Over the Independence Day holiday, a friend asked me if Republican Populism is a person or a movement. I mulled the question, and here is my cursory response to this curious citizen:

Throughout the Trump candidacy, presidency, and to the present, the Left has endeavored to conflate their opponents with a person. True, historically, both American political parties have issued full-throated Philippics against the leaders of the other side. For example, Barry Goldwater was an extremist who would start a nuclear war. Michael Dukakis was a soft on crime egghead who was going to furlough murderers into your neighborhood.

But there was a limit to these political calumnies. While reviling the opposition’s leaders, the opposition’s voters were largely off-limits. Simply, each side wanted to leave open the possibility of capturing swaths of the other side’s voters, who may be disgruntled with the direction of their party’s current crop of leaders. In recent memory, the most obvious example was the GOP’s courting of “Reagan Democrats,” blue-collar, heavily unionized workers in urban and interior suburban areas dismayed by the Democrats’ economic “stagflation” and its leaders’ cultural drift hard left.