Vital Interests: Dennis, thanks for joining me for the Vital Interests forum. You and your colleague, Jacob Hale Russell, are working on a new book with the working title Taking Populism Seriously: Elites, Experts, and Populist Skepticism. This is an interesting and timely topic of concern for many. What’s the premise of the book and what impact do you and Jacob hope it will have?

Dennis Patterson: We came up with the idea for this book when Jacob and I were teaching a seminar on populism. As a result of that experience and the reading we did, we came to a view about populism - and here we are talking not about politicians who may align themselves with the populist movement, but about the actual people who identify with, or who have some affinity to, the populist credo – and its relationship to expertise.

As we see it, the essence of populism is the rejection of elites by the masses. This is now a global phenomenon, and we think it's quite politically significant. From Trump and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. to Brexit in the UK and populist parties in Europe and South America, it has forced a rethinking of what populism really means. We felt that this reality could be studied in real-time. 

Populism, we think, has three different dimensions, globally, three core ideas. Populism has a cultural, economic, and political dimension. Each of these dimensions is present in all populist movements, but each has a different emphasis.

The cultural dimension, we think, is described well by Joan Williams in her book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.  Her emphasis is on the cultural sources of the rejection of elites by the masses: populists disdain elitist rejection of populist values such as religion, patriotism and nationalism.

The second dimension of populism is economic. This expresses itself in the embrace of a new mercantilism, where a nation’s wealth and power are thought to be based in domestic manufacturing and an export-orientated economy. Mercantilism seems to be the norm for populists, and that puts national manufacturing and the interest of national workers above every other consideration. This, of course, has tremendous implications which we see today in calls to completely revamp the global supply chain. 

The third dimension is political, and I think Brexit exemplifies this best. Ordinary citizens have a conception of what it is to be a part of the nation, in the case of Great Britain, to live in a democracy. UK populists reject the idea that an elite institution, like the European Court of Justice, can dictate national policy. They are willing to reject that at the expense of their short-term economic interest.

We think these three dimensions are really the core of populism. This contrasts with someone like Jan-Werner Müller, an important scholar of populism. For Müller, the essence of populism is an “us versus them” mentality. The populist credo is expressed by the idea that the nation is the real people, the ordinary folks are the real polity. They are antithetical to expertise and elites in the sense that they don’t want to be dictated to and they especially don’t want their particular cultural beliefs to be rejected – and in fact they want their culture to be the only legitimate one. We think that approach is too narrow, because it excludes many modern examples that are commonly called populism, including Sanders supporters.

We think the three dimensions that we articulate pretty much capture everything you see about populism in the UK, in Europe, South America, and the United States.

VI: The actual term “populism” in the U.S. can be traced to the Populist Party that arose in the Midwest in the late 19th century. This Party was opposed to corporate and financial monopolies, the Robber Barons of that time, and the control they had over American society. Can we trace the origins of American populism today to these ideas or is that too remote?

Dennis Patterson: Well, you could say that. You can think of populism as either a family resemblance concept originating with late 19th century populism or an essentially contested concept. The specific version that you've just articulated is best illustrated by Bernie Sanders. Sanders's central contention is that the rich are exploiting the working class and middle class. What Sanders ran on is the idea that the wealthy are rent seekers and that the economy is essentially serving their interests and not the interests of the common person.

Medicare for all, free university education, the elimination of student debt, and a wealth tax, these are all populist ideas. The thrust of these ideas is to reverse the gross imbalance between rich elites and the middle class. What I find somewhat odd about this is that Sanders never mentions the role of the Federal Reserve in creating wealth for the top one percent. The FED has been on an easy money gambit for 10 years and the middle class has benefitted not at all.

People like me, college professors, who have their money invested in their retirement accounts, are all benefiting from this. But ultimately this is doing nothing for the real economy. As the CARES Act payments and the unemployment payments end, people are going to continue to lose their homes, be kicked out of their rental apartments; they're not going to have enough money to feed their kids. 

Again, it’s Main Street versus Wall Street. That’s the Populist divide (ironically, Trump wants interest rates at zero because he thinks that benefits the economy. But it has not engendered growth in the underlying economy).

VI: Let's drill down a bit more into your idea that populism has cultural, economic, and political dimensions. Looking at the cultural aspect, every country’s popular culture is based on mythologies about their origins and values. Certainly the United States has well known notions of what it means to be an American based on our history and form of government - with the origins going back to the Founders and the principles of our Constitution. But much of this messaging comes from elites - from scholars and the government. Do populists really understand their culture or are they just controlled by propaganda that is constantly being pushed from both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum?

