him, the danger lies in thinking of politics as a linear story of progress. It’s tempting because people want to believe the world is steadily improving. But the reality is far more complicated: politics moves in cycles, at different times, paces, and directions. It is unsettling, but also the reality we must reckon with.

While this was going on, this refinement in techniques to get in front of the public, you could also make the case that at the same time, the belief in democratic accountability and the demands for democratic accountability have strengthened. In his book (How Democracy Ends) on democracy, David Runciman points to the growth of what he calls "monitory democracy"—that's monitoring democracy—involving the proliferation of pressure groups and reporting by corruption and public scrutiny watchdogs, tribunals, public inquiries and committees and experts, and other forms of monitoring aimed at strengthening the democratic process.

Whether these things have strengthened democracy or not is, of course, another question. Ironically, these types of democratic checks and balances and inquiries and committees risk becoming the very elite institutions that attract populist ire when they thwart the will of the democratic majority. And that can be interpreted in many different ways. In other words, these new things, these new processes and bodies and committees and what have you, they can become new elite gatekeepers.

However, technology gives us increasing ways to communicate with each other. The trend is clearly away from having an establishment at the gates. And unless some new set of institutions become the new gatekeepers online and off—and I wouldn't rule that out entirely—populism is here to stay.

So what does that mean for us?

Populists against Authoritarians

With its history in mind, we are in a better position to think about what populism is, what it means, and what the potential risks and rewards might be. There's always a people versus an elite—a people who are decent, hardworking, pure versus an elite that's corrupt, out of touch, gone wrong somehow. The people in the heartland are also often authentic insiders versus somehow bad outsiders. Those outsiders could be immigrants or NGOs or multinational corporations or elites that represent them, who have betrayed the real, authentic people.

The most striking thing here is that Manichean binary—the good versus the bad. There are some other recurring features: the emphasis on a national identity as a response to the need for content, for what "authentic people" means. What is the nation? What are our values? And then a charismatic, often idiosyncratic leader that channels that authenticity and represents the true, authentic people. Then a battle with the establishment, including the media and universities, and often other institutions, and often through an expansion of executive powers, sometimes through democratic backsliding and at worst through authoritarianism.

Often this battle has to be waged through alternative media of some kind, whether direct mail or podcasts, to circumvent traditional, captured, established institutions.

The Three Strategies of Populists in Power

Professor Taggart argues that populists, when they get into power, have three strategies. The first thing they can do is actually moderate their populism, to become less anti-institutional and just use that language. Someone like Berlusconi exemplifies this approach—claiming to still be subject to the judiciary and the attacks of the press, and so on, still positioning himself as under attack, but in practice becoming more of a conventional politician. Over time, this approach sees populism kind of drop out as the leader becomes absorbed into the system.

The second strategy involves restructuring the institutions themselves. Leaders can reshape politics so it suits them, and by doing this, they are delivering on their promise of being anti-institutional. They are essentially saying they will change the institutions, perhaps establishing a new constitutional settlement. Many Latin American populist leaders have done this to recast politics. This approach has the double effect of doing something that appears anti-institutional but is also effective—reshaping institutions in a way that helps the leader and limits the power of their enemies.

The third strategy is where leaders get into power and behave as if they're not in power. They behave like they're in opposition essentially. This allows them to maintain the stance that everything is against them, that the institutions are against them, and they can simply break things, unsettle things, shake up politics. We can see this approach in various contemporary examples of populism.

Understanding Populism's Core Tensions

The difficulty with assessing populism is how varied it has been. What you think about populism will depend on the period you're in, who you are, what populists are doing at the time, what your ideological beliefs are, what the economy's like for you.

Rather than making broad judgments, it's more productive to assess populism on its own terms, as an expression of popular sovereignty, of democracy. Doing so allows us to understand populism's inherent tensions.

