As someone less sceptical about the utility of populism as a concept, but who shares Art's misgivings about the empirical and normative consequences of its misuse, my take-home was "We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we should perhaps give the baby a shower." https://twitter.com/SLdeLange/status/1326814202720382977

I certainly agree with Art that the pursuit of competitive (or, increasingly, non-competitive) authoritarianism is the foremost characteristic of regimes like Orban and Kaczyński's. However, populism has been of significant importance to the articulation and communication of

these parties' actions toward that end. Certainly in Poland, the kind of political and social polarisation on which the illiberal turn has been founded would have been difficult to achieve without the articulation of populist discourses.

This is definitely something Kaczyński himself recognised. I have no doubt that, unlike someone like Samoobrona leader Andrzej Lepper, he is far from holding a genuine conception of politics as a battle between the elite and the people. Ultimately, for Kaczyński politics is a

battle between competing elites. The need to achieve popular majorities to win that battle is a regrettable inconvenience. Populism is the means by which he generates and maintains that majority.

So Kaczyński has sought to exploit the idea that there is something inherently corrupt, inauthentic and illegitimate about the post-1989 transition elite in its entirety (the lack of discrimination between its elements is a hallmark of populism), and to counterpose against this

"mendacious elite" and its narrow base of clients (the business elites, rich urbanites, cosmopolitans, quasi-Germans) the "pure people" of small-town and rural Poland (with some enclaves in the poorer districts of cities, sure) whose identity, interests and values can be

encapsulated in "the one authentic system of values available to Poles"; that expressed by the Catholic Church (and preferably in its John Paul II variant). Without articulating this message and constantly reinforcing it, the moral force of his assault on the elite and the

institutions of the Third Republic would have been much harder to maintain. Authoritarianism (or, in its local form, "zamordzym" - grabbing the people by their faces and leading them) is the message, but populism is the delivery mechanism.