Populism Is As American as the Declaration of Independence. Reject It At Our Peril.

Far from posing a threat to liberty, populism has protected it since 1776.

Ask members of the political elite to name the greatest threat to our democracy, and chances are that they will point to the people they call “populists” and the movement they call “populism.”

Complaints about Trump’s populism abound on the political Left, yet it’s far from limited to it. Much of the harshest criticism of populism comes from people who style themselves as anti-Trump Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.

The American Enterprise Institute, which for decades was the flagship think tank of the conservative movement, announced in 2018 a “unique collaboration” to fight populism alongside the Center for American Progress, the think tank run by longtime aides to Hillary Clinton. AEI’s Matthew Continetti, founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon and a historian of the conservative movement, links “demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories” to populists in the movement. 

At George Mason University, the libertarian Mercatus Center hosted a blog called The UnPo…