The case for populism is that it is a reaction to the failures and corruption of “the elites.” The people who have the impressive credentials and run our institutions, the “so-called experts,” have gotten everything wrong, have credulously fallen for ridiculous fads, and are corrupt and self-dealing. So they need to be pushed aside in favor of someone who represents the views of the common man. There is a long history of left-wing populism where the targeted elites are Wall Street and billionaires, and the solution, ironically, is to hand over a lot of unaccountable power to bureaucrats. But currently the dominant form of populism is coming from the right, where the villain is an imagined “deep state” and the solution is to create a “deep state” of their own.

But before we can dismiss today’s populists out of hand, we have to ask: Do they have a point?