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Saturday, January 06, 2018

Populism & its critics


Roger Kimball

Populism and current populist movements in the U.S. and Europe are a reaction to an overbearing government run by people who have no visceral understanding, or empathy with, the people they attempt to rule.  As a result they govern against the will of the people while living privileged lifestyles.

.... it is often said that “populism” is “anti- elitist,” but when it comes to phenomena like Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, I am not sure that the effective contrast is between elites, on the one hand, and us common folk, on the other. Often, I believe, the putative “elites” turn out to be neither “elite” nor elevated, merely to be possessed, through no virtue of their own, of an abundance of state power....

My own feeling is that most contemporary examples of what are called “populist” movements are at bottom movements to force the question: “Who rules?” Jeremy Black is doubtless correct that much of what we call “populist” today is at least in part a coefficient of upheavals wrought by technological displacement and homely facts of population change. Behind those realities, however, I would suggest that “populism” is primarily about what I have elsewhere called the location of sovereignty. For one thing, the question of sovereignty, of “Who governs?” stands behind the rebellion against the political correctness and moral meddlesomeness that are such conspicuous and disfiguring features of our increasingly bureaucratic society. The smothering, Tocquevillian blanket of regulatory excess has had a wide range of practical and economic effects, stifling entrepreneurship and making any sort of productive innovation difficult....

The issue of sovereignty also stands behind the debates over the relative advantages and moral weather of “globalism” vs. “nationalism” as well as the correlative economic issues of underemployment and wage stagnation. In Federalist 10, Madison warned against the schemes of “theoretic” politicians. “Globalism” may sound attractive in the abstract. But the spirit of local control tempers the cosmopolitan project of a borderless world with a recognition that the nation state has been the best guarantor not only of sovereignty but also of broadly shared prosperity. What we might call the ideology of free trade—the globalist aspiration to transcend the impediments of national identity and control—is an abstraction that principally benefits its architects.

Behind the various moods and movements that have been described as “populist” is a growing recognition that the goals of the administrative state are inimical to freedom. “Populist,” indeed, is one word for those phenomena. An affirmation of sovereignty, underwritten by a passion for freedom, is another, possibly more accurate, phrase. If that is correct, then I’d say that conservatives ought to respond to the “populist challenge” by embracing it wholeheartedly.


Its the rebellion of the country class against the ruling class.  The anger of the country class is made greater by the realization that the ruling class has stacked the deck; that elections are a charade where the winner is pre-determined.  And if the "dark horse" should actually win - a dark horse like Donald Trump - the ruling class will do everything in its power to destroy him.

That will not stand.



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