So, you know how BioShock Infinite does that extremely jarring thing of applying the typical lib anticommunist "both sides suck" thought terminating cliché to a slave revolt? That's probably a product of rewrites.
In early interviews, Ken Levine talks about the Vox as "starting as kind of a student movement, working to unionize workers, protect rights of minorities" and an "internationalist movement, a worker's movement". IIRC there's even some vestigial elements of that in the final game, like the red color scheme, and an audio log that unsubtly draws a parallel between the Vox and the khmer rouge, something about going after people with glasses/intellectuals (I might be missremembering this last one, since I couldn't find it by CTRL + F on a transcript).
The real step is realizing that "populism" isn't a thing, but an empty buzzword used to describe everything that isn't bloodless liberal managerial technocracy. It gets applied to everything from explicitly elitist ideologies like Fascism or even Monarchism, to tepid flavors of social democracy, to any and every form of leftist thought. It gets applied to both racism and civil rights activism, to both anti-war protesters and pro-war agitators (when they're using the "wrong" reasons, of course - cold and cynical justifications for war are obviously good and mature geopolitics), to both elitist theocracy that favors the entrenched privileged classes and to secular liberation movements that focus on the oppressed classes.
It's completely and utterly without any meaning at all beyond saying that something is either to the right or left of a narrow band of right wing hegemonic liberal ideology.
Well said. I more or less dropped it from my vocabulary when I noticed how loosely it would get throw around by ( everyone. Whatever the fuck could actually constitute "American populism", I don't want to see it
Imo populism is when the people overwhelmingly support something. It can be people, it can be wars, its that patriotic spirit that fell over everyone except the most educated of libs after 9/11.