As a writer, I consider Thomas Frank something of an idol. Early issues of The Baffler, the magazine he cofounded in 1988, were hugely influential to me as an adolescent, and his books on political culture—like The Wrecking Crew and Listen, Liberal—continued to influence me well into my adult years. My own writing is what I call “store-brand Thomas Frank,” at its best a passable substitute for the real thing.

But it was with some hesitation that I approached a review of his latest work, The People, No, a history of anti-populism from the founding of the People’s Party in 1892 to the Reagan years. I had the nagging fear that the book could be his heel turn, a cringe-inducing “Actually, Tom Cotton and Donald Trump are the real populists!” take.

Fortunately, The People, No is not that. Rather, it is a book that gets—in fact, obsesses over—what “populism” is and is not, historically and in the present. Populism has a long and impressive history in American politics, a record of achieving real, tangible improvements in the lives of working people, including progressive income taxes, the eight-hour workweek, direct election of senators, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Frank identifies a pattern of elites (or anti-populists) who have perceived popular movements—early 20th century Progressives, labor activists, the civil rights movement—as threats to their own power and have responded by belittling those groups that have not met with their approval.

This is the fundamental premise for Frank: that true populism represents the economic interests of the working class and, as such, is reliably detested and rejected by the upper classes (hence the titular No). Populism is not the practiced folksiness of a George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, whose man-of-the-people politics were merely a performance while his policies were always meant to serve moneyed interests. Neither is populism synonymous with anti-elitism alone: Donald Trump sounded faux-populist notes in 2016, but proceeded to govern like the id of the plutocracy when elected. In short, a lot of what gets called populism is not. “Right wing populism,” with its top-down power hierarchy, is the latest incarnation of Father Coughlin or later-period Huey Long demagoguery, while the abundant use of populist language is a marketing strategy for an ideology based solidly in meritocratic deference to elites and experts.

It could come off as an exercise in semantics to parse the “correct” use of an ideological term in a country where some people consider Joe Biden a socialist and in which “liberal” means “anything I don’t like.” But there is something important here, as our present political discourse legitimizes the nationalist, authoritarian, antidemocratic right by calling it a true populist movement. It should matter—it does matter—that the reactionary right and genuine populists share nothing but a superficial dislike of cultural elites. Trump exudes that kind of resentment, spewing bile at the establishment that won’t embrace him, at magazines that won’t give him awards. Anti-elitism, though, does not a populist make.

To elites, though, anything arraigned against them is “populist.” Anyone who thinks Larry Summers is a fraud and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a bunch of self-gratifying bullshit must be of the same ideological cloth. Frank characterizes, correctly, the current state of American politics not as elites versus the masses but as two parties (superficially liberal and conservative) that represent warring factions among the elites.