A good working definition of political ‘populism’ in today’s rich democratic world is something along the lines of ‘that party over there has policies and views I dislike and is way too popular with the voters for my liking.’ Or, ‘I don’t agree with that party about anything much but it looks as though it might win.’ Or even, ‘I find that party’s views on immigration and social issues to be morally repulsive and would be prepared to forego basic majoritarian democratic norms and practices to make sure it doesn’t assume power.’ Those are the core attitudes that far too frequently rest deep within the psyches of the journalists and politicians and university types who throw around this label ‘populist’. You know it. I know it. They know it. They are just flagging their disdain for those they see as deplorables who support these parties. They are virtue-signalling. It’s generally a safe bet, as well, that those throwing around this label ooze a healthy, well-developed sense of their own moral superiority. Perhaps they don’t fully and comprehensively believe that after 3.8 billion years of life on earth, that they are the pinnacle of moral evolution. And that their moral antennae today vibrate at just the perfect godly frequency, unlike the hicks and plebs who would vote for these parties. Perhaps not. But boy, oh boy, outside observers could certainly be forgiven for thinking that was the level of their moral and political holier-than-thou self-regard. 1

All of which must make the current state of play in much of the developed democratic world pretty depressing for these self-perceived and self-assessed moral paragons – people, I’m afraid, who highly correlate with those who vote for the Greens or work for any of the main organs of the legacy media or dominate our universities as top administrators or academics. Close your eyes if any of that describes you because here is the latest polling from parts of Europe. In Britain, Nigel Farage and the Reform party (which, like the name Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, is unmentionable and never to be voted for or praised if you work for the BBC) are leading the governing Labour party by seven points, with the self-destructing Tories back even further in the worst positioning in the party’s centuries-old history. In Germany, the anti-immigration and pro-family AfD party has, for the first time ever, just become the country’s most popular party and leads the ‘we’d rather continually deal with socialists than anyone wanting to limit immigration’ governing Christian Democrats by two points. In France the rebranded Marine Le Pen party is leading by a whopping ten points, so that many of the great and the good are trying to think of how they can ban this populist party.  And it’s the same sort of story with other so-called populist parties in Europe. In Austria the FPO leads by 13 points. In Switzerland the SVP leads by 12 points. In Italy the Fdl leads by seven points. In Holland the PVV leads by one point.

As the perspicacious editor of Australia’s best weekly, the one you’re reading right now, Rowan Dean noted some time ago there are insiders and outsiders. The former are the globalists, the ones who think international law more worthy and legitimate than their own country’s domestic law, the anywhere people, those who pooh-pooh such tawdry notions as patriotism – unless, of course, it can somehow be a tool against the big, bad, orange-haired man who heads up the US of A. The latter support national sovereignty;  they think domestic law created in a democratic country such as Australia (or Canada, or the US, or Britain) is far superior to international law which barely has a democratic bone in its top-down, elitist body (just go and see how customary international law is made and you’ll never again take at face value any claims about the legitimacy of international law); they are the somewheres who vociferously reject the rather delusional belief that all cultures are equal and that the West is somehow uniquely evil – when it has plainly delivered the best places to live in human history, especially for women and minorities, as witnessed by the tidal wave of those from the Third World trying to get in.

Here’s the key thing. Our establishment elites, overwhelmingly insiders, have done a truly terrible job these past few decades. The political class has, as a generalisation, been woeful and arguably the worst in many a democratic country’s history. They have overseen a mass influx of Third World immigrants under the soothing-sounding, mollifying label ‘multiculturalism’ (which politicians across the spectrum from Tony Blair to David Cameron have publicly admitted has failed us). They have genuflected before the woke gods, to the extent that they ignore the evidence from the external, causal world that every human in history until two decades knew was true and pretend that men can become women (not some cheap, ersatz facsimile). They failed us all with their pusillanimity and thuggery during the Covid years, but especially they failed the young, closing the schools and overseeing the biggest transfer of wealth from young to old ever (via insane money printing and spending and hence asset inflation, with the old having assets but not the young – the young just get to pay back the debt for the rest of their lives).

The list of failures of our elites, pretty much across the board, goes on off into the horizon. But the main one has to do with allowing a tidal wave of immigration, illegal and legal, that threatens the free-speech-supporting, more-or-less harmonious, tolerant cultures of the West. Worse, the long-standing establishment political parties seem to just throw up their hands in despair and voice anodyne mutterings that amount to managed decline and surrender being the best option going, with hefty doses of censoring speech thrown in.

Well, the populist political parties don’t buy that guff. They can see that Donald Trump has stopped flat all illegal immigration in three months. All it requires is will.  As of last week the US Center for Immigration Studies reports that the overall foreign-born US population is down 2.2 million, January to June of this year. And that 1.6 million of that were illegals who have left.  (This, by the way, is in the context of the foreign-born population of the US still being the highest in the nation’s 250-year history.)  Meanwhile, because he actually tried, President Trump has taken on the entire identity-politics DEI industry and he is winning.  He is fighting the transgender lobby that believes 13-year-olds can consent to surgery that will sterilise them. He is tackling men in women’s sports. He is shunning all amnesties and going all-in to remove people who arrived illegally. And, he is fighting for more scope for free speech, not less (in part because the established legacy press is patently and absurdly biased in favour of the left).

Almost all those European populist parties mentioned above, the ones leading in the polls, support Donald Trump’s policies and want to mimic them. Don’t tell me this isn’t a mighty attractive manifesto to many voters. Because the evidence is plain that it is.   Certainly I am a proud populist in political terms. We are winning in the US and starting to win in Europe. Give us a half-decent party to vote for here in Australia. Please!