How does constitutional democracy collapse? We have learned that the answer isn’t what we thought it was. Authoritarian moments need not arrive through coups and violence; they can occur through ordinary democratic practices and quiet legal changes. The pattern is now well-known: authoritarian leaders in our age enter office through relatively uncontroversial elections and then slowly create what is effectively a new constitutional order, one with an unconstrained leader and an absolute state—and, indeed, one with its own reasons and arguments. Even though this much is familiar, we are less certain of what might follow our contemporary political era. Perhaps, in some cases, the answer will be full-blown authoritarianism, like one sees in the case of Venezuela. But assume, as Brazil and Poland encourage us to assume, that the authoritarian populist we have in mind loses an election and exits office. In the phase that follows, what form might political life take?

I want to offer one possible answer to this question: competitive populism. A generation or so ago, Levitsky and Way focused our attention on the idea of competitive authoritarianism. Certain regimes, they suggested, allow for some degree of limited contestation; they allow for competition that is genuine but unequal. The states that invite our focus today, such as Hungary and Turkey, share some characteristics with competitive authoritarian regimes, but differ in how they have reconstituted and repurposed traditional institutions. Such institutions, from investigative agencies to legislatures to courts, are no longer active—if somewhat managed—possible sites of opposition. Instead, they have lost their credibility in fundamental ways. Moreover, even though their falling into disrepute surely relates to the workings of authoritarian populism, many key institutions were weakened and broken, even corrupted, by the time the authoritarian populist took the stage.

Given this, it is hard to conceive of democracy in the post-populist phase as having the thick institutional element we associate with postwar democratic constitutionalism. Of course, all states require and use institutions in the trivial, basic sense, but what is crucial is that our traditional institutions are unlikely to function as before. They are unlikely to serve tasks like limiting power, enabling deliberation, negotiating conflict etc.; they are unlikely to offer processes that serve the task of legitimation; they are unlikely to exist as domains of independent normativity. Instead, we are likely to be in a political era where the answer to populism is populism—where one form of populism competes with another and where the traditional institutions of democracy matter minimally as they are entirely instrumental to the political agenda of the day. Indeed, given the state of preexisting institutions, the competition to authoritarian populism may have no choice but to be anti-institutionalist to be credible.

The era of competitive populism will thus center on political contestation over social power rather than on institutional design. This should not necessarily worry us. The populist challenge to authoritarian populism may well have its virtues. As Tushnet and Bugarič argue, all populisms may not be equally bad. Tushnet and Bugarič rightly encourage us to distinguish between authoritarian forms of populism and more democratic varieties. Insofar as this is true, the replacement of authoritarian populism by a progressive variant should allay our concerns over the death of democracy. Indeed, a progressive populism holds the promise of taking seriously the real sites of power and of recalibrating the relationship between popular sovereignty and representation.

But there is more work required from a progressive variant of populism. For those of us who seek—in some respects with good reason—a democratic form of populism to counter authoritarian populism, the question is whether it is possible to craft a populist politics that can both empower the people and hold the virtues that we have come to associate with legality. A democratic version of populism uses power towards different ends than its authoritarian counterpart. But what kind of relationship does such a version share with the rule of law? Can its egalitarian conception of the people embrace a certain non-instrumentalism? Can it create a politics that is not fully reducible to the exercise of power, even when that power is exercised for the greater good?

These questions have uncertain answers, but the questions themselves are a reminder that a progressive version of populism that merely seeks to defeat authoritarian populism will only achieve a partial victory. Its test lies in whether it can both empower the people and treat each person as free and equal. Whether it will pass that test is of course a question of politics—but if both democracy and the rule of law are to survive, it must be the question for progressive populism.