The elevation of Elon Musk to shadow president, and his continued presence in that role, proves to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Trump movement is not a serious option for governance. The incompetence and stupidity on display are absolutely staggering, and the constant apologetics for it leave me at a total loss for words. I certainly don't want the left back in power, but if this is the alternative, I don't know what to say at that point. It seems that the consequences of social media for politics have actually been far worse than anyone could've predicted.
I've now been thoroughly convinced that Trump's rise to power and takeover of the GOP was for the worse, in a big way. I'd much rather have Mitt Romney's Republican party back.
Authoritarianism can have big ups and big downs. If this was 2015 Elon Musk, I think he'd be doing a vastly better job than 2025 Elon Musk whose brain has been fried by Ketamine. In general it's not worth taking the risk of authoritarianism.
“In general it's not worth taking the risk of authoritarianism.”
The American people agreed with you on this in 2024, which is why they saw through the false claims by elite swamp leftists of Trump as fascist Hitler authoritarian and voted to get rid of the *actually* authoritarian Biden-Harris regime and its cronies who committed repeated acts of lawfar against Trump, pressured and colluded with a big Tech to censor information unfavorable to the regime, and literally tried to install a Disinformation Board…
“I'd much rather have Mitt Romney's Republican party back.”
That’s nice.
But it’s mostly irrelevant.
The choice was between Trump and “his” GOP or the actual authoritarian leftists (fronted by first Biden then Kamala) with anti-abundance economic policies who were happy to use censorship, lawfare and authoritarian political power in service to their political ends.
They were the ones who *actually* corruptly used political power to influence elections.
Richard seems now to have forgotten all of these points.
P.S. had it not turned out that Romney 2012 was a phony conservative and in fact just a moderate Republican only slightly to the right of Susan Collins, I would agree with your (still not really relevant) preference. But I’m mostly a Ted Cruz / Mike Lee / Ron Johnson guy, and since Richard irrationally hates Cruz as much as Trump, he’d claim it’s basically no different at this point than being for Trump…
Mitt Romney is plenty more conservative than Trump in several aspects. I'm not sure what Trump really has going for him over Romney on substance besides maybe immigration policy. I'd like to say it's still an easy choice in favor of Trump based on that alone, but it really isn't.
I'd rather have Ted Cruz over Trump any day. I doubt Cruz would have handed the keys to the kingdom over to Elon Musk and then tripled down on such a move after the fact. I doubt Ron DeSantis would have done that either. Elon and DOGE are something I can only imagine being greenlit to this extent by Trump, so they're emblematic of his particular brand of "conservatism"--which is to say, massive incompetence and stupidity.
“ I'm not sure what Trump really has going for him over Romney on substance besides maybe immigration policy.”
Hmmmm….
RomneyCare.
Voting baselessly - twice - to impeach Trump. The 2nd I *merely* strongly disagree with; the first time it turns out that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but that Biden had in fact done - and admittted doing as VP - the thing they *falsely* accused Trump of having done in influencing Ukraine.
He supported the 2021 infrastructure mass spending bill
He voted to approve the *very* leftist Justice Katanji Brown Jackson.
And Xavier Becerra for HHS.
He thinks we should tax carbon emissions.
Voted for yet more gun control laws.
I’m not sure what Romney really has going for him on conservative substance other than a proper distaste for imposing and maintaining tariffs.
- Given this description of populism v. elitism, it seems more rational for any *individual* to seek power through populism assuming both paths lead equally high. Popular power sounds more robust since power through elitism can be taken away by those above pretty easily
- Trump acquired power through populism. Didn’t his hangers on acquire it through a sort of shadow elitism though? If Kash Patel were fired by Trump I think his star would quickly fade, much like the NYT writer
- Ultimately it seems it is up to the institutions to beat the populists in the competition for popular support. They have a ton of advantages. Institutions live much longer than people, wield tremendous power, and have massive name recognition. If they cannot use this to win people over (in the context of democracy) or customers and capital (in the context of markets) they deserve limited sympathy…
Mostly DOGE. The tariff policy has certainly been bad as well, but I'm not sure if Elon Musk has much to do with that. DOGE is wildly retarded though. It's exactly the sort of grift right-wingers criticized BLM as being, except possibly even worse--while stuff like BLM only sought to skim their cut off the top of institutions, DOGE seeks to destroy them outright.
I think of populism like acid. You need an occasional flush of populism to clean out the corrosion of elite institution pipes due to arrogant group think, outdated orthodoxy, suboptimal filtering and patronage networks, and conflicts of interest. But just as too much acid can end up destroying pipes rather than just clean them, populism becomes destructive when it becomes excessive or an end unto itself. Ideally populist movements will be short-lived and cause elites to self-reflect, clean up their institutional defects, and then make the elite ranks effective and respectable again.
Disaster strikes when either the elite arrogantly reject any legitimate criticism, leading to revolution (think 1789 France and the "divine right of kings" doctrine), or when the commoners refuse to acknowledge the good faith efforts of elites to improve, instead succumbing to a mob mentality that glorifies the "will of the majority" over all else.
A grave problem arises when the corrosion is so pervasive that it can't be fully expunged without destroying the pipes. A smaller dose of acid might open a channel, but the corrosion is still there, and the pipes continue to crumble (and begin to leak). Trump and "The Cathedral" are symptoms of the same systemic rot.
This is a really interesting framework. Perhaps Trump will prove to be a "shock to the system" that Democrats and centre-right Republicans needed to rouse them from their complacency and force them to be more competitive in elections.
You present a very convincing case to prefer elite governance over the longer term and within the context of relatively well functioning institutions. I have a BA from Yale and an M Phil and MA from Columbia University, and yet I nevertheless voted for Trump in this past election. My reasoning was that America’s institutions had so deteriorated that only an external shock had any chance, however minimal, to provoke true reform. We all know the examples: the manner in which Kamala Harris was selected and the telling way in which, after her selection, she was unable to perform even minimally is one proof point in support of my vote. Another is the deaths of 7 million people worldwide from a Covid outbreak that represented the knowing outsourcing to China of research in viruses that the US science establishment deemed too dangerous to do at home, and yet a fiasco that was lied about and suppressed by this same establishment and by the legacy media; a final example, selected from many further candidates, was the multi-year cover-up of Biden‘s senility that clearly required cooperation among hundreds of White House staffers, the media, financial backers of the Democratic Party, and — let’s not forget! — the vice president herself.
