Just What is Populism?

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same kind of politician. I know — put the pitchfork down for a second. They don't agree on taxes, immigration, healthcare, or basically anything anyone would actually vote on. But strip all of that away, and both of them are doing the same thing structurally: there's a corrupt elite screwing you over, and there's a silent majority getting ignored. They simply have different definitions of who that corrupt elite is, mainly because it's each other.

Trump's enemy is the "deep state," and who better to embody that than someone who's been in national politics for 35 years? Sanders' enemy is the millionaires and billionaires, so naturally that would include the gold-plated billionaire building a ballroom. By the end of this video you'll know exactly what populism actually is, how the left and right versions differ, where each one has actually taken power, and why the same word describes politicians who'd probably hate being mentioned in the same sentence as each other. Welcome to Transatlantic Brief, where we break down the policies, institutions, and political movements affecting the transatlantic world in a way that's analytical, pragmatic, and accessible, so you don't need an advanced degree in political science or international affairs to understand it.

Here's the mistake almost everybody makes: they hear "populist" and think "fascist," or they hear "populist" and think "socialist," depending on which cable news channel raised them. Populism isn't either of those, and it isn't nationalism either, even though the three get thrown around like synonyms. Fascism is a full ideology: ultranationalist, built around one leader, hostile to democracy itself, and generally done with elections the moment it wins one. Socialism is also a full ideology, concerned with who owns the means of production, how wealth gets distributed, and actual economic policy you could build a national budget around. Nationalism is a full ideology too, treating the nation as the primary political unit, with loyalty to it placed above class, above party, sometimes above everything else.

Populism, on its own, doesn't have a budget. It doesn't tell you what to do about the minimum wage or immigration or borders or anything else. It tells you who to blame and who's the hero, and nothing more than that. Which is exactly why it can attach itself to almost any full ideology and change how that ideology talks to people, without changing what it actually believes underneath. Pair it with economic-left thinking and you get Bernie Sanders railing against billionaires and Wall Street.

Pair it with cultural-right thinking and you get Donald Trump railing against the media and the establishment. Pair it with nationalism specifically and you get Viktor Orbán, who started out sounding populist and kept most of that furniture once nationalism moved in for good. Three very different destinations, wearing the same rhetorical outfit. You cannot hear "populist" and think you've learned anything about someone's actual politics. You've learned how they talk about their politics, or how they frame "us versus them."

Those are not the same piece of information. So when you hear "populist" and your instinct is to auto-complete it to "fascist" or "socialist," stop and ask the actual question: populist attached to what?

Political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser wrote the definition everyone in this field actually uses, and it's short enough to remember: populism is a thin-centered ideology that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. Thin-centered means populism, by itself, doesn't have enough substance to run a country. It can't write a tax code or set a foreign policy. It needs a host ideology to actually govern with. Left-wing populism grafts onto economic grievance.

Right-wing populism attaches itself to cultural and national grievances. Both use the same underlying foundation: a virtuous "us," a corrupt "them," and a leader who claims to be the only one actually listening to "us" instead of managing them. That "general will of the people" phrase goes back to Rousseau, the idea that there's one true, unified will of the people out there, and anyone who disagrees with the populist leader isn't just wrong, they're standing between the people and their own actual will. Keep that in mind, because it's why populist movements of both stripes tend to grow hostile toward courts, toward independent press, toward anyone positioned to check them.

If you believe you alone speak for the true will of the people, every institutional obstacle, like a Supreme Court ruling that says "no, you can't do that, it's unconstitutional," stops looking like a legitimate check and starts looking like sabotage. Almost nobody proudly calls themselves a populist, either. It's usually a label thrown at you by whoever the "corrupt elite" in your story happens to be.

