Why Populism?

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlanticpopulist 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?  I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the present as a “populist moment,” and I develop an account of populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire.  I also sketch a multi-layered explanation for the clustering in time and space that constitutes the populist moment.