Of course, my current concern is that Donald Trump represents something more ominous than a needed external shock. His attacks on law firms like Coie-Perkins, and his removal of security from figures like John Bolton, are disquieting evidence of the depth of his narcissism and disregard for or perhaps ignorance of Constitutional norms and simple civility. But almost equally ominous, the Democratic Party seems unable to reform itself by acknowledging how its own elite obsessions (monetized DEI, performative anti-racism, trans celebration, Hamas) continue to enrage us and thereby moderate our disquiet over MAGA excesses.
Come on, Kamala performed minimally. She spoke well at the debate and in her convention speech. She secured nearly half of all votes in America. There's plenty to criticize her and the liberal establishment for, 2024 was undoubtedly a choice of the lesser evil. But Trump's evils were underestimated by his voters. His 2016 presidency -- during which he was rigidly constrained, and his influence was limited -- was held up as the model we should expect in the future, in spite of this running contrary to all indications from Trump himself and from all the Republicans who worked with him. I believe you made a mistake in voting for him, and that the Democrats made a horrifying unforced error by selecting Kamala to oppose him.
Yes, my vote may have been mistaken. But it will be redeemed if the Democrats return to actually using primaries to select candidates, and reacquaint themselves with the interests of the non-college working class.
J.W.- helpful comment. I have a question for you. I just left another comment to the main post that touches on where I’m going for this.
You mentioned “My reasoning was that America’s institutions had so deteriorated that only an external shock had any chance, however minimal, to provoke true reform” and then cited the Kamala Harris selection process, Covid-19 policies, and the Biden cognition fiasco (all extremely reasonable things to critique).
My question is: How do you get from making these specific critiques to developing a global worldview that all (or most) of America’s institutions are broken beyond repair? My view (apparently this makes me an elite anti-populist) is that because there are so so so many government institutions in the USA, plus unprecedented leaking in the social media era, we will never be lacking for examples and anecdotes of institutional failure, but this tells us nothing about the brokenness of the median institution and whether it’s higher than it was 20 years ago. (An analogy: I’ve never seen more Nazi white supremacist tweets than I have in the last 12 months, but that’s weak evidence that Americans are getting more racist). One could also make the argument that institutions are structurally less able to be corrupt in the current media environment; as an example it is very unlikely that the government could conduct secret bombings of Cambodia in 2025.
So my contention is that “our institutions are broken” is an ideological claim supported by anecdata, not one you could ever “prove” in a formal way. If you disagree, could you tell me what I’m getting wrong?
The reason I find myself interrogating this claim is that the amount of people who now make strong claims about our broken institutions seems to be inflating much more rapidly than the actual incidences I see of institutional failure (in my view, institutions are bungling things are approximately the same rate they have been throughout my whole lifespan; to the extent I’m finding more anecdotes, it roughly matches the rise in how many hours a week I spend online reading the news, and/or the increase in how lucrative it has become to report on institutional failures in the modern media environment). This suggests to me that group psychology is driving this perception more than facts on the ground. But I’m willing to be contradicted here.
The FBI has always been known to engage in sleazy, unethical behavior, last in date being the Steele Dossier. Its opaque, elite, institutional status has, if anything, shielded it from accountability, because if they all know each other and have for a long time, then they're not going to rat each other out.
If you rely solely on the people on the inside to reform themselves in any significant way, then you're going to be waiting a long time. Major reform requires outsiders with outside (popular) forces. Shielding institutions from popular pressure is the best way to make them sclerotic, inefficient, and detached from the realities of the ground over time. It's why private businesses work so much better.
And then there is the foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob, which has managed to be completely and catastrophically wrong about everything for decades
I consider myself a populist and I certainly don’t ascribe to all, or maybe any, of these beliefs. I simply feel the ruling elites - politicians, technocrats, media etc - have adopted a set of luxury beliefs that are making the population poorer and less safe. These include net zero, open borders, trans men in woman’s sports and spaces, defund the police, safe supply for drug addicts etc. The elite power base is shifting though, which has implications of course.
Except that net zero is the only item you list which elites overwhelmingly support. The rest of the things you list are liberal populist beliefs which liberal elites tried to prevent from being implemented. You might possibly add the safe supply for drug addicts to the list, but after Oregon crashed and burned so hard on that one, they have all but abandoned it.
The leadership of the Democrats has been captured by progressive elites and its policy reflected that. Biden implemented changes to Title IX that allowed trans men to compete in women sports, and illegal immigration soared to record levels. This is why Trump won the election.
While Biden did a terrible job on immigration, he did things like keeping Title 42 in place and issued the executive order to stop asylum claims which dramatically reduced the number of illegal crossings. That's not open borders. If progressives took over the party why do they all hate him so much? Why did so many of them declare that they wouldn't vote for him or Kamala?
You are incorrect about Biden's Title IX changes, they did absolutely nothing to let transgender women play women's sports. The administration had considered adding something that would make it harder to ban them from sports, but it was never implemented.
Clearly, Biden could have done much more to reduce illegal immigration, considering that it has dropped about 90%. To suggest the Dem leadership opposes trans men competing in women’s sports is wishful thinking, even if the Title IX changes had yet to be implemented.
When did the drop start? Back in 2023, under Biden. When did the surge start? Back in 2020, under Trump. By the time Biden left office monthly crossings were half what they were when he took office in January 2021. Which makes him an improvement on Trump, who more than doubled monthly crossings between when he took office and left.
Love how you can make up facts, then just say it "had yet to be implemented" when someone points out that you are wrong. That's a neat trick.
Border encounters in February 2025 were under 10,000. In January, 2024 they were more than 190,000 - a staggering drop of 90% and the lowest level in decades. This is all easy to verify.
lol. Maybe I do. It still doesn’t make it right for trans men to compete in women’s sports. Funny thing. Of all the luxury beliefs I cited, you get triggered by what I consider the least consequential. I’m not a woman though and either are you.
I don’t agree with transwomen in sports either, but in my experience people who obsess about trannies and use neo-alt-right neologisms like “luxury beliefs” are almost always mean-spirited and incompetent r3t@rds. Also why is net zero a bad goal?
