The End of Populism

One of the most frequent questions asked with regard to the rise of populism that we have seen recently is how to combat that rise. The focus here is on contemporary cases of populism and the natural lines of enquiry are to ask what has caused that populism or what factors have or have not inhibited its development. But another way to approach this question is to look back at where populism has become a significant force in the past and then has faded to see if we can draw lessons. This amounts to looking at the ends of populism. This paper is an attempt to look across a set of such cases. The paper deliberately looks at a diverse set of cases to draw broad lessons. The cases include the People’s Party at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, Huey Long in Louisiana in the 1930s, Peron(ism) in Argentina, Poujadism in France in the 1950s, Fujimori in Peru and Menem in Argentina in the 2000s.