Pop(ulism) Goes the Weasel

“The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior.” In a very interesting piece, Andrés Miguel Rondón explains how populism works, and maybe more importantly, how to fight it. (Hint: it’s pretty much the opposite of what most people are doing right now.) How to let a populist beat you, over and over again.

+ “Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character. We were right.” A hawkish neocon explains why this is a clarifying moment in American History.