Populism, as a political movement, has been ascendent on both sides of the Atlantic in the last few years.
Its orthodoxy, its machinery of outrage, appeals to the baser part of our brain; it provides a sense of tribal belonging and populism requires very little critical thinking.
I say “baser part of our brain” because populism never articulates the human virtues of love, generosity or tolerance.
The populist focus is always on anger, selfishness and division. Prove me wrong.
Populism is, therefore, a problem.
The respected conservative columnist George Will offers this succinct definision, “Populism is the passions of the people translated directly into governance, without the moderating influence of institutions.”
In other words, populism is mob rule.
In the United States, populist rhetoric begins with the words “we the people," and patriotic hearts are stirred.
Almost any idea or action can be placed after that phrase, and folk will buy into it.
To the populist’s mind, our Constitution ends after the first three words of the preamble.
Populists, who attack the governmental institutions that stand between their deeply-held political passions and enacting those passions into law, need to read past those first three words.
The rest of the preamble and the entire body of our Constitution establishes the very structure that they oppose.
“We the people” clearly provides sovereignty to the voice of people of the United States, but our Constitution sets up the government through which that voice finds expression in the real world.
Our Founders grasped the fact that a direct democracy, whereby the population directly passes laws, executes those laws and acts themselves as a judiciary, would create chaos.
So, they established a form of government where the sovereign power of the people was distributed among three co-equal branches of government in a republic.
Those institutions – Congress, the Presidency and the Judicial Branch – serve to moderate and temper the often angry and confusing will of the people.
Populists seek to weaken or tear down those institutions, so that the mood of the mob becomes the law of the land.
Rampant populism succeeded in doing just that during the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, shortly after we formed our own country.
The downside was that the French mob ushered in the Reign of Terror, and paved the way for the despot Napoleon to gain power.
For all of their rhetoric that celebrates “the common man” and “the voice of the people," and their derision of government as rule by elites, populist movements always seem to be nothing but background noise until a strongman shows up.
Populism is chronically susceptible to demagogues.
When someone tells them “nobody understands your pain like I do” and “nobody can speak for you like I can,” the mob lines up behind him (or her) with their pitchforks and torches, and are led around by the nose by any wanna-be tyrant with a lust for power and a way with words.
The January 6 riot offers itself as a case in point.
Closer to home, the recently-disgraced Wyoming Freedom Caucus embodies the gnarly, deconstructionist ethos of populism.
Except they cynically re-brand it as “conservative.”
Populism’s caustic tactic of dividing the world neatly into “us vs. them,” and fostering an irrational fear of established institutions fueled the rise of the Freedom Caucus.
And they rode the crest of that wave until 8/18/26 when voters finally saw through their bullshit.
It seems now that the populist fire-breathers are gravitating from the Republican Party toward Rebecca “Checkgate Becky” Bextel (a disgruntled apostate from the GOP) and the Wyoming Constitution party.
Checkgate Becky’s entire political posture consists of nothing more than being the poster girl for the pissed off, and her public persona proves it.
The Constitution Party is building a sanctuary city as a refuge for those hard-liners who are disenchanted with our republican (small “r”) political institutions and who still love the taste of populist snake oil.
It’s a tiny little clubhouse with a small crowd of folks who want to tear those institutions down so the passions of the people can be translated directly into governance.
I’ll leave you with the words of former Speaker of the U.S. House, Sam Rayburn, who said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