I don’t have an issue with net zero as a concept - if we were building a bunch of nuclear power to get there, I would be fine with that. But we’re not doing that. We are building wind and solar, which is expensive, inefficient and intermittent. Look at Britain and Germany. Their energy costs are four times higher than North America and China. Industry has stopped investing there and domestic production is slowly shutting down or moving abroad. Britain doesn’t have a domestic steel industry anymore and auto manufacturers are looking at shutting down as well, if the govt doesn’t reform its EV mandates.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn’t make a profit for investors easily. That’s the biggest reason it’s not being adopted more quickly, not the environmentalist boogyman people like you blame. But the tide is turning in favor of nuclear energy.
Tell that to Germany, which shut down its last three nuclear power plants last year. They were perfectly functional and operational. They were shut down for ideological reasons.
“Power brings an endless number of opportunities for abuse, and it is therefore important to make sure people we can trust are elevated to high positions. Who is more likely to engage in corrupt practices…”
🙄
This argument for the swamp, and against Trump appointees in general and Patel in particular, I find especially ridiculous given the facts of the last 10 years.
E.g. Consider the FBI and how it went after Trump, got wiretaps based on planted evidence - sourced by the Democrat Party! - known to be false, buried the info on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop, while pressuring social media companies to censor stories on the laptop and on COVID and from Alex Berenson that opposed the Biden agenda.
All these leaders at the FBI fit Richard’s definition of the elite to a “t”.
So in terms of federal power abuses? Hell yeah I trust Trump appointees a lot more than the Biden and Obama appointees and the career bureaucrats who ran the FBI.
And it’s not even remotely close.
[P.S. I do *not* consider myself a populist, and like Richard am opposed to most populist economic policies that don’t involve curbing illegal immigration.]
I think examining what meanings have been associated with the term populist is useful here and deserves our scrutiny, especially when it appears that political shifts have been occurring over the past ten years. But I object to the distinction you make between the elites under the Democrats and the newly emerging none-elites under Trump. I'm very sympathetic to Andy's comments (above) since you don't mention at all the norm and law shattering actions of the Democrats who you should remember illegally engaged in activity and conspiracies to overthrow a sitting president, Donald Trump.
Their violations and illegalities have not been fully detailed yet but even with what we do know absolutely, they're guilty of treason, political perfidy and in the election we just had, attempted murder of a candidate. Unless you wish to excuse them because they have these high status university degrees, many of them, starting with Wray, Comey, and many others, are certainly responsible for Trump wanting people loyal to him in the same way the Democrats wanted only those with Yale, Princeton, and Harvard degrees, who as it turns out proceeded to demonstrate what deep corruption looks like even with their respected degrees.
Who would you really trust among those who foisted the Russian Collusion charge on the American people, on the entire Trump administration, and who impeached Trump three times using transparently phony justifications. Some group of trusted highly educated criminals.
So I'm at a loss to understand your reluctance to cite those egregious actions of the Democrats and the few Republican conspirators, who as far as I can tell, deserve every demotion that may come to them from the new populists, however you else feel Trump should be regarded.
If you think anything Democrats have done in terms of violating norms is in the same universe as Trump, if you think his actions and character can even be spoken of in the same terms as anyone else, you’ve lost the plot. Your diet of information or reasoning ability is so bad you simply can’t be reasoned with. “Trump is uniquely corrupt and anti-democratic and any supporter of his has no right to complain about Democrats on similar grounds” is a litmus test for being a sane human being at this point.
Wow! Hard to believe you believe that nonsense considering what the Democrats have done, and then accuse me of losing a plot. What say you of attempting to oust a democratically elected president by way of russian collusion, of phony impeachments, of lawfare directed at a candidate for the presidency? That you wouldn't regard those as serious criminal activities of the justice department, of the very elites you seem to favor in your abusive dismissal of my comments says more about your lack of perspective in assessing threats to democracy. I was willing to go along with what appeared to be a richer description of the term populist but now wonder how such an arrogant and insulting comment could serve you well in your analysis. Uniquely corrupt? Really? That comment truly reveals something about your judgment or perhaps political bias. It's not trustworthy.
Not interested in debating this. Debating Trump’s level of corruption is like debating whether Asians are low in crime, or Putin invaded Ukraine. Feel free to debate with those who have more patience for this.
A distinction worth noticing is that Trump‘s malevolence is singular in nature: it is hardly something that could have emanated from anyone else. On the other hand, the assaults on our institutions that have derived from the left, have emerged from network connections among the political class, the educational establishment, the legacy media, and perhaps even what we would reluctantly think of as the “deep state.”
You may not be interested in the debate about who's more corrupt but the question about the illegal activities and criminal policies pursued by the Democrats are now out there for all to see whether you want them seen or not. Since you appear to be blinded by your ideological proclivities, I too see no further reason to "debate" the question of who's more uniquely corrupt. That must mean you see nothing unusual about the Steele document and its use by the Corrupt Democrats, or the FBI violating the legals rights of defendants, or the dozens of other steps the Bureau took to conceal the conspiracy, even as Mueller said there was no connection, to cite but a few of the illegalities. If you don't see them, and quickly dismiss what you actually won't acknowledge, there isn't any point to sustain an exchange with someone so closed minded, and arrogant as well.
"Elites pride themselves on being tolerant of outsiders, which makes them favor things like more liberal immigration policies and DEI programs. They trust scientists as a default and tend to reject conspiracy theories."
Elites pride themselves on being tolerant of 'outsiders' in theory, as a kind of virtue signal (the same way they're tolerant of shoplifters and sex workers and Palestinian terrorists-basic norms of responsibility and public decency are considered distasteful among such people) but are actually extraordinarily intolerant of outsiders on a community and interpersonal basis. Their 'tolerance' is an ideological setting, not a deeply rooted character trait.
'Conspiracy theory' is a completely broken term at this point. I think that nearly everyone trusts scientists as a default. What they don't trust is the research-science funding blob, which churns out inane 'correlation' studies and consistently refuses to apply reasonable perspectives, or admit their own errors. 'Scientist' is an occupation. 'Science' is a process of knowledge accumulation. The blob is a massive, corrupt structure which is, in many ways, an appendage of the federal government. Even scientists no longer trust the blob, even when they rely on it for their income.
