"The ten essays that comprise this book began life in The New Criterion throughout the course of our thirty-fifth anniversary season beginning in September 2016. We had already begun thinking about commissioning a series on populism when the world was stunned by the successful British referendum, in June 2016, to take Britain out of the European Union. In the United States, the effervescent presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were, in their different ways, pushing the term 'populism' to the forefront of public debate and, indeed, public anxiety. In continental Europe, kindred phenomena had focused public attention on a wide variety of figures and movements that were hailed or dismissed as 'populists.'"--Backcover.