There is much to be said for the new republicanism, but there are two major hazards to be avoided, and it is not at all clear how that will be accomplished without dissipating the forces behind the movement.

The first is that attacks on expert and intellectual elites can easily devolve into a populist orgy of anti-intellectual assaults on expertise and knowledge themselves. There is nothing anti-intellectual, or even anti-expertise or anti-elite, about republicanism. To the contrary, a genuinely republican society is one in which informed, independent citizens have a duty to do their own learning and inform themselves from the best experts and the best minds in society. But populist rage at experts who misuse their position and authority can easily break loose from its moorings.

The second hazard is the flip side of the first: that populism married to republicanism will lead only to tearing down institutions that have arrogated themselves too much neo-aristocratic privilege, while doing nothing to replace them. Properly understood, republicanism requires what Yuval Levin calls “civic republicanism”: the tending of institutions that instill civic virtue and informed citizenship in ordinary people, so that they can fill the void left by aristocratic elites and the noblesse oblige they are supposed to embody. If the few are unworthy to rule, their replacement by an equally unworthy many is not an improvement.