Abstract
Many theorists agree that populism divides the social field into a struggle of ‘people’ versus ‘elite’. Yet this is not what a series of alleged populists worldwide, from Bukele to Magufuli to Trump, do. Instead, they present themselves in elite terms. They flaunt their highness, rather than their lowness. Thereby, they neither divide the social into two, nor construct the struggle as one of below against above. I review attempts to resolve this contradiction. The only attempts which succeed involve removing the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide from populism’s definition or classifying elite-leader ideologies as non-populist. How instead, then, should such populism-adjacent elite-leader ideologies be analysed? I develop a framework in which to theorise ideologies which divide society into not two, but three. In it, I conceptualise four ideologies which construct the people-as-part alongside a good/moral elite as allies. I argue that they better capture the specificity of these hierarchical and inegalitarian elite-leader ideologies.
‘Populism, I suggest, is . . . a way of perceiving the political world that sets . . . people against elites’. ‘They [populists] are fine with elites as long as they are the elites leading the people . . . They know that they are part of the elite, and so do their supporters’.
When, during a tour of the White House, Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham asked Donald Trump why he had privileged gold in his redecoration of the Oval Office, his answer was about inimitability. ‘There is no paint’, he explained, ‘that imitates gold’. ‘So this is not’, responded Ingraham, ‘from, like, Home Depot, or something?’ ‘No’, Trump replied, ‘this is not Home Depot stuff. This is not Home Depot’. The taste for hierarchical distinction on display in these remarks was not a break in character for Trump. Instead, it was aligned with the wider persona of gilded luxury and broadcast success that he has long projected. He is not the only such leader to inflect his persona upwards. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele does so by fusing millennial cool, allegedly inspired leadership and techno-utopianism into a model of visionary leadership in the Silicon Valley mould. In Tanzania, the late John Pombe Magufuli did so by layering displays of academic credentials, upstanding character, consensus-breaking vision and presidential power in a conception of elite vanguard rule.
This poses a problem in the analysis of these leaders’ ideologies, for they are all widely read as populist. Populisms, many theorists agree, bifurcate. They split the social in two. They construct a struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ and fold everyone into one of those categories or the other. The centrality of this dualist division is, ironically, a point of consensus on how to define populism in a literature otherwise strewn with disagreements. On it, those writing in the widely adopted ideational (Mudde, 2004), discourse-theoretic (de Cleen et al., 2018) and discourse-performative (Ostiguy et al., 2020) conceptions of populism largely agree. Yet this claim is hard to square with how the allegedly populist leaders referred to above, and others besides, present themselves. A subset of supposedly populist ideologies, in one way or another, constructs ‘the leaders of the people’ in elite terms.
I argue that such ideologies contradict the ‘people’/‘elite’ component of populism; they do not do what the concept stipulates that they would, if they were populist. If populism constructs ‘the leaders of the people’ in elite terms, then ‘the elite’ or a part of it is constructed as an ally of, rather than the enemy of ‘the people’. This contradiction is particularly analytically significant, because, as others have remarked (de Cleen and Glynos, 2021), populism has already been distilled to such a minimal core. This minimality is what enables the concept of populism to hold together the diversity of political ideologies to which it is ascribed. When, in an analysis, the concept of populism is applied even though this core cannot be located faithfully in the object of analysis, then the deployment of that concept confuses, rather than clarifies. In this article, I confront that elite-leader problem. This is my point of entry into the populism literature.
There are two straightforward ways to resolve the elite-leader problem. One is to keep the ‘people’/‘elite’ division in populism’s definitional core, and to accept that, in spite of the partial resemblances, elite-leader ideologies do not qualify as populisms, thus defined. Another is to define populism as an illiberal (Urbinati, 2019) or anti-oligarchic (Borriello et al., 2024) vision of democracy, or similar, in which the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide is secondary at most. However, few today, when confronted by the elite-leader problem, adopt such an approach. Instead, most continue to ascribe populism to elite-leader ideologies, in spite of the contradiction which they generate in the process. Many of these studies draw on one or more of three alternative approaches. Each of these three alternatives, whatever their authors’ intentions, constitutes an attempt to address this contradiction, while neither revising the classification of elite-leader ideologies as populist nor removing the ‘people’/‘elite’ component from populism’s definition.
I argue that they fail to do so. One, which proposes that populist ‘leaders’ performatively adopt a mixture of popular and elite features, complicates rather than resolves the contradiction. So does another, which proposes that populisms conceptualise ‘the leader’ as the embodiment of ‘the people’. A third begins to resolve the contradiction, but only by tacitly expelling the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide from their definitions of populism.
In light of this conclusion, I pose a new question: how should the social imaginaries of such elite-leader ideologies be analysed instead? For while some elite-leader ideologies may contain disfigured or restorative visions of democracy, they do not only contain such visions. Constructions of the social remain central in their fixations of meaning. In search of better ways to analyse them, I argue for a shift from dualist theories to trialist ones: theories of ideologies in which the social is divided into not two, but three. I theorise four trialisms which embrace, rather than deny, that ‘the leaders of the people’ are constructed in elite terms, even as they construct ‘the people’. To recognise how central the elevation of the leaders is in these ideologies, I flip the script. I call them plebeian elitisms, or synonymously, popular elitisms.
Seeing with clear eyes that elitism lies at the heart of these allegedly populist ideologies is important. Many have analysed how populists in power make their societies accumulate power and wealth for themselves and their allies (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015; Dávid-Barrett, 2025). Recognising the degree to which the ideas behind these ‘populisms’ are inegalitarian opens the door to seeing new ways in which such substantive political projects are in alignment with, rather than in creative tension with (de Cleen and Ruiz Casado, 2024), their legitimising ideologies. It may already be that when analysts ascribe populism, they sometimes mean something like ‘popular elitisms’. If so, the need for a richer conceptual vocabulary is only greater. Explicit concepts are better than silent work-arounds.
In the first section, I describe how studies in recent years have ascribed the populism as ‘people’/‘elite’ divide to an expanding global body of cases. In the second, I analyse the self-constructed personas of three alleged populists from vastly different contexts around the globe: Trump, Bukele, and Magufuli. I show that they present themselves in elite terms. I spell out why these and other such constructions of leaders stand in contradiction with the concept of populism. In the third, I critically review approaches through which theorists have attempted to address this contradiction. In the fourth, I theorise four sorts of popular elitist trialisms through which elite-leader ideologies can be analysed instead of populism.
The ‘people’/‘elite’ divide, worldwide?
