Which concept of populism?

The concept of populism is slippery and ever-changing. In recent decades, it has been severed from its original historical meaning and is increasingly used to label illiberal political movements that could not be further apart from nineteenth-century populism. It now proves very difficult to escape this conceptual conundrum: those who wish to reduce populism to an anti-elitist anti-pluralism are unable to erase its democratic origins, and those who emphasize those democratic origins must acknowledge that populism can evolve into forms of authoritarian nationalism. It is nevertheless necessary to distinguish populism from a "democratization of oligarchic feeling" (Savidan, 2016) and to sort out, within populism itself, that which pertains to a defense of democratic common sense, to the fantasy of a "unified people," or to the practice of "wild democracy" (Lefort, 1979).