What Is Populism?

by Jan-Werner Müller

populism is simple; democracy is complex.

It is not just populists who engage in such practices; what is distinctive about populists is that they can do so quite openly. They claim to have a moral justification for their conduct,

what matters for populists is less the product of a genuine process of will-formation or a common good that anyone with common sense can glean than a symbolic representation of the “real people” from which the correct policy is then deduced.

Populists simply wish to be confirmed in what they have already determined the will of the real people to be. Populism is not a path to more participation in politics.

Populists should be criticized for what they are—a real danger to democracy (and not just to “liberalism”).

Talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists. One can take the problems they raise seriously without accepting the ways in which they frame these problems.