Scathing and incisive. Precisely because populism is a big tent movement gathering together the outcasts expelled from mainstream discourse, it contains idiots and malefactors in abundance. There's a strong whiff of boomerism about it in the touching faith in people power, in the tendency to shrink back from decisive action, and in the reflexive desire for respectability eg to show that actually the other side are the REAL racists.

The key problem that gives rise to populism in the first place is elite decay. Our current system produces rancid elites. Populists think we can vote our way towards better elites, or that we can somehow just not have elites at all. The existing system is intolerable but it's very likely that populist parties would largely just switch out one crop of retarded malefactors for another group of hysterical incompetents.

What we actually need is a way to produce virtuous and competent elites, and/or to identify the ones who despite the best efforts of existing institutions have actually somehow been produced already, and then get those men into positions of influence.