...often used pejoratively against liberals and progressives, as well as figures on the right.
here's another perspective:
___populism is neither right nor left—nor anti-science—by definition. It is merely a concern, whether genuine or feigned, for the common people. Today’s most prominent populists include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Bernie Sanders—people who base their policies on valid evidence and have given their lives to fighting everything that the far right represents.
Indeed, the most crucial progressive political movements of our time—Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, climate marches and gun-reform rallies—are by nature populist. Founded at ground level, often by victims of racism, sexism, environmental injustice, and lax gun laws, they were then energized by the fed-up masses.
Similarly, during the 1890s, a group of Kansas farmers—bankrupt due to falling crop prices, drought, greedy railroad monopolies, and a federal government serving powerful interests—coined the phrase “populist” to describe an alliance of the people. Within a year, their People’s Party, or Populist Party, was a national coalition of farmers, unions, and workers’ organizations. Their radical ideas included labor rights, corporate regulation, the progressive income tax, women’s suffrage, popular election of senators, and the eight-hour workday. No movement to overthrow corrupt power will get far without true unity, and the party was thwarted by racism and nativism within its own ranks. The Democratic Party platform today, though, owes much to their efforts.
Yet “populist” remains a dismissive, even pejorative descriptor in prominent liberal discourse, a polite way of hinting at bigoted fools wearing red trucker hats. Journalists surely know what “populism” actually means, but they apply it to dangerous reactionary movements far more readily than to progressive uprisings. This habitual, unchecked misuse of the term perhaps betrays an unexamined distrust of, or even distaste for, the proletariat—whose power might upend the capitalist structures from which plenty of liberals, including the most influential voices of establishment media, benefit. This is the sad grain of truth beneath working-class resentment of the so-called media elite, and it provides fodder for condemnation of our essential, often heroic free press.
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/populism-progressive-aoc-sanders-warren.php
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