Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been called many names, and “fascist” is an increasingly popular way to describe him. In our political vocabulary, the F-word remains the ultimate condemnation. Even after the atrocities of Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot, there are communist parties throughout the world, but there are no self-declared fascist parties and no attempts to formulate fascism with a human face.

The Donald is very bad news in very many ways, but he’s no fascist. Fascists believed in redeeming nations through large-scale violence; for them, war as such created meaning in people’s lives. Fascism promised its followers that they would be ennobled by hardship and would gain immortality through the national collective; Trump glorifies individualism and, like former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, suggests that anyone who makes an effort can have a life of comfort just like his.

Trump should be described as a far-right populist. In the United States, the word “populism” is mostly associated with left-wing movements advocating for Main Street against Wall Street. Both the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and Trump are routinely called populists, so it appears they must have something in common. But this is misleading.

A real populist is not just a critic of powerful elites. He or she is a politician who claims to be the one and only legitimate representative of the true people. In the populist imagination, the people are always fully unified and morally infallible; there is no such thing as a legitimate opposition, nor are there minorities who might legitimately disagree with the savior of the people. Populists always pose a danger to democracy because they deny the pluralism inherent in modern democratic societies.

While the West supposedly has a shared liberal-democratic vocabulary, “populism,” like “liberalism,” has different meanings in different countries. In the U.S. — as well as Latin America — populism is primarily seen as a leftist phenomenon, whereas in Europe “populism” is today applied almost exclusively to the far right. In North America “populism” first became widespread with the rise of the People’s Party in the late 19th century. The People’s Party defended agrarian interests against finance capital. No adjective was initially available to name the leaders of the People’s Party; eventually someone came up with “populist.”

The meaning of “populist” then shifted from defenders of certain interests — those of farmers and later the downtrodden in general — to politicians responsive to the feelings of supposedly forgotten parts of the population. Today we constantly hear about the fears and resentments of the middle class, which sees salvation in figures such as Trump or Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front.

But it is peculiar to identify an ideology purely on the basis of its supporters and how they feel. One would never say that socialism is simply the stuff discontented workers vote for. Yet in the case of populism, analysts often prefer to indulge in psychological profiling rather than to listen to what populists say and to explain what’s wrong with it. Populist voters are thus confirmed in their impression that liberal elites never take them seriously.