Today, it seems, populisms are everywhere. Analysts have seen them in the global north and the global south; on both the right and the left; and expressed both from opposition and in power. Equally, it seems, they are growing. Large-scale research projects (Kyle and Gultchin, 2018; Norris, 2020; Rooduijn et al., 2024), a series of handbooks (de la Torre, 2019; Kaltwasser et al., 2017; Ostiguy et al., 2020), and, at this point, an almost unfathomably deep literature depict the proliferation of populisms worldwide. In the eyes of this literature, the populist zeitgeist which Cas Mudde (2004) hailed long ago has truly arrived. Populism, of course, is a contested concept, and so what analysts mean when they ascribe populisms differs. Nevertheless, perhaps the three predominant approaches to populism are the ideational, the discourse-theoretic and the discourse-performative. For all the differences between them, these three approaches converge on two significant points as they map this ostensible global rise of populisms.
First, they all take meaning-making to be the stuff of populisms. They do so in different terminologies. Those writing in the ideational conception (Hawkins et al., 2018; Mudde, 2004) draw on Michael Freeden’s (1996) theory of political ideology. As such, they understand populisms, like all ideologies, to be ‘systems of meaning’ which are fixed through the arrangement of concepts (Freeden, 1996: 50). Those writing in the discourse-theoretic conception, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001), also take their subjects to be systems of meaning, or discourses (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). They focus on how social identities in discourses are constructed through antagonisms. For them, an antagonism begins with a heterogeneous set of demands. An ‘us’ is generated by connecting these demands in a ‘logic of equivalence’. Insofar as this ‘equivalential chain’ runs to the edges of the social, in a ‘logic of difference’, it becomes an ‘internal frontier’ and those beyond it become a ‘them’. The meanings of key signifiers are generated through these logics of articulation. Those in the discourse-performative conception share this focus on meaning-making (Moffitt, 2020; Ostiguy, 2017). However, they understand populism itself to consist of the praxis – the domain of practices and performative actions through which meanings are made and especially relationships are constituted (Ostiguy et al., 2020: 3–5). Altogether, while these three approaches differ subtly in their focuses, and their underlying ontologies, they all understand populisms to be about the making of meanings.
Second, these three approaches agree on how populisms construct and divide the social field. In the discourse-theoretic conception, what distinguishes populisms from other us/them discourses is that the us and the them are constructed as ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ (Stavrakakis, 2004): ‘a large powerless group. . . [and] a small and illegitimately powerful group’ (de Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017: 310). Those in the discourse-performative school adopt this position wholesale (Ostiguy et al., 2020: 1). So, in their own way, do those writing in the ideational conception (Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008). For them, populism consists of an illiberal vision of democracy and an accompanying project of power (Mudde, 2021; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012; Pappas, 2019; Taggart, 2004; Rogenhofer and Panievsky, 2020). Yet this illiberal vision lives within and emanates from, as Mudde puts it (2004: 543): An ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’.
Parenthetically, while each of these conceptions of populism offers a way to analyse something about systems of meaning, none of them offers a way to represent the broad swathe of meanings generated in any such system in the way that a theory of a more fully-fledged ideology like liberalism or conservatism might (Freeden, 1996). Instead, whether theorised as a thin-centred ideology (on just how thin, see Freeden, 2017; Stanley, 2008), a logic of articulation, or a praxis, each of these conceptions of populism describes at most only an aspect of these meaning systems or that which underpins them. This is why, when one describes an ideology, discourse, or style as populist, one leaves much open and much unsaid about its wider meaning-laden content (on this point, see Freeden, 1998; Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 161; Ostiguy et al., 2020: 3). For consistency, below, I default to referring to these systems of meaning as ideologies. When I describe them as populist, or indeed in other ways, this should be understood as only ever a partial description of the meanings fixed therein.
Altogether, what the growing literature on populism alleges, among other things, is that a burgeoning global body of ideologies are dividing the social field into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, worldwide. I intervene in this literature by questioning whether all of those ideologies analysed as populist do so. I do so by focusing on how a series of alleged populist leaders around the world are constructed.
The elite-leader contradiction
A series of allegedly populist leaders present themselves in elite terms. It is not only, as de Cleen and Ruiz Casado (2024) argue, that those constructed as ‘the people’ and their ‘leaders’ possess social privilege in the eyes of the sociologist. Nor is it only, as Arjun Appadurai (2020) argues, that populists materially ‘from above’ constitute a ‘revolt of the elites’. It is that these populisms construct ‘the leaders’ as displaying elite characteristics. Prior to this conclusion is the question: what constitutes eliteness in this context? For now, as eliteness is an essentially contested concept, the question is not whether the ideology in question imbues ‘the leaders’ with the true meaning of eliteness. Instead, it is whether they imbue them with eliteness, as it is constructed in that ideology. I return to the definition of eliteness later.
There is, perhaps, no more vivid example than Trump. He, of course, has been analysed as populist too often to cite comprehensively (though see Kaltwasser et al., 2017; Moffitt, 2020; Ostiguy and Roberts, 2016). Nevertheless, he presents himself in elite terms. Trump does not style himself in every possible version of eliteness. He has a well-publicised love of Big Macs and Coca Cola. His low brow tastes are far flung from some American high cultures, whether the classical arts and quiet philanthropy of old-money refinement or the academic sophistication and curated-casual aesthetics of progressive creatives. Many have taken this as evidence of Trump’s anti-elitism, writ large. In this telling, his popular tastes are how he ‘flaunts the low’ (Ostiguy, 2017, also see Ostiguy 2009). They put him ‘on the low socioculturally and politicoculturally’ (Ostiguy and Roberts, 2016: 35). They are part of his ‘blue-collar billionaire’ persona (Cooper, 2015). Yet while Trump stands apart from these models of eliteness, he embraces another.
One of its central features, as others have noted (Aiolfi, 2025; Schoor, 2019), is success. The forms of Trump’s success have changed over the years, as he narrates it, from striking deals and making billions to winning elections big and ratcheting up policy accomplishments. Yet he consistently defines them in the language of ‘wins’ (Debussman, 2025). Behind this success is another of the central features of his eliteness: his brilliance. In Trump’s telling, his success is earned. He boasts that he got high grades and is ‘very smart’ (ABC, 2018). He recurrently proclaims his ‘genius’ (Restuccia, 2019). More widely, as he tells it, he has honed a recipe for success composed of hard-ball negotiating, risk-taking and savvy situation-reading (Trump and McIver, 2004; Trump and Schwartz, 2005).
This merited success is what sustains a third feature of his eliteness: opulence. Trump materialises his success and billionaire wealth in his signature style of interior décor. His private residence at Mar-a-Lago, his Manhattan penthouse, his redecoration of the Oval Office, his rebuilding of the East Wing, and his ‘palace-in-the-sky’ replacement of Air Force One share an aesthetic of extravagance. They are laden with gilt, marble, and solid gold ornamentation in a manner which is imitative, albeit imperfectly, of Versailles grandiosity (Wellington, 2025).
