ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a rubric that allows us to identify a group or movement as populist in various socio-political settings. A minimal definition is suggested, distinguishing core features present in all populisms from second-order features that vary among settings. In our minimal definition (also stated in the Intro), “populism is a way of understanding and developing solutions to economic, way-of-life, and status-loss duress which relies on an us-them binary, stronger or weaker, that in mediated ways draws its ideas about government and society from the historico-cultural background of the place where the populism is situated.” Each feature of this definition is explained and exemplified. The background pool of ideas about government/elites contributes to political constructions of us-them while ideas about society contribute to civilizational accounts. The two may interact, as when populist anger is directed at government/elites for not constraining suspect “others” in society. The two traditional “them's” of American political culture are government and “outsiders,” new immigrants and African Americans, conceptualized since the slave system as radically “other” from whites.
