Today it seems normal to think of “populism” in negative terms. Elite politicians warn us about the threat it poses to stability, articles in illustrious journals tell us about the rising “populist” threat to democracy, and pundits use the term to put both the far right and the radical left in the same basket, as just so many challengers to the status quo. Even if these figures lack any shared or scientific definition of populism, they each locate this phenomenon somewhere in terms of “lies” “demagogy”, ‘‘extremism’’ and “attempting to mislead the masses.” Yet this “anti-populist” punditry is itself far from innocent – and its effect in shaping how we think about “populism” has clear political implications.

Indeed, anti-populism doesn’t come from a vacuum. It’s the result of determined ideological interventions, designed to mask the radical history of this term and collapse it into its most negative contemporary expressions. Seeing how this pejorative definition of “populism” has been spread also allows us to question the role of punditry in informing public debate today, whether expressed by journalists, politicians, and think tanks, or by scholars like historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Though academic discussions of “populism” are far from one-sided, the political uses of this term since the 2008 crisis (and especially since the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election in 2016) have given vent to a renewed cycle of anti-populist elitism.

Indeed, while academic definitions of “populism” remain contested, the ones that have fanned out into the public debate in recent decades primarily take their lead from the American historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter. While the term “populism” was widespread already in the nineteenth century, the discussions that inform today’s use of the term especially refer back to the 1950s. Historian Richard M. Roberts has aptly highlighted the importance of Hofstadter’s 1955 book Age of Reform, which “touched off an . . . ideologically charged and sometimes vituperative dispute . . . that raged in the pages of major journals and in the meeting rooms and hallways at historians’ conventions.”