First, populism itself often doesn't do a good job of accurately describing the very people it's meant to represent. "The people" are never singular, as implied in the "people versus elites" framework. Both categories are plural, diverse, made up of millions, with different views, interested in different issues, living in different areas, in disagreement both with each other and often with themselves depending on the day and the issue.

Taggart writes that:

"political scientists have long argued that a completely coherent, single popular will is a fantasy, and that no one can credibly claim that the political leader is the one who does what the people want."

As the people as a concept becomes so vague and ambiguous and flexible as to hollow out any serious debate on the details of something like policy or the negotiations between different interest groups in society.

Michael Kazin puts it:

"The traditional rhetoric pitting ordinary people against the establishment sounds to many ears naive if not offensive in its assumption that, for example, the American people share anything beyond a geographic space."

Jan-Werner Müller says that:

"the core claim of populism is thus a moralized form of anti-pluralism."

It is anti-politics in that it chooses to ignore the realities of political processes—negotiations, judiciary, coalition building, policy planning, etc.—and focus instead on rhetoric. As he succinctly puts it:

"Anti-politics cannot generate real policies."

This is a tension. But the populist response is to emphasize the necessity of democratic populist language for anyone speaking to large majorities of the people with very few things in common.

Second, there's a tension between the sovereign will of the people and a single populist leader who can often become increasingly authoritarian. This is not always the case, but statistically speaking, Peron and other South American populists, Huey Long, Orban, Erdogan, Modi, populists in Italy, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, some of Trump's rhetoric—the literature on populism is full of figures who engage in what's referred to as "democratic backsliding." If you also include fascists as populists, which some scholars do, and there are obvious similarities, then the risk significantly increases.

Müller writes that:

"populists quickly start tampering with the institutional machinery of democracy in the name of the so-called real people."

Why is this? One generous reason is that populists see the state apparatus as tainted, corrupt, broken, and so on. And so the only way then to break through it is through the strengthening of the executive office. A less generous reason is that to break through the conversation in the first place—the political conversation dominated by the establishment—populist movements need forceful, charismatic, often eccentric figures who, because of the nature of their personalities, once in power, continue to drive for more power. In short, populism can attract narcissists.

This is a fascinating tension in populism. On the one hand, populists are meant to be symbols of ordinary people, but they often turn out to be highly idiosyncratic figures—outsiders, objects of ridicule as much as objects of veneration. This also poses a difficulty for succession and longevity within populist movements. As Taggart writes:

"Where populism relies on charismatic leaders, it has great difficulty in sustaining itself in the long term."

The third tension is between the democratic ideal—the sovereign will of the people—and constitutional, representative democracy. Müller states that:

"populists are supposedly impatient with procedures. They are even said to be against institutions as such, preferring a direct, unmediated relationship between the personal leader and the people."

And of course, many argue we don't have anything like a true democracy at all, that the entire system is either controlled or managed or directed by elites, or a facade for bourgeois interests underneath. Others see the civil service, the judiciary, the separation of powers, the media, all as necessary features of democracy, and many people fall somewhere in between.

To take one example, in Hungary, Orban's government removed older oppositional judges and inserted their own loyalists with long nine-year terms. In the UK after Brexit, the Daily Mail newspaper caused a controversy when it printed the faces of judges thwarting Brexit as "enemies of the people."

Populists have also often done things like gerrymander constituent boundaries or work with media figures to fix votes in their favor. Taggart says:

"The populists tend to colonize or occupy the state."

Continuing:

"What Orban sought was a transformation of the civil service law so as to enable the party to place loyalists in what should have been nonpartisan bureaucratic positions."

Which leads to the final tension. At this point, what I think is an outright threat: authoritarianism itself. Populists run a risky game, even if they are democrats. In strengthening the executive office, authoritarianism becomes a very real risk.

Finkelstein argues that populism is not fascism. The difference is that populists are still ultimately, in the end, maybe hesitantly, democrats, and fascists are not. But the genealogical roots, strategies, rhetoric, aims have a lot of similarities. After comparing the two, Finkelstein concludes that

"fascism is always a possibility, but it is, we have to remember, very uncommon."