These features of Trump’s eliteness are connected by another: his showmanship. For Trump, success, brilliance and luxury should all be broadcast. As he wrote, ‘If you don’t tell people about your success, they probably won’t know about it’ (Trump and McIver, 2004: 8). This principle runs through Trump’s self-curated image. His public manner is full of braggadocio (Megerian, 2025). The looming scale of Trump Tower, his gold-adorned interiors, and his focus on prestige items, from planes to trophies, all unapologetically project highness. Various analysts read Trump’s boastful displays as reeking of new-money tackiness and therefore smacking of yet more socioculturally low ‘bad manners’ (Moffitt, 2016: 60; Ostiguy and Roberts, 2016: 40; Reicher and Haslam, 2017). Yet this is not the way that Trump himself presents them. For him, they are part and parcel of his vision of high living.
I’m described as a cartoon . . . version of the big-city business mogul with the gorgeous girlfriend and the private plane and the personal golf course and the penthouse apartment with marble floors and gold bathroom fixtures . . . but my cartoon is real . . . I love living in it . . . If you’re going to live, live large (Trump and McIver, 2004: 42).
Through these displays and boasts, far from flaunting his lowness, Trump is, in his own way, flaunting his highness. It is not only, then, that in now-infamous off-teleprompter moments, Trump declared himself and his people to be ‘the super elite’ above the bad ‘elite’ (Fox News, 2018). It is that he instantiates and projects his own version of eliteness. It is far-removed from the elite cultures of WASP aristocracy and progressive intelligentsia. Yet it hews closely to the high culture of conspicuous consumption, celebrated success and businessman hagiography which was re-emergent in 1980s America and was iconised in Trump himself.
Perhaps the feature which Trump has most recently folded into his own version of eliteness is political power. The frames that Trump conjured so often in his first term, in which he presented himself as hounded or constrained by an establishment (CNN, 2018; Shear and Fadulu, 2019), have been displaced by mediated performances of personalised power, from signing executive orders to reviewing military parades. Like power itself, many of these performances are relational. Trump’s routines of chastising journalists and deriding opponents have become part of a broader repertoire of performances in which he intimidates, threatens and dominates on the public stage. Even when given opportunities to cast himself as constrained, such as during the 2025 government shutdown, he leant into projections of his own unmatched power (PBS Newshour, 2025). He is punching downwards not only sociologically (Ostiguy and Casullo, 2017: 8) but performatively. In so doing, he locates himself above his opponents, as the strong above the weak, the victor over the defeated.
Trump has long defined his highness in reference to those around him. In part, this is about the company he keeps. From The Art of the Deal hustling through to his Elon Musk dalliance, Trump has showcased his high connections. In equal part, it is about the credentials of his subordinates. In 2016 Trump said that he would ‘surround myself only with the best and most serious people’ (Bump, 2016). This sentiment was on display in his infamous 2025 Justice Department speech, where he told a series of officials that they were ‘the best people, the smartest people, the toughest people’ and that their work would ‘put you in the upper tier and maybe the top tier’ (Trump, 2025). These layers of elite performance stack. Each complements the other. If one holds them all in view, it is hard to deny that Trump, in his own way, increasingly casts himself as the highest of the high. Thus, while Trump claims to fight for ‘the American people’, he locates himself at the apex of an elite-led political movement doing so.
While Trump is an archetypal case of an alleged populist who presents himself in elite terms, he is far from the only such case. Alleged populist (Meléndez-Sánchez, 2021) Bukele of El Salvador offers another. Bukele (2019) proclaims himself to be ‘the coolest president in the world’. Aviator sunglasses and leather jackets are regular parts of his attire. 1 Alone, this taste for the informal might be read as a downwards and, in particular, a youthful inflection of his style. However, it should be read in the context of his wider self-presentation. Bukele cracked down on gangs, made Bitcoin legal tender, and secured constitutional reforms. Whatever the true content of these ideas, he portrays them as transformational changes which not only liberated El Salvador but set it on the path towards tech-utopianism (Boos, 2024). Implicitly, this transformational agenda emanates from his own brilliance. His supporters call him a ‘visionary’ and a ‘genius’ (Molina, 2025). He suggests as much himself. He set his X handle to ‘Philosopher King’. When asked about his thinking, he elaborated that a philosopher king distilled the ideal of someone ‘who considered all the angles, analysed all the possibilities in making a decision’ and was insulated from considerations of ‘what is most popular’ (Bergengruen, 2024). In this context, his ‘millennial cool’ (Meléndez-Sánchez, 2021) connotes not lowness, but his place in a creative class of imagineer disrupters. Bukele’s wider image stabilises these associations between consensus-breaking leadership and hipster glamour. He associates with tech- and crypto-executives. He is intensively online. Altogether, he plays up the associations with the image of Silicon Valley visionary.
Like Trump, Bukele acts out his eliteness by performatively punching down. At first, ‘the gangs’ were the principal focus of this hostility. Yet in 2023, as he announced a ‘war against corruption’, bureaucrats and mayoralties became equally prominent themselves (Bukele, 2023). While he portrayed ‘the corrupt’ as existential threats, like Trump, he did not portray them as his equals in struggle. Instead, as he ordered arrests, launched investigations and threatened legal consequences from the pulpit, he cast them as his lessers in status and power. They should fear him, not he them.
Far flung from each of these contexts, and located on the anti-imperialist left, the late Magufuli of Tanzania has been repeatedly analysed as a populist (Collord and Nyamsenda, 2025; Jacob and Pedersen, 2018), yet he too offered a distinctive vision of (vanguard) elitism. He emphasised his lowly beginnings, but he and his supporters also celebrated his abilities. He called out a series of alleged imperialist frauds and conspiracies, not least on the supposed falsity of covid-19 tests. As he did so, his advocates belaboured his scientific qualifications (a PhD in Chemistry) and status quo-upending vision (Daily News, 2020b; The Citizen, 2020). A government-owned paper hailed him as a ‘global genius leader’ (Daily News, 2020a). More widely, they portrayed the uppermost tier of government and party leaders in similar terms. Altogether, he and his lieutenants presented the ruling party as the guardians of the nation, meritocratically selected to rule in the people’s best interests. This view was on display in Magufuli’s paternalist remarks that ‘I know that many people live a low life . . . we [the ruling party] are struggling to bring development for them’ (Kitalima, 2017). Like Trump and Bukele, Magufuli acted out his location above ‘the corrupt’. He fired officials on stage, instructed subordinates to launch investigations live on television, and issued warnings to crooked traders and embezzlers from the podium (The East African, 2016). Altogether, he articulated a model of vanguard eliteness, shaped by the postsocialist context of Tanzania’s liberation regime (Askew, 2006; Paget, 2021; Phillips, 2010).
