Yascha, you’ve been critical of what might be called the “New Far Left” in Europe and elsewhere. You seem to put them at least partly in the same basket as the populist right, in the sense of posing a threat for the future of liberal democracy.

What is your case for that characterization, and would you put Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in that category?

I don’t want this to turn into a big debate about where to classify people, so I’ll answer more broadly on my main topic of study, which is populism, and what I take the meaning of populism to be. Of course, there are many undisciplined uses of the term “populism,” as there are many undisciplined uses of most political terms, but what I take to be the core meaning of this designation is a situation in which politicians make a claim to the exclusive representation of the people.