n. A political movement in which a wealthy individual offers ideas and policies that appeal to the common person.
2016
Why has this happened? The answer is that this is how a wealthy donor class, dedicated to the aims of slashing taxes and shrinking the state, obtained the footsoldiers and voters it required. This, then, is “pluto-populism”: the marriage of plutocracy with rightwing populism.
2015
2013
Based on traditional patron-client relationships and the remaining big income gap between mostly rural poor and limited mostly urban middle classes, "pluto-populism" and "pork-barrelling" have become prominent features of party politics everywhere.
1997 (earliest)
Does the crumbling of the Soviet Union, accomplished more or less peacefully, invalidate or con?rm the notion of totalitarianism? Did it perish along with the other great all-inclusive ideologies or might it be reborn in other forms, as for example a media-based pluto-populism?
The pluto- part of this timely term is short for plutocrat, a member of the plutocracy, "government or rule by the wealthy" (a word that dates to at least 1631). The pluto- prefix comes from the Greek plouto, "wealth, riches." The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that this is a variant of the Greek term plein, "to swim, float, … to flow, hence to abound." If true, then it adds etymological truth to the phrase "swimming in money."