![]() ![]() ![]() The “distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have. This conception of legitimacy stems from the fact that populists view their mission as “essentially moral,” Mudde noted. They consider just one group-whatever they mean by “the people”-legitimate. Populists, in contrast, are not pluralist. They split society into “two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other,” and say they’re guided by the “will of the people.” The United States is what political scientists call a “liberal democracy,” a system “based on pluralism-on the idea that you have different groups with different interests and values, which are all legitimate,” Mudde explained. Populists are dividers, not uniters, Mudde told me. So it’s usually paired with “thicker” left- or right-wing ideologies like socialism or nationalism. Populism doesn’t it calls for kicking out the political establishment, but it doesn’t specify what should replace it. An ideology like fascism involves a holistic view of how politics, the economy, and society as a whole should be ordered. That’s because populism is a “thin ideology” in that it “only speaks to a very small part of a political agenda,” according to Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia and a co-author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction. No definition of populism will fully describe all populists. But there is also an ideological explanation, and it involves a concept that gets mentioned a lot these days without much context or elaboration: populism. ![]()
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