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[...] Today, the choice offered the electorate is no longer that between right and left, but centre-right and centre-left. The distance between the two discourses emerged in the late 1990s when Arthur Schlesinger snapped back at Clinton’s increasing use of the coinage ‘the vital centre’, writing in…

Not for nothing is the plebiscite, the institution most closely associated with populism—populists are regarded as quintessential supporters of ‘plebiscitary democracy’—the only one that retains a clear trace of its ‘plebeian’ origin (plebs: common people; scitum: decree)

His view of populism has been hegemonic in political science ever since.

The central thesis of this study is that systematic use of the term populism is a post-war phenomenon which develops in exact proportion to the disuse of the term ‘the people’: the more peripheral the people in political discourse, the more central populism becomes.

'scrapping’ the current leadership of his Democratic Party, relegating it to the role of an old jalopy