Why Has Populism Swept the Globe for a Decade? Media Structure Is the Key Driver

Over the past decade, populism has evolved from a fringe current into a core force in American politics and global politics at large. Two veteran observers—Jonathan Chait and Eric Levitz—from Vox and The Atlantic traced this trajectory in depth on a podcast episode. What they discussed was not just Trump's rise, but a frequently overlooked driving force: the structural transformation of media technology.

What Is Populism: A Zero-Sum Political Style

Jonathan Chait offers a practical definition: populism is a political style that frames political questions as zero-sum conflict, holding that there exists a single, clear, simple solution that would benefit "the people"—or whichever segment you deem the legitimate people—and that this solution is being blocked by selfish elites.

This definition is not confined to left or right. Right-wing populism aims its arrows at "globalist elites" and the "Washington establishment"; left-wing populism emphasizes that economic power is held by a few. The common thread: there is always a clearly defined "enemy," and a spokesperson who claims to represent the "real people."

Zero-sum politics refers to a political game in which one side's gain necessarily means the other side's loss, with total gains always summing to zero. In the context of populism, this means politics is reduced to an adversarial struggle between "the people" and "the elites," with no room for win-win outcomes or compromise. This mode of thinking stands in stark contrast to pluralist political views, which hold that society is composed of multiple interest groups and that the political process balances these interests through negotiation, compromise, and coalition-building. Populism's zero-sum framework rejects this complexity, reducing political questions to single-dimensional confrontation, thereby paving the way for the narrative that "there is only one true solution." This simplification is extremely effective at mobilizing voters, but it also makes governance difficult, because real-world policy often requires weighing multiple objectives rather than a simple "us" versus "them."

Trump's Rise: Precise Positioning Against the Establishment

Chait points out that Trump's populism was appealing partly because of its precise ideological targeting. Around 2016, Republican elites were eager to cut taxes for the rich, slash Social Security and Medicare, and launch wars in the Middle East. Trump positioned himself around completely different priorities: restricting immigration, not cutting Social Security, not launching Middle East wars. Although these promises later proved not entirely accurate, they successfully helped Trump consolidate his standing within the party and undermined the establishment's credibility.

"He really did take down the Republican elite," Chait says. "The Bush family went into exile; many people who had influence in 2016 are gone." But what about the economic elites? Chait argues that Trump did not shake them—he consolidated them—through a kind of "Putin-style" understanding with the business world: as long as you align with the ruling party's agenda, you get favorable regulation and policy, but you must "pay tribute" and not cross the line.

The Paradox of Power: When Populists Take Office

Populism needs a "victim narrative" to sustain its energy. During Trump's first term, he was constantly blocked by the "deep state," RINOs within the Republican Party, the courts, and the media—which actually gave him perfect populist material: it's not that I'm incompetent, it's that they're stopping me.

But the second term was different. Chait analyzes that when he more successfully overcame opposition forces, he could no longer play the "victim of shadow forces"—because he was signaling "I control everything" every day. Power itself dissolves the narrative foundation of populism.

Biden's Populist Turn and the Inflation Dilemma

After defeating Trump in 2020, Biden actually retained quite a few of Trump's populist policy tools, such as tariffs. But he did not package them with Trump-style rhetoric about "evil elites." The problem was that inflation became the biggest economic challenge of his tenure, and populists have almost no effective policies for dealing with inflation—in fact, populist tools like tariffs tend to worsen inflation. Chait believes Biden reacted too slowly and failed to get the economy back on a stable track in time.

How Media Structure Shapes Populist Waves

Vox's Eric Levitz proposes an overlooked theory: structural changes in the media environment are an important variable in the rise and fall of populism.

The Radio Era: Intimacy Breaks Through Elite Filtering

The spread of radio in the early 20th century was revolutionary. It allowed political figures to speak directly to people in their living rooms, bypassing traditional elite filtering. Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats" were a model of left-wing populism; on the right, Father Charles Coughlin used radio to build a massive anti-establishment audience, and even after being dropped by CBS, he could still buy airtime directly through independent stations. Radio's decentralized structure made anti-establishment voices difficult to completely silence.

Fireside Chats were a series of informal national addresses delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt over the radio between 1933 and 1944, about 30 in total. Roosevelt used the emerging medium of radio to explain his New Deal policies directly to the American people in a warm, conversational style, bypassing the newspaper editors and publishers who were then biased toward conservatives. This direct communication built an emotional bond between the president and ordinary citizens, strengthened public trust in government, and demonstrated radio's potential as a political tool. The Fireside Chats are regarded as an early model of left-wing populist communication: it emphasized a direct connection between the leader and "the real people," weakening the filtering role of intermediary elites. This model was later imitated by many politicians and confirms how media technology can reshape political mobilization.

