> If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come

> If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. i read this as saying not that populism is bad, but that it doesn't _exist_. to someone trying to intuit the meaning of "populism", encountering the word for the first time, it looks like "populism" means "the will of the people". both from its root and from the things which it's used to label (movements with popular support). and there's no correction for this misunderstanding. you just see more and more leaders critiquing popular movements simply _for being popular_ ("populist") and that _amplifies_ the impression that those in power wish to suppress the will of the people. it's just a bad phrase. another commenter positioned populism as contrary to pluralism, which was helpful for me to understand the negative connotation. the actual problem with these "populist" movements is that they _appear_ to represent a unified will of the people, but the unification doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. if (following your example) you could put the whole populace in a room and hammer out policy from start to finish without disagreement or compromising, then we could have an actual unified will of the people; populism would be true, and good. populism doesn't really seem like a thing i should be against in the extremely rare circumstance i find it, _illusory_ populism seems to be the actual thing i should fight against.