<em>Populism</em> Is Meaningless

One spring weekend, dozens of academics from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics with an ambitious goal: to define populism. None were under any illusions about how difficult this challenge would be. “The term continues to be used in many different ways,” one participant observed, noting its association with issues as disparate as McCarthyism in the United States and Maoism in China. In the end, they failed to settle on a single definition, concluding that “there can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is clear what it is.”

That was in 1967. More than half a century later, populism is still being used in many different ways: to describe the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., to explain Brexit in Britain, and to contextualize the disruptions taking place in national politics across the globe. The sheer scale of the phenomenon is evident in just how much everyone seems to be talking about it. Words like and , once confined to academic circles, have in the lexicon. Countless and have been written on the subject. The pope has weighed in on the matter as well, declaring populism an “” that “ends badly.”