Shunned by the White House and the right-wing US media machine, Steve Bannon recently sought to reestablish his image as a political mastermind by embarking on a European speaking tour. If Bannon had begun to suspect that Donald Trump’s presidency was no longer the vanguard of a global far-right turn, at least he could still show his support for the more serious neofascist movements across the Old Continent. And so, Bannon gave speeches on the importance of the Italian xenophobic party La Lega, praised his Brexiteer friend Nigel Farage, and appeared as the surprise guest at the convention of the French Front National. “The populist surge is not over,” he insisted in an interview with the British paper The Spectator, “it’s just beginning.”

Bannon is of course not the only one to speak of “populism” in this way. While the most influential voices in the political mainstream paint populism as a danger to the survival of democracy, for others, populism is the key to democracy’s future. This latter narrative has obvious appeal to far-right figures like Bannon: far-right populists can often seem to be the most democratic political choice precisely because so many in the elite center decry them as an existential threat. And as Anton Jaeger has observed, though many of these right-wing movements never embraced democratic values in the past, the very use of the term “populism” against them has helped them reinvent themselves as champions of “the people.”

Despite the word’s association with the worst elements of the Right, some on the Left have also embraced populism as the wave of the future — none more articulately or more consistently than the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Since the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, she and her late husband Ernesto Laclau have argued that the contemporary center-left has lost its way. Even as the neoliberal turn was just beginning to take hold — eroding social protections, creating a pauperized and precarious workforce, and enriching a narrow oligarchy — Mouffe castigated Third Way social liberals like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton for adopting a politics of “consensus” that failed to give people a voice for their discontent. As the social destruction of neoliberalism intensified over the years, Mouffe has argued that “de-politicized” center-left parties have failed to provide a forceful alternative.