After Brexit, and with a Trump victory in November still a possibility, liberals are in a panic about populism. They have struggled to comprehend what a figure like Trump is about ideologically – hence the enormous amount of ink spilt over the question of whether he is or isn’t a fascist – and the rather hapless attempt to coin the term “Trumpism” (Trump, you see, is really a representative of Trumpism). Alternatively, liberals have focused on actual Brexit and Trump supporters and jumped to conclusions about what they think and, especially, feel. As a result, the content of what, after all, is an “-ism” – that is to say, a political belief system – has become conflated with the supposed psychological states of its supporters, namely feelings of resentment and relative deprivation.

It is correct that in Europe and the United States (at least in the case of Trump) less educated males are the main constituency of what is commonly referred to as populism; it is true that in surveys many voters register their sense that the country as a whole is declining (an assessment that does not necessarily depend on their personal economic situation; it is simply not true that every supporter of what can plausibly be classified as a populist party is an objective “loser in globalisation”). But all this is like saying that we best understand the intellectual content of social democracy if we keep redescribing its voters as workers envious of rich people. The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronising to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austria’s Norbert Hofer reaching out to his supporters. Photograph: Lisi Niesner/EPA

Instead of speculating about the motives of voters, we need to pin down what populism really is. And that can only be done by paying attention to what populist leaders themselves are saying. The crucial point is this: it’s not enough to be critical of elites in order to be classified as a populist. Otherwise, anyone finding fault with the status quo in, for instance, the US, UK, Greece and Italy would by definition be a populist – and, whatever else one thinks about, for instance, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Syriza or Beppe Grillo’s insurgent Five Star Movement in Italy, it’s hard to deny that their attacks on the status quo can often be justified. Also, virtually every presidential candidate in the US would be a populist, if criticism of existing elites is all there is to the phenomenon: everyone, after all, claims to run “against Washington”.

When in opposition, populists for sure criticise elites. But there is also always something else they do that is the tell-tale sign of populism: they claim that they, and only they, represent the people. Think, for instance, of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing his critics in the country: “We are the people. Who are you?” Of course, he knew that they were Turks, too.

The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral. Populists’ political competitors and critics are inevitably condemned as part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say when running for office; once in government, they will not recognise anything such as a legitimate opposition. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people at all: there are American citizens, and then there are what George C Wallace, an arch-populist of the 1960s often viewed as a precursor of Trump, always called “real Americans” (white, God-fearing, hard-working, gun-owning and so on). Thus, populists do not just claim: we are the 99%. According to their own logic, they actually have to say: we are the 100%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage, centre, claimed the Brexit vote was a victory for ‘real people’. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Think of Nigel Farage celebrating the Brexit vote by claiming that it had been a “victory for real people” (making the 48% of the British electorate who had opposed taking the UK out of the European Union somehow less than real – or, rather, questioning their status as members of the political community). Or consider a deeply revealing remark by Trump that went virtually unnoticed, thanks to the frequency with which the New York billionaire has made scandalous statements. At a campaign rally in May, he announced that “the only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything”.

The conventional wisdom that populists want to bring politics closer to the people or even clamour for direct democracy could not be more mistaken. They do say that they are the only ones who care for the “people’s will”, but they are hardly interested in an open-ended, bottom-up process where citizens debate policy issues. What populists take to be the people’s real will is derived from what they stipulate to be the real people. What’s worse, “the people’s will” that populists claim they will just faithfully execute – in that sense denying their own role as leaders and also any real political responsibility – is a fiction. There is no single political will, let alone a single political opinion, in a modern, complex, pluralist – in short, enormously messy – democracy. Populists put words into the mouth of what is after all their own creation: the fiction of the homogeneous, always righteous people. And then they say, like Trump, “I am your voice.” Or think again of Erdoğan claiming this July: “What does my people want? The death penalty!” Never mind that he had asked for its reintroduction first.

This split between the actual citizenry and “the real people” explains why populists so frequently question election outcomes when they aren’t the winners (which, after all, seems to falsify their claim to be the only legitimate representative of the people): populists only lose if “the silent majority” – shorthand for “the real people” – has not had a chance to speak, or worse, has been prevented from expressing itself. Hence the frequent invocation of conspiracy theories by populists: something going on behind the scenes has to account for the fact that corrupt elites are still keeping the people down. Before Trump was assured of the Republican nomination, he kept alluding to fraud, and with a defeat in the November election looming, he is already trying to discredit Hillary Clinton’s victory.