So maybe we ring the fascist alarm a bit too often. But what about the link between populism and authoritarianism? I asked Professor Taggart, and he was skeptical.

"Most populists don't end up being authoritarians, frankly, when they get into power. From a very broad reading of the literature, I got the sense that that was a common theme. And I haven't seen anyone going through number by number and counting the results of populists in power, but it seemed to be a common enough theme to be a dominant part of the literature. But you're not wrong. I mean, maybe I'm not in the mainstream here. I don't think that it necessarily leads there. But there are many cases. And, you know, when we look at populism in Europe, for example, at the moment, we focus on those cases which are often associated with democratic backsliding. And yet, however, there are populists all over Europe who are not in power who are not necessarily advocating backsliding. So there's the paradox—again, you're focusing on the spectacular moments of it. And I think that we're a bit over-obsessed with those elements. And we've got to always draw back and look at it as a whole."

All of this explains why populism often correlates with the rise in conspiracy theories, as fascism did, because populists tend to demonize elites and those around them and related to them. It means they've been historically susceptible to draw on conspiracies about things like Jewish bankers and international financiers or powerful NGOs, or in the past, especially in the 19th century, "Popish plots."

Assessing these tensions is difficult because having an executive office with authority, a balance between democracy and the processes of democracy, the difficulty in capturing what we should do as a people—who we even are, what "the people" even means—and the inevitability of charisma and demagoguery, all of these things aren't just features of populism, but of democracy itself. Which is why some theorists of populism see it as a threat to democracy—the shadow of democracy—while others see it for what it is: an expression of democracy, a part of democracy.

Populist Democracy

Switch on the news or look at polling data, and it seems quite clear: increasing distrust of politicians, the decline in affiliation with or membership of traditional parties, increasing inequality, cultural and social and economic division. If a system is failing, then people will obviously seek alternatives.

But it's also easy to forget that democracy isn't one thing. It's a complex system of processes, institutions and rules that have evolved over time. Secret ballots, campaign funding rules, political parties, legislative processes, codes of conduct, regulations, unions, referendums. Study any democratic system and you need to understand hundreds, if not thousands of these moving parts of democracy. Even what's thought of as direct democracy, like ancient Greece, was a lot more complex than is often assumed.

So with that in mind, I think it's useful to think of a dialectic within democracy—a debate, a negotiation, new institutions, new ideas, change—and populism has proved to be a part of this dialectic.

There are many scholars that emphasize the dangers of populism, using language like "the shadow of democracy" in Margaret Canovan's phrase, or calling populism "a constant peril" in Müller's. Populists clearly don't like institutions, the establishment. Generally speaking, they don't seem to like universities, intellectuals, professors.

I mailed Taggart about this apparent bias in academic literature, his response:

"I think it's a problem in the sense that, you know, if you want to be objective about populism, you're going to be studying, by definition, people who are not objective about you. So there are no populist theorists—there's one slight exception, but I'll ignore that for the moment—because by definition, populism is not about education. It's about what's in the heart. It's about common wisdom. It's about folk tales and so on. So by definition, populists don't like me. And as a consequence, you know, I've been studying populism for 30 years, and I don't think I've ever been to any event, any academic conference where there's ever been a populist."

There are those that are a bit more neutral, like Anselmi, who writes that:

"populism at base is a demand for more democracy on the part of citizens. However, once it has taken hold, it can even generate an involution of democratic institutions."

But there are those that are much more positive, like Chantal Mouffe, who argues that populism should aim to:

"deepen and extend democracy."

Or Edward Shils, who said that populism was like:

"an inverted egalitarianism because it is tinged by the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers, but are actually better than their rulers."

What's clear is that it has to be taken seriously as a force, as a demand, as a part of the sovereign will, the general will, while also at the same time understanding the risks, the dangers, the threats.