Dennis Patterson: I think the most accessible version of this is coastal elites telling the Midwest, "We reject your religious values, we reject your guns, and we reject your conception of what it is to be an American." Joan Williams, in the book I previously mentioned, explains how the professional elite -- journalists, mainstream media, and establishment politicians – reject core conceptions held by the working class about what it means to be a member of a polity, what it is to live a quality life. The elite just completely reject it, in part because they don’t really even take time to understand it.

This is best distilled in Hillary Clinton's “deplorables” comment. The white working class are often dismissed as racist, xenophobic, and the like. I think that this was a good example of it.

VI: East Coast elites are perhaps disdainful of Midwestern values and lifestyles, but you also have people in the so-called “flyover states” who tune into Fox News, listen to right-wing talk radio, and view Facebook postings that feed them distorted ideas about how bad, aberrant, and unamerican East and West Coast elites are. So isn’t the rhetoric of polarization coming from both sides?  

Dennis Patterson: I think I would take issue with your premise that people are controlled in what they think. You are correct, I agree with you, about the polarization. But in many ways, the polarization is more a manifestation of elite culture – both right- and left-leaning versions -- than of voters. Fox isn’t a grassroots media organization based in the Midwest, after all. Nor is Fox news synonymous with populists, because remember populism is voters of both right and left who are turning on elites. Part of the reason that Jacob and I are writing this book is because we are worried about this discourse — traditional values versus coastal culture, or  as you described it, Fox News versus CNN. 

When I watch, for example, CNN there's no contrary point of view. The same thing is of course true with Fox News. You take something like the discourse around the COVID virus, it creates two polarizing camps, neither of which is willing to entertain anything by way of argument from the other side. Our discourse has basically deteriorated to the point where we can't have a rational discussion. I think discussions around the virus are a great example of this.

Let me say one final thing about the working class. The great economist, Albert Hirschman, wrote an important book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In that book, he makes the case that when it comes to everything from an organization to a population, to a nation, we basically have three choices with respect to political participation.

If you have a voice in it and you are heard, you're willing to continue and contribute and participate, you will then be loyal. If that voice gets ignored or snuffed out, your only alternative really is exit. That's what we have now. That's the fate of the middle class and the working class in the United States. This is the cultural dimension of populism. They feel that nobody cares about their opinion, whatsoever. That, of course, is why they're driven to something like Fox News – at times it may be the only place that appears to give voice to their ideas, however imperfectly. 

Now, when it comes to the virus, the virus has experts.  Our central claim about experts is that elites love to invoke them. When it comes to the virus, the mantra is - we follow the science. You heard Joe Biden recently say, if the experts tell him to shut the country down, he'll do it. Now, the problem with this, of course, is that it's completely one dimensional and I think it evinces a misunderstanding of science. Science doesn't tell you what to do. Science provides data, it provides evidence but it's up to us, it's up to our politicians, to decide what we're going to do with that evidence. I think the problem with the discourse now is that the public lacks the context for making a well-informed decision about what to do.

Take something like ventilators. Remember when we didn't have enough ventilators and Trump was criticized by The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and CNN endlessly for failing to be prepared for the virus and to have enough ventilators? Do you know what the state of ventilators today is? They’re piled up in warehouses. We have more than we could possibly use. Why is that? How have we gone from, a country that is completely unprepared, to now where we have more than we need? There are several reasons why it turned out that ventilators really aren't a solution to the problem, including other treatments, concerns that ventilators were not exactly a great way to treat many patients, and changes in the types of cases. 

So, what's the point? We've gone from a state of national self-flagellation in March to one where ventilators turned out not to be as important as expected, with no real acknowledgment. At every moment, the media and its experts are willing to make confident proclamations, which often turn out to be wrong. That they are wrong is not inherently a problem – things are bound to be uncertain in a novel pandemic – and hindsight is not the right way to evaluate a problem. The problem is the extreme overconfidence, the false confidence, the failure to acknowledge incomplete information, the failure to admit mistakes. These decrease public trust in experts, and they are not the fault of science. They are the fault of elites and pundits who misuse science. 

Let's take the opening up of schools, an extremely controversial topic. Now, suppose you wanted to open up a local school. What kind of information would you want? We’d want science to tell us how transmittable is this disease by children? How many kids get COVID? How many kids die from it? What is the hospitalization rate? Are campuses different from primary schools?