At some point you're going to have to redraw your categories. 'Elites' are quickly becoming infiltrated by members of the 'new right' (or, probably, many of the people who had those views for years are now more comfortable owning them publicly, since the tone of the culture is shifting and they're less likely to be cancelled or ruined for being honest about their ideas). The notion which might have been correct 5 years ago, that 'elites' are for DEI and open immigration and the axioms of Critical Theory is vanishing before our eyes. Some elites (as a group) are still very progressive. Some are less so.
These ideas never commanded as much support as they seemed, though. They simply controlled bureaucracies and accreditation and promotion mechanisms and so they had the power to force members into public quiescence. Lots of people always knew these were idiotic theories, and in my experience they tend to be the more experienced and independent-minded ones. What effect do you think having the ELITES among the elites subscribing to the ideas of the 'new right'? It should be an interesting dynamic. People tend to emulate mediocre and resentful peers less than brilliant and collegial ones.
Racism and the other 'isms' are so marginal in these spaces that there's absolutely no reason to mention them, in my opinion. We get it-you're no longer racist. Most of us never were. Stop bringing it up all the time.
That focus on the "isms," and the bureaucracies pushing such a worldview, are largely a function of tertiary wealth, as capitalism devolves from its entrepreneurial to corporate/managerial phase, and subsequently to a welter of foundation-funded nonprofits and NGOs (e.g., consider who's sponsoring NPR: The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, etc.).
Nearly 80 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter predicted this state of affairs. Heck, the process of sedentarization and civiiizational decay was observed over 1,000 years ago by Ibn Khaldun.
I thought Trump’s first presidential win, regardless of how much Dems hate(d) him, was going to be enough for Dems to shape up, learn and be better. I never thought Trump had actual answers, rather, he had the balls that Dems didn’t have. Ironically, Trump + The Dems made a good team. So I was actually glad for the silver lining of his first win. But I didn’t feel the same about a second term. And I do not trust Trump, and I also am deeply disappointed in Dems for not heeding the warnings about what the American people needed/wanted.
Now the void in any kind of good leadership on any side, anywhere near the top, is on full display and well, it’s devastating. This article points all of this out very well.
So basically Richard’s definition is that the elites are “the swamp” (though they prefer the term “the establishment”).
And by extension anyone who supports Trump or supports causes or policies that MAGA folks believe in are populists. And are either themselves stupid or corrupt or intelligent-but-mindlessly-doing-the-bidding-of-the-stupid.
And every Republican Senator who votes with Trump or for a Trump appointee is either a stupid MAGA populist or only doing it in every case because he/she fears Trump, not because they genuinely believe it in the best interest of the country.
Got it.
It is wonderful that Richard knows the motivations of everyone who takes political actions with which he disagrees.
Exactly how was it in the best interests of the country to select an antivaxx environmental lawyer to head of the HHS? Do we really have to pretend that they just did it because they reasonably believe it was such a great move for Americans?
Andy: Agreed. You know they know they're wrong when they use ad hominem attacks-their intellectual resources are meager. I sympathize with Richard who presents himself as an honest if not mistaken from time to time intellectual. Aren't we all mistaken sometimes? But I do think reviewing previous understandings of elites and populists help us all to come to more helpful conclusions about the definitional shifts in those terms at this time.
Populism’s role in amplifying marginalized voices (e.g., rural voters in 2016) or challenging corporate-media monopolies (e.g., Rogan’s podcasting success) isn’t addressed.
the tone risks conflating populism with incompetence or extremism.
The author assumes traditional elite institutions (e.g., Ivy League-educated FBI directors) are inherently more trustworthy, despite historical failures (e.g., Mueller’s Iraq WMD investigation, Comey’s 2016 election interference).
Treating all populists as monolithic (e.g., equating Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy theories with Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-interventionism)
Many institutions (e.g., media, academia) now incorporate populist tactics (e.g., NYT’s embrace of viral op-eds). The line between "elite" and "populist" is blurrier than presented.
I love the way you put it, that definitely helps frame the problem.
Another way to see the fallacy of populism is that it justifies itself by arguing that problems are the result of people in power being evil/stupid/corrupt. Of course, populists are usually less moral, dumber, and more corrupt than the elites were, but that's beside the point. The point is that they can't solve the problems because they were never trying. They were only ever trying to figure out who to blame. When they fail to solve the problems, they have to come up with a reason.
Why wasn't Trump's first term great? Because Trump didn't have ENOUGH power to fix things. Every time he fails, it's a justification for more power concentrated in his hands. When DOGE doesn't fix anything, they will say that it's all the fault of the elites or the liberals or the bureaucrats and their malicious compliance. Their failure will simply be proof of how bad things really are, and how important it is that they stay in power to fix it. They will never take responsibility.
This is a great frame, and one that we can use to analyze other moments. I wonder, e.g. how the stable institution-building process happens once the anti-elites seize power and need to develop institutions of their own to reproduce themselves. The rise of Bolshevism was similar situation, no? But my knowledge of the actual process by which institutions transformed from Tsarist to Bolshevik is a schematic:
Whether they are Mandarins, Squirearchy, Nomenclatura, or Brahmins. Group of People who willing to embrace its ideal, signal its commitments, and push society to certain directions.
One thing that has surprised me is how paralyzed supposedly elite institutions are right now. All this cultural, economic and technological power amassed over centuries doesn't seem to be worth very much as it turns out. The legal system might be the exception but are operating at a snail's pace and may not be able to enforce their rulings.
The elevation of Elon Musk to shadow president, and his continued presence in that role, proves to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Trump movement is not a serious option for governance. The incompetence and stupidity on display are absolutely staggering, and the constant apologetics for it leave me at a total loss for words. I certainly don't want the left back in power, but if this is the alternative, I don't know what to say at that point. It seems that the consequences of social media for politics have actually been far worse than anyone could've predicted.
I've now been thoroughly convinced that Trump's rise to power and takeover of the GOP was for the worse, in a big way. I'd much rather have Mitt Romney's Republican party back.
Authoritarianism can have big ups and big downs. If this was 2015 Elon Musk, I think he'd be doing a vastly better job than 2025 Elon Musk whose brain has been fried by Ketamine. In general it's not worth taking the risk of authoritarianism.
