The Real Character of American Populism: A Response to Richard Epstein

Richard Epstein has offered an interesting contrast between what he calls a “growth industry” of populism as it currently manifests itself on the right, with the MAGA followers of Donald Trump, and the left, with the rise of socialists supporting newly elected mayors Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson. Epstein relegates populism in both cases to “public distrust of established legal and social institutions,” which is not an unfair categorization as far as it goes. But he continues the definition by including the necessity of a “self-identified champion” who will demand the transformation of the governmental power structure; a demand Epstein implies cannot succeed. This point illustrates the moral and political equivalence that Epstein mistakenly imposes on populism of the right and the left.

Definitions of populism — both scholarly and popular — call it a movement that represents the interests of the common people against the elites or the “establishment.”  The Tea Party, for instance, was a conservative populist movement that opposed excessive taxation, government spending, and government overreach into the private sector. The movement sprang up organically in opposition to many of the Obama administration's policies, but it certainly never had a “self-identified champion.” To redefine populism in terms of the champion rather than the characteristics of any given populist movement is the first mistake in Epstein’s argument, followed by the assertion that populist leaders and their followers are delusional about the prospects for success.

The first step down that populist path is for the prospective champion to convince both himself and his supporters that the will to succeed will somehow translate into change — don’t ask how. The key assumption is that these largely ignorant and wealthy opponents lack the intelligence to understand the imperatives for the new era, let alone resist them. Thus, entering public office will equip the new champion with the tools needed for social transformation.

Epstein dismisses any possibility that the Trump administration might in fact have had both a plan and “the tools” necessary to overcome the elite establishment that the MAGA movement so vehemently opposes. Epstein makes no mention of Trump’s successes: the closure of the border; government restructuring and efficiency initiatives; the attack on the Iranian nuclear program and the end of the Gaza war; reducing urban crime; tax relief; or job creation through deregulation and foreign investment. Epstein speculates instead that MAGA will abandon Trump because he raised private funds to build a ballroom addition to the White House (which matters little one way or the other for the success of conservative populism) or because of financial support to a critical South American ally. Epstein’s evidence for these beliefs comes from the New York Times, whose partisan bias in reporting on Trump is apparent to any neutral observer. The most recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 84 percent of Republicans approving of Trump's job performance as president.

What Epstein is most upset about is Trump’s tariffs, and insists that MAGA is blaming Trump for high prices caused by his tariff policies. This is not accurate; 68 percent of Republicans or those who lean Republican approve or strongly approve of Trump’s tariffs. Epstein, whose libertarian views on tariffs are quite pronounced, calls Trump’s tariff policy a “sad, demagogic fantasy.”  Epstein maintains that if America can become wealthy through punitive tariffs on other countries, other countries can do the same by reciprocating, as if this is Trump’s central justification for his tariff policy. But tariffs may be part of a larger to restrict international trade.  The United States will apply higher tariffs to compel other countries to reduce trade barriers, while also excluding China entirely from the benefits of international trade as long as it continues to conduct covert hostilities against us.

Moreover, Epstein asserts that Trump lacks “the courage” to make his tariffs permanent and would lower them in response to complaints about higher commodity prices. There is no consideration of the fact that Trump’s America First perspective, along with his typical penchant for dealmaking and his refusal to adopt a theoretical industrial policy, explains what Epstein considers a chaotic and contradictory international trade policy. It is not our intention here to defend Trump’s tariff policies, or even point out the cherry-picking with which Professor Epstein attacks them.  Rather, we mean to point out that populist MAGA support for Trump is not significantly undermined by 55 cents/pound bananas, as much as the New York Times would like us to believe.

Epstein attributes to Trump’s deregulation policies the kind of economic growth that may ultimately save him with MAGA. Mamdani, et al, are rightly afforded no such credit. As Professor Epstein explains, “there are systematic reasons why socialism fails, of which the most dominant is that a state-controlled economy receives few if any price signals needed to direct where human, physical, and intellectual resources are allocated. State ownership puts fools and kleptocrats in charge of the system.”  This is exactly right, and the analysis that follows clearly lays out how the socialist project to be advanced by Mamdani in New York City is bound to fail—and why!

The question then becomes to what extent populism on the right versus populism on the left should be understood as the success or failure of the “self-identified champion” to advance the interest of the movement that put him/her there, or whether there is, in fact, a fundamental difference between what motivates populists on the right and populists on the left. It may be the case that both are motivated by a belief that the elites who exercise power in our society are corrupt, self-interested, and have rigged the system to assure their continuance in power. It may even be the case that this belief engenders resentment on both sides of the populist political spectrum.

However, the real contrast between right- and left-wing populism is not that the champion of the right, Donald Trump, will make enough “correct” economic policy decisions to overcome his “blunders,” while Mamdani will fail because all his choices will lead to disaster. Rather, the real contrast is in the character of the populists themselves. At the risk of oversimplifying, MAGA populists believe in the Constitution, the sovereignty of the American people, the American dream, and fundamental fairness. To the extent that they resent establishment elites, it is because they think those elites have betrayed those fundamental ideals, not because they resent elites’ wealth or even privilege. Trump, for all of his failings (real and imagined), appears to MAGA to share those beliefs.

The Democratic Socialists’ resentment could not be more different and more destructive to the American republic. Their rage against establishment elites is much more intense. It is fundamentally rooted in envy and in the belief that society can be remade in radically egalitarian terms as long as government makes the rich pay their fair share; identifies and promotes marginalized communities at the expense of the dominant or privileged; treats crime as merely the expression of poverty and despair; and denigrates safety from crime as a white supremacist construct. While such notions seem practically insane to reasonable people, especially those with any knowledge or experience of how the real world works, the envy that drives the left-wing populists eclipses their capacity for rational debate or understanding.

Ultimately, this difference in the character of right versus left populism may prove to be the most important political development of this decade. Will MAGA’s insistence that the country return to its constitutional roots carry the day, regardless of the success or failure of Trump? Or will the rise of the Mamdani-style populists destroy our constitutional republic once and for all?

Linda Denno is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs & Administration for the University of Arizona, College of Applied Science and Technology. She also serves as the Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for Arizona, an appointed civilian position that carries the equivalent rank of three-star general.

John Yoo is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley where he supervises the Public Law and Policy Program among other programs at Berkeley Law. Concurrently, he is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.