The point is that you need a textured account of the data to make an informed public policy decision. The most important thing, in our view, is that people need to be candid about the fact that this is a complicated decision, it's not a one-step process, and the claim to be 'following the science,' buries the fact that it is a complicated decision, one that has to be made by looking beyond the science. 

For example, according to a new study by the CDC, one in four people aged 18 to 24 seriously contemplated suicide this summer. You can't tell me that you can just 'follow the science' and that'll take you to where you want to go. Here you’ve got 25% of the 18 to 24 population seriously contemplating suicide presumed to be a result of a lockdown. And then there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether lockdowns add much protection against the virus if you have social distancing, masks, and you wash your hands. But there is an utter failure by elites to acknowledge the uncertainty and complexity of balancing tradeoffs and making momentous decisions under conditions of uncertainty, risk, and probability. And there is a seeming reluctance to gather data.

Sweden and the state of Georgia in the United States, which resisted lockdowns,  were criticized; pundits said they would create death on a massive scale, and yet both places’ policies have remained largely popular. The Swedes will also tell you, they’re “following the science," but of course, they're doing more than that. They're looking at how they can control this thing in a way that doesn't destroy the economy, and doesn't create tremendous mental health externalities.

Elites love to read Ed Yong in The Atlantic magazine. Yong is the kind of person that we think is part of the cultural elite. Yong trots out a variety of statistics from experts and tries to persuade you that there is a single consensus expert opinion that is the lodestar for coming to a correct decision.

That's just false. There are other considerations that need to be taken into account and to have this point of view dismissed as just Luddite, I think contributes to the rise of, shall we call it, uninformed judgment? It contributes to the rise of anti-maskers and to other kinds of doubt.

Part of the reason so many are skeptical of experts is because, time and again, experts have been shown to be incorrect. Remember, scientific models that predicted how many would die as a result of the virus were treated as if they were true – which is not a scientific conception of a model – yet were often wrong by ridiculous margin. This misuse of expertise just encourages people to doubt expertise.

VI: What you're talking about is a national state of confusion caused, as you said, by the fact science doesn't dictate, it informs. Political leaders need to evaluate the science and come up with effective policies for citizens to follow. But you’re also saying that populists are apathetic about the truth. You’re  defending their skeptical frame of mind? 

Dealing with a pandemic or any other national crisis requires leadership. It requires a government that is accepted as legitimate based on its interpretation of scientific information, and on opinions it gathers from various sectors of society, and then after evaluating public policy alternatives, making  the hard decision all governments are tasked to make.

Dennis Patterson: Give me an example of where that has happened.

VI: Consider another national health crisis in the United States, smoking tobacco. For years, studies showed that smoking was dangerous to your health and the health of others. The tobacco industry, however, had its own experts who tried to debunk these findings so that they could keep selling cigarettes and cigars. After decades of considering the risks, the government passed laws about who could smoke and where. Now the dangers of smoking are well articulated, well known and accepted as part of our national consciousness about what makes us healthy and the dangers to avoid. Some may criticize anti-smoking regulations as the government being too paternalistic but this public good is accepted by the majority of people.

Dennis Patterson: Smoking and the triumph of expertise in smoking is a good example. Of course, it is important to remember this was built on many years of research and scientific consensus, and on more than just elite proclamation – there was persuasion and debate. But let’s consider a monumental failure - the 2008-09 financial crisis. The experts said, "There's nothing to worry about, there's no threat of a housing bubble." Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went on their merry way, giving mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. This went on for years.

People were told there was no problem and then the whole thing blew up. The experts were afraid to admit they were totally wrong. What did it do? It created one of the greatest financial disasters in the history of the world, a disaster that reached way beyond the United States. All because the experts said there was nothing to worry about. It was a colossal failure.

This is a very recent example of where expertise gave you not just a failure, but a wide-ranging, financial and economic meltdown that impacted the world for years. Government and industry all spoke with one voice, "There's nothing to worry about here. Everything will be fine. There's a little bit of excess in the system, but it's not a problem." That was completely wrong.

Of course, scientific expertise is something that any rational person should value. With respect to COVID-19, our point is that scientific expertise does not directly translate into public policy. Expertise is important but what we want is textured data. What do we want to know? We want to know rates of infection, the ease of transmission, the ages to target populations, the severity of the virus, and so on.