“In general it's not worth taking the risk of authoritarianism.”
The American people agreed with you on this in 2024, which is why they saw through the false claims by elite swamp leftists of Trump as fascist Hitler authoritarian and voted to get rid of the *actually* authoritarian Biden-Harris regime and its cronies who committed repeated acts of lawfar against Trump, pressured and colluded with a big Tech to censor information unfavorable to the regime, and literally tried to install a Disinformation Board…
“I'd much rather have Mitt Romney's Republican party back.”
That’s nice.
But it’s mostly irrelevant.
The choice was between Trump and “his” GOP or the actual authoritarian leftists (fronted by first Biden then Kamala) with anti-abundance economic policies who were happy to use censorship, lawfare and authoritarian political power in service to their political ends.
They were the ones who *actually* corruptly used political power to influence elections.
Richard seems now to have forgotten all of these points.
P.S. had it not turned out that Romney 2012 was a phony conservative and in fact just a moderate Republican only slightly to the right of Susan Collins, I would agree with your (still not really relevant) preference. But I’m mostly a Ted Cruz / Mike Lee / Ron Johnson guy, and since Richard irrationally hates Cruz as much as Trump, he’d claim it’s basically no different at this point than being for Trump…
Mitt Romney is plenty more conservative than Trump in several aspects. I'm not sure what Trump really has going for him over Romney on substance besides maybe immigration policy. I'd like to say it's still an easy choice in favor of Trump based on that alone, but it really isn't.
I'd rather have Ted Cruz over Trump any day. I doubt Cruz would have handed the keys to the kingdom over to Elon Musk and then tripled down on such a move after the fact. I doubt Ron DeSantis would have done that either. Elon and DOGE are something I can only imagine being greenlit to this extent by Trump, so they're emblematic of his particular brand of "conservatism"--which is to say, massive incompetence and stupidity.
“ I'm not sure what Trump really has going for him over Romney on substance besides maybe immigration policy.”
Hmmmm….
RomneyCare.
Voting baselessly - twice - to impeach Trump. The 2nd I *merely* strongly disagree with; the first time it turns out that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but that Biden had in fact done - and admittted doing as VP - the thing they *falsely* accused Trump of having done in influencing Ukraine.
He supported the 2021 infrastructure mass spending bill
He voted to approve the *very* leftist Justice Katanji Brown Jackson.
And Xavier Becerra for HHS.
He thinks we should tax carbon emissions.
Voted for yet more gun control laws.
I’m not sure what Romney really has going for him on conservative substance other than a proper distaste for imposing and maintaining tariffs.
P.S. but I’m glad we agree about Cruz at least.
Good article. A few thoughts:
- Given this description of populism v. elitism, it seems more rational for any *individual* to seek power through populism assuming both paths lead equally high. Popular power sounds more robust since power through elitism can be taken away by those above pretty easily
- Trump acquired power through populism. Didn’t his hangers on acquire it through a sort of shadow elitism though? If Kash Patel were fired by Trump I think his star would quickly fade, much like the NYT writer
- Ultimately it seems it is up to the institutions to beat the populists in the competition for popular support. They have a ton of advantages. Institutions live much longer than people, wield tremendous power, and have massive name recognition. If they cannot use this to win people over (in the context of democracy) or customers and capital (in the context of markets) they deserve limited sympathy…
We should talk sometime about this perspective.
Interesting. Can you expand? What do you mean by incompetence and stupidity? DOGE? Tariffs? The Canada business?
Mostly DOGE. The tariff policy has certainly been bad as well, but I'm not sure if Elon Musk has much to do with that. DOGE is wildly retarded though. It's exactly the sort of grift right-wingers criticized BLM as being, except possibly even worse--while stuff like BLM only sought to skim their cut off the top of institutions, DOGE seeks to destroy them outright.
I think of populism like acid. You need an occasional flush of populism to clean out the corrosion of elite institution pipes due to arrogant group think, outdated orthodoxy, suboptimal filtering and patronage networks, and conflicts of interest. But just as too much acid can end up destroying pipes rather than just clean them, populism becomes destructive when it becomes excessive or an end unto itself. Ideally populist movements will be short-lived and cause elites to self-reflect, clean up their institutional defects, and then make the elite ranks effective and respectable again.
Disaster strikes when either the elite arrogantly reject any legitimate criticism, leading to revolution (think 1789 France and the "divine right of kings" doctrine), or when the commoners refuse to acknowledge the good faith efforts of elites to improve, instead succumbing to a mob mentality that glorifies the "will of the majority" over all else.
A grave problem arises when the corrosion is so pervasive that it can't be fully expunged without destroying the pipes. A smaller dose of acid might open a channel, but the corrosion is still there, and the pipes continue to crumble (and begin to leak). Trump and "The Cathedral" are symptoms of the same systemic rot.
This is a really interesting framework. Perhaps Trump will prove to be a "shock to the system" that Democrats and centre-right Republicans needed to rouse them from their complacency and force them to be more competitive in elections.
You present a very convincing case to prefer elite governance over the longer term and within the context of relatively well functioning institutions. I have a BA from Yale and an M Phil and MA from Columbia University, and yet I nevertheless voted for Trump in this past election. My reasoning was that America’s institutions had so deteriorated that only an external shock had any chance, however minimal, to provoke true reform. We all know the examples: the manner in which Kamala Harris was selected and the telling way in which, after her selection, she was unable to perform even minimally is one proof point in support of my vote. Another is the deaths of 7 million people worldwide from a Covid outbreak that represented the knowing outsourcing to China of research in viruses that the US science establishment deemed too dangerous to do at home, and yet a fiasco that was lied about and suppressed by this same establishment and by the legacy media; a final example, selected from many further candidates, was the multi-year cover-up of Biden‘s senility that clearly required cooperation among hundreds of White House staffers, the media, financial backers of the Democratic Party, and — let’s not forget! — the vice president herself.
Of course, my current concern is that Donald Trump represents something more ominous than a needed external shock. His attacks on law firms like Coie-Perkins, and his removal of security from figures like John Bolton, are disquieting evidence of the depth of his narcissism and disregard for or perhaps ignorance of Constitutional norms and simple civility. But almost equally ominous, the Democratic Party seems unable to reform itself by acknowledging how its own elite obsessions (monetized DEI, performative anti-racism, trans celebration, Hamas) continue to enrage us and thereby moderate our disquiet over MAGA excesses.
