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.

Some establishments didn’t answer the door. Other attempts ended in confrontations with confused Somali women who appeared to have practically no English skills, bewildered by the young man and his old friend and partner in journalism, Dave, who’d just come by asking to see some kids.

In response, the Right-wing echo chamber went wild. “Prosecute @GovTimWalz,” tweeted Elon Musk. JD Vance exclaimed that Shirley had done more valuable journalism than the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Before long, the Trump administration froze billions in funds for childcare and assistance to the poor going to Minnesota, and four other blue states for good measure. Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) has even introduced a resolution to award Shirley a Congressional Gold Medal.

Yet the real lesson of this story is how poorly suited the American Right is to engaging in journalism — and, indeed, the movement’s impoverished understanding of what journalism is all about.

Start by stipulating that there has been fraud involving Somalis in Minnesota. In 2022, the Biden administration charged 47 defendants in a $250 million scheme to exploit a child-nutrition program. This summer, the acting US Attorney for Minnesota said in an interview that his office had prosecuted cases amounting to $500 million in fraud over the past few years, and that in the case of the federal Housing Stabilization Services program, the “vast majority” of the money being distributed is fraudulent.

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It appears that most of this is coming from within the Somali community, and The New York Times in November reported on how Democratic politicians in that state were shy about shining a light on criminal activity in a way that could demonize a minority group or alienate a sizable new voting bloc.

None of this, however, means that Nick Shirley was engaging in real journalism. What he did was the equivalent of a reporter covering the mafia randomly showing up at Italian-owned butcher shops and restaurants with a prefabricated narrative that criminal activity must be going on. Almost immediately, Shirley’s narrative began to fall apart. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families last week visited the daycares targeted by Shirley and determined that they were “operating as expected.” Children were, in fact, present at all of the sites, except for one that had yet to open for the day. Apparently, just showing up at a daycare and asking “Can I see the children?” does not get you access to them.

Reporters from the Minnesota Star Tribune visited the 10 facilities in Shirley’s video, and found children in four of them. The other six were either closed or did not open their doors, which would be understandable, given what they had recently been through. At one facility, the paper reported, “the daycare’s phones now ring nonstop from early in the morning to late at night, with people pretending to want to place their children there or threatening harm.”

The Star Tribune reported that some of the facilities had been cited for large numbers of violations in recent years. And the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families is pursuing ongoing investigations of four of the 10 daycares in the video. One of them, Quality Learning Center, closed down after Shirley’s visit. But there is little in Shirley’s video that, without more, qualifies as evidence of wrongdoing.

From the video itself, Shirley appears to not have much understanding of how health-care and government licensing work. At one point, while wandering through a facility of various medical providers, Shirley wonders, “Why would you have the same company essentially inside of the same building?” The kid has apparently never heard of a medical plaza. While visiting an office that appears to have patients in a waiting room, he asks a bewildered receptionist what their “health-care rates” are — a question that no patient in the American health system ever asks a provider. At facilities like the ones in the video, payment is often provided through government health programs, and depends upon the exact services that are authorized. This isn’t like asking for a menu in a restaurant.

Shirley finds a facility that is licensed to care for 102 children, and expects to see exactly that number of kids, not understanding that this is the maximum number they are authorized to serve. When the Star Tribune went to the same place, the paper found around 50 children inside. They simply hadn’t been visible from the door. At another facility, Dave (Shirley’s partner) taunts people standing outside that they might need an Amber Alert for the exact number of kids that they are licensed to care for.

Shirley has inspired similarly ignorant imitators on social media. One December X post, from the sensationalist @WallStreetApes account, declares that regular homes in Minnesota being registered as assisted living facilities is indicative of fraud (it has garnered more than 900,000 views as of this writing). Yet as the journalist Christina Buttons points out, the trend in US policy has been towards encouraging home- and community-based care over large institutions, meaning that these homes could well be assisted-living facilities.

Some have followed Shirley in showing up to random Somali businesses and haranguing the people inside. One video with 16 million views as of this writing involves a YouTuber informing her audience that “90% of small businesses fail, yet the Samara Adult Day Care still has their lights on without having one customer seemingly.” The woman who answers the door doesn’t speak English very well, but communicates that she is waiting for a driver to bring the people they take care of. The lack of assimilation among Somalis clearly does hinder communication, but that is not the point the influencer is going for. Without any evidence that anything is untoward is happening, the woman is smeared as a fraudster based on her ethnicity and line of business.

The episode is another showcase of why the nation needs real institutions, and highlights the failure of conservatives to build or maintain ones Americans can trust. Elon Musk encourages “citizen journalism,” giving the impression that anyone can show up with a camera — without any background knowledge, editorial guardrails, writing ability, or fact-checking — and provide useful information on current events.

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The amateurism is corrosive to Americans’ capacity to reform real problems. Shirley’s partner, Dave, claims at one point that Tim Walz took Minnesota from having an $18 billion surplus to a $6 billion deficit, a swing of $24 billion, of which he attributes 90% to fraud. In fact, Minnesota still has a surplus for the current fiscal year. There is projected to be a deficit of about $6 billion by 2028-2029, but no evidence is provided in Shirley’s video for the claim that fraud will be a substantial reason why.

The only attempt to ground his so-called journalism in empirical data is Shirley’s running tally of supposed fraud uncovered, based on which businesses he considers illegitimate. That determination, in turn, rests on little more than his unsuccessful attempts to locate children or wrangle “health-care rates” out of confused receptionists.

In a sense, Shirley starts with a narrative and then grabs on to whatever evidence he can find in order to tell the story, including short videos and official government numbers provided without the necessary context to understand what is going on. Do mainstream-media institutions sometimes do the same thing? Undoubtedly. But the Shirley version is so much more grotesquely low-quality — and subject to none of the editorial scrutiny and pushback that is routine for institutions like the Times even on their worst days.

To be clear, conservatives have uncovered a real problem in the form of government fraud. There are points to be made about topics such as immigration from clannish, hard-to-assimilate backgrounds, and Democrats letting fraud run rampant to avoid accusations of racism and to curry favor with an ethnic voting bloc. Yet a Times reader could have learned about Somali fraud in Minnesota in late November, minus the encouragement to harass random people who may not have had nothing to do with criminal activity.

Shirley is far from the worst influencer in the new Right-wing media ecosystem. That’s not saying much, however, in a community in which it is completely normal to sit in a podcast studio and fabricate “facts.” What the young YouTuber reveals, however, is in some ways even darker. It is that, even when the Right has a point about a news story, its partisans, and even its leaders, are either unwilling or unable to either demand or adhere to basic journalistic or intellectual norms. Moreover, there appears to be a growing appetite for opportunities to harass minority communities in real life over the sins committed by individuals who share the same background. That is a greater threat to the future of the country than welfare fraud.