Yet populism, left or right, is a permanent latent condition of democracy—from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to Trumpism and the Bernie bros. It is a democratic opportunity–turned–democratic emergency. It is one vital, dangerous source of democracy that never leaves a democratic polity, just as an adult’s origins as a child never leave him. And it can emerge in the mature republic the way childishness comes out in the adult: as anger, spite, fanatical idealism, tantrum, despair. If liberals had been honest about the normalcy of firebrand populist movements, they would not have, for example, immediately characterized the Capitol riots as an “insurrection” or a “coup”—here is where some historical references would have been clarifying—but as just such a burst of energy. No, I don’t mean the rioters with zip ties, or the ones who injured police officers, or the people who apparently plotted to do harm to Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other democratically elected representatives. Let them face the music before a judge. I mean the ones who suffered a trauma when they were kids—a loss, an absence, a beating; who floundered in life; who went from job to job; whose every wrong step led to more wrong steps; who kept getting in trouble with the police; who found no reflection of their experience in the norm-shattering culture around them; who drowned their troubles that day in something larger than themselves, hoping to meet kindred souls and blunt their loneliness and despair; who got caught up in something they couldn’t control; who occupied buildings and, in one case, defecated in a university president’s office. Oops, sorry, I mixed up my populist outbursts: that last item was about antiwar protesters occupying buildings at Columbia University in the 1960s.