Why Populism is the Sugar,Salt,and Fat of Our Politics. . . with Variations: A Reflection

Ultraprocessed Foods, Addiction, and the Endurance of Populism

Part of the explanation for populism’s enduring appeal can be found in recent studies on ultraprocessed foods and addiction.

Before elaborating, I should clarify my definition of populism. I subscribe to a definition of populism that has become increasingly standard in political science. Populism is a movement that competes for votes by (1) describing itself as representing the “good” people versus the “bad” elites, (2) justifying restrictive policies toward elites, and (3) disseminating intolerance for institutions believed to be serving elites (Müller, 2016).

My argument is that populism is the salt-sugar-fat of modern democratic politics. It is a distortion in the supply of key ingredients of democracy to create a pretend democracy, and like ultraprocessed foods with an oversupply of sugar, salt and fat, populism can also lead to “abuse” and “toxicity” (Lustig, 2020). By toxicity I mean two effects: populism’s tendency to exacerbate polarization and to pave the way for authoritarian moves.

Sugar

Sugar is the enticing part of populism: the call for more inclusion, “integration” of the unabsorbed masses (Germani, 1978), or “rediscovery of the people” (Laclau, 2005). This call to side with the needs of ordinary folks is the aspect of populism that produces least criticism from a democratic point of view, and in fact, elicits a great degree of normative approval.

Populist inclusion-oriented policies can be tangible or intangible. Tangible forms typically involve state spending on welfare and job-creating programs or any form of government policy that makes economic improvements in the life of ordinary citizens. Populists may very well like to be seen as “strongmen” (see Bavbek and Kennedy 2024), but even more so, as “patrons.” They want to be seen as providers of essentials for the have-less (see Garrido 2024).

Intangible forms of inclusion typically involve the use of inclusionary language, making appointments throughout the bureaucracy to signal commitment to income/racial/ethnic/gender representations, deliberately speaking like ordinary citizens, repeating folk tales or conspiracy theories, using colloquialisms, even curse words.

Another common strategy of intangible inclusion is to invoke a version of nationalism predicated on some threat. These references to the threatened nation are similar to what Prozorova (2024) calls appeals to “cultural-civilizational particularism.” Often, this form of paranoid nationalism is cast using a standard rhetorical template: (1) invoke “nostalgia,” that is, affirm that the nation has a glorious past; (2) stress recent “decay,” and (3) offer “utopia” (Elgenius & Rydgren, 2022). The aim is to appeal to well-meaning patriots through emotion.

The problem is that populism, like the food industry, oversupplies sugar. It takes the democratic ideal of siding with the voiceless and goes for the overkill. Social spending becomes excessive, clientelistic, and partisan. Representation becomes more symbolic than substantive and is weaponized to deflect criticism. The goodness of ordinary citizens is touted, but often by treating dissent as some kind of outside elite-stemming threat that requires containment, which then serves to justify declines in pluralism. In short, in these excess proportions, sugar starts to become toxic (leaning authoritarian), while still addictive: with more sugar, voter dependence on populism expands.

Salt

Salt is a condiment to make flavors more intense, to heighten the senses. In populist terms, salt is the heightening of aggressive and incendiary discourse toward the opposition or the institutions of the status quo.

Populists accept the “competition” element that is intrinsic to democracy but scale it up to near-war levels. They engage in aggressive and sometimes extremist discourse against adversaries and institutions they dislike and mobilize movements that advocate radicalization and hate (see McKena and O’Donnell in this volume).

This extremist aggressiveness toward critics, so typical of populism (and authoritarianism), is the equivalent of oversalting manufactured food. When populist leaders engage in vicious insults and provocations at opponents (Müller, 2016; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), attack the objectivity of experts or the press (Monetti in this volume; Mounk, 2018), commit outrageous forms of norm-breaking (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018), “trash-talk” institutions (Cella et al., 2023), they are overusing salt.

This overuse of salt is toxic. Demonizing enemies renders followers unable to make rational judgments, as Arendt (1951/1994) would say. Followers become more prone to disqualify the out-group than the leader of their own group. Accountability declines. This explains why populist presidents are often unhinged about their feelings, often using “bad manners” that include local slang, swearing, resort to anecdote, mannerisms, and insults (Moffitt, 2016)—it helps them achieve blame-shifting.