Come on, Kamala performed minimally. She spoke well at the debate and in her convention speech. She secured nearly half of all votes in America. There's plenty to criticize her and the liberal establishment for, 2024 was undoubtedly a choice of the lesser evil. But Trump's evils were underestimated by his voters. His 2016 presidency -- during which he was rigidly constrained, and his influence was limited -- was held up as the model we should expect in the future, in spite of this running contrary to all indications from Trump himself and from all the Republicans who worked with him. I believe you made a mistake in voting for him, and that the Democrats made a horrifying unforced error by selecting Kamala to oppose him.
Yes, my vote may have been mistaken. But it will be redeemed if the Democrats return to actually using primaries to select candidates, and reacquaint themselves with the interests of the non-college working class.
They won’t. Democrats will probably just court the typical suburban Republican instead. We might see deep red states flip.
J.W.- helpful comment. I have a question for you. I just left another comment to the main post that touches on where I’m going for this.
You mentioned “My reasoning was that America’s institutions had so deteriorated that only an external shock had any chance, however minimal, to provoke true reform” and then cited the Kamala Harris selection process, Covid-19 policies, and the Biden cognition fiasco (all extremely reasonable things to critique).
My question is: How do you get from making these specific critiques to developing a global worldview that all (or most) of America’s institutions are broken beyond repair? My view (apparently this makes me an elite anti-populist) is that because there are so so so many government institutions in the USA, plus unprecedented leaking in the social media era, we will never be lacking for examples and anecdotes of institutional failure, but this tells us nothing about the brokenness of the median institution and whether it’s higher than it was 20 years ago. (An analogy: I’ve never seen more Nazi white supremacist tweets than I have in the last 12 months, but that’s weak evidence that Americans are getting more racist). One could also make the argument that institutions are structurally less able to be corrupt in the current media environment; as an example it is very unlikely that the government could conduct secret bombings of Cambodia in 2025.
So my contention is that “our institutions are broken” is an ideological claim supported by anecdata, not one you could ever “prove” in a formal way. If you disagree, could you tell me what I’m getting wrong?
The reason I find myself interrogating this claim is that the amount of people who now make strong claims about our broken institutions seems to be inflating much more rapidly than the actual incidences I see of institutional failure (in my view, institutions are bungling things are approximately the same rate they have been throughout my whole lifespan; to the extent I’m finding more anecdotes, it roughly matches the rise in how many hours a week I spend online reading the news, and/or the increase in how lucrative it has become to report on institutional failures in the modern media environment). This suggests to me that group psychology is driving this perception more than facts on the ground. But I’m willing to be contradicted here.
The FBI has always been known to engage in sleazy, unethical behavior, last in date being the Steele Dossier. Its opaque, elite, institutional status has, if anything, shielded it from accountability, because if they all know each other and have for a long time, then they're not going to rat each other out.
If you rely solely on the people on the inside to reform themselves in any significant way, then you're going to be waiting a long time. Major reform requires outsiders with outside (popular) forces. Shielding institutions from popular pressure is the best way to make them sclerotic, inefficient, and detached from the realities of the ground over time. It's why private businesses work so much better.
And then there is the foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob, which has managed to be completely and catastrophically wrong about everything for decades
Weren't the blob actually remarkably prescient about Russia invading Ukraine? Or do I misunderstand what you mean by blob?
I consider myself a populist and I certainly don’t ascribe to all, or maybe any, of these beliefs. I simply feel the ruling elites - politicians, technocrats, media etc - have adopted a set of luxury beliefs that are making the population poorer and less safe. These include net zero, open borders, trans men in woman’s sports and spaces, defund the police, safe supply for drug addicts etc. The elite power base is shifting though, which has implications of course.
Except that net zero is the only item you list which elites overwhelmingly support. The rest of the things you list are liberal populist beliefs which liberal elites tried to prevent from being implemented. You might possibly add the safe supply for drug addicts to the list, but after Oregon crashed and burned so hard on that one, they have all but abandoned it.
The leadership of the Democrats has been captured by progressive elites and its policy reflected that. Biden implemented changes to Title IX that allowed trans men to compete in women sports, and illegal immigration soared to record levels. This is why Trump won the election.
While Biden did a terrible job on immigration, he did things like keeping Title 42 in place and issued the executive order to stop asylum claims which dramatically reduced the number of illegal crossings. That's not open borders. If progressives took over the party why do they all hate him so much? Why did so many of them declare that they wouldn't vote for him or Kamala?
You are incorrect about Biden's Title IX changes, they did absolutely nothing to let transgender women play women's sports. The administration had considered adding something that would make it harder to ban them from sports, but it was never implemented.
Clearly, Biden could have done much more to reduce illegal immigration, considering that it has dropped about 90%. To suggest the Dem leadership opposes trans men competing in women’s sports is wishful thinking, even if the Title IX changes had yet to be implemented.
When did the drop start? Back in 2023, under Biden. When did the surge start? Back in 2020, under Trump. By the time Biden left office monthly crossings were half what they were when he took office in January 2021. Which makes him an improvement on Trump, who more than doubled monthly crossings between when he took office and left.
Love how you can make up facts, then just say it "had yet to be implemented" when someone points out that you are wrong. That's a neat trick.
Border encounters in February 2025 were under 10,000. In January, 2024 they were more than 190,000 - a staggering drop of 90% and the lowest level in decades. This is all easy to verify.
lol. Maybe I do. It still doesn’t make it right for trans men to compete in women’s sports. Funny thing. Of all the luxury beliefs I cited, you get triggered by what I consider the least consequential. I’m not a woman though and either are you.
I don’t agree with transwomen in sports either, but in my experience people who obsess about trannies and use neo-alt-right neologisms like “luxury beliefs” are almost always mean-spirited and incompetent r3t@rds. Also why is net zero a bad goal?
