Here’s a datum: I listened to NPR for an hour yesterday on my drive home [first time in a long time, but I was curious about their take on the Scott Brown victory]. I heard the results described about twenty times by quite a few different people as “populist”, e.g. “a populist revolt”, “Brown’s populist message”, etc. I don’t recall them using the “c word” at all (conservative). Elite [sic] opinion seems to be gelling around the notion that it’s okay to think of the grave discontent with Obama as “populist”, but they still have cognitive dissonance with the notion that the revolt has any “conservative” component at all. And libertarianism, I think, is not on their radar at all….
The significance of this is two-fold: first, populism per se is neither Democrat nor Republican, and indeed many Democrat proposals for expanding government fit the definition of “populist”. This is why you still hear Democrats arguing that the election results mean that they have a mandate to push through health insurance reform as quickly as possible. So the use of “populist” [in the sense of “policies intended to help common people”] instead of “conservative” [”policies intended to promote individual liberty and initiative”] allows the Democrat conscience to pursue essentially the same anti-liberty, anti-business, anti-individual policies that they did before. This is the core calculation that is driving Obama to demonize the banks – he thinks that by repackaging his Marxism as “populist” all will be well.
Second, it helps to convince Democrats that the connection of Scott Brown to conservatism is accidental at best. Thus, they see no mandate to work with Republicans, who, after all, represent a kind of secular Satanism to them.
We shall see what this particular delusion earns them next November.