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Recently, the rightwing populist Freedom Party in Austria successfully contested the outcome of the presidential election in May. Its candidate, Norbert Hofer, had kept confronting his rival, the economics professor Alexander van der Bellen, with the claim: “You have the haute volée [high society] behind you; I have the people with me.” What clearly follows: if the people’s politician doesn’t win, there must be something wrong with the system.

Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the “masses” who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in “revolt”. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people. This is why one cannot score points against figures such as Geert Wilders (who has spent his entire adult life in the Dutch parliament) or Trump by pointing out that they themselves are not exactly ordinary people. The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.

Does all this matter in practice? It’s certainly worrying that populists cast doubt on election outcomes and try to question the legitimacy of all other politicians (to the point of wanting to lock them up, or even suggesting they could be shot, if we believe Trump’s recent musings). But this might also lead one to conclude that populists live in a kind of political fantasy world and hence are bound to fail in practice. Many liberal observers think populists only offer simplistic prescriptions that will quickly be exposed as unworkable, or even that populists, deep down, are afraid of actually winning, because they are clueless about what to do next (an impression confirmed by Farage’s flight after the referendum). Conventional wisdom has it that populist parties are primarily protest parties and that protest cannot govern, since, logically, one cannot protest against oneself: anti-politics cannot generate real policies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Viktor Orban at an election rally for the Fidesz party in Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad.

Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, for instance, would always point to the dark machinations of the opposition – that is to say, the officially deposed “oligarchy” – and the US trying to sabotage his “21st-century socialism”. Erdoğan would present himself as a plucky underdog; he’d forever be the street fighter from Istanbul’s tough neighbourhood Kasımpaşa, bravely confronting the old, Kemalist establishment of the Turkish republic, long after he had begun to concentrate all political, economic and, not least, cultural power in his own hands. One little noted side-effect of the recent failed putsch has been to reinforce this self-presentation as struggling with the people against the visible and invisible forces of evil – the military and the shadowy Gülen network – as opposed to the face of a sultan-in-the-making, holed up in his pompous presidential palace, which Erdoğan had been showing in the past few years.

More worryingly still: when populists have sufficiently large majorities in parliament, they try to build regimes that might still look like democracies, but are actually designed to perpetuate the power of the populists (as supposedly the only authentic representatives of the people). To start with, populists colonise or “occupy” the state. Think of Hungary and Poland as recent examples. One of the first changes Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz sought after coming to power in Hungary in 2010 was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable them to place loyalists in what should have been non-partisan bureaucratic positions. Both Fidesz and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland also immediately moved against the independence of courts. Media authorities were captured; the signal went out that journalists should not report in ways that violate the interests of the nation (which were equated with the interests of the governing party). Whoever criticised any of these measures was vilified as doing the bidding of the old elites, or as being outright traitors (Kaczyński spoke of “Poles of the worst sort” who supposedly have “treason in their genes”).

The Austrian arch-populist Jörg Haider would hand out €100 bills to 'his people' on the streets of Carinthia

Such a strategy to consolidate or even perpetuate power is not exclusive to populists, of course. What is special about populists is that they can undertake such state colonisation openly: why, populists can ask indignantly, should the people not take possession of their state through their only rightful representatives? Why should those who obstruct the genuine popular will in the name of civil service neutrality not be purged?

Populists also engage in the exchange of material and immaterial favours for mass support. Again, such conduct is not exclusive to populists: many parties reward their clientele for turning up at the voting booths, though few would go so far as Austrian arch-populist Jörg Haider, who would literally hand out €100 bills to “his people” on the streets in Carinthia. What – once more – makes populists distinctive is that they can engage in such practices openly and with moral justifications: after all, for them, only some people are really “the people” and hence deserving of the support by what is rightfully their state. Without this thought it’s hard to understand how Erdoğan could have politically survived all the revelations about his regime’s corruption, which began to emerge in 2013.