I don’t have an issue with net zero as a concept - if we were building a bunch of nuclear power to get there, I would be fine with that. But we’re not doing that. We are building wind and solar, which is expensive, inefficient and intermittent. Look at Britain and Germany. Their energy costs are four times higher than North America and China. Industry has stopped investing there and domestic production is slowly shutting down or moving abroad. Britain doesn’t have a domestic steel industry anymore and auto manufacturers are looking at shutting down as well, if the govt doesn’t reform its EV mandates.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn’t make a profit for investors easily. That’s the biggest reason it’s not being adopted more quickly, not the environmentalist boogyman people like you blame. But the tide is turning in favor of nuclear energy.
Tell that to Germany, which shut down its last three nuclear power plants last year. They were perfectly functional and operational. They were shut down for ideological reasons.
I'm a woman. I support women's only sports. It is hard to imagine an issue that should have influenced your vote less.
“Power brings an endless number of opportunities for abuse, and it is therefore important to make sure people we can trust are elevated to high positions. Who is more likely to engage in corrupt practices…”
🙄
This argument for the swamp, and against Trump appointees in general and Patel in particular, I find especially ridiculous given the facts of the last 10 years.
E.g. Consider the FBI and how it went after Trump, got wiretaps based on planted evidence - sourced by the Democrat Party! - known to be false, buried the info on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop, while pressuring social media companies to censor stories on the laptop and on COVID and from Alex Berenson that opposed the Biden agenda.
All these leaders at the FBI fit Richard’s definition of the elite to a “t”.
So in terms of federal power abuses? Hell yeah I trust Trump appointees a lot more than the Biden and Obama appointees and the career bureaucrats who ran the FBI.
And it’s not even remotely close.
[P.S. I do *not* consider myself a populist, and like Richard am opposed to most populist economic policies that don’t involve curbing illegal immigration.]
I think examining what meanings have been associated with the term populist is useful here and deserves our scrutiny, especially when it appears that political shifts have been occurring over the past ten years. But I object to the distinction you make between the elites under the Democrats and the newly emerging none-elites under Trump. I'm very sympathetic to Andy's comments (above) since you don't mention at all the norm and law shattering actions of the Democrats who you should remember illegally engaged in activity and conspiracies to overthrow a sitting president, Donald Trump.
Their violations and illegalities have not been fully detailed yet but even with what we do know absolutely, they're guilty of treason, political perfidy and in the election we just had, attempted murder of a candidate. Unless you wish to excuse them because they have these high status university degrees, many of them, starting with Wray, Comey, and many others, are certainly responsible for Trump wanting people loyal to him in the same way the Democrats wanted only those with Yale, Princeton, and Harvard degrees, who as it turns out proceeded to demonstrate what deep corruption looks like even with their respected degrees.
Who would you really trust among those who foisted the Russian Collusion charge on the American people, on the entire Trump administration, and who impeached Trump three times using transparently phony justifications. Some group of trusted highly educated criminals.
So I'm at a loss to understand your reluctance to cite those egregious actions of the Democrats and the few Republican conspirators, who as far as I can tell, deserve every demotion that may come to them from the new populists, however you else feel Trump should be regarded.
If you think anything Democrats have done in terms of violating norms is in the same universe as Trump, if you think his actions and character can even be spoken of in the same terms as anyone else, you’ve lost the plot. Your diet of information or reasoning ability is so bad you simply can’t be reasoned with. “Trump is uniquely corrupt and anti-democratic and any supporter of his has no right to complain about Democrats on similar grounds” is a litmus test for being a sane human being at this point.
Wow! Hard to believe you believe that nonsense considering what the Democrats have done, and then accuse me of losing a plot. What say you of attempting to oust a democratically elected president by way of russian collusion, of phony impeachments, of lawfare directed at a candidate for the presidency? That you wouldn't regard those as serious criminal activities of the justice department, of the very elites you seem to favor in your abusive dismissal of my comments says more about your lack of perspective in assessing threats to democracy. I was willing to go along with what appeared to be a richer description of the term populist but now wonder how such an arrogant and insulting comment could serve you well in your analysis. Uniquely corrupt? Really? That comment truly reveals something about your judgment or perhaps political bias. It's not trustworthy.
Not interested in debating this. Debating Trump’s level of corruption is like debating whether Asians are low in crime, or Putin invaded Ukraine. Feel free to debate with those who have more patience for this.
A distinction worth noticing is that Trump‘s malevolence is singular in nature: it is hardly something that could have emanated from anyone else. On the other hand, the assaults on our institutions that have derived from the left, have emerged from network connections among the political class, the educational establishment, the legacy media, and perhaps even what we would reluctantly think of as the “deep state.”
Do you now officially regret your vote and feel humbled by not seeing what others saw?
You may not be interested in the debate about who's more corrupt but the question about the illegal activities and criminal policies pursued by the Democrats are now out there for all to see whether you want them seen or not. Since you appear to be blinded by your ideological proclivities, I too see no further reason to "debate" the question of who's more uniquely corrupt. That must mean you see nothing unusual about the Steele document and its use by the Corrupt Democrats, or the FBI violating the legals rights of defendants, or the dozens of other steps the Bureau took to conceal the conspiracy, even as Mueller said there was no connection, to cite but a few of the illegalities. If you don't see them, and quickly dismiss what you actually won't acknowledge, there isn't any point to sustain an exchange with someone so closed minded, and arrogant as well.
Considering how Trump has hurt markets, do you now regret your vote? I’m genuinely curious.
Get some therapy (and stop drinking!).
"Elites pride themselves on being tolerant of outsiders, which makes them favor things like more liberal immigration policies and DEI programs. They trust scientists as a default and tend to reject conspiracy theories."