Reading between the lines, other studies come to the brink of similar conclusions, even as they analyse politicians and movements as populist. Alternative für Deutschland and Forza Nuova portray(ed) themselves as the guides and defenders for stupid and prostrate peoples (Caiani and Della Porta, 2011). Victor Orbán portrays himself as the paternal protector of an ill-disciplined people (Csehi, 2019; Enyedi, 2016). Boris Johnson and Thierry Baudet portray(ed) themselves as educationally and culturally elite (Schoor, 2019). Some analyse how populists performatively take on the role of saviours or display ‘outstanding leadership qualities’ (Casullo, 2019; Moffitt, 2016: 52; Ostiguy and Roberts, 2016; Schneiker, 2019). It may well be possible to construct an actor as a saviour or as extraordinary without simultaneously characterising them as elites. However, at least some alleged populists do not do so, as Trump, Bukele and Magufuli amply illustrate. Nadia Urbinati argues that populists are antiestablishment (opposed to any that become established in power) rather than anti-elite per se. They are against the political elite, not the elite at large. Yet as other studies come to the cusp of showing, some so-called populists flaunt their political power. Yannis Stavrakakis et al. (2016) argue that Hugo Chavez ‘performed . . . a directive style of leadership’ in which he took on a ‘caesarean’ role. Liberation governments in not only Tanzania but Uganda and Namibia have all presented themselves as vanguards that rule aloof from people and everyday politics (Melber, 2025; Nakayi and Wiegratz, 2024). A number of alleged populists in power could be analysed in similar terms.
These ideologies are not all alike, but they share something: they are all ideologies which imagine elite leaders for the people. No matter through what other, mutually compatible lenses one might wish to view them, they are thus elite-leader ideologies. Therefore, they deviate from populism’s ‘people’/‘elite’ divide. Consider again how Mudde defines populism’s social imaginary: ‘an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogeneous groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”’ (2004: 543). There is no room for a third actor in this formulation. Yet the ideologies in question construct an elite actor which is not opposed to ‘the people’, but allied with it. This is the elite-leader contradiction. Populism divides society into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, but some ideologies analysed as populist construct elite leaders of the people which fit into neither such category. In discourse-theoretic terms, it is unclear whether these leaders are joined to ‘the people’ in anything resembling an equivalential chain. Even if they were, the ‘us’/‘them’ divides constructed in relation to them would cease to be those of low and high. Instead, they would cross that divide, uniting ‘the people’ below and their elite leaders above. In fleeting recognition that analysing such ideologies as populist misses something, Stavrakakis and Giorgos Katsambekis (2014: 123) call them ‘paradoxical elitist populism[s]’.
Some have seen a way out of this contradiction of concept and application, which is located in particular subclauses of these definitions. Most notably, in one passage of Mudde’s (2004: 560) seminal piece, he discusses the status of some populists as counter- or outsider-elites: Interestingly, the populist leader is not necessarily a true outsider . . . they would be best described as outsider-elites: connected to the elites, but not part of them.
Similarly, Müller (2016: 30), as profiled in the epigraph, stipulates that populists construct ‘the leaders of the people’ as ‘part of the elite’. It is unclear whether Mudde’s passage refers to the status of leaders in their own eyes, or the analysts. The latter is how he writes about it in subsequent texts (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012). If, like Müller or Caiani and Della Porta (2011), he meant the former, this would not offer any resolution to the elite-leader problem. Instead, it would simply transform it from a contradiction between concept and application to a contradiction within the concept of populism itself. Put plainly, if society, in the eyes of the populist, were divided into two groups alone, then there would be no space in that vision for a third group that was connected to, but not part of, one of them. Therefore, in either reading, these lines of text do not contain a resolution to the contradiction. The elite-leader problem stands.
Trying (and failing) to resolve the elite-leader problem
Two approaches have been developed which successively and unproblematically resolve this elite-leader problem. In the first, a different definition of populism is adopted, one which explicitly expels the ‘people’/‘elite’ division from its core. Urbinati (2019) exemplifies such an approach. For her, populism as a project of power involves the illiberal disfiguration of democracy. A ‘people’/‘elite’ divide can emerge in such populism but is epiphenomenal to it (Urbinati, 2019: 55–59). Similarly, the seminal work of Paul Taggart (2000, 2004; 278) on populism focuses not the division of society into two homogeneous entities but its hostile and illiberal ‘reaction to representative politics’. Aiolfi (2022, 2025) proposes that populism be redefined as a transgressive style, to which the flaunting of the low is orthogonal. Arthur Borriello et al. (2024) propose a conception of populism in post-Laclauian terms which casts it as an innately pro-democratic and anti-oligarchic project but likewise relegates the role of the ‘people’/‘elite divide in it’. Carlos de la Torre’s (2021) reconceptualises populism as a family-likeness concept with no necessary features at all. Paul Blokker (2019) theorises it as a project of constitutional change, which involves not necessarily anti-elitism but the ‘friend-enemy logic of populist political mobilisation’ (2019: 343). Thereby, he relegates a specific ‘people’-versus-‘elite’ division into a wider category of friend–enemy divisions. This move is analogous to later Laclau’s (2005a) redefinition of populism’s ‘people’/‘elite’ divide as any ‘us’/‘them’ one. All of these authors propose theories of populism in which remove the ‘people’/‘elite’ division from it. By these definitions, elite-leader ideologies could qualify as populist without contradiction.
The second approach is simpler. It attends to this contradiction not by altering the definition of populism, but by restricting to which ideologies it is ascribed. In this approach, studies recognise that some elite-leader ideologies at least partially resemble populisms, but nonetheless do not conform to populism’s ‘people’/‘elite’ division and so do not qualify as populist. In Spain, Ferreira (2019) analyses Vox as non-populist radical right, a conclusion echoed in other analyses of radical rightisms in Europe (de Cleen et al., 2020). In Russia, Luke March (2017, 2023) argues against the analysis of Vladimir Putin as a populist, on the grounds of his paternalism.
However, most research on populisms has adopted neither of these approaches. Instead, many elite-leader ideologies continue to be analysed as populisms. These applications are sustained by three sorts of conceptual approaches developed in the populism literature. None of these approaches explicitly addresses the elite-leader problem, but each alters how populism is defined or applied. These changes constitute attempts, advertent or inadvertent, to resolve the elite-leader problem while both continuing to define elite-leader ideologies as populist and keeping the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide in the definition of populism. I review and critique each in turn.
