[bigfishrunning]

"Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

I can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people...

[tptacek]

Populism is implicitly an argument that, on some issue or portfolio of issues, there is a coherent will of the decisive majority of all people, such that the opposing view on the issue(s) is democratically illegitimate (because it's an elite interest, or a concentrated interest in a collective action problem). Populism is thus an implicit rejection of pluralism, the idea that groups of people are complicated and contain multiple overlapping and often incoherent sets of issue preferences, and that the goal of politics is to accommodate that.

Populism can be tactically useful in a democracy, especially if the ground truth on some issue is that its politics really have been captured by elite interests, and that all of the variance in opinion on that issue comes down to "elite vs. popular". But those issues are pretty rare, and as a formula for the broader project of governing, populism is a disaster.

[JumpCrisscross]

> can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people

Populism, pejoratively, means rampant majoritarianism, a known failure mode of democracies. Unfortunately it’s a term, like liberal, that’s been expanded to the point of meaningless.