Civilization
Today’s Populist Rebellion Shouldn’t Alarm Us
American populism might alarm the elite but need not alarm anyone else, because the elite have only themselves to blame.
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Establishment voices are expressing alarm these days about the rise of political populism. All around the globe, workaday citizens are offering new resistance to authorities. In the U.S., voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class. Those who have dominated public life for a generation declare that the sky is falling.
Populism is in line with American political tradition
In the United States, though, there is a long tradition of popular revolts against order-giving grandees. Indeed, our whole system is built to support rebukes of eminences whenever they get heavy-handed with their neighbors. Our current bottom-up rebellion should neither surprise nor panic public-spirited Americans.
Plain folks are objecting to the direction of society today across boundaries of geography, race and ethnicity, profession, and income. They resent being bossed by an aristocracy of experts in our federal bureaucracy, university departments, news salons, and entertainment studios. They are resisting pressures that have inflamed racial identities, stigmatized skeptics of health dictates, shut off religious rights, and suffocated economic producers. They are rebelling against campaigns to redefine sexuality and family life in unprecedented ways, secrete propaganda into children’s media, deny parents the right to guide their own offspring, and punish dissenters right up to the level of FBI intimidation. They’re pushing back on betrayals of popular trust that have normalized drug use, shackled law enforcement, set criminals free, prosecuted good Samaritans, and run interference for addicts and vagrants as they take over city streets.
Corrupt functionaries provoke populism
Our very constitutional structure is being corroded by functionaries who have altered laws, forgiven loans and spent money by mere presidential fiat, put illegal immigrants on welfare programs, jammed through trillions in new federal expenditures entirely outside the required appropriations process, and discredited the judicial branch when its rulings were inconvenient. The same intriguers have threatened to pack the Supreme Court, discard the Electoral College, rewrite Senate rules, let aliens vote, and induct into the Union new states that will rubberstamp all of the above.
The elites pushing these nostrums include some of our most brilliant individuals. But they are over-privileged, over-educated, over-wealthy, over-indulged, and over-confident. They have been tremendously favored in schooling, networking opportunities, salaries, and access to power. Educators and gatekeepers of culture tell them they are not only talented but a moral elect entitled to set the nation’s course – in politics, law, science and technology, reporting and publishing, medicine, literature, and the most intimate details of domestic life.
Many within this new gentry have convinced themselves that their iron grip on our media, colleges, political bureaus, and arts institutions is the only thing preventing the bigoted rubes in flyover country from imposing fascism across our fruited plain. They think the folks out in Podunk should sit down, shut their reactionary mouths, swallow the radical new definitions of what’s true/real/enlightened, and let their superiors make the big decisions about where our country should head.
Trying to redefine civilization
Our would-be dominators want more than just political and economic authority. They aim to redefine civilization and even reality, denying fundamentals of biology, economics, and human history to further their progressive visions. They use the powerful mainline institutions they control to disseminate approved narratives and smother alternative interpretations. They suppress unsanctioned ideas, language, facts, and forms of humor, steer public opinion, and cancel personalities. They claim the right to decide what is misinformation, disinformation, and acceptable information. They attack dissenters, picket family homes, wreck careers, and demand conformity.
Some of these schemers crave power and want a whip hand to control government decisions and business practices. Others are just fantasists indoctrinated with the kind of magical thinking that graduate schools now stuff into our anointed ones. Collecting grants, fellowships, praise, annual prizes, TED Talk invitations, tenured jobs, and lush salaries from academe, foundations, and public-sector agencies, they are insulated from real-world disciplines and able to devote their lives to imposing the progressive fairy tales on everyone else.
Both types of bossy pants see no injustice in their disproportionate accumulation of influence and money. They believe they deserve to run things by dint of their qualifications – that their IQs, paper credentials, and connections to other members of the Illuminati will yield better decisions than letting millions of plebes blunder through uninformed choices. It’s not 1776 anymore, they smirk, and in today’s technocratic society, hicks, deplorables, and simpletons must defer to expertise.
The Founders knew this would happen
The founders of our country anticipated all of this. In their careful studies of history, Madison, Adams, and others noticed how talented but manipulative elites time and again hijacked societies and grabbed the levers of power. The designers of the American experiment were hell-bent to avoid that on our shores, and very intentionally made us a popularly ruled republic. They knew that average men and women would make mistakes – but that these would be less egregious, systematic, and damaging than the coercive edicts of a privileged class. “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,” warned Thomas Jefferson.
Every man or woman is as good as another – that is the central proposition of traditional American politics. Ordinary people are not to be ruled over by others but should make their own decisions and order their own lives. That sounds innocuous enough, but most potentates in most eras have utterly trampled that claim.
The extreme cases are communist Edens, fundamentalist caliphates, personal autocracies. Over the last century, historians calculate, those types of rule from above have snuffed out more than 170 million lives. It took extreme centralizations of power and social control to produce fatal error and terror on that massive scale.
Moral autocrats hate individuals
Even when less deadly, governance by mandate suffocates human potential. Cunning masters have booted and whipped the masses in many subtle ways across socialist Europe, rule-bound Japan, and bastions around America dominated by the smart set.
All recent autocrats have had one thing in common, notes Michael Ignatieff. They “hated moral and political individualism: the idea that a nation’s destiny should depend on the sovereign judgment of separate individuals.” Today’s reassertion of political individualism is a ratification of the most profound American principles.
In the U.S., political, economic, and cultural authority are dispersed in ways quite different from almost any other nation. We have no dominant center in the way elites of London, Paris, or Tokyo reign over Britain, France, and Japan. Our talent, resources, and energy are widely scattered across distinct regions that compete with each other. Small businesses, new startups, and first-generation wealth are far more common in America. We have no reflex of deference to oligarchs.
Research for my new book on populism shows that American successes are more often attributable to ordinary workers, middle-class neighbors, dutiful privates and sergeants, and small donors than they are to CEOs, bureaucrats, generals, or billionaires. Common citizens are far from perfect but they carry deep social wisdom in their brains and breasts. As they navigate the real world in their collective millions, typical residents build up valuable trial-and-error information and life lessons that make them better arbiters of their own futures than some centralized cognoscenti.
Trust the people
Run-of-the-mill Americans can be trusted – indeed must be trusted – to make our society’s most crucial decisions. The uprising that returned Donald Trump to the White House is not some rash tantrum. It has been building for three decades, and fits seamlessly in a long historical string of protests that break out whenever normal citizens feel they are being domineered over. Mandarins who crave societal control have wrested away the wheel at institution after institution in the U.S., and tried to install progressive mandates on their fellow countrymen.
The 2025 backlash is a predictable response to this power grab. Everyday workers and families and neighbors have answered with an emphatic: “Oh no you don’t.” That’s a healthy and necessary turn of events, and there is lots of evidence that salutary results are likely to flow from this populist remonstrance.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Karl Zinsmeister is the author of “Backbone: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared.”
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