The first such approach sees a way out of the elite-leader problem in populists’ performance (Ostiguy, 2017; Ostiguy et al., 2020). Populists may stylise themselves in elite ways in some respects, goes this analysis, but, like Trump, they nevertheless present themselves as socioculturally low (Casullo, 2019; Mendonça and Caetano, 2021; Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy, 2017: 77; Reicher and Haslam, 2017; Schneiker, 2019). Such interpretations may very well be insightful readings of such leaders. However, they do not circumvent the elite-leader problem, unless ‘the leaders’ in question present themselves in sociocultural terms alone. If instead they flaunt their political highness as well as their sociocultural lowness, for instance, then the ‘people’/‘elite’ is not one of low against high but of both low and high against high. Therefore, the discourse constituted in their performance deviates from the definitions of populism reviewed above. This might seem like a subtle deviation, but it is one that fundamentally alters the social imaginary being fixed. In short, this approach complicates the contradiction but does not resolve it.
The second such approach builds outwards from the Laclauian idea that ‘the name of the leader’ becomes a signifier for ‘the people’. Some interpret this signification, or representation, as embodiment, notably (early) Carlos de la Torre (2016; also see Müller, 2016). It is not only that, as in Urbinati, ‘the leader’ alone speaks for ‘the people’, but that the characteristics of ‘the people’ are incarnated in them. The best case for how this resolves the elite-leader contradiction is that in the person of ‘the leader’, highness and lowness can appear at once. They can display elite qualities, and simultaneously display the characteristics of ‘the people’ (Ostiguy et al., 2020: 60–63). In a variant of embodiment, ‘the leader’ might embody the ennobled ideal of ‘the people’, or indeed the people’s ‘ego ideal’ (Ostiguy, 2017: 84; Reicher and Haslam, 2017: 43) in which the status of ‘the people’ itself is elevated. However, in either case, if ‘the leader’ is imbued with constructed eliteness, their simultaneous selective embodiment of ‘the people’ does not resolve the contradiction; it exacerbates it. If ‘the leader’ embodies highness and lowness at the same time, then the divide is both high and low against high. Again, the contradiction is complicated, but not resolved. If ‘the people’ are – through transformation in reference to ‘the leader’ – of high status, then likewise, the ‘us’/‘them’ divide is one of high against high, and the contradiction is only made worse. I return to embodiment in the final section of the article.
The third approach focuses on conception of ‘the elite’ in populism. Mudde (2004), and later Mudde and Kaltwasser (2012: 8), emphasise that ‘the elite’ is an empty signifier. As such, they stipulate, to say that a populism constructs ‘the elite’ is only to say that it constructs an actor as immoral. ‘The [people/elite] distinction . . . is first and foremost moral (i.e. pure vs corrupt), not situational (e.g. position of power), sociocultural (e.g. ethnicity, religion), or socioeconomic (e.g. class)’. This definition certainly offers the beginnings of a way out of the elite-leader contradiction. It makes it possible for ‘the leaders’ to be imbued with constructed elite qualities, and yet not be imbued with the same qualities as the entity named ‘the elite’.
However, in these moves, the theory of populism is subtly but profoundly changed. Populism remains an ideology in which an entity is constructed and referred to by the words ‘the elite’. Yet in what sense is this entity being constructed substantively as elite (as others have queried, de la Torre and Mazzoleni, 2019)? What conception of eliteness are Mudde and Kaltwasser invoking? They certainly do not invoke the (ruling) elite of Pareto (1997), the ruling class of Mosca (1961), or the oligarchy of Michels (2019), for whom, variously, wealth, status, knowledge and above all else power are central. Nor do they follow Marx, Weber (2019), Giddens (1972), Bourdieu (1998) and others, for whom, of course, mode of production, wealth, status, resources, cultural capital, habitus and similar would be the stuff of eliteness or ruling class-ness. Ultimately, it matters not whether Mudde and Kaltwasser channel any particular sociologist as they stipulate that populisms construct an entity as ‘the elite’. Yet it does matter whether they are invoking any of the range of meanings associated with the term ‘elite’.
What is that range of meanings? When does a constructed entity become, and cease to be, a constructed elite? Paolo Zannoni (1978: 20) argues that while conceptions of eliteness vary, they all understand an elite to be a minority distinguished from a majority by its excellence on some criterion or other. This underlying theme hews closely to the etymology of elite, from the Latin eligere, to choose. An elite is the chosen or best part. Eliteness then is about social superiority, and that superiority is inherently constructed. Even if it has a material basis, it is always also something alleged or claimed (Abbink and Salverda, 2012; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017). To describe some group of people as elite is to describe them, at a minimum, as better than other people, in some way. It is, therefore, to paint a social field as unequal. Pejorative uses of ‘elite’ do not cease to connote superiority. Instead, the meaning of superiority they fix moves from first to second order. Elites become those who have acquired superior positions, no matter how undeservedly. Eliteness, then, is an essentially contested concept, but superiority is, in Freeden’s terms, an inalienable element of that concept.
Elements of this insight can already be found in writings on populism. Ostiguy (2017: 80), as already described, theorises that the people/elite divide runs along a ‘low-high axis’ consisting of the sociocultural and politicocultural. De Cleen and Stavrakakis fold back in the economic and the political. For them ‘populism is structured around a vertical, down/up or high/low axis that refers to power, status and hierarchical sociocultural and/or socioeconomic positioning’ (de Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017: 311). Put in more general terms, for an ideology to construct an entity as ‘elite’ it must place it above other entities on some axis or axes of hierarchical differentiation. The constructed content of this axis can vary from one ideology to the next. It may be power, position, influence, wealth, intelligence, education, norm conformity, cultural sophistication, virtue or any combination of those things. Equally, it might be overlaid with categories of gender, religion, race, ethnicity or other sorts of identity. Like privilege, eliteness can be conceptualised on many axes and crystallised at many possible intersections of such axes (Collins and Bilge, 2020).
For an ideology to construct ‘the elite’ as a singular elite entity, as populism does, it must construct what Andreas Schedler (1996: 297) calls a society with a ‘high centre’. The elites across the sectors of society must be connected and intertwined, like Wright Mills’ (1956) power elite. It need not construct ‘the elite’ as possessing every conceivable mark of highness. It need not, for instance, style ‘the elite’ in the mode of The Wolf of Wall Street, Succession and Fraser all at once. In fact, to do so would be write-in in endless contradictions. However, it must construct ‘the elite’ as lying at the high-end of each axis of differentiation onto which the ideology charts eliteness. Put otherwise, it must style ‘the elite’ in full accordance with whatever conception of highness it embraces.
