Lower income taxes sounds great today, but greater wealth inequality and no social safety net making wealth meaningless (population level poverty and poor social mobility make life for even the wealthy worse)

The working class doesn't think that way, on the contrary! They have to live careful as small missteps have long term consequences. There are plenty of cases where people will happily vote for austere measures, and they rather think the government should spend less.

For the ultra wealthy, everything is free lunch for them, even if that would mean you will be 10% poorer.

If the 0.01% get 10% richer, and the rest 10% poorer, than that is still a win for them. Hence why right wing populists are a great business case to invest in.

Maybe you're saying it means democracy-when-it-doesnt-select-"elites"?

- people made bad choices through deception or carelessness - populism.

Populism is a type of political messaging. Democracy is a system of government. They’re orthogonal concepts.

You should give the message another try, sincerely. It might come across like that if the environment has become a polarized world, where it is not about policy, but about the tribe one identifies with. I guess you are sick of that, and I am sure the author doesn't mean anything like that.

What he talks are real world consequences if politics doesn't concern itself with policy for the people, but rather focuses on the bare quest for maximum of power, often helped by the 0.01%, by deliberately misleading people, usually to advance the interests of those 0.01%, and so getting the populus to vote against their own interests. That phenomenon is known and measurable, as the article demonstrates.

> We benefited greatly from the fact that the academic literature of recent years has converged on a consensus definition of populism that is easily applicable across space and time and for right-wing and left-wing populists alike. According to today’s workhorse definition, populism is defined as a political style centered on the supposed struggle of “people vs. the establishment” (Mudde 2004). Populists place the narrative of “people vs. elites” at the center of their political agenda and then claim to be the sole representative of “the people.” This definition has become increasingly dominant, and is now also widely used by economists (see Section 2, and the recent survey paper by Guriev and Papaioannou, 2020). Populist leaders claim to represent the “true, common people” against the dishonest “elites,” thus separating society into two seemingly homogeneous and antagonistic groups.

But that isn't how the word is used by the media. Mamdani and Trump are both described as populists, but resistance to elites is hardly in their platform. Trump would never describe the democrats as "elite", and AFAIK resisting elites isn't Mamdani's platform either.

The "elite" is referring to "the establishment"

The "deep state" and the "swamp" represent the establishment. You also have people like RFK Jr whose entire claim to fame is questioning the legitimacy of scientific institutions.

That’s what you’re saying, which is absurd, but what you’re really thinking is that your people are better than other people

I know is not a deliberate motte-and-bailey, it’s just so fully baked in that you can’t be objective about it

Wikipedia has a great definition if you care.

Would you call them elites?

So if you vote based on your happiness and thigs you care about as opposed to voting to optimize the "GDP", then you're a populist voter.

And if you get what you want (instead of increased GDP at all costs) then the government is populist.

And if then you're happy, then you're a fascist.