Populism Always Sounds Great in the Abstract
A New Jersey truck driver defeated the state Senate president, but politics needs people who know what they’re doing.
“I go on this great republican principle,” James Madison said in 1788, “that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
The notion that a virtuous people will select virtuous representatives to exercise their judgment is at the core of the American experiment. Populism—the notion that “the people” are always right by virtue of being numerous and ordinary—is utterly antithetical to our national idea. The Founders hoped that America would be led by people of moral and intellectual excellence; they built anti-majoritarian firebreaks into the Constitution precisely to avert sudden and intemperate movements.