Elites pride themselves on being tolerant of 'outsiders' in theory, as a kind of virtue signal (the same way they're tolerant of shoplifters and sex workers and Palestinian terrorists-basic norms of responsibility and public decency are considered distasteful among such people) but are actually extraordinarily intolerant of outsiders on a community and interpersonal basis. Their 'tolerance' is an ideological setting, not a deeply rooted character trait.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmpolemic/p/ordo-amoris-inverted
'Conspiracy theory' is a completely broken term at this point. I think that nearly everyone trusts scientists as a default. What they don't trust is the research-science funding blob, which churns out inane 'correlation' studies and consistently refuses to apply reasonable perspectives, or admit their own errors. 'Scientist' is an occupation. 'Science' is a process of knowledge accumulation. The blob is a massive, corrupt structure which is, in many ways, an appendage of the federal government. Even scientists no longer trust the blob, even when they rely on it for their income.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-gavin-newsom-strategy
At some point you're going to have to redraw your categories. 'Elites' are quickly becoming infiltrated by members of the 'new right' (or, probably, many of the people who had those views for years are now more comfortable owning them publicly, since the tone of the culture is shifting and they're less likely to be cancelled or ruined for being honest about their ideas). The notion which might have been correct 5 years ago, that 'elites' are for DEI and open immigration and the axioms of Critical Theory is vanishing before our eyes. Some elites (as a group) are still very progressive. Some are less so.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-schism-of-the-elites
These ideas never commanded as much support as they seemed, though. They simply controlled bureaucracies and accreditation and promotion mechanisms and so they had the power to force members into public quiescence. Lots of people always knew these were idiotic theories, and in my experience they tend to be the more experienced and independent-minded ones. What effect do you think having the ELITES among the elites subscribing to the ideas of the 'new right'? It should be an interesting dynamic. People tend to emulate mediocre and resentful peers less than brilliant and collegial ones.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-new-right
Racism and the other 'isms' are so marginal in these spaces that there's absolutely no reason to mention them, in my opinion. We get it-you're no longer racist. Most of us never were. Stop bringing it up all the time.
That focus on the "isms," and the bureaucracies pushing such a worldview, are largely a function of tertiary wealth, as capitalism devolves from its entrepreneurial to corporate/managerial phase, and subsequently to a welter of foundation-funded nonprofits and NGOs (e.g., consider who's sponsoring NPR: The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, etc.).
Nearly 80 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter predicted this state of affairs. Heck, the process of sedentarization and civiiizational decay was observed over 1,000 years ago by Ibn Khaldun.
I thought Trump’s first presidential win, regardless of how much Dems hate(d) him, was going to be enough for Dems to shape up, learn and be better. I never thought Trump had actual answers, rather, he had the balls that Dems didn’t have. Ironically, Trump + The Dems made a good team. So I was actually glad for the silver lining of his first win. But I didn’t feel the same about a second term. And I do not trust Trump, and I also am deeply disappointed in Dems for not heeding the warnings about what the American people needed/wanted.
Now the void in any kind of good leadership on any side, anywhere near the top, is on full display and well, it’s devastating. This article points all of this out very well.
So basically Richard’s definition is that the elites are “the swamp” (though they prefer the term “the establishment”).
And by extension anyone who supports Trump or supports causes or policies that MAGA folks believe in are populists. And are either themselves stupid or corrupt or intelligent-but-mindlessly-doing-the-bidding-of-the-stupid.
And every Republican Senator who votes with Trump or for a Trump appointee is either a stupid MAGA populist or only doing it in every case because he/she fears Trump, not because they genuinely believe it in the best interest of the country.
Got it.
It is wonderful that Richard knows the motivations of everyone who takes political actions with which he disagrees.
Exactly how was it in the best interests of the country to select an antivaxx environmental lawyer to head of the HHS? Do we really have to pretend that they just did it because they reasonably believe it was such a great move for Americans?
Wow, simple one-liner ad hominem attacks.
Strong evidence that Richard is correct and I am wrong. Objectively.
Thanks!
Andy: Agreed. You know they know they're wrong when they use ad hominem attacks-their intellectual resources are meager. I sympathize with Richard who presents himself as an honest if not mistaken from time to time intellectual. Aren't we all mistaken sometimes? But I do think reviewing previous understandings of elites and populists help us all to come to more helpful conclusions about the definitional shifts in those terms at this time.
No personal attacks please
What would you call your response to my first comment?
Populism’s role in amplifying marginalized voices (e.g., rural voters in 2016) or challenging corporate-media monopolies (e.g., Rogan’s podcasting success) isn’t addressed.
the tone risks conflating populism with incompetence or extremism.
The author assumes traditional elite institutions (e.g., Ivy League-educated FBI directors) are inherently more trustworthy, despite historical failures (e.g., Mueller’s Iraq WMD investigation, Comey’s 2016 election interference).
Treating all populists as monolithic (e.g., equating Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy theories with Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-interventionism)
Many institutions (e.g., media, academia) now incorporate populist tactics (e.g., NYT’s embrace of viral op-eds). The line between "elite" and "populist" is blurrier than presented.
I love the way you put it, that definitely helps frame the problem.
Another way to see the fallacy of populism is that it justifies itself by arguing that problems are the result of people in power being evil/stupid/corrupt. Of course, populists are usually less moral, dumber, and more corrupt than the elites were, but that's beside the point. The point is that they can't solve the problems because they were never trying. They were only ever trying to figure out who to blame. When they fail to solve the problems, they have to come up with a reason.
Why wasn't Trump's first term great? Because Trump didn't have ENOUGH power to fix things. Every time he fails, it's a justification for more power concentrated in his hands. When DOGE doesn't fix anything, they will say that it's all the fault of the elites or the liberals or the bureaucrats and their malicious compliance. Their failure will simply be proof of how bad things really are, and how important it is that they stay in power to fix it. They will never take responsibility.
This is a great frame, and one that we can use to analyze other moments. I wonder, e.g. how the stable institution-building process happens once the anti-elites seize power and need to develop institutions of their own to reproduce themselves. The rise of Bolshevism was similar situation, no? But my knowledge of the actual process by which institutions transformed from Tsarist to Bolshevik is a schematic:
1. Storming of the winter palace
2. ???
3. Terror
Which is not very instructive.
Society need Elites.
Whether they are Mandarins, Squirearchy, Nomenclatura, or Brahmins. Group of People who willing to embrace its ideal, signal its commitments, and push society to certain directions.
Society without Elites would fail.
One thing that has surprised me is how paralyzed supposedly elite institutions are right now. All this cultural, economic and technological power amassed over centuries doesn't seem to be worth very much as it turns out. The legal system might be the exception but are operating at a snail's pace and may not be able to enforce their rulings.
How would you rate yourself? Elite or Populist?
Clearly they aren’t , we are working up a piece on Rogan , which should be entertaining at best as to why he’s such a titwaffle
Contemporary American politics can basically be summarized as people willing to burn it all down just to spite people who use the word "titwaffle"
Yeah you guys are winning.