Column: Mike Pence is railing against populism among Republicans. But he's late to the game

”, i.e., the “little guy” crushed under the heel of the state or big business. Critics of populism — like me — argue that populism is best understood as the exploitation or cultivation of anger and fear among a subset of the public. In “?” Jan-Werner Müller, a politics professor at Princeton, describes populism as a form of identity politics and a “degraded form of democracy that promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals .

That’s populism’s gimmick. It claims the small-d democratic language of “we the people” but usually defines “we the people” not as all Americans but a privileged political or cultural identity. As Trump, “the only important thing is the unification of the people — because the other people don’t mean anything.”

Populism’s biggest drivers are upstream of politics. Fueled by everything from educational fads about self-esteem, victimization and entitlement to widespread distrust in institutions and an epidemic of conspiratorialism, all amplified by social media and traditional media alike. America has been a petri dish for the populist bacillus for years.

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