What is populism - lecture by Jan-Werner Mueller

Populism is used as an umbrella term for different movements. But there is a confusion about what populism actually is.

The lecture proposes a theory of populism which identifies the political category as both anti-elitist and anti-pluralist.

Mueller devides his lecture in 4 parts:
1. The dead ends of populism
2. How to capture populism in a nutshell
3. What populism in power means
4. Unanswered issues about populism

Mueller claims that populists are anti-elitist, but that could not be the only criteria. As everybody who would be critical about the established world would be a populist. So there has to be something more, he calls it the populist core claim. Which is the claim of the populist, that he/she/they only truly represent “the people”.

So there has to be the claim to exclusive moral representation that it is only "my party" who truly represent this morally pure homogenious people. If this claim is not there, one can not really call it populism. Populism needs to define who is really part of the people and who is not. And who really represents the people and who don't.

The distinction between who the people are and who aren’t are often based on nationalism, but that doesn’t mean that populism is necessarily nationalistic as such. As an example he gives the Tea Party. They catagorize "the people" as "the hard working Americans" and are against "the lazy Americans". This is not necessarily rascist or nationalist, but has a tendency towards it. Namely "the lazy Americans" could connotate certain groups of society.

You could say populist: hate the elite + hate the people at the bottom