The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.

I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”

I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.

If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.

And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.

So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.

And that’s exactly where we are today.

If you grow up in the rural South, you understand populism almost by osmosis. The region has long been populist territory, and sometimes for understandable reasons. The antebellum South was an extraordinarily economically stratified society, with a small planter elite that both owned slaves and exercised political and economic dominance over the yeoman farmers who made up the bulk of the white Southern population.