Increasing anxiety about the fitness of the cultural, political, and economic establishments stands as a background to our public debates. This context is crucial for understanding the current populist ascent. “Populism” is one of the favorite stigmatizing words of the Beltway. Self-appointed Solons cluck their tongues at populists’ vulgarity, anger, and paranoia. Some of this skepticism about populism is well warranted; the fact that something is popular does not necessarily make it true or noble, and populist movements have, over the years, committed wrongs. Mob rule is one of the great internal threats to a free republic, and so efforts to restrain the mob should be applauded. Moreover, populists can often rightly be faulted for having a huge gulf between rhetoric and reality. Populists like William Jennings Bryan have proposed solutions that sounded good at some visceral level but weren’t actually practical.

However, contrary to the pretensions of the anti-populists, it has been technocrats — not populists — who have had egg on their faces over the past decade. Pedigreed members of the meritocracy were the architects of the real-estate bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Technocrats flocked to Barack Obama, sure that “No Drama Obama” with his perfectly creased pants would be the return to competence. As the rise of ISIS, the OPM hack, and the Affordable Care Act rollout demonstrate, this belief was sorely mistaken. And the establishment hasn’t exactly been the embodiment of judicious sobriety, either. Many in the cultural and economic elite drive the frenzy of the new intolerance. It’s not slack-jawed yokels who want to ban Civil War video games, suppress Latin literature, and hector transgressive comedians. The philistine demagogues of our day can, unfortunately, all too often be found in boardrooms, college classrooms, newsrooms, and seats of government. The current ruling establishment has not lived up to its own standards, which has made it harder for this establishment to ward off populist challenges.

At the moment, there is potential for a party to craft a governing majority that combines populist energies with sober deliberation. This enlightened populism would try to scale back the Byzantine bureaucracy that so often aids the powerful, but it would also focus on crafting government policies that would ultimately strengthen the nation’s vast aspirational majority. It would seek to temper popular anger with an optimistic and realistic narrative about the United States.