ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric ‘populist’ in fact belong together? Or is ‘populism’ just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? This chapter defends the use of ‘populism’ as an analytic category and the characterization of the present as a ‘populist moment’ and develops an account of populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire. It also sketches a multi-layered explanation for the clustering in time and space that constitutes the populist moment.
