ABSTRACT
Populism is widely used as a term of abuse, often as no more than as a byword for simplicity, primitivism, and impending threat to the world as it is. Populist politics, on this view, is, in short, an out-of-bounds way of doing politics. A more systematic defense of "good" populism emerges in the public interventions and writings of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who does it by drawing on the writings on populism of her late husband, the Argentinian thinker Ernesto Laclau. The shared antagonism against the power elite so far, at least in Europe, has not gave birth to any sort of alliance between both antiglobalist camps, and such meeting of populist anticonformists has yet to make an impact in the still short 21st century. This "impossible alliance" is in part blamed to these populism supporters "ideological purism" and lack of a "sense of compromise" that makes them prioritize what separates rather than what unites them.