As superiority is integral to the concept of eliteness, it is integral to the construction of a ‘people’/‘elite’ divide. To allege that that an ideology constructs a ‘people’/‘elite’ divide, but does not paint that divide in (constructed) hierarchical terms is to alienate superiority from the concept of eliteness. It is to abuse the term. Yet this is exactly what Mudde and those who make equivalent moves do. It is not necessarily that the populists he analyses misuse the meaning of this term, though of course they may. He distorts it’s meaning when he stipulates that populists construct ‘the elite’, where ‘elite’ need only mean ‘immoral’. To see why, imagine an ideology which meets all the ideational criteria of populism: it constructs a pure-vs-corrupt struggle between two homogeneous groups; it refers to these groups through the concepts ‘the people’ and ‘the elite;’ and it attributes to the former a Rousseauian volonté générale. Further imagine that it also characterises ‘the elite’ as impoverished, powerless, wretched, uncouth or otherwise inferior (and constructs it in no other, mitigating ways). By his definition, Mudde is committed to recognising such an ideology as populist. His theory leaves him no recourse to argue that the entity referred to as ‘the elite’ is not imbued with any characteristics which are recognisable as elite ones, nor indeed, that it is being imbued with the inverse. He would have no such recourse, because, by his own definition, the ‘people’/‘elite’ ‘distinction . . . is first and foremost moral’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012: 8). Therefore, Mudde and others who make equivalent moves, nominally keep ‘the elite’ in their theories of populism, but substantively they eliminate it. This at least partially resolves the elite-leader contradiction, but at a high price. Their conceptions of populism ceases to separate those that substantively construct ‘people’/‘elite’ divides from those that merely construct some us/them divides. Like Urbinati and others, in practice, they make the ‘people’/‘elite’ division at most epiphenomenal to their definitions of populism.
Altogether, the literature offers two straightforward ways to resolve the elite-leader problem. Either, one can continue to define populism in reference to a ‘people’/‘elite’ divide and not to classify elite-leader ideologies as populist. Alternatively, one can define populism in reference to a (disfigured) vision of democracy, to the exclusion of a ‘people’/‘elite’ divide. Theorists make three sets of conceptual moves which, deliberately or not, constitute attempts to resolve the elite-problem while circumventing this choice. However, what I have shown above is that none of them succeed. They either complicate the elite-leader problem without resolving it, or resolve it only by removing the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide in all but name. I summarise these ways of navigating the contradiction in Table 1 below.
Attempts to resolve the elite-leader problem.
Popular (or plebeian) elitisms as variations upon populism
Yet another way out of this elite-leader problem would be to redefine populism’s ‘people’/‘elite’ divide to better resemble the relations between low ‘people’ and high ‘leaders’ which elite-leader ideologies seem to exhibit. This is what Ostiguy and Moffitt, (2020: 61) and others (Barr, 2009; Casullo, 2020) inch towards doing, when they propose that the populist leader takes on the role of a ‘father and (older) brother’. However, it is not a path that I advocate. This choice would resolve one conceptual problem, but create a new one: how instead to theorise all those ideologies which construct a ‘people’/‘elite’ divide without portraying the leaders in elite terms? My position is not that it is impossible to construct leaders in non-elite terms. It may be, as Bernard Manin (1997) argues, that in electing candidates, one inevitably looks for characteristics which single them out. Yet it does follow that these features must be the ones in reference to which a hierarchy of status is defined in a populist ideology. Not all leaders need be constructed as elites. The left populisms of Lean-Luc Mélenchon’s Gauche Français and Gustav Petro’s Pacto Histórico are both good examples of how populisms can construct leaders which do not occupy positions of high status (Chiocchetti, 2019; Kajsiu, 2022, 2025). So are a number of potential elite-leader ideologies, before they took power, such as Erdoğan, Modi, Morales, Zuma and Orbán. Therefore, I advocate keeping the ‘people’/‘elite’ divide in populism and preserving its specificity. In parallel, I propose looking for other concepts through which to analyse elite-leader ideologies.
One could, of course, still analyse at least some elite-leader ideologies as populist in the sense of democracy-disfiguring or democracy reviving or similar, to the exclusion of a ‘people’/‘elite divide. However, this would leave unaddressed what social imaginaries elite-leader ideologies construct instead of an ‘people’/‘elite’ divide. To address how such ideologies’ social imaginaries can be analysed, I look for the concepts which can be applied in combination with others, in the analysis of elite-leader ideologies.
Schoor (2019) offers the beginnings of an answer. She critiques the ideational theory of populism. She elucidates that it sets both populism and elitism as bifurcatory -isms which stand in opposition to pluralism. She argues that these three supposed opposites need not be thought of as binaries; between them are dimensions of variation in which these -isms mix. I agree; I build on her ideas by theorising in what ways ideologies might depart from these ideals. The first step which I propose is to recognise that elite-leader ideologies do not bifurcate the social into two sets of actors, they trifurcate it into three. Populisms imagine the social divided into ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. At least some of the elite-leader ideologies in question imagine the social divided into ‘the people’, an elite friend and an elite enemy, with the former two allied against the latter. Even ideologies which construct just a single elite-leader of the people alongside ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ are better understood as trifurcatory; a category of one is a category nonetheless. Even if one insisted that such single-person elite-leader ideologies did not qualify as trifurcatory, many elite-leader ideologies construct not lone leaders, but bands of leaders, who staff movements, parties, parliaments, cabinets and the like. I am not the first to propose a theory of an ideology which thus constructs an alliance between a popular and an elite actor. For instance, Schedler (1996) and Robert Barr (2009) offer formulations of such as part of their own theories of populism or equivalent. However, unlike them, I theorise such trifurcatory discourses which stands apart from populism.
In the language of ideology studies, this distinction is straightforward to draw but to do so in discourse-theoretic terms requires further conceptual work. Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 115) are clear that ‘antagonism does not admit tertium quid’: the existence of a third element. For them, when an ‘equivalential chain’ runs to the edges of the social, all are folded into the ‘us’ or the ‘them’. To theorise trifurcation within this framework involves interrogating the meaning of ‘equivalence’. For Laclau and Mouffe, to render demand-makers as equivalent is not to construct them as the same but simply not to draw-out differences between them. However, there is no reason why a discourse cannot construct entities as equivalent and foreground such differences simultaneously. To return to and extend their metaphor, a chain of equivalences may be kinked.
In such an interrupted chain, the demand-makers before this kink could be presented as equivalent to one another without complication and constructed as one heterogeneous ‘people’. The demand-makers after the kink would be presented equivalent to one another without complication and constructed as ‘the people’s elite leaders’. The demands of ‘people’ and their ‘elite ally’ would only be rendered equivalent with complication: equivalent in spite of the significant differences between them. All those in the chain would stand in shared opposition to a ‘them’, and so would form a united ‘us’. Nevertheless, within that thin and fragmentary ‘us’ coalition, ‘people’ and ‘elite ally’ would stand apart as distinct thick identities, separated by the low and high status. Perhaps, as the unity of the ‘us’ would be weaker, there would be ‘a lessening of the charge of negativity attaching to the antagonisms’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 132), but what of it? Discourses which generate weaker antagonisms should not be of a priori lesser interest to the analyst than those which generate stronger ones. Therefore, a trifurcatory discourse produces both an equivalence across and a difference within an ‘us’.