Look at how Governor Cuomo of New York handled the virus. Some say Cuomo did a great job and followed experts. But he took thousands of recovering elderly COVID patients out of the New York hospitals, put them into nursing homes, and many blame that for creating a worse situation. And New York’s death count remains the highest in the US. There are plenty of reasons that contributed to that, no doubt. But the point is you can’t just say “follow the experts” and guarantee success.

Our point is that the reliance on the expert is a trope and it shuts down the conversation. Reliance on expertise has serious implications when you are unwilling to be cognizant of the fact that more than just scientific data is involved in making decisions for all segments of the country.

Take opening up a university. Now, if you listen to a certain portion of elite culture, no university should be open. Everybody should stay at home and we should have remote learning for the foreseeable future. It's not clear to me that that is the right choice. Again, my point is that it's not just a matter of the data. We certainly are not of the view that COVID is just another flu, that's just stupid. But for a particular college or a graduate school it might be the case that, with the right precautions, students are safer on campus than they would be somewhere else. 

We want to see a discussion where there's a sensible weighing of the risks and the benefits and a reflective decision about the protective measures that you need to take in order to have some semblance of a normal life. Let me point out the obvious - this lockdown has destroyed the economy. Although the jury is still out, it is quite plausible evidence will ultimately suggest that locking down did not do much good in fighting the virus. In other words, maybe you could have gotten to the same place with much less draconian measures. And either way, there are tradeoffs, and not just the economy versus death – but many other things, including schools, other aspects of health, our way of life.

VI: When it was understood that COVID-19 was a highly infectious and deadly pathogen that came quickly into our society and immediate action was required. The CDC seemed surprisingly unprepared and issued a confused response. China, after a period of denial, acted decisively as did South Korea, Japan, and other countries. Governments that were able to enforce mandatory quarantines, masks, and social distancing were able to control the spread of COVID. Interestingly populist countries have had less success and resisted following the examples of others. Are populists always nationalists who are skeptical of the policies of other countries thinking that their way is the best way?

Dennis Patterson: 

Well, first of all, recall that our interest is in populist voters, not leaders who claim the mantle of populism. And it’s not clear that populism has cut any one way in the pandemic – there are liberal democracies that have fared badly so far, and more populist places that have done better. I don’t think you can chalk up most variation to populism or policy, as many factors including demographics and chance probably matter more.

I’m sure that you can find a nationalistic perspective among populists, but you can also find it among elites who think that the scientists here are better than elsewhere. I don't think there's anyone that has a populist point of view that thinks there's some special insight that is driven by a nationalist perspective on science, so I would say no. 

VI: Populists are skeptical of elites and experts, but they also consider themselves to be in a moral struggle to preserve what they believe to be the core values of their society. This moral struggle promotes an “us against them” mentality. 

In a liberal democracy ideas of pluralism, compromise, and accepting your opponent as legitimate are fundamental. If populists view those that oppose their views as the enemy, how can there be agreement on policies that impact all of society? 

Dennis Patterson: Here’s one populist take on this. For people like you, people like me, the professional class, we can sit at home and do our work. I just finished teaching an entire course on contracts totally online. I never left my home office. My salary hasn't been cut, but the average middle-class person in the United States has suffered greatly as a result of this.

Try to look at that. You have the elites telling you that we are following the science and the science says we cannot control this unless we shut down the economy. They hear "I'm sorry that you lost your restaurant job. Sorry that your business has been closed, but there's really nothing we can do." I think the whole notion that “liberal democracy” means “compromise” is another example of an elite construction – when elites say “compromise” they mean “do what we say,” and often don’t treat the concerns of the working class as legitimate.

I didn't see anybody doing much to help small businesses or the unemployed in the United States. In the United States, you heard no one, almost no one, other than right wing populists saying that the elites are dictating to us what to do, the elites are telling us we can't stop this unless we shut down the economy, and they're not suffering, but the average person is, and that's the point.

VI: Let’s discuss the economic dimension of populism you mentioned. For populists, globalization is the primary cause of their economic woes. They advocate a mercantilist national policy that supports domestic manufacturing and exports. 

However, the reality is that the largest employer in the U.S., outside of the government, is Walmart. With close to 1.5 million employees, Walmart is the largest employer in 22 states. Paradoxically, everything that Walmart does depends on globalization with close to 95% of what is sold in Walmart stores made overseas and imported into this country. In addition to employment, Walmart offers Americans a vast array of inexpensive consumer goods.

