Beware of Republican populists!

But the problem seems not to be that government made poor decisions over the past year; it’s that government made any decisions at all. Government, in Mr. Ryan’s view, is alternately the tool and the terror of big business, doing one firm’s bidding as it crushes another one. The solution is to get government out of the game altogether, and Mr. Ryan fondly recalls the great deregulatory campaigns of the past (leaving out the embarrassing story of how he and his colleagues overturned Glass-Steagall and then watched the banking industry explode in a fireball of freedom)…

For millions of disaffected independent voters, meanwhile, the tail-chasing logic behind the “down with big business” rhetoric probably won’t make any difference. All that will matter will be the sincerity of the emotion, and if Mr. Ryan’s essay is any indication, this is a job Republicans can do as well as any Code Pink activist.

That’s why we may be heading for the greatest burst of fake populism since those TV commercials 10 years ago that showed a mob breaking down the doors of a stock exchange—not because the revolution was on but because they wanted to trade like the pros, which the sponsor promised to let them do.

Democrats, for their part, will find it difficult to respond in kind, especially after having spent their first year delivering regal gifts to the insurance industry and dithering over the urgent matter of new financial regulation. Their friends in the labor movement, meanwhile, got a lump of coal.