The Television Era: Oligopolistic Media and Consensus Politics

By the 1950s, television had become the dominant medium, but at the time there were only three national networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Building a national television network required enormous capital, which naturally formed an oligopoly. Levitz points out that during that period, American political consensus was stronger and economic growth was broadly shared; together with the gatekeeping effect of the three major networks, this suppressed the space for populism.

Cable TV and Social Media: The Disappearance of Gatekeepers

Cable TV broke the monopoly of the three major networks, and the number of channels exploded. News organizations had to compete more fiercely for attention, which rewarded provocative, emotional, culture-war-driven content—content that naturally leans toward a populist style.

The real turning point was social media. Anyone, with a sufficiently engaging short video, can reach millions of viewers almost instantly, without the approval of any producer, editor, or network executive. Levitz points out that this competitive pressure led many influencers and podcasters to discover that packaging themselves as "the only source of secret truth" is the most effective way to stand out—and conspiracy theories and anti-establishment narratives are precisely the fuel of populism.

Gatekeeper is a core concept in communication studies, referring to individuals or institutions that decide which content can enter the public view during the information dissemination process. In the traditional media era, newspaper editors, television producers, and network executives played the role of gatekeepers, screening and arranging information according to professional standards, commercial considerations, and political leanings. The existence of gatekeepers meant that information passed through multiple layers of filtering before reaching audiences, which could both suppress the spread of extreme or false content and maintain existing political consensus. The rise of cable TV and social media dismantled this centralized gatekeeping structure: the surge in channels forced every outlet to compete for attention, while social platforms allowed anyone to publish content directly. The disappearance of gatekeepers lowered the information threshold, but it also eliminated mechanisms for quality control and consensus-building, creating a structural advantage for provocative, emotional, and anti-establishment content.

Will Artificial Intelligence End Populism?

Levitz offers an intriguing conjecture: AI may partially offset the information fragmentation brought by social media. On social media, people with different political stances often get information from completely different sources; in the AI era, people increasingly rely on a few leading models to understand the world, which could create a more shared information environment—similar to the effect of the three major television networks back then.

Moreover, there is evidence that mainstream AI models tend to track the reality as understood by traditional knowledge authorities (mainstream scientists, journalists). Even Grok, the "anti-woke" chatbot Elon Musk tried to build, gives answers similar to ChatGPT and Claude on many issues.

But Levitz himself is not optimistic: if AI ultimately causes massive white-collar unemployment, then the fact that "everyone is using similar AI" probably won't be enough to prevent a populist backlash against the emerging tech oligarchs.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are AI systems trained on massive text data that can generate coherent natural language responses. The training data for these models comes mainly from public sources such as the internet, books, and academic papers, which inevitably include the knowledge systems constructed by mainstream knowledge authorities (scientists, journalists, encyclopedias, etc.). As a result, the models tend to reproduce the consensus views of these authoritative sources rather than marginal or anti-establishment narratives. This characteristic may produce a "centralizing" information effect: when millions of people use a few models to get information, they may encounter a more consistent factual foundation than in the social media era. However, model outputs are also influenced by biases in training data and adjustments by developers, so their "authority bias" is not absolute and may change under commercial or political pressure.

Will the Populist Era End?

Chait's judgment is: it will eventually end, but the timing and manner are uncertain. A key variable is the reversibility of policy. Trump's tariff policy is his broadest populist measure, but he never passed it through Congress—it relied entirely on executive action. This means the next administration can easily reverse it. When people find that the populist agenda has not delivered real benefits, the opposition party gains room to turn things around.

But Chait also acknowledges another possibility: populist policies gradually become entrenched and difficult to reverse. Everything depends on future political contests.

This conversation reveals that populism is not merely the product of a particular political figure; it is closely intertwined with the structure of media technology, the felt experience of economic livelihood, and the paradox of power. For tech and content creators, understanding this logic is equally important: platform structures determine which voices get amplified, and every media revolution redistributes who has the power to define "the people" and "the elites."

One-line Summary

The rise and fall of populism is closely intertwined with structural changes in media technology, and the AI era may bring new variables.

Paragraph Summary

Based on a podcast conversation between Vox and The Atlantic, this article explores the evolution of populism in the United States and its deep connection to media technology. Jonathan Chait defines populism as a zero-sum political style whose core is the claim that there is a simple solution blocked by selfish elites. Trump's 2016 rise benefited from precise anti-establishment positioning, but in his second term, concentrated power made it difficult to sustain the victim narrative. Eric Levitz proposes a media structure theory: radio decentralization encouraged anti-establishment voices, television oligopoly suppressed populism, and cable TV and social media dismantled gatekeepers and reignited populist waves. AI may create a more shared information environment, but if it causes mass unemployment, it could instead trigger a new backlash. Chait believes the populist era will eventually end, and the key mechanism is that policies like tariffs, which rely on executive orders, are easy to reverse.