Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders presaged Donald Trump... but what comes next?

An exploration of modern American populism.

I think a lot about populism these days.

We are clearly living in a “populist era” in US politics. For most of my life, the two wings of the “regime” seemed to be doing a decent enough job to satisfy the public. The masses would switch back and forth between political candidates representing the leftist, progressive face of the regime and those representing the more conservative face.

For most of my life, whatever populist energy there was in the country was relegated to minor political parties and very fringe elements of the Democrats and Republicans that never managed to form a broad movement.

That changed with the presidential runs of Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 and with Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Paul ran on libertarian principles and Sanders on socialist principles, but both clearly had a large swell of populist energy behind them.

Despite their philosophical differences, lots of voters sensed that these two men weren’t part of the “blob”. They weren’t part of the statis quo. They weren’t part of the regime. There was at least some hope with these two candidates that the average citizen would be represented in Washington DC rather than the usual warmongering and blatantly corrupt political interests.

Naturally, both the Republican party and the Democrat party used dirty tricks to not let Paul or Sanders advance past their respective primaries.

It was this populist energy that paved the way for Donald Trump to crash, bull-in-a-China-shop style, into the White House in 2016, and again in 2024.

To me, Trump represents a very unfocused expression of populist energy. His popularity stems from the very obvious fact that he isn’t part of the regime, and the regime obviously despises him.

His supporters love that about him.

But what he actually stands for is much more muddled. He’s kinda anti-war, but not really. He’s kinda pro free markets, but not really. He doesn’t understand political philosophy or economics on any level beyond the very rudimentary.

His only clearly stated principles are that he is nationalist as opposed to globalist and that he’s against whatever woke, trans-maniacal, racist, sexist, identitarian lunacy is currently on display in the Democrat party.

That was more than enough for a modern day electoral landslide in 2024. Trump won 312 electoral votes and even won the popular vote.

That’s a huge win, evidencing a huge swell of popular support.

But again, it’s a rather unfocused type of support, and Trump only has four years in office to direct that energy and turn it into specific policy reforms and political goals.

What is that going to look like? What will come after Trump?

I’m hopeful that the libertarianism I am seeing rising in the zeitgeist isn’t just a mirage. I hope people are actually being red-pilled into realizing that their government schools and universities and major media outlets and regime politicians have been lying to them their whole lives.

I further hope that the people recognize that these lies have been fed to them to serve nefarious interests that use government power to tax them, control them, suppress them, and send them into bloody wars that don’t have anything to do with their interests.

That they’ve been propagandized and bled dry and controlled and shackled. All while hearing incessantly that, “It’s all for your own good.” And more recently, “And it’s all your own fault, really.”

I hope people realize all that and embrace libertarianism and reduced government power as the solution. It doesn’t have to go that way, towards freedom. Populism often results in socialism or communism or strong-man dictators. We could easily head in that direction if we aren’t careful.

So what follows Trump? Will it be eight years of JD Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy? That would probably be a good thing. Or will it be some modern day Lenin or Mussolini?

(Of course, I am praying for a Dave Smith or Spike Cohen or Angela McArdle presidency, but that’s just a flight of fancy.)

We need to pay close attention to what happens next, both in the Trump administration and in the broader “collective consciousness” of the general public.

Where this populist energy goes next is going to be really important — assuming the Deep State and the crony regime doesn’t swallow us up again instead.

Fingers crossed for a brighter future!

Naturally,

Adam