[jetrink]

Populist politicians claim that they represent "The People." The problem, as Umberto Eco pointed out, is that The People is a fiction. We have only The Public, which is a collection of individuals with diverse interests and beliefs. We aggregate The Public's will though democracy as it is impossible for a single individual or political group to speak for everyone. But populists claim that democratic institutions do not represent The People, because they are corrupt and controlled by The Elite. Only the populists truly speak for The People and anyone opposed to them is therefore automatically also an enemy of The People. Enemies are very useful to the populist. (Sanders has spent his career railing against the 1% on behalf of the 99% and Trump, of course, has literally called the press "the enemy of the people.") In short, it's a corrosive ideology that works by undermining faith in democracy and dividing the public into friend and foe.

[mikekchar]

I wanted to verify this description by reading the definition in Wikipedia, but then I realised that the editor elites control Wikipedia and hide the truth from the people. So I'm none the wiser.

Actually, thank you for that description. It's the best summary I've ever read and cleared up a lot of my confusion about the term.

[atq2119]

What if democratic institutions really have been captured by an elite? Regulatory capture comes to mind as a problem that objectively exists.

The kind of populism that promises easy answers by oversimplifying the issues is a problem.

At the same time, I often feel that there is a deep flaw in modern "moderate/centrist" thinking in not trying hard enough to do the things that would actually be popular, instead coming up with overly technocratic and ultimately flawed arguments for maintaining a status quo that provides bad results for a large fraction of the population.

As a politician, how would you call for getting out of that without being branded as the bad kind of populist?