Some populists have been lucky to have the resources to build up entire classes to support their regimes. Chávez benefited from the oil boom. For regimes in central and eastern Europe, funds from the European Union have been the equivalent of oil to some Arab authoritarian states: governments can strategically employ the subsidies to buy support or at least keep citizens quiet. What’s more, they can form social strata that conform to their image of the ideal people – and that are deeply loyal to the regime. Erdoğan continues to enjoy the unshakable support of an Anatolian middle class that emerged with the economic boom under his AK party (and that also embodies the image of the ideal, devout Turk, as opposed to westernised, secular elites and minorities such as the Kurds). Hungary’s Fidesz has supported a new group that combines economic success, family values (having children brings many benefits) and religious devotion into a whole that conforms to Orbán’s vision of a “Christian-national” culture.

There is one further element of populist statecraft that is important to understand. Populists in power tend to be harsh (to say the least) with non-governmental organisations that criticise them. Again, harassing civil society is not a practice exclusive to populists. But for them opposition from within civil society creates a particular symbolic problem: it potentially undermines their claim to exclusive moral representation. Hence it becomes crucial to argue (and supposedly “prove”) that civil society isn’t civil society at all, and that what can seem like popular opposition has nothing to do with the real people.

This explains why Putin, Orbán and PiS in Poland have gone out of their way to try to discredit NGOs as being controlled by outside powers (and also legally declare them to be “foreign agents”). In a sense, they try to make the unified people in whose name they had been speaking all along a reality on the ground: by silencing or discrediting those who refuse their representative claim (and, sometimes, by giving them every incentive to exit the country and thereby to separate themselves from the pure people; 500,000 Hungarians have left in recent years). Thus, a PiS government or Fidesz government will not only create a PiS state or a Fidesz state – it will also seek to bring into existence a PiS people and a Fidesz people. In other words, populists create the homogeneous people in whose name they had been speaking all along: populism becomes something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rally for Donald Trump in Austin, Texas, in August. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

There is a tragic irony in all this: populism in power commits the very political sins of which it accuses elites: excluding citizens and usurping the state. What the establishment supposedly has always done, populists will also end up doing. Only with a clear justification and, perhaps, even a clear conscience. Hence it is a profound illusion to think that populists, as potential leaders of Gray’s “revolt of the masses”, can improve our democracies. Populists are just different elites who try to grab power with the help of a collective fantasy of political purity.

So how should we react to the current wave of populism in the west? To begin with, we should stop the inflationary use of the term “populism”. There is no reason to put Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza and Podemos into the same category as Trump, Farage and Erdoğan – only the latter group claims exclusively to represent the one authentic people, whereas the former are just more or less plausible attempts to reinvent social democracy. Second, one should call populists out for what they are: a danger to democracy and not a useful corrective for too much elite power, as some commentators naively assume. This doesn’t mean that one should avoid engaging them politically: talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists. Otherwise, one ends up in a paradoxical situation: because populists exclude, we exclude them; because they demonise their opponents, we demonise them. Instead, one should concede that some of their complaints may have been justified (Erdoğan and Chávez did not invent the notion that many citizens in their respective countries had been excluded from the political process; rising inequality across the west is not a figment of the populist imagination).

Finally, one has to face up to a genuine conflict that characterises our time (but which is hardly about “elites versus the people”): on one side there are the advocates for more openness; on the other, the proponents of some kind of closure. Openness can mean more porous borders and the recognition of minorities inside a country (a commitment to openness can also translate into more trade agreements – but, contrary to what neoliberals insinuate, it doesn’t have to). Demands for closure can come in the form of legitimate concerns about democracy. “Take back control” is not necessarily a populist imperative, whereas “We have been robbed of our country” is likely to mean: “The government is un-British or un-American by my definition of Britishness or Americanness”, or “Too many other citizens don’t look like us”. It can also hide outright racism or a desire to preserve traditional hierarchies (on closer inspection Trump’s “Making America Great Again” turns out to mean: “Make sure white males continue to rule”).

It’s tempting to think that all liberals have to do is make these conflicts ones about interests, not identity, and win back voters willing to back populists by offering trade agreements more favourable to workers (and, right now, hammer away at the point that Trump’s actual economic policy proposals, especially the enormous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, are a slap in the face of the working class). All this undoubtedly has to be part of an anti-populist strategy. But liberals also have to tread on the dangerous territory of identity politics. They have to argue against the populist fantasies of a “pure people”, and instead fashion attractive and, above all, pluralist conceptions of Britishness and Americanness.

• Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton and a fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. His book What Is Populism? is published this month by the University of Pennsylvania.