Populism is not defined by anti-elitism alone, since any democratic critic can oppose elites; its distinguishing feature is anti-pluralism, the claim that one faction exclusively represents the authentic people. By this logic, all rival parties and their supporters are cast as illegitimate, not merely mistaken.
Populists invoke 'the real people' as a moral and symbolic construct rather than an empirical majority, so electoral defeats can be dismissed as the silent majority being thwarted or betrayed. The people's will is something the leader intuits and declares, not something measured, which makes the claim unfalsifiable.
In power, populists tend to colonize the state by filling institutions with loyalists, practice mass clientelism and discriminatory distribution to reward supporters, and systematically suppress civil society that opposes them. These are presented as moral acts of restoring the state to its rightful owners rather than as the corruption they resemble.
Populists do not reject constitutions wholesale; they often draft new 'popular' constitutions designed to lock in their vision of the authentic people and keep themselves in power. These founding documents function as partisan weapons that preempt genuine pluralism rather than as neutral frameworks for contestation.
Ignoring or excluding populists as beyond debate tends to confirm their narrative of a conspiring establishment, yet imitating their exclusionary rhetoric concedes the terrain to them. The recommended response is to talk about the real problems they raise while refusing their core premise that any single group exclusively embodies the people.