The universe of possible trifurcatory discourses may be large indeed. However, my focus is the elite-leader ideologies, hitherto analysed as populisms, which I have brought into view above. Below, I outline four categories of trifurcatory discourses. For reasons of brevity, they remain only sketches. Nevertheless, they offer the beginnings of another way to analyse elite-leader ideologies. One could conceptualise them as aspects of ideologies, or if one prefers, (paper-)thin-centred ideologies which always appear in combination with others. Some of them can be combined with one another; ideologies can simultaneously fit into more than one of the four categories which I outline below. The examples which I present bear this out. Some politicians’ ideologies exemplify more than one of these categories at once. The conceptual boundaries between them are also simple to transgress. As such, some of the examples which I highlight sit in one of these categories at some point in time, and another category at another point.
The elite-leader ideologies in question all construct ‘the people’. However, as this ‘people’ sits alongside an ‘elite’, it is constructed not as ‘the totality of the community’ (Laclau, 2005a: 81), but as Camila Vergara (2020b) theorises, a part of it. ‘The people’ becomes ‘the ordinary people’, ‘the commoners’ or ‘the plebeians’ without being simultaneously constructed as the whole. To encapsulate this construction of people-as-plebs alongside a good elite as dual political subjects, the best descriptors are plebeian and elitist. As these ideologies attribute agency foremost to the elite, I make elitism the core term and plebeian the modifier: plebeian elitism. With vernacular use in mind, I use this term interchangeably with popular elitism.
While I borrow the term plebeianism and the notion of people-as-part from Vergara (2020b) (for other theories of plebeianism, see Breaugh, 2013; Green, 2016), I do not embrace her plebeianism wholesale. The identity of Vergara’s people-as-plebs is defined through their opposition to a dominating elite. They are placed at the bottom of a spectrum of hierarchy. In contrast, in the ideologies in question, the identity of ‘the people’ is generated in reference to their differentiation from but also friendliness with ‘elite leaders’. In parallel, they are defined in reference to themselves which are located, depending on the ideology in question, below ‘the elite leaders’, and sometimes below ‘the people’ itself. Therefore, the peoples constructed in these ideologies vary. Some are peoples-as-down-and-outs, but others are peoples-as-commoners, people-as-yeomen or people-as-the-respectable, inflected towards middle or even the middle-upper positions on some vertical spectrum of hierarchy.
The first trialism I advance is popular elitism proper. A popular (or plebeian) elitism constructs ‘the people’ as a part. It constructs ‘the corrupt’ as an elite them opposed to ‘the people’ and located above them on a vertical spectrum. However, it does not locate them at the top. It places ‘the leaders of the people’ above ‘the corrupt’ in turn. It defines those leaders as ‘the moral elite’, ‘the super-elite’ ‘the vanguard elite’ or equivalent. This good elite is not part of ‘the people.’ Nor does it necessarily embody it. However, it does act for it, as a friend or guardian. It struggles against ‘the corrupt’, deploying its elite abilities in service of ‘the people.’ It is an elite ally of ‘the people.’ The ‘caesaro-plebeianism’ proposed by Stavrakakis et al. (2016) to theorise later-years Chavez is a likely candidate of plebeian elitism. So is the speech of his now-deposed successor, Nicolás Maduro, albeit articulated with an anti-imperialist and socialist nationalism (see, for instance, Maduro 2022). So too is the (vanguardist) ‘elitist plebeianism’ of liberation leaders in Africa (Melber, 2025; Nakayi and Wiegratz, 2024; Paget, 2021, 2024). However, there are popular elitisms which do not depict ‘the people’ so lowly as Chavez’s ‘poor’ or Magufuli’s ‘downtrodden.’ While Trump describe ‘the people’ in terms of victimhood, they also describes them as good, virtuous, and, increasingly, prosperous. As such, in this and other popular elitisms, ‘the people’, are constructed as respectable, rather than as subaltern.
The second is a popular (or plebeian) counter-elitism. Something analogous to it has been analysed as populism by Caiani and Kröll (2017) and Schoor (2019). Like populism as ‘people’/‘elite’ divide, it constructs ‘the people’ below and an ‘elite’ them above. Like popular elitism proper, it constructs ‘the people’ as a part. Unlike popular elitism proper, it imagines ‘the elite’ as a them and ‘the moral counter-elite’ or ‘outsider elite’ as entities that operate on the same level of status-hierarchy; the counter-elite is positioned neither above nor below the elite them. It does not claim that ‘the counter-elite’ embodies ‘the people.’ However, it does portray them as acting on their behalf by engaging in a struggle against ‘the elite.’ Many of its likely instantiations can be found in the European and North American radical right in opposition. While later Trump articulates a popular elitism proper, Trump in opposition often articulated a popular counter-elitism. So did Boris Johnson, as he agitated against an ‘elite’ even while leaning into his aristocratic pedigree and classical education (Schoor, 2019). So too did Jörg Haider and Pim Fortuyn. So do the extreme right in Italy and Germany which Caiani and Kröll (2017) analyse as separating themselves from their supporters through knowledgeable/ignorant, saviour/victim and leader/follower distinctions. Moving from the empirical to the theoretical world, the vision of struggle in the so-called aristo-populism of Patrick Deneen (2023: 28 and 54), in which a ‘self-conscious aristoi’ joins the many to confront an oppressive liberal elite, fits this category.
The third is elitist post-populism. The term ‘post-populism’ is developed most elaborately by Dani Filc (2011). However, the populisms which he theorises such post-populisms succeed are not defined in accordance with any of the theories elaborated above. By elitist post-populism, I mean an ideology which locates the actors it constructs at different low/high positions at different points in (constructed) time. Specifically, I mean a trifurcatory ideology which constructs ‘the people’ below, ‘the moral elite’ above, and ‘the fallen, corrupt elite.’ This ideology constructs a prior point in time, during which ‘the fallen, corrupt elite’ was located as high or higher than ‘the moral elite.’ However, it also constructs a recent process by which that ‘corrupt elite’ fell, or was thrown-down, and it locates them in a low position at the present time. Such a ‘fallen elite’ lacks the might to overpower the regime, but can still, spitefully, employ weapons of the weak against it and ‘the people’, such as rumour-mongering, division-sowing, sabotaging and trouble-making. Accordingly, ‘the moral elite’ must stand against and over them, or even embark on a campaign to suppress or eliminate them. As such, elitist post-populisms are simultaneously popular elitisms proper; they construct equivalent actors in equivalent hierarchical locations. Elitist post-populisms are also the easy chronological successors to populisms (and indeed popular counter-elitisms). It is easy to imagine how a populism might construct the ‘them’ as ‘the corrupt elite’ while in opposition, and then shift to the constructing the same them as ‘the fallen, corrupt elite’ once in power. However, post-populist elitism need not be preceded by a populism (or popular counter-elitism). Elitist post-populisms could equally be articulated in the absence of such a preceding ideology in a reinterpretation of past events.
