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.