Since the rise of “formal” democracy, populism has dogged it like a shadow, dramatizing, as political scientist Laura Grattan argues, a general paradox of democratic politics. “The people” ostensibly govern themselves in a democracy — but who are “the people”? As Rousseau put it, for a people to self-govern, “the effect would have to become the cause”; the people both constitute democratic institutions and are constituted by them. Democracy is in many ways an ongoing political contest to define the people and their powers. By making claims about the identity of the people and how they enact their political power, populist movements and leaders on both the left and the right confront this fundamental problem of democracy. Their answers, however — how they define “the people” and their prescriptions for democratic practice — could not be more opposed.

Populism can shore up exclusionary visions of the people. But it can also do the opposite, fostering unlikely alliances between marginalized groups. The emancipatory potential of populism relies on the political construction of a “social bloc of the oppressed,” as philosopher Enrique Dussel has argued, drawing on Gramsci and Laclau. Left-wing populism exposes class antagonisms; right-wing populism obscures them, replacing them with cultural chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism. Where left-wing populism contests inequality, right-wing populism redistributes it — making certain kinds of inequality seem not only acceptable but natural.