Word.ws English Dictionary

sadopopulism

sadopopulism noun: a political strategy or act in which a leader appeals to people by harming them but convincing them that people they hate are at fault or suffering worse harm.

Noun

sadopopulism (uncountable)

  1. A political strategy or act in which a leader appeals to people by harming them but convincing them that people they hate are at fault or suffering worse harm.
    • […] 'sadopopulism', in which people are willing to inflict pain on themselves so long as they can believe that, in the same moment, they are making their enemies hurt more: […]'2019 November 5, Fintan O'Toole, The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism, Liveright Publishing, →ISBN

Origin of sadopopulism

From sado- + populism, coined by historian Timothy Snyder, then influenced by earlier terms and concepts like "political sadism".

Questions about sadopopulism

What does sadopopulism mean?
Sadopopulism means a political strategy or act in which a leader appeals to people by harming them but convincing them that people they hate are at fault or suffering worse harm.
What part of speech is sadopopulism?
Sadopopulism is a noun.

Words near sadopopulism in the dictionary

  1. sadomasochist
  2. sadomasochistic
  3. sadomasochistically
  4. sadomasochists
  5. sadoparanoiac
  6. sadopopulism
  7. sadopopulist
  8. sadopopulists
  9. sadospiritual
  10. sadospirituality
  11. Sadoun

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sadopopulism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sadopopulism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sadopopulism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.