How did this come about? Certainty expertise from management consultants sent manufacturing abroad and established the world trade system that you know so well. How can populists reconcile an economic reality which is not going to be reversed or altered in any substantial way?

Dennis Patterson: The populist sentiment, as you've correctly described it, is “You sent all of our jobs to the Far East. You've gutted industries like steel and automobile manufacturing, and you've done nothing for us.” Even though I think the globalists have the economics right, that does not mean I think the populist voters are wrong. There is a reason they feel hurt, and a lot of it has to do with distribution, status, and culture. To just tell them they’re wrong, the facts don’t match what they experience, is just another example of elite hubris. You correctly stated that, because of the relocation of global supply chains and manufacturing outside the United States, the cost of goods for the average American has gone down dramatically.

The internet and globalization are the two greatest deflationary devices in the history of the world. Somebody's nominal salary is not the complete measure of the quality of their life. In fact, when you look at it, people have more appliances in their home, they live better, they have better food, better medical care than they've ever had and yet, populists claim globalization is destroying their life. I think that’s false.

Let me let me say a few things about it. First of all, the thing that populists miss about globalization is that the United States does not act alone. The entire world, every major global corporation, has taken advantage of all of the deflationary aspects of globalization. They have relocated manufacturing to places where they can get a product produced for the least cost. That cost includes three things: labor, capital equipment, and taxation. These three things together dictate the cost of the finished good.

The problem with globalization, as Bill Clinton correctly observed, is that it is inexorable, meaning no matter what the United States does, we have to be cognizant of the fact that we compete against every other nation. If we're going to have a system that essentially closes us off from the rest of the world, we are going to make the situation worse. This, in my opinion, and I speak only for myself not for my co-author, this is Trump's greatest fraud on the middle class of America. These jobs are not coming back, and the problem is that this government is completely wrong in its approach to global trade.

Do I think Trump is right to take it to the Chinese? Absolutely. I commend him as being the first president in the last four or five administrations to actually confront the Chinese with respect to forced technology transfers, manipulation of proprietary information, and to basically calling out the Chinese for cheating. But Trump’s policy responses to this situation are disastrous. Now, the problem is this. If you have an enlightened view of globalization, which Trump does not, you would observe a number of things. For example, take automobile manufacturing, one of the most successful globalization stories. From the U.S. point of view, it is attractive to have BMW assemble their cars in places in Georgia. BMWs, Toyotas, and other foreign owned cars are in fact made in the United States. These are jobs for American workers that are high-paying jobs and they are here as a result of globalization.

I read somebody like Richard Baldwin who has written two great books on globalization. Basically, what he explains is that there are ways in which governments can be smarter about globalization, take advantage of it, and do things that will attract international manufacturing to a particular nation. But Trump makes no effort to do anything about it whatsoever. I think it's a tremendous mistake. Mercantilism and tariffs- Trump’s preferred tools - never work.

Instead, what he does is he feeds the populist beast by telling Middle America their jobs have been sent to the Far East and the only people who are benefiting are East Coast elites and Wall Street. This is simply false. Trump has done nothing to attract international investment in the United States. This is poor policy and no one will benefit from this. 

We have a fantastic information technology industry, it is the envy of the world. You have the rent-seeking Europeans trying to over-regulate it and extract rents from it. My point is that if you really understand how globalization works, you wouldn't be embracing mercantilism, you wouldn't be walking away from things like TTP, you would be trying to engender connections with global firms to bring them to the United States.

Trump doesn't do any of this. The only thing he does is go after China. And he does so by going on the wrong course, by imposing an absurd array of tariffs. Tariffs have not benefited anyone in the United States. If anything comes out in this interview, I want you to quote me. “Tariffs don't work, they never work. Ricardo was right.” It's only when you get smart about globalization that you're going to make some progress. The populist approach to the economics of globalization is going to result in nothing but sustained misery for everyone. It just doesn't work. Trump destroyed the Maine lobster industry, for example. By imposing tariffs on the Chinese, they doubled the tariffs on Maine lobsters. When I was in Maine last summer, every lobster fisherman told me the same thing. 

VI: All the Canadians were delighted.

Dennis Patterson: Exactly. When it comes to economics, those elected as populists have a bad track record, bad decisions throughout, ideas that don't work.

