The presentation will consider conceptions of “populism” and argue that there is no such thing and “populist” should be used as an attribute rather than a noun of different strands of “left-wing” and “right-wing” backlashes against liberal democracy. The presentation will then outline four conditions for the emergence of different varieties of populist anti-liberal democracy challenges. Two general conditions have to do with various regions’ proximity to global innovation frontiers and capacity to compensate losers of the process of social transformation. The variance on these dimensions is mostly inter-temporal. Two specific conditions vary more cross-sectionally and they concern the alignments of ethno-cultural divisions in polities and the institutional mechanisms of aggregating interests. The presentation will finally proceed to the prediction of different modes of populist mobilization in different parts of the world. One implication is that the United States faces much more intense populist challenges to liberal democracy than Western European democracies.