Trump and Vance certainly advertise themselves as far more populist than the current clowns who inhabit Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington. Americans will determine soon enough if that’s hype or real. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
Let us hope that whomever ascends to the leadership is a populist in the full sense of the word, channeling Emerson and his fellow critics of what we now call neoliberalism.
What does it mean to say a politician is a populist? Over 30 years ago, Christopher Lasch observed in his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics that populism had been applied to such a wide swath of individuals and causes that it had lost any specific meaning.
This definition is a start: A political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
Lasch, if not alone among American intellectuals, was certainly one of the few who was deeply concerned with the roots of American populism, and with its critique of the changes in the American social, cultural and economic realms that were promoted by the status quo at the expense of those social classes diminished by those changes. Those who resisted these changes were deemed populists.
Lasch meticulously traces the roots of American 19th century populism through the influential Enlightenment era thinkers of Europe, the Protestant tradition’s theological debates and American intellectual critics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom Lasch wrote: “his social views can easily be recognized, I think, as the views of a nineteenth-century populist. He has a populist distain for the fashionable life” which “fosters vanity, luxury and frivolous display.”