But even though I think the globalists have the economics right, that does not mean I think the populist voters are wrong. There is a reason they feel hurt by globalization, and a lot of it has to do with distribution, status, and culture. To just tell them they’re “wrong,” that their experience doesn’t match facts, is exactly what we are worried about. It produces a sense that experts do not listen to reality.

VI: To throw this back to you, populists opposing globalization are losing out because they don't listen to experts who understand the advantages of international trade and strategies to bring good jobs from globalization back to your own economy?

Dennis Patterson: I think that, certainly, expert opinion can sit down and explain to somebody how globalization works, but you don't have to be an expert to grasp the fact that the entire world now produces goods in a way that is wedded to a model of globalization that cannot be thwarted by mercantilism. An expert like the economist Veronique de Rugy at George Mason who writes excellent pieces all the time about tariffs and trade and populism. She shows consistently that it just doesn't work.

VI: But Trump has his own expert, Peter Navarro, who spins another scenario about the benefits of reversing globalization.

Dennis Patterson: Expert is your word for him. The guy you want to talk about is Robert Lighthizer, who's really smart and is the Trump administration’s international trade negotiator. They haven't made any progress with the Chinese, they've beaten him back, they slowed him down. These guys are just not smart when it comes to trade, I'm sorry. Somebody like, I mentioned Baldwin, he's just got a much better take on this. The thing is that it's all the product of ignorance, I think. I'm sure Lighthizer knows these arguments, they're just not politically palatable.

I would say this: When it comes to global trade, the populist rhetoric out of the Trump government has been nothing but a steady stream of disinformation. 

VI: That brings us to the third dimension of populism which is the political aspect. Politics is electing representatives, who go to Washington, engage in political discourse and try to work out national policies through legislation.  How can that work in a liberal democracy if you have populists coming at things from a moralist, rather than a political, point of view - where compromise is not on their agenda? Doesn’t this breed the type of criticism that populism just doesn't sync with liberal democracy?

Dennis Patterson: Liberal democracy has given us Trump and Brexit, right?

Let me make some comments about Brexit. I've worked in the UK. I talk to a lot of people in the UK. Part of the problem is what I hear from my liberal friends all the time: “If you voted for Brexit, you're a moron.” This is the view. Fintan O'Toole, who writes for the Irish Times, has a way-out theory that the British suffer from a long standing anti-German animus and regard Europe as essentially Germanic. That is a bit of a stretch for me. The people that I talk to in the UK who voted for Brexit, many of them are from the professional class. They have a nationalistic view of sovereignty. They do not want to share their sovereignty with Europe.

Why is that? Well, because they think that their British values are different from Europe and that they want to decide national policies for themselves. In other words, they view supranational organizations as anti-democratic. I don't think that's a stupid view at all. It's not my view, and I think this point of view is short-sighted, but the point is just that it's legitimate. It's legitimate and it's not moronic, but British populists are dismissed as moronic. I know plenty of people who won't even talk to somebody who voted for Brexit. I just don't understand this at all, because I think the sentiments of people who no longer want to be part of the EU are perfectly understandable.

VI: So British pro-Brexit supporters are dismissed as ignorant and were sold a false reality by the likes of Nigel Farage who is claimed to have been financed by the Russians?

Dennis Patterson: Exactly right. The view is that people are manipulated, that people are manipulated by the press, by the culture generally, and they're just falling into these camps and they're unreflective. I don't share that view.

Anyway, at the end of the day, populism is a mixed bag. I think on trade economics, populism is weakest. I do think populists have legitimate complaints about culture, and they certainly have legitimate complaints about expertise. Scientific knowledge is not going to be replaced by religion, that's just absurd, but that I think is the sentiment that most elites have. I just think it's just not warranted.

VI: Dennis - thanks for this interesting conversation. To sum up, populism is a characteristic of our times and it's been part of American political culture since the late 19th century. Populists in recent years have become more vocal because of the economic impact of globalization and other societal changes that populists believe threaten their core values. Trump’s election can be credited to the support of this populist movement which has gained traction during his administration. The impact of the COVID pandemic has certainly altered the global political and economic landscape and it remains to be seen how populist sentiments react to new realities. 

Dennis Patterson: Yes, populists are not going anywhere. 

Dennis M. Patterson, a Board of Governors Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. Professor Patterson has expertise in commercial law, trade law and legal philosophy. He has won senior research grants from the Fulbright Commission, Humboldt Stiftung, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of numerous books and articles in both commercial law and legal philosophy.