Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses.1 This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Western Europe); time periods (e.g. 1930s versus the present), and classifications (e.g. left/ right, authoritarian/libertarian, pluralist/antipluralist, as well as strains that muddy these distinctions such as homonationalism, xenophobic feminism and multicultural neonationalism). While useful efforts have been made to navigate the vast and heterogeneous conceptual terrain of populism,2 they rarely engage with each other. The result is a dizzying proliferation of different definitions unaccompanied by an understanding as to how they might speak to each other. And this conceptual fragmentation reinforces, and is reinforced by, diverging assessments of populism which tend to cast it as either “good” or “bad” for democracy (e.g. Dzur and Hendriks 2018; Müller 2015).

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In his recent essay, Mark Wenman highlighted parallels between Connolly’s theory of pluralism and earlier iterations of pluralism in the postwar period and the early twentieth century. Focusing on his account of postwar pluralism and especially his interpretation of Dahl, I argue that Dahl’s vision of democracy as polyarchy is fundamentally at odds with Connolly’s. A close reading of Dahl’s text and a consideration of the historical context suggest that Dahl’s theory effectively creates a depoliticized world where citizens are unresponsive to claims about alternative possibilities of democratic life.

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