From some segments of the Left, you hear a persistent griping about the need to “reckon” with populism. Populism is taboo now, the term imbued with a foul, nativist odor. For both the technocratic elite and the Democratic party rank and file, left populists and right populists are just two sides of the same coin, chaotic nihilists conspiring to undermine the wise order of experts.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, aka AMLO, is a “nationalist,” a “populist,” and “Mexico’s Trump.” Jeremy Corbyn was a rabid antisemite. Bernie Sanders was “left-wing Trump.” Populism is a smear. Those that embrace it do so at their own peril.

“Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational that threaten democracy’s norms,” as Thomas Frank writes in The People, No, his grand new history of American anti-populism.