The Real Reason Populism Keeps Failing

A decade of populist anger on both the right and left has correctly identified that America’s institutions serve the political class rather than ordinary citizens, yet virtually every goal that anger was meant to achieve, ending DC corruption, winding down foreign wars, reducing inequality, has only gotten worse. Ron Paul’s generation of populists correctly identified the Federal Reserve as the engine funding the administrative state, the warfare state, and corporate welfare, but today’s populist movements have drifted away from that insight toward symptoms instead of the root cause.

The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

America is in a populist moment. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been hearing for the last decade. 

Ever since Donald Trump shocked the legacy press, “expert” pollsters, and the political establishment more broadly in November of 2016, we’ve seen endless attempts to explain what was, at the time, seen as a perennial sea change in American politics.