> The word populist has ended up with a confused set of meanings (intentionally). What we have now is a war between different groups of elites

Of course. The masses never exercise political power directly. As you point out, it's disaffected factions of the elite that claim and wield the moral authority of the masses to defeat other elites. It's been this way since the Optimates and Populares persecuted each other in a centuries-long spiral of escalating stupidity culminating in political upheavel.

Nevertheless, disaffected elites can't swing the club of popular opinion against other elites with any effect unless there is some non-zero dot-product alignment between their governance and popular opinion. In exchange for at least partially enacting popular policy, upstart elites get a tool for deposing other elites. The people win in the end.

Fantastic book: https://www.amazon.com/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Glob...

(Yes, Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history. He's atoned for it and more.)

I would advise reading https://www.amazon.com/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Glob.... Due to the order of development where the US was free first then developed a bureaucratic state. The Us has always had a low state capacity. Add onto that the role of the states in the US as co-sovereign and you run into a lot of implementation difficulties in making these proposed Nordic policies workable here.

Any policy we attempted to implement would be resisted by the states. Held up in court, and ultimately made useless by special interest.