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December 31, 2007
Ivan Krastev opens his article The populist moment at Eurozine with the phrase 'A spectre is haunting the world: populism', and then adds that it is unclear just what populism is:
On the one hand, the concept of "populism" goes back to the American farmers' protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia's narodniki around the same period. Later, the concept was used to describe the elusive nature of the political regimes in the Third World countries governed by charismatic leaders, applied above all to Latin American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. ....Clearly, populism has lost its original ideological meaning as the expression of agrarian radicalism. Populism is too eclectic to be an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are. But growing interest in populism has captured the major trend of the modern political world – the rise of democratic illiberalism
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