Why win votes when you can engage in lawfare?
Mainstream parties could have responded in one of two ways to the populist wave that began to sweep through developed nations on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-2010s. They could either offer attractive policy alternatives that answered ordinary people’s anxieties and rallied them away from populist movements like Trump and Brexit, or they could try to use underhanded lawfare strategies to undo populist ballot-box victories.