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aniel Hannan one of the intellectual architects of Brexit distinguishes between two types of populist movements in a recent New Criterion piece. One kind is deeply fearful. Unable to comprehend the impersonal forces governing a fast-changing world followers cast about for villains to explain their declining fortunes — the railroads the gold standard banks Jews. The villains change but what is constant is the search for villains to rail against.

The agrarian revolt of the late 19th century inAmericatriggered by the move from a rural to an urban economy is one example of  such a disruption. The present shift from a manufacturing to an information economy is another case of a major dislocation.

The second kind of populism simply wants to reclaim for the people control over their lives from societal elites. Such movements are deeply democratic outward-looking and optimistic. Hannan would put most Brexit supporters in that category. As an example of the loss of self-rule that led to Brexit Hannan points out that a seismic shift on the scale of the recent American presidential election could never have taken place in the European Union where the president is appointed in secret around a sumptuous dinner table with no input from voters. And even when voters in theNetherlandsandFrancerejected a proposed European constitution it was imposed under another name.

Hannan’s description of the type of populist movement he supports comports to a large extent with Professor Angelo Codevilla’s descriptions of the Tea Party. Tea Party supporters — the “country class” in Codevilla’s terminology — are those who wish to organize and run their lives without the interference of the government. By contrast the “ruling class” — the leaders of both parties Big Labor and Big Business alike government bureaucrats and lobbyists — is fully oriented toward government power.

The exemplar of the “country class” is the entrepreneur seeking to build his business without anti-competitive barriers to entry being thrown in his path or being weighted down with a regulatory burden that only the largest corporations can afford to deal with.

In real life the bright-line distinction between the two types of populist movements is often blurry and the two impulses are often mixed. There was no doubt a great overlap between Trump voters and former Tea Party supporters. But nevertheless there are some crucial differences between the two movements and those differences are instructive.

The Tea Party arose out of a $787 billion government stimulus package that ended up stimulating nothing and also resulted in the ramming of Obamacare down the public’s throats with nary a Republican vote. Instead of shovel-ready projects which turned out to be in short supply much of the money went to grants to local governments to preserve government jobs. Obamacare constituted one of the largest expansions of government power ever — in particular the power of unelected and almost un-reviewed bureaucrats. It created dozens of independent boards with vast rule-making power.

The “Tea Party” motto hearkened back to the animating spirit of the American Revolution — the desire to be freed from rule by a distant government oblivious to the needs and desires of the colonists and to the limited government of enumerated powers that the Founders erected in place of the English monarchy. Opposition to free trade played almost no role in the Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party’s chosen foe was unrepresentative big government. The tone of the movement was optimistic: Get the government out of our lives so we can go about our business.

While president-elect Donald Trump was highly critical of overregulation stifling the economy he barely addressed the skyrocketing government debt as a permanent drag on our country's finances as the Tea Party did. Except for Obamacare he mentioned no major programs he would slash and made numerous promises to expand existing ones. Dependency on government is not the dragon that Donald Trump came to slay.

And there was a much darker side to the Trump phenomenon almost unseen in the Tea Party: the not infrequent boiling to the surface of racial animus and anti-Semitism. The shift from the “live free or die” spirit of the Tea Party to the far angrier and less optimistic tone of Trump supporters is significant.

True the anger of both movements against elites was well earned. The case for progressive governance boils down to: Let the smart people run things. If the smart people turn out not to be so smart the case for progressivism fails on its own terms. The costly ethanol mandate which turns out to create more carbon outputs than it saves is a case in point. Besides lining the pockets of someIowafarmers and ethanol producers its principal achievement has been to raise grain prices across the globe. Billions of dollars spent on renewable energy boondoggles have had no impact on carbon emissions. And the nostrum of Democratic candidates for economic malaise — dramatic increases in the minimum wage — will only kill off vast numbers of entry-level jobs and destroy the first step for many young people into the workforce while speeding the pace of automation.

For the last two election cycles at least the Democrats — with a big assist from the Republicans — have run campaigns based on cultural issues and nurturing gender and racial grievances while totally ignoring the economic concerns of the working and lower middle-class. The trillions of dollars in unfunded government debt at all levels and the imminent collapse of Social Security have scarcely been mentioned. Nor has the type of educational restructuring needed to help displaced workers find productive work been discussed. The unserious promise of free (and largely useless) college education is hardly the answer.

At the state level where there is no access to a printing press and the piper must ultimately be paid the Republicans dominate and there is a constant population flight from the high-tax blue states to the red states where the jobs are.

IN THE WAKE OF TRUMP’S VICTORY many conservative intellectuals have tended to read the result as a rejection of progressivism and the overreaching administrative state. But that is as much a projection of their concerns as a reflection of what moved many of the president-elect’s most ardent supporters.

Much of Trump’s appeal was the promise of “I’ll take care of you” not “I will work toward creating the conditions that allow you to take care of yourself.” And of his statements of the latter type most were nothing but fanciful promises to turn back the clock.

Character development obviously is not a theme for which the president-elect is a likely voice. But it is the decline of American character that should be of prime concern. In his widely hailed Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Vance describes the culture from which he escaped as one in which the sense of personal agency has been lost a culture in which young men with a wife and a child on the way toss away good jobs with health insurance because they would prefer not to work. The percentage of white male workers receiving disability insurance has quintupled since 1960. The percentage of able-bodied males in the workforce is constantly declining.

Interestingly virtually the only figures who provided any stability to Vance growing up were those who had found the discipline of religion such as his long-disappeared father who resurfaced after many years in which he was succeeded by a seemingly endless stream of male figures.

The attitude that life is just something that happens to one which Theodore Dalrymple describes as endemic among the English prison population with which he worked as a psychiatrist and among the disaffected Muslim youth of the “cities of darkness” surrounding Paris is becoming more and more prevalent in America.

Reviewing Vance’s memoir Aaron Renn notes that the Appalachian culture from which Vance escaped has been dysfunctional for more than a century. Renn too grew up poor — in a trailer on a gravel road with water drawn from a cistern. But the rural southernIndianaof his youth was one of stable families and a vibrant community life. Those places are unrecognizable 40 years later.

The elite culture’s assault on religion and the traditional family and its celebration of pleasure without commitment have taken their greatest toll on the poorest Americans. Drinking was always a problem in the communities Renn knew but easy accessibility of meth heroin and prescription opioids has magnified the destruction. The children of working-class families have been hardest hit by a culture that frees men of responsibility for the children they produce and has removed all stigma from single-parenthood.

Renn describes the havoc of 40 years of broken marriages and out-of-wedlock births. Fewer and fewer children are raised by two parents. And as Harvard economist Raj Chetty has demonstrated the greatest predictor of upward social mobility or its opposite is the percentage of children raised by single parents.

ADAM GARFINKLE OBSERVES that no great power in history “has lost its foothold or decayed because of external reasons; internal social dysfunction was to blame.” To which Harvard historian Niall Ferguson adds the further cheery note that the most striking thing about the decline of great civilizations is “the speed with which most of them collapsed.”

On that score the recent election results offer little more than the hope of temporary respite forAmerica. On the one hand we have arrogant and deeply unserious elites fanning resentment against their country. College students are not only a herd of like-mindedness but proud of the fact. The mourning rituals on campus after campus (and not a few liberal Jewish congregations) proclaim there is only one right way to think about politics.

On the other hand the spirit of self-reliance has died among a large swath of the population with the ballast and strength once provided by religion and stable families also in decline. —

Not a happy picture.