Ben Shapiro

I think that when it comes to populism itself, I do not like populism.

I think that populism is not a philosophy, it is an approach.

And that approach tends to be, again, lowest common denominator.

There are certain areas where I think populism

There's a case to be made for it.

The case that I would largely make for populism is immoral populism, but that is because most people get their morals from their parents, and most parents get their morals from the sort of Western, I would say the gas left in the tank from Western civilization.

And so if you want to do a moral populism, it's sort of like the William F. Buckley, I'd rather listen to the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the professors at Harvard.

I agree with that kind of populism, because the first hundred names in the Boston phone book probably went to church more often than the professors at Harvard.

When it comes to things like economics, no.

I mean, no.

Because the true populism in economics would be, we all have the same, we get to all each have our independent opinions.

There's like the most populist thing in economics is called private property and free markets, where we all have our individual opinions.

But that's not what economic populism is.

Economic populism is 51 of us think the other 49 of you should pay our bills.

Or 50 or 80 of us think that you 20 over there are screwing us and so we're gonna confiscate your property.

Or 90 of us don't like this one guy over there.

And so what we're really going to do is we're going to regulate the hell out of him or subsidize his rival in order to destroy him.

So yeah, I'm not a fan of populism.

But I think, again, it takes a long time to build the wonders of Western civilization, a very short time to break them.

And populism has been a tactic used for literally millennia at this point, so nothing new.