Populism’s elite-leader problem: From Bukele, Magufuli, and Trump to a theory of popular elitisms

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.