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INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTUALIZING POPULISM

      Populism is revolutionizing twenty-first-century politics. But the disruption it brings has not yet been assessed with any degree of accuracy. The word may turn up everywhere, but no theory of the phenomenon has emerged. The term combines a look of intuitive self-evidence with a fuzzy form, as attested first and foremost by the semantic slipperiness manifested in its usage. For it is a decidedly malleable word, so erratic are its uses. The term is paradoxical, too: even though it is derived from the positive foundations of democratic life, it most often has a pejorative connotation. It is also a screen word, for it applies a single label to a whole set of contemporary political mutations whose complexity and deepest wellsprings need to be grasped. Is it appropriate, for instance, to use the same term to characterize Chávez’s Venezuela, Orbán’s Hungary, and Duterte’s Philippines, not to mention a figure like Trump? Does it make sense to put the Spaniards of Podemos and the followers of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), in the same basket with the fervent supporters of Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, or Nigel Farage? To understand something requires making distinctions; it is essential to resist simplifying amalgamations. Populism is a dubious notion, finally, because it often serves only to stigmatize adversaries, or to legitimize old claims by the powerful and the educated that they are superior to the “lower” classes, which are always deemed likely to mutate into plebeians governed by sinister passions. We cannot address the question of populism without keeping this observation in mind, as a caveat as well as a call for political lucidity and intellectual rigor in approaching the subject.

This necessary attention to the pitfalls that underlie the term “populism” must not lead us to stop using it, however, for two reasons. First, because in its very

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