One idea I'm fond of comes from political scientist Anselmi, who starts from the principle that popular sovereignty is the source of democracy, and then argues that popular sovereignty is both a source of legitimacy for the institutional structure and a de-legitimizing force. The former represents an architectural and structuring tendency, while the latter represents a dynamic and de-structuring tendency.

That is, democracy has a structure, an architecture built up over the centuries in response to the demands for popular sovereignty, and if it goes wrong, that same force, that same force of popular sovereignty, the same demands can pick at that structure too. Popular sovereignty can build a house, and popular sovereignty can restructure a house if it's not feeling homely.

When constitutional democracy veers from the sovereign will of the people, populism will result, increasing the distrust of elites and potentially creating a counter-elite meant to change things, hypothetically at least, in the name of the people.

I think the house-building metaphor is a good one, because what do you think will happen when you renovate or neglect or extend or change your house while forgetting that people live in some of the rooms—really forgotten rooms on the other end of a corridor, the rust belt wing, the red wall room, the marginalized wing? When the house will inevitably feel unstable, the idea of the shadow of democracy, the silent majority, Reagan's idea of those with "quiet devotion," the hardworking, rural nation is a perfect representation of the idea of forgotten rooms, the blank spaces, the missed spots, the neglected districts.

It seems to me, then, that there are three important general recurring themes of populism in the modern period that it would do us well to think about: post-democracy, inequality, and authority.

The first is that populism is a response to post-democracy—the idea that democracy isn't in the hands of the people or anyone for that matter, that no one really is pulling the strings, in charge of the system. This is a common critique of the left and the right. The critique from the left is often that democracy is undermined by global capitalism that can jump from tax country to tax country, can offshore labor, can lobby politicians and so on. From the right, the complaint is that institutions like the European Court of Human Rights or the United Nations or the World Trade Organization are seen as taking sovereignty from domestic politics, from the nation, from courts, or that global migration is undermining the nation-state. And both of these, on the left and the right, obviously fuel populist anger.

The second theme is that populism is a response to inequality in a broad sense of the term. Meta-studies on this quite clearly show the positive relationship between inequality and populism. The squeeze on living standards for the working and lower middle classes, plus neoliberal policies that have increased assets and pension and stock market and housing values for the upper middle class and the wealthy, combined with high levels of migration and the erosion of public services, is again a strong basis for populist views.

Finally, both of these lead to a demand for change that hasn't been forthcoming from within the system, leading to support for a strong charismatic authority from without the system. This has often, historically speaking, led to genuine reform of different kinds, but has not been without serious authoritarian risks.

But I think finding ways to radically reform a system and its institutions doesn't mean destroying the pluralism and the democratic norms whose purpose is representing the people, which a lot of populists do critique and then go on to dismantle. On those terms, we can think about reforming these institutions radically. The house metaphor, again, is a good one—not tearing them down, but really thinking about how we change their structure for a very new world.

And there's so much more to say on all of this, but I wanted to try and stick to what populism itself means without veering off into the many, many related subjects that deserve their own exploration.

To end, what I'll say is my favorite book on this has been by Michael Kazin, who sums up populism like this:

"Like the American Dream itself, ever present and never fully realized, populism is too deeply embedded in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but without it we are lost as well."

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Sources and Bibliography

Books:

• Taggart, Paul. Populism. Open University Press, 2000.
• Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Cornell University Press, 1995.
• Finkelstein, Federico. From Fascism to Populism in History. University of California Press, 2017.
• Müller, Jan-Werner. What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Canovan, Margaret. Populism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
• Runciman, David. The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present. Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. Verso Books, 2018.
• McGinniss, Joe. The Selling of the President. Trident Press, 1969.

Historical Documents:

• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789
• People's Party Platform, 1892
• William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" speech, 1896

Newspapers and Periodicals:

• Cohen, Roger. Various articles, The New York Times
• Time Magazine, Person of the Year, 1970

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