What is a populist?

This much used (and abused) term has gone through several American incarnations.  First, it was the name of a 19th-century political party whose program was as vague as its success was short-lived: The party combined an untenable admixture of Southern agrarianism and social-democratic panaceas leavened with a healthy hatred of Eastern elites, with the bankers, the railroads, and the big merchants special targets of their animus.  More recently, populism has been defined chiefly in negative terms, as anything abhorred by the elites.  Indeed, anti-elitism is the essence of modern populism.

For conservatives and their libertarian cousins, however, anti-elitism is a mixed bag: Its usefulness in advancing liberty is contextual.

In a free society, where markets are largely unregulated by government and the cultural ethos is conducive to liberty, the best rise to the top—or, at least, they have a fighting chance.  Ability is rewarded; persistence pays off.  The entrepreneurial virtues are the key to success; political influence, not so much.

In such a society, anti-elitism means resentment of success for being success.  It means hating the good for being good.  In this context, anti-elitism is evil—there is no other word for it.

To our great misfortune, however, we haven’t lived in such a society since the presidency of Grover Cleveland.  I won’t waste words describing how, when, and to what degree we became a nation of moochers, looters, Obamacrats, and Bernie Madoffs.  Suffice it to say that the American system, at present, closely resembles Rome on the downward slide.  Crony capitalism has long since replaced the market economy, and on the cultural front the triumph of vulgar vapidity is complete.

In this society, anti-elitism is a powerful weapon in the hands of the libertarian-conservative Remnant (to borrow a phrase from Albert Jay Nock) for the simple reason that the worst invariably rise, while the best are marginalized.

This is true in every area, from the business world to the political realm: The culture, rotted out at its very foundations by decades of infection by philosophical fungi and other intellectual parasites, is at the level of the last days of the Weimar Republic.

Weimar is a particularly useful example, because we face many of the same conditions that prevailed in that dark era of Depression and looming world war.  Our own developing condition resembles the economic conditions of those years to an alarming degree: the ongoing debasement of the currency, the threat of hyperinflation, the impending collapse of an economic structure built around debt rather than production.  Lurking in the background, a counterpoint to the cries of despair rising up from the foreclosed and the forgotten, the war cries of the neocons warn us that shrikes are on the wing.

Against this forbidding backdrop, the forces of the Remnant are gathering for the final battle.  The economic downturn has created a countermovement that is fast rising in opposition to the crony-capitalist oligarchs and their political front men, and it is coming from both sides of the political spectrum.  In its most organized and politically conscious form, this oppositional movement is embodied by the Ron Paul campaign: As I write, the Establishment is in a panic because it looks like he might win the Iowa Caucuses, and the neocon smearbund, headquartered at FOX News but with ample access to liberal-mainstream outlets, is already churning out reams of material, charging him with the usual thoughtcrimes.

Yet there are also some on the far left who are waking up to the real problem this country faces, particularly on the central role played by the Federal Reserve in enslaving us to the Oligarchy.

When a writer capitalizes a term or a phrase, he’s telling you to Pay Attention, Because This Is Important.  He’s also fudging it, somewhat, by generalizing—and hoping the reader won’t ask for more details.  The only excuse is the one I’ve come up with: considerations of length.  In a short column such as this, I can’t hope to prove the insights of the Austrian economists, the most consistent advocates of the free market, who hold that central banking is the cause of the business cycle.  I can only refer readers to their works, particularly those of the late Murray N. Rothbard, and rephrase his insights into a less-elevated discourse that simply describes bankers—all bankers as they exist today—as parasites and thieves.

These are the Oligarchs.  They stand at the commanding heights of our crony-capitalist economy.  They control the leadership of both major parties; they own the “mainstream” media; and their “left” wing has a compliant and activist mass base in the burgeoning government bureaucracy, the labor unions, academia, and their helots in the underclass.  The “right-wing” component of this two-headed monster has its mass base in the GOP, among the middle and upper classes, and especially the “evangelical” bloc of Protestant heretics who wave Israeli flags at political rallies and patiently await the Rapture.

Whatever their differences, both wings of this unitary Party of Power are united in their fealty to the Oligarchs.  They may take pot shots at “Wall Street” and appropriate populist rhetoric, but they are one in their refusal to point to the plain fact that, alone among the populace, the Oligarchs have profited from the economic crisis.  They and their cronies were bailed out and continue to be bailed out, and this massive thievery—which amounts to the biggest heist in world history—enjoys the full support of the leadership of both parties, as well as the business and academic establishment.

They fear anyone, like Ron Paul, who identifies the source of this theft—the Fed—because they live in dread of the day when the peasants with pitchforks come looking for them.  This defines the central goal of any meaningful fighting movement for liberty: pointing those peasants in the direction of the enemy.

Defining the enemy is no problem: It’s the bankers.  Destroying their power is another matter entirely—but the battle is half over once we’ve identified and targeted the Bad Guys.  We need to ask Americans if they want to be ruled by Goldman Sachs.  The answer is bound to be no.