This book began with a question regarding how puzzled we are by populist politics: we broadly understand its causes, but we still struggle to understand how and why it works so well, and above all, the particular shape it takes. The answer, I argue, is that populist parties have turned one of the most powerful promises of the Enlightenment – and of democracy – against itself. By making the promise of authenticity core to its appeal, it has been able to harness the promises of democracy and subvert them. It is a kind of political jiu-jitsu, in which rather than using its own force against its democratic opponents, populism has turned the opponent’s own force on itself. This hasn’t happened by accident: the nature of political expectations has changed fundamentally under the pressures and the promises of the digital revolution. For those of us living in largely democratic states, authenticity has always been an idea central to our politics, but the transformations ushered in by the digital age have made us more receptive to wild promises of authenticity, of transparency and of accessibility. And so, what was one of representative democracy’s defining ideas has been exploited to usher in the very antithesis of representative democracy.

It is the fact that populism is so closely related to democracy, that it borrows and subverts its most cherished concepts, applies its recipes, and stretches its logic to extremes that makes it such a powerful ideological opponent. Every time you think you have it pinned it down, it struggles free by stunning you with your own references, your own moves.

The dark matter of authenticity

For a number of people, the idea that authenticity should resurface in such a guise is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. And yet populism’s subversive appeal to authenticity seems to have captured the deep tectonic shift that defines this political moment. Authenticity has become both the yardstick by which opposition is judged – a moral yardstick that turns political opponents into amoral, or worse immoral, creatures – but also the defining quality to embody. As G. S. Enli puts it, “it has become a strategy in its own right” (Enli 2016: 133).