Quotes from Jan-Werner Müller

The leader correctly discerns what we correctly think, and sometimes he might just think the correct thing a little bit before we do.

This is the core claim of populism: only some of the people are really the people. Think of Nigel Farage celebrating the Brexit vote by claiming that it had been a "victory for real people" (thus making the 48 percent of the British electorate who had opposed taking the UK out of the European Union somehow less than real—or, put more directly, questioning their status as proper members of the political community).

What the "old establishment" or "corrupt, immoral elites" supposedly have always done, the populists will also end up doing—only, one would have thought, without guilt and with a supposedly democratic justification.

Even for the most minimal definitions of democracy—as a mechanism to ensure peaceful turnovers in power after a process of popular will-formation —it is crucial that citizens be well informed about politics; otherwise, governments can hardly be held accountable.

We have to distinguish illiberal societies from places where freedom of speech and assembly, media pluralism, and the protection of minorities are under attack. These political rights are not just about liberalism (or the rule of law); they are constitutive of democracy as such.

even if ballots are not stuffed by the ruling party on the day of the election, a vote can be undemocratic if the opposition can never make its case properly and journalists are prevented from reporting a government's failures.

In short, the problem is never the populist's imperfect capacity to represent the people's will; rather, it's always the institutions that somehow produce the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities.

In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.

egy PiS-kormány vagy egy Fidesz-kormány nem csupán egy PiS-államot vagy egy Fidesz-államot alakít ki; arra törekszik, hogy létrehozza a PiS-népet, illetve a Fidesz-népet (gyakran valamiféle ezzel megbízott, kormányközeli civil társadalom segédletével). A populisták megteremtik azt a homogén népet, aminek mindig is a nevében beszéltek.

populism is strong in places with weak party systems. Where previously coherent and entrenched party systems broke down, chances for populists clearly increased

Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of moral and symbolic- not an empirical- nature, it cannot be disproven.

populists have no problem with representation as long as they are the representatives; similarly, they are fine with elites as long as they are the elites leading the people.

In Italy, it is not Beppe Grillo's complaints about Italy's la casta that should lead one to worry about him as a populist but his assertion that his movement wants (and deserves) nothing less than 100 percent of the seats in parliament, because all other contenders are supposedly corrupt and immoral.

Opportunism has suffered the emasculation of being converted into a principle;

A "crisis" is not an objective state of affairs but a matter of interpretation. Populist will often eagerly frame a situation as a crisis, calling it an existential threat, because such a crisis then serves to legitimate populist governance.

The danger to democracies today is not some comprehensive ideology that systematically denies democratic ideals. The danger is populism—a degraded form of democracy that promises to make good on democracy's highest ideals ("Let the people rule!"). The danger comes, in other words, from within the democratic world—the political actors posing the danger speak the language of democratic values.

Not everyone who criticizes elites is a populist. In addition to being antielitist, populists are antipluralist. They claim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. When in opposition, populists will necessarily insist that elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogeneous entity whose will cannot err.

populism is inherently hostile to the mechanisms and, ultimately, the values commonly associated with constitutionalism: constraints on the will of the majority, checks and balances, protections for minorities, and even fundamental rights.

populists are not generally "against institutions," and they are not destined to self-destruct once in power. They only oppose those institutions that, in their view, fail to produce the morally (as opposed to empirically) correct political outcomes. And that happens only when they are in opposition. Populists in power are fine with institutions—which is to say, their institutions.

Populists are, after all, often deemed to be heirs of the Jacobins.

Populist constitutions are designed to limit the power of nonpopulists, even when the latter form the government. Conflict then becomes inevitable. The constitution ceases to be a framework for politics and instead is treated as a purely partisan instrument to capture the polity.

Contrary to what liberals like to believe sometimes, not everything populists say is necessarily demagogic or mendacious—but, ultimately, their self-presentations is based on one big lie: that there is a singular people of which they are the only representatives. To fight them, one needs to understand, and undermine, that core claim.

Principled antipluralism and the commitment to "direct representation" explain another feature of populist politics