Remember that "Al-Qaeda" is Arabic for "The Base"

"Populist" and "Populism" have been dirty words on this blog for as long as it's been around. I mean, I've always been up front about putting Florence King and P.J. O'Rourke right there among my early influences.

In 2012:

Meanwhile, the guys on Young Turks were claiming that Gingrich's latest anti-robber baron tack proved that class warfare is as American as apple pie and "even Republican voters are progressive".

I don't know about "progressive", but American politics, especially in the South and Midwest, has a populist streak as wide as William Jennings Bryan's fat head, as tall as a tariff, and as long as a Farm Bill, that would love to be Democrats if it weren't for the fact that Democrats believe in the ev'lution and the 'bortion and are always tryin' to take your guns, and two of the first three primaries are smack in the middle of that turf.

In 2011:

Basically it's a Buchanan-esque populist conservatism with most of the Jesus trimmed off. In other words, Trump is aiming at what he thinks is the bullseye of the Tea Party: Flag-waving xenophobic National Enquirer subscribers who like the F-15 flyovers before football games and want lots of free stuff from the government but hate them some taxes.

Way back in 2006:

While both the Democrats and Republicans have candidates out there playing to the nut-fudge fringe elements of their respective parties, it remains to be seen which way the real swing voters in America are going to go. You know the type: Unashamedly patriotic; loves Jesus in a public, but vague and non-denominational sort of way; afraid of gay cooties, but uncomfortable with blatant bigotry; moderately hawkish on foreign policy, but with a short attention sp... hey, are you done in Iraq yet? 'Cause that Kim guy with the missiles is scaring me; economically xenophobic and protectionist; distrusts big business and hates the rich.

These are the people who got Carter elected because he loved Jesus, and then went and voted for Reagan because Carter was wimpy, and possibly a com-symp. In most parts of the country they've remained with the Republicans ever since Reagan, because their social conservatism has thus far outweighed their populist economic views. (You'll note that Clinton won the first time 'round by playing the role of a centrist-to-moderately-conservative Southern Democrat.)

I've always been sniffy about yahoos using "elite" as a perjorative rather than an aspiration.

So don't go acting like me linking this Shay Khatiri piece at The Bulwark is some sort of novelty or change in my direction...

However well versed the popularizers might have been in conservative arguments, they were ultimately not adherents of any specific conservative ideology. They were beholden to the passions of the masses. That was their business model—not just at Fox News and on talk radio, but among various culture-war organizations that knew profit was to be found in heat, not light. The popularizers came to replace the elites. Talk-radio hosts had once sought to debate and popularize the ideas in conservative magazines; they in time became the arbiters of what counted as conservatism. Fox News hosts became more important shapers of conservative opinion than the authors of rigorously argued think tank studies or the politicians who appeared as guests. CPAC, which had once tried to bring together activists and intellectuals, energy and ideas, turned into a sorry circus for dimwitted demagoguery.

This change allowed Donald Trump to arrive on the scene in favor of big government.

The “anti-state” conservatives—those who had arrived at conservatism on the merits of conservative arguments—refused to join him. But by then they had become the minority even within the right-wing intelligentsia, displaced by the barkers and hucksters.