re: The Anti Populist Crowd

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Good 2-part post. I would just add the dimension that populism takes its authority to come from "the people" but when counted, populists typically amount to a minority of the whole population. They sometimes try to elide this by squinting at the whole population and defining the people down to "the true people", "virtuous people" who are in the coalition advancing the populist framing. So, it's basically a way of a minoritarian politics to claim a sense of legitimacy as being majoritarian.

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Excellent point. The True Scotsman Fallacy.

One thing that has led Americans astray—and it's the leftist populists who have done this, but the right is picking it up—is the narrative of "Democracy" and a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people."

Sure, phrases like that exist in our documents of independence (most people don't remember that the specific phrase I just quotes was not; it was in a presidential speech), but they don't mean what populists today take them to mean.

The founding fathers intended a constitutional representative republic with the constitution providing the limit on what government could do, and they did NOT intend for just anybody to be able to participate in the representation. They put filters on it. You had to be a white male landowner to be eligible to vote.

They intended that we have a system run by "elites."

Because they knew that populist systems are dangerous and unstable, with pure democracies being the worst.

The simple, obvious (yet obscured by well over 100 years of narratives to the contrary) fact is that there are lots and lots of people in America who really don't have any business determining public policy and shouldn't be voting.

Again, this is obvious. We don't let five year olds vote. The populists here love to talk about how white suburban women having the vote has ruined the country...they have no problem with the premise.

But like so many things, they can't extract the general principle and apply it to different context.

If they could, they'd first realize that the general principle dictates that even THEY believe in government. by the "elite." They just have a different definition of where the cutoff line is for separating the commons from the elites.

And second, it would occur to them that if white suburban women shouldn't be voting, probably someone who believes that the government can control the weather shouldn't be voting either.