Frank Bruni is wrong.

In his New York Times column on Feb. 8, “The Donald Trump theory of Bernie Sanders”, Bruni cites Sanders as the anti-Trump populist who could potentially beat Donald Trump in November.

It would indeed be wonderful if Bernie were to beat Trump. But if he does it will not be because he is a populist. He isn’t. Maverick and popular maybe, but don’t mistake him for a populist.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Bruni writes: “Sanders is a populist of the left as surely as Trump is a populist of the right.”

I beg you, Mr Bruni, to step back and take a wider view of populism and see that Trump fits right into the mold, while Bernie Sanders doesn’t.

Populism is not just about a total belief in your ego and an authentic disregard for your hair. Populism is a kind of opportunism that only catches fire in just the right conditions. It requires popular anger at perceived political failure to rectify some national humiliation caused by external forces.

Look at Putin, Trump, Farage, Johnson, and many more — they have all won popularity by crying foul, rightly or wrongly, at some harm done to their nation by supranational forces — it might be unfair treaty obligations, imposition of financial strictures, enforced openness to immigration. In Putin’s case the disastrous 1990s were an authentic national humiliation, largely due to Boris Yeltsin’s inept but U.S.-sponsored reforms, that were crying out for rectification. In Britain, the Brexit slogan of “Take back control” was an irresistible life raft for a nation drowning in a flood of negative media articles about immigration and the malign forces of Europe.

Trump exploited an even more bounteous backlash in 2016. Americans were scarred by economic pain, sick of Washington’s political games, frightened by Islamic terrorism and the rise of China. These were difficult issues for normal politicians. But Trump sensed that Americans were confused, vulnerable, and wide open to a patriarchal promise to turn the page and “drain the swamp”. Voters turned a blind eye to the mendacity, the hypocrisy, the sexism and xenophobia, and lapped up the obviously false promises. This was not some special Trumpian magic, it was a populist response to the popular mood.

Populists are opportunists. When traditional politics cannot meet popular demand, the snake oil salesmen arrive. They lie brazenly, they stir up fear and loathing, and they claim constitutional rectitude while paying scant regard to convention. And they attract thugs. It’s a formidable combination.

Thanks to the 1990s boom in international law and globalization, supra-national bogeymen abound, starting with the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and the more interfering bits of the United Nations. And it’s getting easier and easier to break the international rules, with Trump and Putin setting the pace.

So the kind of populism that has succeeded around the world is not what Bernie Sanders can offer. Populism is not some variant of revolution, just because it involves political upheaval and overturns the status quo. Populism is more like anti-revolution.

Consider this: revolutions occur in non-democracies, when an internationally-connected movement uses violence to overturn the political system in the name of rights and justice.

By contrast, populists blossom in democracies, invoking national sovereignty to quash what others might regard as international justice — migration rights, observance of treaties, payment of debts, or investigations by international courts.

Democracy gives populists a wonderful cloak of legitimacy as they stir up fear of some unquantified foreign threat. And that legitimized nationalism is the magic formula which explains why supporters of Trump — and Putin and Johnson and other populists — stick to them despite the lies and the arrogance.

In the United States, Trump’s populism has captured around half the country. It will be very hard — nigh on impossible — for Sanders to pull off the same trick by claiming to be the populist champion of the other half. A simple anti-Trump approach will leave him fishing for votes in the pool of people who have not already plumped for Trump, making defeat an arithmetical certainty.

Neither Sanders nor any potential Democratic challenger can imagine they are a populist. This was the trap that sank Jeremy Corbyn in Britain’s election in December. It is a dangerous delusion to think that voters not attracted by reactionary nationalism are simply waiting for a disheveled firebrand on the other end of the political spectrum. That’s not how populism works.