"I’ve often found the ubiquity of “populism” in post-2016 discourse to be unhelpful — in part because it’s tended to refer more to a particular kind of political style than to anything more concrete (I went into this in an essay for The Walrus back a few years ago). It’s precisely this quality, however, that attracts Lake to the term: populism might imply a rebellion of some kind pitting “the people against the powerful” but, beyond that, the exact contours of those categories (and others related to them) in effect become a choose your own adventure — a question of attitude, affect, and outlook rather than wealth, social location, or institutional power. In the reactionary imagination, terms like “populism”, “elites”, and “the ruling class” connote vaguely-defined dispositions more than they do coherent analytical categories; their boundaries endlessly malleable; their foundations more cultural than material.

It’s a nifty sleight of hand, in that it allows conservatives to attach the form and rhetoric of class politics to more or less whatever they like while effectively taking the politics out of them. And thus, in one fell swoop, tech oligarchs sitting at the very nexus of corporate power can become the faces of a “populist moment”; a billionaire president ringing in his second term a tribune of the hardworking masses.

The flipside, of course, is the avowedly anti-populist posture taken by so much of the liberal mainstream since 2016."

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-populism-of-fools

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