A likely candidate for ascription as a post-populist is Erdoğan in office. Studies show that Erdoğan certainly did construct a struggle between a ‘people’ and a republican ‘elite’ (Dinçşahin, 2012). However, over his 22-year ascendancy, his discourse ‘shapeshifted’ (Genc, 2019). On one level, he transformed his populist bifurcation into a nationalist one (Esen and Gumuscu, 2023). However, on another level, he constructed an increasingly weak ‘old elite’ (Günay and Dzihic, 2016). Erdoğan’s remarks about the opposition upon his 2014 re-election that ‘they may have cursed us. They may have insulted us. We have stomached most of them’ (Hurriyet, 2014) reads as a portrayal of an such an impotent and bitter fallen elite. 2 So does Javier Milei’s sung pronouncement, in words adapted from La Renga’s Panic Show, that ‘I am the king of a lost world . . . I eat all the elite for breakfast’ (El País, 2024). Stephen Miller’s portrayal of ‘left-wing organizations that are promoting violence’ (Vance, 2025) was a portrayal of malign-intentioned fallen elites. While the struggle from opposition which Deneen (2023: 54 and 128) outlines is a popular counter-elitist one, the new mixed regime he envisages in which the aristoi rules over the many while rooting out the remnants of the liberal system, is such an elitist post-populist one.
The fourth is contradictory populism-elitism. Ideology studies and discourse analyses inevitably confront contradiction, incoherence, and polysemy in the texts and performances that they examine. They often endeavour to distil coherence from them and analyse internally consistent meaning systems. However, these contradictions in meaning are significant. Indeed, politicians worldwide deploy incoherence and contradiction deliberately and sometimes artfully. Analysts of ideologies should not contradict themselves, but they should recognise and theorise the contradictions in the ideologies they interpret. This is key to making sense of many elite-leader meaning systems which have been previously analysed as populist. Several studies recognise that particular populisms make contradictory claims (de Cleen et al., 2018; Stavrakakis et al., 2016). However, they do not recognise these contradictions as features which distinguish these ideologies from populisms; they should.
There are two equivalent ways to theorise such a contradictory ideology. One is to theorise an ideological configuration of ideas which contains a contradiction. Another is to conceptualise a pair of ideologies. In this second rendering, each ideology is internally consistent, and each is identical to the other, save for some set of contradictions across them (like, for instance, whether the social is divided into two or three). This pair of ideologies is articulated in parallel. This creates two contradictory layers of meaning woven together, in which each oscillates between foreground and background. To encounter and interpret such an interwoven pair of ideologies is to encounter them as one ideology, in which there are disjunctures of meaning, switches between one subtly different set of underpinning ideas and another. Once one recognises that an ideology can thus be contradictory, it is simple to theorise a contradictory populist elitism. It involves the construction a bifurcatory ‘people’/‘elite’ divide, but in parallel, the construction of a trifurcatory divide in which ‘the leaders’ are a third elite actor. This inconsistency in meanings may involve ‘the leaders’ serving as a ‘signifier of abundance’ (Ostiguy et al., 2020: 60), who is constructed in multiple incompatible ways at once. It may involve ‘the leader’ serving as an embodiment of ‘the people’ such that ‘the leader’ both is and is not ‘the people.’ As these are novel theoretical terms, applications of this concept in particular should be tentative. Nevertheless, Chavez’s claim that ‘I am a people’ (GlobovisionRCTV, 2010) while flaunting his stately grandeur and political power is a likely candidate. Other leaders who have been analysed as embodying ‘the people’ but who also present themselves in elite terms are possible cases of such contradictory populism-elitisms. Trump is among them. He tended towards a popular counter-elitism in opposition, and a (post-populist) popular elitism proper in office. Yet at times, especially before 2025, he flitted between these imaginaries and populist ones. Sometimes he leant in his elitist persona, as described above. At other times, he sought to minimise it.
With these distinctive constructions of the social field come distinctive conceptions of representation and government. The anti-establishmentarianism which Urbinati sees as central to populist ideology stands in tension with the elitism of these ideologies. Equally, if the people are the part rather than the whole, then why would this people as part be sovereign, and why would alternative opinions be illegitimate? Of course, just as an ideology can integrate two contradictory visions of the social, it can sustain these sorts of tensions too. Nevertheless, the popular elitisms outlined above lend themselves to a domain of elitist conceptions of representative government. These include ocular democracy (Green 2009), in which citizens maintain a watchful gaze over their rulers and the sort of the plebiscitarian rule which others theorise (Illés and László, 2025; Körösényi et al., 2020; Urbinati, 2014). Equally, they include elected aristocracy, in which the role of the citizens is to selected best rulers (Manin 1997); not least the so-called aristo-populism advocated by Deneen (2023). Perhaps they even include ascendant notions of plebeian tribunes revived by John McCormick (2011), and indeed plebeian dictatorship revived by Vergara (2020a).
Therefore, reinterpreting populisms as (trialist) popular elitisms throws into a new light the relationship between the ideologies in questions and their accompanying substantive political projects. Many studies argue that populists in office amass power (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015) and reconfigure states and societies in the interests of themselves and their allies (Dávid-Barrett, 2025). These trends are especially acute among so-called ‘populisms from above’ (Appadurai, 2020). Yet studies understand these material projects to lie in at least partial tension with their undergirding ideologies. These ideologies may legitimise or otherwise enable state capture and grand corruption. Yet in sociological terms, they turn the leaders ever-more into the very elites which they vilify. The conventional account is that populists deflect attention from or deny their own material elite status through the ‘obfuscation of privilege’ (de Cleen and Ruiz Casado, 2023: 12–13). Yet if one recognises that alleged populisms in fact embrace principles of societal hierarchy and integrate them into trialist social imaginaries, it becomes apparent that they need not deny and may instead celebrate their elite status. Increasing political and perhaps even socioeconomic inequality is not in tension with, but potentially in alignment with their legitimising ideas.
Altogether, in this article, I have brought into view a subset of the ideologies and leaders across contexts and across the world which have been analysed hitherto as populist. These ideologies are profoundly and proudly inegalitarian. They denounce one elite, but hail another. In their open construction of a good ‘elite’, and their division of the social field into not two, but three, they are best understood not varieties of populism, but variations upon populism; ideologies which are adjacent to but distinct from it. My intention is not to offer the definitive reading of these ideologies, but begin the project of developing a theoretical toolset through which to analyse them. Thereby, I hope to chart a course for ideology studies which moves with, but also beyond, populism studies (de Cleen and Glynos, 2021).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article. He thanks Paul Taggart for the encouragement to write this article, and to all who supported him on the long journey to getting it published.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
