I probably didn’t find the definition persuasive if I don’t remember it. That’s certainly not the definition given in say Merriam Webster (though that one’s not illuminating either).

Populism is not inconsistent with pluralism, though it is incompatible with the elaborate anti-democratic machinery that’s been created to manage pluralism: administrative bureaucracy, elaborate laws, racial political machines and interest groups, etc.

“Pluralism” as it exists in places like New York City and Chicago are failure states of democracy, where you’ve got divided populations managed by ethnic political machines, with politics consisting of horse trading between interest groups. Yes, populism is quite at odds with that version of pluralism.

It doesn't seem like you're trying to reach any kind of shared understanding here, but rather just trying to perpetuate a partisan argument. Those are off-topic for the site.

I’m not making a partisan argument. I attended the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2019, and saw vibrant participatory democracy as de Tocqueville described. And I am trying to reach a shared understanding—what do we mean by “pluralism,” and how does that relate to “populism” and “democracy.” Your view seems to be that pluralism and populism are distinct but orthogonal to democracy. My point is that “pluralism” in practice seems to entail anti-democratic structures to manage the pluralism, and thus is less “democratic” than populism.

To put it differently, you characterized populism as a rejection of pluralism. And my point is that, insofar as populism has anything to do with pluralism, it’s more a rejection of the anti-democratic structures that have been installed to manage pluralism. Which just makes it democracy.

You might want to check out something like https://politicalscience.jhu.edu/faculty-books/the-hollow-pa... for a more detailed treatment of this

I’m sorry, but just reading the description of the book makes me suspicious. They talk about “hollowing out of the party system,” but then point to the GOP, instead of the party that’s was dominated for nearly the whole 20th century by ethnic political machines and clientism. The party system on the right works just fine. There is far more alignment between GOP voters and the current GOP leadership than between democrat voters and the current democrat leadership.

I'd say you're better off looking at the book instead of looking for confirmation trigger words in the blurb.