I should add a corollary to this adage:

If you’re going to get in trouble for the right reasons, you should make a point not to get into any more trouble than necessary for the wrong reasons. https://twitter.com/ind_bronson/status/1353428075250380802

Years ago, some writer joked that Republicans had solved their internal divide between populists and elitists thus: the populists would accept elitist policies, while the elitists would learn to shout and bang the table like populists.

Obviously in terms of substance this arrangement gave populists the short end of the stick, but it was pretty effective politically.

E.g., for a guy who was the wealthy scion of one of America’s leading families, George W Bush had a fair amount of demotic appeal...

The way he walked and talked triggered BDS in a lot of progressive journalists and intellectuals, and they duly took the bait by being unable to hide their contempt for Southerners, evangelicals, etc...

So if a Bush (or Palin, to take another example) was hated by people who also happen to hate you, well, that goes a long way toward establishing populist bona fides—especially in our two-party system, which naturally magnifies such zero-sum partisan dynamics...

But again, being hated by the right people for the wrong reasons is no great accomplishment. It’s not hard to do, and it doesn’t represent any substantive victory in terms of the actual interests of ordinary people who voted for you...

Any political agenda organized around the WWC/Sailer Strategy is going to be considered downmarket & un-SWPL by soccer moms in the suburbs, so part of what I’m saying is, Don’t go /out of your way/ to offend them, beyond the inherent “offensiveness” of your pro-prole platform...

But my more important point here is that abjuring boorish populist affectations is a way to keep populism honest

That’s 1 reason I admire Enoch Powell. An erudite classics professor wouldn’t make a good pseudo-populist; he earned the respect of his WWC constituents the hard way.

There’s always going to be a chunk of the conservative/GOP base that will be satisfied with Triggering Tha Libs, even if it’s entirely superficial.

Likewise, some large segment of the Dem base will cheer corporate monopolies as long as they fly a rainbow flag to Own Tha Cons...

This is partly the nature of our 2-party system and partly just human nature in general. We don’t want the identity politics engendered by the system to displace the identity politics that actually matters...

I think Trumpism represented a genuine improvement over previous GOP/Conservatism Inc orthodoxy in important respects. That’s why I voted for him twice. Thrice, really.

But it’s also true that some of his appeal was the same old trigger-the-lib-eggheads-with-tackiness schtick.

That may still work politically, but the hour is late for the old nation, and we can’t afford that kind of cheap grace.

So that’s my corollary: anyone representing the dissident/populist right needs to get in trouble for the right reasons...and /only/ for the right reasons!