Left populism points the finger at economic power. The villain is the billionaire, the bank, the multinational corporation, Wall Street, and the "corrupt elite" is whoever's protecting them, usually a political establishment accused of being bought off. The term populism actually has its roots in the American political left, specifically the left-wing People's Party of the 1890s, made up of farmers crushed by railroad monopolies and hostile banks, who built an entire movement out of that grievance. This was, in fact, the driving force within the Democratic Party from about 1890 until Wilson's election in 1912. The populist William Jennings Bryan was the three-time Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908.

He lost each time, and one might think the party would have moved on, but it seems it has always taken longer than it should for Democrats to learn from past mistakes. His 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech remains the single most famous piece of populist rhetoric in American political history, framing the economic struggles of the day as a fight between the "producing classes" of farmers, laborers, and small business owners and the bankers of the Gilded Age. Sound familiar? Later, in the twentieth century, Latin America turned left populism into a governing style rather than a protest movement, with Juan Perón in Argentina serving as the textbook case: direct appeals to "the people," built around personal charisma, running straight over the heads of parties and institutions.

Latin America remains the most successful case for this, at least in terms of electoral success. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro turned left populism into full state doctrine. Bolivia under Evo Morales ran a version built on indigenous identity layered over that same economic grievance. In Europe, Spain's Podemos and Greece's Syriza both rode the 2010s debt crisis into real governing power, blaming banks, austerity, and the EU's economic institutions. In the US, it shows up less as a governing party and more as a faction, Bernie Sanders being the clearest example, operating inside the Democratic Party rather than replacing it.

Right populism points the finger somewhere different: cultural and national identity. The villain is the immigrant, the globalist institution, the out-of-touch cultural elite, and the "corrupt elite" is whoever's accused of prioritizing outsiders over "real" citizens. One can trace an early version to interwar Europe, agrarian and nationalist movements reacting against industrialization and cosmopolitan cities, though those cases sit close enough to fascism that historians still argue over where one ends and the other begins. The modern wave is much more recent, largely a post-2008 phenomenon, financial-crisis anger fusing with immigration anxiety across the US and Europe at almost the same time.

The geographic hot spots today: Hungary under Viktor Orbán is the clearest case of right populism actually consolidating long-term power, built around "illiberal democracy" as an explicit governing label. France's National Rally under Marine Le Pen and now Jordan Bardella has spent two decades turning street-level anger into the country's leading party. Germany's AfD built support in the former East around immigration and EU skepticism. Italy has run right-populist governments repeatedly over the past decade. And in the US, Donald Trump remains the defining case, built on "America First" and open hostility toward the media, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy itself.

Put them side by side, and the framing is the same, just different wallpaper. Both frame politics as pure people versus corrupt elite. Both claim to speak for a silent majority nobody else is listening to. Both lean on a single dominant, charismatic leader over party structure. Both grow hostile toward the press and the courts, or really anyone who disagrees with them.

Where they split is entirely in who gets cast as the villain and who gets cast as the people. Left populism blames concentrated wealth and defines the people economically: workers, renters, anyone getting squeezed. Right populism blames cultural and demographic change and defines the people nationally, the "true" citizens against newcomers and cosmopolitan elites. That's the whole fork in the road. Same structure, opposite target.

One uses an economic divide, the other a racial or ethnic one. It also explains why left and right populist voters can sometimes swap sides entirely between elections. If you're angry at "the system" and don't have a fixed ideology underneath that anger, whichever populist tells the more convincing villain story that year can pull you in either direction. That's exactly what a thin-centered ideology would predict; the underlying anger can attach itself to whoever makes the more compelling argument against that "elite."

So the next time someone calls a politician a populist, that label alone doesn't explain who they are or what policies they support. You still have to ask which version, aimed at which villain, and whether the "corrupt elite" they're pointing at is actually the problem or just the most convenient target available. But the answer to that question depends on your own politics. Populism isn't left or right on its own. It's a rhetorical structure both sides have learned to use, built the exact same way underneath completely opposite politics, and pretending only the other side does it is exactly the kind of convenient lie this channel exists to call out.

Hope this cleared something up.