Slopulism

One-line definition: Noah Smith’s coinage for policy that seems like populism but wouldn’t achieve the results people want from it — “snake oil that sells well based on people’s inability to see the consequences of what they’re being sold.”

How sources describe it

• Coined in Slopulism Is Taking Over America (August 2026). The type case: a proposed New York bill mandating a 10% self-checkout discount, which would raise prices across the board and get cashiers replaced by machines — the opposite of its stated goal.
• Smith splits it into two categories: accidental (“the people making the policy just don’t understand what they’re doing”) and ideological (“ideologues sell the public on an ideologically-driven policy by pretending it offers benefits that it doesn’t really offer”).
• The ideological kind is held to be more dangerous. Accidental slopulism yields to “patience, education, and reason”; the ideological kind risks becoming a “bipartisan equilibrium, with each party’s ideologues executing a coup against the reasonable moderates.”

Where it shows up

• Slopulism Is Taking Over America — the coinage and its taxonomy.
• AI Slop Is Swamping a House Office That Drafts US Laws — the same dynamic applied to legislation: AI-generated bill text that looks like lawmaking but is riddled with errors and misunderstood nuances.

Related concepts

• Populism — slopulism is described as its “inevitable outgrowth.”
• Technocracy — the expertise slopulism routes around.
• Automation — the self-checkout case is an anti-automation policy that accelerates automation.