Populism

One-line definition: Politics organized around the judgment of ordinary people against that of technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers.

How sources describe it

• Slopulism Is Taking Over America treats populism as the precondition for policy scams: “Once people decide that technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers aren’t worth listening to, they become vulnerable to all sorts of policy scams.”
• The same source frames the honest version of the self-checkout debate as “technocracy versus populism” — a few cashiers’ livelihoods against very slightly lower prices for many consumers — and concedes “there’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.”

Where it shows up

• Slopulism Is Taking Over America — populism as the soil Slopulism grows in.

Related concepts

• Slopulism — the degraded form: looks populist, delivers the opposite.
• Technocracy — the pole populism defines itself against.