Trump was a populist nemesis visited upon the hubris of the coastal culture.

At The New Criterion, Victor Davis Hanson writes about the good populism and the bad populism. He gives examples from history, then focuses on the present day.

Today, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon all stand in the same current. Often, urban intellectuals, aristocrats, and elites—from the patrician Roman Republican street agitator Publius Clodius Pulcher and the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, to present-day billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer—have sought to assist the urban protesters. Perhaps these gentleman-agitators thought they could offer money, prestige, or greater wisdom, thereby channeling and elevating shared populist agendas.

The antithesis to such radical populism was likely thought by ancient conservative historians to be the “good” populism of the past—and what the contemporary media might call the “bad” populism of the present: the push-back of small property owners and the middle classes against the power of oppressive government, steep taxation, and internationalism, coupled with unhappiness over imperialism and foreign wars and a preference for liberty rather than mandated equality. Think of the second century B.C. Gracchi brothers rather than Juvenal’s “bread-and-circuses” imperial Roman underclass, the American rather than the French Revolution, or the Tea Party versus Occupy Wall Street.

...the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, saw America’s unique strength in the populist influence of a nation of small agrarians. Such property owners were suspicious of both hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, and yet were economically autonomous enough to resist radical calls for government-enforced equality.

Many Republicans, foolishly, either wished for cheap labor or deluded themselves into thinking that amnestied impoverished illegal immigrants would soon vote for family-values conservatives. Neither party worried much about the insidious destruction of immigration law, much less how federal laws that were otherwise applicable to most Americans could be arbitrarily ignored by a select few or how wages of entry-level workers were driven down by imported labor. Few conservatives raised the objection that mass influxes of illegal aliens, mostly non-diverse, poorly educated, and without skills, were difficult enough to assimilate quickly under the old culture of the melting pot, but even more so now, given the current paradigm of the tribal salad bowl.

There was a similar consensus across party lines to embrace globalization. It was seen not just as an inevitable result of Western cultural dominance and technological supremacy, but rather as something almost morally and culturally enriching. Internationalism and open borders would give way to a positive globalized sameness—even as such homogenization left millions of Americans between the coasts with stagnant wages, or lost jobs, or a sense of alienation from the centers of power in bi-coastal America.

...When, during the 2016 campaign, a crass Manhattan billionaire real estate developer began campaigning in terms of the first personal plural pronoun—our miners, our workers, our farmers—few emulated him. Most rivals were convinced apparently that he would prove as irrelevant as those to whom he appealed. Yet, again in Burkean terms, assembly-line workers, clerks, miners, loggers, fabricators, welders, and builders had been the traditional bulwarks of thousands of American communities. Their loss of viable livelihoods—at a time when their products were often highly coveted—was a radical prescription for cultural suicide.

...So Trump was a populist nemesis visited upon the hubris of the coastal culture. When he took on “fake news,” when he tweeted over the “crooked” media, when he railed about “globalists,” when he caricatured Washington politicians—and ranted non-stop, shrilly, and crudely—a third of the country felt that at last they had a world-beater who wished to win ugly rather than, as in the case of John McCain or Mitt Romney, lose nobly. As a neighbor put it to me of Trump’s opponents, “They all have it coming.”

All had forgotten that there was also another populist tradition, lying dormant. It was a quieter but far more potent bomb just waiting to blow up—if someone ever would be so uncouth and angry enough to detonate it.

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