While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

Silver must have been livid. Yet in a sense, he helped make this moment happen. A decade ago, he took to the pages of The New York Times to call for legalizing sports betting nationwide. The argument then sounded pragmatic: Americans were already gambling illegally, so why not bring it into the open, regulate it, and tax it? What Silver helped set in motion was the merger of sport and speculation — a regime in which the game itself becomes an advertising vehicle for constant wagering, and every fan morphs into a potential bettor.

Once, gambling was the seedy underbelly of sports culture, the business of backroom bookmakers and shady offshore sites. Now it’s the official sponsor of the pregame show, the banner scrolling under highlight clips, the push notification buzzing our smartphones. Players, coaches, and fans alike have been folded into a vast machine that monetizes the uncertainty that makes sport so compelling to begin with.

The scandals were bound to multiply. Toronto Raptors power forward Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban last year for betting on his “over/under” stat line was a canary in the coal mine. Major League Baseball soon faced its own embarrassment with the Cleveland Guardians’ reliever Emmanuel Clase and pitcher Luis Ortiz placed on leave amid gambling investigations. Each time, the league officials express shock. Each time, they pretend these incidents are isolated. But when you turn the entire emotional economy of sport into a betting market, moral rot is just a cost of doing business.

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I used to sympathize with the liberalizers. I thought legalization could make gambling safer, draw it out of the shadows, and starve organized crime. It was the same logic many of us on the Left used for dealing with other vices: regulate, don’t prohibit; treat people like adults; reduce harm.

But what we’ve seen since 2018 — the year the US Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting — isn’t harm reduction. It’s market expansion on a scale that would have astonished the old mobsters of Las Vegas. In less than a decade, 39 states and Washington, DC, have legalized wagering. Americans legally bet $148 billion on sports last year, billions more than the gross domestic product of entire countries. And that’s just the above-board total.

The total volume of betting, legal and illegal, is likely much higher than it was before 2018. This shouldn’t be surprising: when you normalize and advertise a vice, you don’t just displace the old market, you expand it. Imagine a black market where two people are harming themselves at a certain quantifiable level. Legalization might, in theory and with the right regulations, lower individual harm, but by expanding participation, it increases the total amount of suffering.

After all, what changed in the last few years isn’t just the law, it’s the technology and marketing that power the gambling industry. Betting used to require effort: making a trip to Vegas or at least knowing a local bookie and dropping off an envelope of cash with him. Then it required tech savvy: navigating sketchy offshore sites, converting cash in and out of Bitcoin. Now it requires nothing more than turning 18, owning a phone, and linking a credit card. Push notifications nudge users to “get back in the game.” Algorithms track every habit and weakness. The house no longer waits for you to walk in, because it already lives in your pocket.

Every industry now traffics in behavioral addiction, but sports betting weaponizes it with a particular cruelty. The product being sold is not a physical high or even an illusion of connection — it’s the brief jolt of predictive mastery, the feeling that you understand something about the game that others don’t. And when you lose, the next tap offers a chance to win it back.

The results are visible everywhere. Gambling helplines across the country report record call volumes, mostly from men in their 20s and 30s. Surveys show nearly 40% of young men admit they’re betting more than they can afford. Some are wagering their rent money, while others are just dealing with small debts that make their lives a little more frustrating and unpredictable.

Yet there’s no real political appetite to reverse course. Many Republicans invoke freedom when arguing against the “nanny state.” Some Democrats see a new tax base and a new way to undercut organized crime. Even worse, the media are literally bought: ESPN runs its own sportsbook, and podcasts on new media outlets like The Ringer are sponsored by the very companies they should be scrutinizing. In this world, the idea that sports should embody integrity sounds almost absurdly old-fashioned.

But integrity and decommodification are two things we need more of.

A healthy society doesn’t eliminate every vice, but it draws lines. It understands that some freedoms corrode the conditions that make freedom meaningful. The case for recriminalizing bookmaking and banning betting from the airwaves isn’t an extreme form of paternalism. Rather, it’s about creating friction again through banning live-betting apps, curbing nonstop ads, and making it harder for gambling to reach people before common sense does. We don’t need to prosecute individuals who gamble, but we do need to dismantle the infrastructure that invites and normalizes it.

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For all our talk about “harm reduction,” there’s something perverse about designing digital opium dens and calling it liberty. The Left, at its best, has always believed that society should cultivate the conditions for a good life. And a good life doesn’t involve compulsively wagering on the performance of 20-year-old sports stars and DMing them death threats if they lose you money (yes, this happens).

But beyond the individual toll that rising addiction has on people, we’re going to see a mounting crisis of trust in sports. Sports offer a rare civic commons, a place where our differences recede before the live drama of chance and skill. When every play is a potential payout, that trust evaporates. If you look at the discourse around athletes and especially umpires, it’s clear that fans increasingly see a rigged spectacle instead of the purity of competition.

In that sense, the growth of gambling represents more than a policy failure. It’s a cultural catastrophe. It reveals how little confidence we have left in collective meaning. The rituals that once bound us together have been turned into platforms for extraction. The market doesn’t merely exploit our appetites; it shapes them, then sells us the means of our own disintegration.

Across the political spectrum, people should demand that Congress thinks about more than profit and starts helping us draw moral boundaries around our beloved pastimes. We live in a cynical era, one where even virtue seems performative. But if we want to rebuild trust — in one another, in the games we love, in the idea of fairness itself — we have to start somewhere.

As the son of a Leftist radical targeted by the FBI over his opposition to the Vietnam War, I know which side to cheer for.