The overuse of salt is thus a distortion of a key ingredient of democracy: competition. Transgressive speech is the most aggressive way to compete with the opposition short of proscription. While competition is the sine qua non of democracy (Schumpeter, 1947), it must come with limits. Adversaries in democracies ought not engage in an all-out war against each other or else democracy turns precarious (Schedler, 2023). This is why Schmitter and Karl (1991) talk about democracy requiring “competition and cooperation” between government and opposition. Populism instead downplays cooperation and overuses transgression.

Another reason transgressive speech is so overused by populists in office is that it conveys to the base that populists are war dogs. If populism in office is predicated on the idea that “government of the people” is all about making elites pay, it behooves the government to show hard aggression toward those elites. Hate toward the out-group earns presidents credentials as crusadists, while building community and loyalty within the in-group (Simonovits et al., 2022).

Soon, the overuse of salt manifests itself in more than just speech and tweets (now X posts). Populists in office often begin to adopt policies and laws designed to shackle the opposition. This is why populism often comes with “autocratic legalism” (see García and Sánchez-Urribarri in this volume). Autocratic legalism is the use, abuse, and lack of use of the law to empower the president (allow him or her to get away with their wishes) and to disadvantage opponents (Corrales, 2015; Scheppele, 2018).

Autocratic legalism, naturally, feels overtly repulsive to opponents. Once in place, autocratic legalism turns populism into an authoritarian project. But followers of populist governments don’t mind it too much, at least at first, despite its clear undemocratic foundation. The reason is that populist leaders portray it as a technocratic approach—as the deployment of professional tools such as judges and the law—to deal with guilty parties. For populist supporters, this seems preferable to the alternative—to do nothing or to repress guilty actors with violence (see Khalil in this volume).

Fat

A frequent component of populism in office is agenda density. Populists in office often overwhelm the system with proposals for massive institutional change. They take a noble aim of democratic politics—to prioritize institutional reform—and turn it into an overzealous campaign to overhaul a large number of institutions, laws, regulations, norms, even constitutions, often en masse. Institutions that do not help advance the populist project are seen as captured by elites and thus eligible for overhaul. The key is to have an exceedingly long list of institutions to revamp. And the aim is to create new institutions staffed with loyalists and rules that would make it easier for populists to implement their policy proposals.

Agenda density fulfills the same role as fat in digestion. As a macronutrient, fat contains the highest energy kick. Likewise, agenda density energizes the base. It makes followers feel that something is being done on behalf of the “people,” that change is finally happening. It is how populism tries to contrast itself with what Carothers (2000) calls “feckless pluralism”—the appearance in many liberal democracies that nothing gets done and problems don’t get resolved. Feckless pluralism causes widespread displeasure. By packing the agenda, populists try to show that they are enhancing democracy—escaping gridlock and finally getting things changed.

Another purpose of agenda density, understood as a form of multi-shooting, is to confuse, distract, and saturate critics. While it is true that machine-gunning your way through institutional change runs the risk of misfires, it still has the potential of overwhelming opponents with too many issues to focus on. Multi-shooting reduces the ability of the opposition to focus on just one thing. Opponents have to focus on many things and on nothing at once.

In short, agenda densification allows populist presidents to deflect sustained and probing criticism, while energizing the base with the feeling that the president is finally unlocking change. If populists do succeed in implementing such an agenda, the end result is often new institutions that are typically deprived of capacity to check the powers of the Executive branch and the ruling party. A dense agenda of institutional overhaul appears democratic at first, but is also a tool to produce autocracy through institutional capture.

The Analogy’s Limits

The sugar-salt-fat analogy offers various heuristic advantages for the study of populism. It helps us understand populism as a hybrid and noxious-for-democracy ideology all at once. It highlights populism’s emotional effect on voters. It also draws attention to the supply side of populism, especially the role of politicians in manipulating and oversupplying its key components.

That said, the sugar-salt-fat analogy is imperfect, and in some dimensions, even unhelpful to understand every aspect of populism. The analogy does not capture the notion that present-day populism produces adverse reactions among voters, sometimes even the majority. Not everyone gets hooked. Many voters feel repulsed. Populism is polarizing. As Harteveld et al. (2022) explain, populist parties both “send and receive” emotions of “dislike” like no other parties in their countries. ¹

This counter-reaction to populism is the good news about populist politics in our time. Although of course there are exceptions (Uribe in Colombia, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia, Bukele in El Salvador, and Modi in India), populism rarely captivates an entire nation. Instead, populism splits the electorate. And sometimes, this split can compel the other side to develop greater appreciation for liberal democracy, party building, and electoral unity. When that’s the case, polarization can be said to be helping democracy (Somer & McCoy, 2018), that is, helping democracy “trump populism” (Weyland & Madrid, 2018).

