The difficulty of separating the real nature of populism from the fraught discourse that surrounds it is telling, because among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to “the people”: these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about “unity” and “consensus” for the hard semantic distinction between “us” and “them”.