Since retaking office, Trump has dismissed dozens of officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice. According to The Hill, the administration is “eyeing firing perhaps thousands more in an unprecedented purge.” The earliest targets include officials involved in prosecuting Trump himself, as well as those who caught some 1,500 defendants in a post-Jan. 6 dragnet.

Then there is Kash Patel, the president’s choice to lead the FBI. If confirmed, Patel would join the ranks of other Trumpians leading agencies of which they are deeply skeptical. Among other measures, Patel has mused about shuttering the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI’s headquarters, named for its notoriously lawless and racist first director — and converting it to a “museum of the deep state.”

The building’s 7,000 staffers would fan across the land, under Patel’s plan, solving workaday crimes. As opposed to the kind of highly politicized activity that has turned half of the country against the bureau, not least the use of its vast investigatory powers to corner Trump, seeking to undo his first election.

That project began when the bureau used allegations of “Russian collusion” proffered in the so-called Steele Dossier to launch a wide-ranging investigation into the Trump campaign. Commissioned by the Clinton campaign of 2016, and partially paid for by the Democratic National Committee, the dossier’s claims about Russian collusion were entirely unsubstantiated, as special counsel Robert Mueller revealed in an extensive probe that concluded in 2018.

Nonetheless, the FBI leaked parts of the Steele Dossier, then used the ensuing DC rumors as “evidence” with which to apply for and receive four wide-ranging Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. This allowed the bureau to spy on the communications of the Trump campaign; one of the FBI attorneys who helped apply for the FISA warrants was later convicted of having altered an email to make it look more incriminating.

Around the same time, Hillary Clinton was also under investigation for having permanently deleted some 31,000 emails that had been subpoenaed by the DOJ in 2014. The FBI investigated Clinton’s illegal destruction of evidence, but in the run up to the 2016 election, it soft-pedaled the matter and declined to recommend prosecution.

Rather than abandon politics-by-probe, the FBI ramped up its anti-Trump efforts four years later, during his second presidential campaign. That’s when the bureau took a leading role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in what appears to have been an attempt to control the outcome of the 2020 election. Having come into possession of the laptop 10 months before the New York Post published its first story about it, the FBI verified had its authenticity. Yet it warned social-media platforms to be wary of a Russian disinformation operation involving Hunter. Sure enough, when the Post’s first story appeared, Twitter (now X) and Facebook swiftly throttled it.

The Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol gave rise to another embarrassing episode, combining neglect and imperiousness. There is no excusing the rioters’ actions, and some of those pardoned by Trump upon returning to office undoubtedly committed violent crimes. But the question remains: Why was the US Capitol so poorly defended that day? And why did the Capitol Police Board — consisting of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the architect of the Capitol — deny requests from the Capitol Police to deploy National Guard in anticipation of brewing turmoil?

The answer hinges, in part, on the failure of the FBI to share important intelligence with the Capitol Police. According to Steven A. Sund, then the commander of the Capitol Police, the FBI as early as December 2020 had intelligence indicating that various individuals were actively planning to march into the Capitol and that many of them planned to be armed and ready to use violence. Yet the bureau didn’t alert Sund about this fact, which would likely have led to the authorization of a National Guard deployment.

Then, too, the FBI has to this date failed to comply with congressional requests for basic information, such as how many FBI agents and informants were in the crowd on Jan. 6. As it happens, FBI Agent Steven D’Antuono, who was in charge of the bureau’s Washington, DC, field office that day, had also managed the bureau’s infiltration and entrapment of a ragtag band of right-wing militiamen who, at the urging of undercover FBI handlers, concocted a scheme to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The full extent of FBI manipulation of the suspects only came to light because two of the defendants refused to take plea bargains, went to trial, and were acquitted after proving FBI entrapment.

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is another reason Trump is coming after the bureau. Accused of illegally hoarding state secrets after leaving office in 2021, Trump was cooperating with officials from the National Archives and Records Administration to return classified documents. The cooperation started early as May 2021 and would continue to the first half of 2022. Nevertheless, the FBI launched a dramatic early-morning raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. A year later, Trump was charged with 37 federal felonies connected to the retention of national security secrets.

At the same time, then-President Joe Biden was also found to have retained and improperly stored classified documents from his time as vice president. Biden’s documents were sitting unguarded in his garage. But there was no FBI raid, nor any discussion of criminal charges. Recall, too, that Hillary Clinton was likewise spared charges over her mishandling of State Department emails.

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Despite it all, Trump is now back at the summit of American power. Gone is the naïve showman from reality television. Trump 2.0 is battle-hardened and arrives with a wrecking crew and an aggressive plan to dismantle or weaken the key institutions of America’s unaccountable security state.

This is good and necessary. The FBI has a long and sordid history of framing people; disrupting, misdirecting, and destroying progressive social movements; and blackmailing politicians of any persuasion. As a result, there are many who dislike Trump yet cheer for him — because they dislike the FBI even more.

I understand this impulse. My father, the Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, was a fierce and public opponent of the Vietnam War, and he came under FBI surveillance. He even got a copy of his file. They harassed him, visited our home, bothered my mother. And so, when I read of stunned bureau officials seeking to calm the “fear and angst within the FBI ranks” and vowing to “dig in”, I felt that some little bit of cosmic justice was being done for Dad, who like many radicals of his generation spent years at the sharp end of FBI bullying.

The FBI is reeling from these early blows. But unless Trump and his colleagues are determined and systematic in their efforts, the security apparatus will regroup, shake off the dust, and strike back. We are in the opening rounds of what will be a long and brutal confrontation over the right to enjoy authentic political contestation, rather than a politics stage-managed by men in black.

Progressives who wish to preserve room for real politics, and who know their FBI history, should stand with the Trumpians in this tug-of-war.