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Over recent years, populism has emerged as a key signifier in political discourse, designating a simplifying sort of politics which pits a more-or-less homogenous “people” against the elites. Yet, given its precedence, it is rarely a label that anyone identifies with. Such a banal insight, gestured at in the title of Smith’s recent book and further developed in its preface, marks out the uniqueness of his intervention into understanding the genesis of the conditions of so-called “new populism” and thinking through the political possibilities arising within it, and functions as one of its greatest strengths. As someone interested in the contemporary value of “the critique of ideology”, this was deeply appealing as it gestured toward a parallel phenomenon within my field. While on first glance ideology is similarly almost always something only other people are duped by, this is in fact the ideological gesture par excellence, and something we need to transcend if ideology is going to have any reflexive, analytical and critical traction beyond dogmatic judgement. Smith similarly, in highlighting the tendency of populism, just like ideology, to be pejoratively designated as “almost always other people’s politics” (p. 3), counters its progressive denunciation by figures from the political centre either side of the Atlantic (e.g. Tony Blair and Hilary Clinton), recognising in it a symptomatic tendency to disavow their own complicity in creating such a “populist” condition. In doing so, he not only provides the appropriate ground for sober appreciation of how and why such a condition came to be, but also creates the space for assessing how its strengths can be used to pursue the Leftist goals of movements behind those like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. Smith’s book thus aims to intervene both analytically and polemically, making it relevant reading for academics and activists alike. While the book is split in half according to these two distinct purposes, the more detach