“Your insinuation that Levin is misinformed about his revolutionary history is misplaced. “
Try selling that to someone who hasn’t listened to Levin as much as I have. I know perfectly well what Levin focuses on and it’s the prominent Founders and the various writers and philosophers who influenced them.
What makes Levin a fool is his denunciation of populism, which played a huge role in the Revolution. The thousands of Colonials who gathered at Liberty Trees around the Colonies in the 1760s were populists. The merchants and farmers who boycotted British trade were populists. Tea Party rebels, Boston Massacre protestors, Minute Men were populists. The Militia and the Continental Line were populists. The last thing in the world that they were were obedient subjects deferring to their betters. There would have been no Revolution without them. Only an ignoramus dismisses the role of what the Colonials called “The Body of the People” in the Revolution.
Only an ignoramus dismisses the role of [populists] Who is dismissing the role of the people in the American revolution? Now if you choose to put the label "populism" on that movement of approximately 1/3 of the colonials you may do so but semantic games are not the salvation represented by the "populism" of the 21st century.
The revolutionary spirit of 1776 evolved into a written constitution in 1787 with a Bill of Rights. It understood the limits of majority rule. Much of the populism of today (think Bernie Sanders his followers and those who co-opt his politics) disregards elements of the Constitution and does not understand that it is the Constitution which protects us from the tyranny of the majority. At the same time it is the Constitution which protects us from the tyranny of elites. One tyranny is as deadly as the other and the protection from both is in the document. The prophylactic against tyranny is not in the fashioning of a new glossary for our time, of playing with words because using the term "populism" is no more effective in protecting liberty then is failing to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism" for the same purpose.
It the Constitution which will save us!
We have just been served up a special soufflé of populism delivered by one of America's most effective demagogues, Elizabeth Warren.
How did you like it?
Like the problem with socialism populism ceases to work when you run out of other people's money and the entire speech by Elizabeth Warren can be seen as a search for more of other people's money. Our problem is that she is nowhere close to exhausting the sources of other people's money in America, there is so much more good she can do. The problem, as well, is that a lot of people are buying what she is selling. She is inciting a mob which she defines as much more than 90% of the populace against a minority which she describes as being 1/10 of one percent. If Elizabeth Warren had been nominated instead of Hillary Clinton, we would be in full retreat mode.
Elizabeth Warren's populism is not different in kind from Bernie Sanders socialism or Hillary Clinton's opportunism; it matters not what label you put on it, it matters whether there is a standard against which it can be held accountable, a standard which forces a halt to the insatiable search for other people's money.
Warren, Sanders, Clinton all have varying emphasis but they are at the end of the day all free ranging confiscators of other people's property, free ranging because the limits on their ability to confiscate exist only at the place where they exhaust popular support. So long as they have the mob, they have the power. If you want to know where the limits of mob tyranny are, examine the history of Venezuela.
Populism is a path toward tyranny of the majority. Constitutionalism is our only salvation. Our Framers who seem to be out-of-favor even in this forum with neo-populists certainly knew that, the French Revolution confirmed that, we forget it at our peril.