went on to write an extended panegyric, before arriving at his real political objective
it is above all a useful hermeneutic tool for identifying and characterizing those political parties that accuse their opponents of populism
The idea that populism works when regarded as a certain kind of rhetoric, applied in different ways in different situations, is appealing—but in truth, merely registers its polysemy and returns it to sender.
[...] one may throw the term out the window, but others will continue to use and disseminate it. The alternative is precisely to regard its vagueness and self-contradictoriness as its defining characteristic. This was the route taken by Pierre-André Taguieff, for whom populism is a political style …
