65 Quotes About Populism

"What came in the end was only a small war and a quick victory; when the farmers and the gentlemen finally did coalesce in politics, they produced only the genial reforms of Progressivism; and the man on the white horse turned out to be just a graduate of the Harvard boxing squad, equipped with an immense bag of platitudes, and quite willing to play the democratic game."

"populists are not generally “against institutions,” and they are not destined to self-destruct once in power. They only oppose those institutions that, in their view, fail to produce the morally (as opposed to empirically) correct political outcomes. And that happens only when they are in opposition. Populists in power are fine with institutions—which is to say, their institutions."

"Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities."

"He read an article in a left-leaning paper that took the ad to task for grammar errors and mixed metaphors and other literary crimes, but Jack thought it was cool."

"What in Mandela was seen as an almost saintly ability to conciliate could, in a lesser man, be read as weak-kneed populism."

"When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement."

"A “crisis” is not an objective state of affairs but a matter of interpretation. Populist will often eagerly frame a situation as a crisis, calling it an existential threat, because such a crisis then serves to legitimate populist governance."

"Populist constitutions are designed to limit the power of nonpopulists, even when the latter form the government. Conflict then becomes inevitable. The constitution ceases to be a framework for politics and instead is treated as a purely partisan instrument to capture the polity."

"One of the good things about running as a populist firebrand is that if the present doesn't offer you enough disasters to exploit, you can always invite your supporters to live in the imaginary disasters of the future."