However, the counter-reaction to populism is not always in the direction of greater appreciation for liberal democracy, party building, or unity. Sometimes the counter-reaction yields such mistrust of the other side that it plunges the nation into what Schedler (2023) considers the most dangerous form of conflict in democracy: when each side sees the other as an existential threat. Right-wing populism can galvanize left-wing populism, and vice versa, and each can make the other turn more radical and anti-institutional, and in the process, entrench populism further. When that is the case, polarization harms democracy.

Variation and Adaptation

The fact that populism can engender a populist counter-reaction that may be populist in nature suggests that it makes sense to talk about at least two main variations of populism, left versus right-wing, and how they interact with each other.

Populism’s ideology is often thought of as a loose framework that can be filled in with tenets from diverse ideologies (De La Torre & Mazzoleni, 2019). This ideological eclecticism leads many scholars to argue that the traditional left/right labels are muddier than ever, or at least, less useful to classify populist movements: populism is ideologically too hybrid.

No doubt, the left–right distinction is less useful today than in the past to describe populist economic policy. Both left- and right-wing populist administrations today oscillate between promoting profligacy and austerity, statism and market openings, tax increases (tariffs) and tax cuts, re-regulation and de-regulation. Left- and right-wing populist leaders believe in the power of the state to interfere in the market, as needed, and this means governing the economy with plenty of discretion rather than following left (more state) or right (more market) dictates.

However, outside of economic policy, the left-v-right clustering still makes sense to study populism for three reasons. First, it helps us understand how populists portray themselves (De La Torre & Mazzoleni, 2019). ² Many contemporary populists self-identify using the left-v-right spectrum, or at least, using anti-left or anti-right labels (e.g., “anti-woke,” “anti-socialist,” “anti-fa,” “anti-imperialist”). Second, the left–right distinction helps us understand how populists define the two poles they perceive in the electorate: the people and the elites (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2014). And third, it helps us understand the ends populists invoke to justify attacking “the elites,” or to concentrate power.

Before discussing these benefits, a word on adaptation is in order. Both left- and right-wing populists have undergone significant changes in policy stands over the years. This adaptation is part of their effort to stay electorally competitive by staying attuned to what people demand. But this adaptation is also the result of mutual emulation.

More specifically, both right-wing and left-wing populism sometimes react to each other not always by offering the opposite, but sometimes by introducing their own version of similar products, the way firms try to compete for similar markets by offering similar products or services, but with some variation (different features, price structures, looks, etc.).

Adaptation by Emulation and Innovation

Not too many contributions in this volume examine the ways in which left- and right-wing varieties of authoritarian populism borrow from each other. In this section, I look at several of the most important forms of adaptation through emulation in the last 40 years.

Traditionally, left-wing populism saw as its main aim to fight against economic inequality. It defined the “good people” in terms of low economic resources (low-income or low-opportunities people), and elites, in terms of market power: the very wealthy and the actors who run large firms, multinationals, or any capitalist organization. The key ideology was to favor the former and restrain the latter.

This standard variety of left-wing populism experienced an important adaptation starting in the 2000s, especially in Latin America. The anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, anti-trade bent of left-wing populism began to make exceptions to accommodate neoextractivism: the large-scale export of land-based natural resources, mostly to China. With this adaptation, left-wing populists in Latin America were essentially borrowing from right-wing populists of the 1990s, all of whom were prominent free-traders (De La Torre, 2017; Hogenboom, 2012; Weyland, 1996). This copying paid off. Left-wing populist regimes in the 2000s were able to ride the commodity boom of 2003 to 2013, securing record-level windfall profits that helped them achieve impressive electoral wins, and in the process, sometimes transition to semiauthoritarian regimes (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia in the 2000s).

Likewise, right-wing populism has adapted ideologically over the years through emulation. For many years, left-wing populism’s emphasis on fighting inequality disadvantaged the right when competing for votes. Because the right does not typically like income distribution, it had trouble offering anything that could appeal to low-income sectors. But starting in the 1990s, right-wing populists began to discover ways to appeal to disadvantaged masses. They did so by tweaking some ideas from left-wing populism.

