If you listen to establishmentarians in Washington and Brussels, liberal democracy is under threat from anti-democratic populist movements. Instead of being a legitimate expression of citizen anguish, the establishmentarians say these populist movements are instead either driven by “fake news” or by sinister Russian interference.

This is, on its face, slightly perplexing. These same establishmentarians hold that every single past Western populist uprising — Andrew Jackson’s revolution of the 1820s, the European revolutions of 1848, the late 1800s American Populist Party (which gave the English language the word “populist”), FDR’s New Deal, and more — were righteous expressions of citizen anger. But the one that happens to threaten those in power today is illegitimate. A strange coincidence.

But what is it that is threatened? Those in power often talk about the threat to “liberal democracy.” This has been used all over the place, from Washington, DC-based think tanks to German courts. This is a clever turn of phrase, incredibly useful for cutting those who opposed the current political order. When non-political folks hear “liberal democracy,” they likely think of, well, simply democracy: the idea that individuals have rights and can cast votes to change the direction of the government if they are unsatisfied with it. So long as a few crucial individual liberties were protected – the freedom of speech, of religious belief, of protest – citizens could vote as they wished, though even that was tepid; if enough people really wanted things to go one way, it was understood that the people would ultimately get what they wished for. That is democracy as it has been understood throughout much of modernity.