Hannan on "Populism"

This is worth reading--for the #NeverTrump crowd AND for the Leftoids--who have something in common:  their utter hatred of "populism"

The vilest slur in Brussels, the insult to end all insults, is “populist.” Eurocrats spit it out, rather in the manner of a teenager at a party who mistakenly takes a swig from a beer can that was being used as an ashtray. Yet, monstrous as the word is in a Eurocrat’s vocabulary, he is surprisingly vague about its meaning.

The one thing that he unequivocally understands populism to signify is “something that other people like, but I don’t.” Thus, calling for a referendum is populist. Accepting the result of a referendum is populist. Free speech for Eurosceptics is populist. Tax cuts are populist. Cutting waste is populist....

Umnnhh humnnnhhh..  In fact, it's a rather delicate balance.

...My point is that populism is not intrinsically a bad thing. It may be either positive or negative according to context. The essential feature of all populist movements is their belief that an elite is governing in its own interests rather than that of the general population. To make an obvious point, the validity of the populist argument depends on the extent to which that assessment is accurate....

Some populist movements rely on scapegoating, on attributing every misfortune to a privileged or powerful minority. These are the ugly movements, the ones that offer anger and division rather than solutions. “Are you poor? Are your children jobless? It’s not your fault! It’s all the fault of international financiers/powerful foreigners/Jews/the one percent!”...

Such populist movements depend on what we might call a piece of faulty circuitry in the human brain: a tendency to see patterns where none exist....

It is fair to state that the AltRight bunch is playing in the above sandbox to an uncomfortable degree.

[William Jennings] Bryan set the tone for every populist insurgency that was to follow in the democratic world. Misfortune was not a part of the human condition; it happened because someone somewhere was being selfish....

Here he presents the 'other side':

...Equally, though, let’s not pretend that oligarchy is unknown in democracies. Many polities, from the Roman Republic onwards, have retained the outward forms of representative government while being captured by cliques. The Roman precedent was, indeed, vividly in the minds of America’s Founding Fathers and informed many of the checks they put in place to prevent a similar decline in the United States.

Those checks worked. Unlike, say, the near-contemporary French Republic, the American Republic did not follow Rome into autocratic rule. But, even in an open democracy, there is a natural tendency for people in power to rig the rules in their own favor, to give themselves an institutional advantage....

Yes.

...Established political parties passing laws that make it harder for newcomers to challenge them; big corporations using the regulatory regime to erect barriers to entry; public-sector workers ensuring that the system favors producers over consumers; mega-banks persuading politicians to bail them out with taxpayers’ money—all these are, in their ways, examples of oligarchy. And all of them are intrinsic to modern politics, because human beings are naturally self-interested. To the extent that they trigger a populist backlash, that backlash might be considered a proportionate and necessary antibody.

To put it another way, a measure of populism is inherent in any democratic system. The intensity and validity of the phenomenon depend upon circumstances....

Ahh.  That "delicate balance" thing!

Hannan sees 1)  the Iraq War; 2) the bank-bailout; and 3) the Mass Immigration as the trigger(s) which began the successful Trump Revolt.  Personally, I think that the Queer "Marriage", same-sex bathroom mandates, and ridiculous "global warming" bullshit regulations added fuel to the fire; but even more influential were the McConnell/Boehner cave-ins and the imbroglios of Hillary which seemed to go un-remarked by most of the Establishment (and yes, I'm looking at the Senate and House.)

...Put it all together and what do people see? A political class that will send boys to die in distant lands on the basis of, at best, a half-truth; that taxes the poor to bail out the rich; and that supports an immigration policy designed for big business at the expense of ordinary people.

For what it’s worth, I think only the second of these assertions is wholly fair. But I can see why a gap has opened up between government and governed, between the paese legale and the paese reale, between the smirking classes and the working classes. Into this gap have sprung populists of every hue...

Hannan sees the EU as a far more significant threat to Ordinary Europeans than the US Government is to Ordinary Americans, by the way.  But, in either case, "populism" is not necessarily the pariah that the #NeverTrump/Communist Left" would want you to believe it is.