The big adaptation in Europe emerged in Italy, when Silvio Berlusconi began to talk about villainous elites in the form of state bureaucrats (Anselmi, 2015). To him, bureaucrats and their defenders (politicians) were the source of people’s misery. The harm was not so much fiscal spending, but excessive taxes and red tape. Thus, the needed recipe was not to reduce state spending (that’s what mainstream center-right leaders and neoliberals were doing in the 1980s), but to run the state without politicians. Italians should elect a wealthy tycoon, rather than a traditional politician, to streamline the bureaucracy and redirect spending. Like the left, Berlusconi’s populism centered on trashing established politicians and fiscal austerity.

In Latin America, a different form of right-wing populist adaptation began under Alberto Fujimori in Peru at around the same time. Fujimori began to offer a new type of sugar: fighting insecurity. He became famous worldwide, and adored by many at home, for supplementing economic reforms with a hard-line approach toward violent actors, specifically, the Shining Path, a vicious guerrilla force dominant in the 1980s. Enthralled by this new sugar (as well plenty of salt and fat), Fujimori’s supporters voted for him as he slid further into autocracy. In the 2000s, Álvaro Uribe in Colombia would bring this focus on insecurity to new heights, to include not just targeting political guerrillas but also organized and random crime. He called this new sugar: “democratic security.”

Since then, right-wing populism in both Latin America and advanced capitalist countries in North America and Europe would take this new focus on fighting insecurity (as a substitute for fighting inequality) and run with it. In the early 2020s, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador used special powers granted by the legislature to launch a brutal “war on gangs” that led to a massive increase in incarceration rates and the suspension of the rights of association and legal counsel. Bukele’s approval ratings surged to almost 85 percent.

Insecurity soon became an elastic concept. It included not just terrorism and crime but also any minority group, at home or abroad, operating from a position of power and wishing to upend the country’s traditions or norms. So, for instance, when bureaucrats come up with regulations prescribing too much social engineering, right-wing populists complain about unelected elites expanding cultural insecurity (Mounk, 2018). When bureaucrats are too lax on migration, they are blamed for the great demographic “replacement” of natives (Bracke et al., 2024). When liberal intellectuals with tenure at universities become too critical of existing social practices (e.g., racism), they too are portrayed as unforgiving elites. When international organizations make decisions that impact domestic laws, such as climate treaties, they are portrayed as foreign elites impinging on national sovereignty (Benson et al., 2023). When human-rights NGOs denounce abuses committed by state security forces combatting crime, they are portrayed as privileged elites interested only in the rights of criminals rather than the rights of innocent majorities.

In sum, populism is all about theme and variation. The theme is always: the “many” threatened by the “protected few.” But each variant produces enough distinctiveness, itself the result of adaptation by emulation and innovation.

Conclusion

Populism in office oversupplies the sugar, salt, and fat content of democratic politics to create a new political regime that is at best a pretend democracy. Populism discovered that conventional aspects of democracy (concern for the voiceless, competitive politics, and institutional reform) can be manipulated and oversupplied to produce declines in pluralism as well as a bliss point among followers, leading to addiction (supporter’s emotional connection to it) and toxicity (willingness to tolerate authoritarian power grabs).

In addition to endurance, I argued that populism has shown ideological and policy adaptability. Populists have adapted by learning from rival populist groups.

In other words, populism is not ideology-free. Instead, its ideology comes with a core theme (the binary antagonism “people versus elites,” along with an anti-institutional streak) and variation (left- versus right-wing frames to discuss “people,” “elites,” and “type of threat”). This ability to maintain the core theme—its sugar, salt, and fat—supplemented by adaptative and emulative variation is one reason that populism has tended to endure, even if policywise, its record in office is less than stellar. Populism no doubt mixes and matches ideas and strategies, which makes it hard for analysts to classify these movements using clear-cut ideological clusters. But this mix and match is one more reason populism stays competitive.

The main problem with the sugar, salt, fat metaphor is its inability to predict electoral repudiation and, by extension, polarization. Populism “sends and receives” animosity far more than other movements. It turbocharges the opposition.

This turbocharging of the opposition helps explain why populism is often ejected from office, even when populism in office makes it difficult for the opposition to compete. As long as the opposition remains electorally united, populism grants the opposition energy that can be marshalled electorally. For defenders of liberal democracy, this counter-reaction is reassuring because it is a check on populism’s addictiveness.

The worry, however, is that the counter-reaction to populism can end up emulating populism, rather than embracing liberalism. Right-wing populism may engender more left-wing populism, and vice versa. When this mutual reinforcing occurs, populism-induced polarization hurts democracy. Populism becomes further entrenched in the party system, which is one more way that populism ends up reproducing itself into the future.