One of the clearest recent analyses of political populism comes from the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s dual-process psychology, Heath argues that populism is best understood not as an ideology but as a political strategy that privileges intuitive (“System 1”) cognition over analytical (“System 2”) cognition. Populists offer voters relief from the relentless cognitive burdens modern life imposes: relief from analytical reasoning, from cognitive override, from the tests of polite speech. Forget the fancy theories. Trust your gut. Punish the wrongdoers. Common sense is enough. It’s worth a read.
Heath’s account is right about the anti-cognitive elitism of the populist strategy, but the category “cognitive elite” is not as homogeneous as his framing suggests. Some cognitive elites are genuine analytical specialists whose views diverge from common sense because they did the work—the criminologist who has read the recidivism data, the economist who can trace tariff incidence. But a great deal of what now functions as the cognitive elite refers to a different population: the one that generated the populist mirror now running against it.
The most candid theorists of populism are the people who actually wrote books defending it as a strategy. They were not Trumpists or Bolsonaristas; they were post-Gramscians: Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and their heirs in the academy. They opposed understanding populism as a vulgar deviation from politics because populism was the essence of politics. The antagonistic construction of a “people” against an “elite,” with its popular identification around shared grievances, they argued, was the only way emancipatory politics could work.
The post-Gramscians built an entire intellectual edifice on the populist insight. Identity was something that could be articulated and coalitions could be assembled across different dimensions such as postcolonial critique, gender studies, racial politics, queer theory, etc. Each had a distinct front, producing its own “people” against its own “elite.” This was postmodern populism performed by people with doctorates.
The strategy was supposed to empower the disenfranchised, but it required enormous cognitive infrastructure to operate: conferences, books, jargon, deconstructive rituals, elaborate theoretical scaffolding. The articulators of “the people” were unmistakably a cognitive elite. They produced exactly the cognitive burdens Heath describes, while claiming to speak for those most burdened by cognition.
One of the contradictions of identity populism was that it tried to overcome rationality with its own kind of rationalism. Much of its agenda relied on deconstructive moves designed to demand a rational justification for the inherited practices of modern life. What is the justification for monogamy, for the family, for Christmas, for laying flowers on a grave? This was a way to expose deeper structures of power, such as capitalism, patriarchy, or colonial legacies. It was also Rousseauian to the core. Hayek spent a career warning against this exact temptation, what he called constructivist rationalism: the assumption that any institution we cannot rebuild from first principles must be illegitimate.
Hayek’s point, and Chesterton’s before him, was that the burden of proof is misplaced. Most enduring institutions are emergent. We cannot justify them from first principles because they were never designed from first principles. Their justification is the civilization they produce. To demand otherwise is to throw the acid of deconstructive rationalism on every inherited practice.
Once that acid is in circulation, you cannot put it back. The deconstructive move identity populism used against tradition, family, religion, and nation became a tool anyone could pick up. What Heath now calls the anti-cognitive populism found in Western right-wing politics is in important respects the mirror of identity populism. It uses the same political grammar: an articulated “people” set against a corrupt “elite,” a chain of equivalences across disparate grievances (immigration, trade, urban arrogance, expert hubris), and a contempt for the procedural restraints that had constrained earlier mass politics.
So we have two populisms. One ascended through universities and cultural institutions, claiming the cognitive high ground while using its tools to dissolve inherited norms. The other rose through social media and electoral politics, claiming the moral high ground of common sense while using its tools to dissolve institutional procedures. Each presents itself as the antidote to the other. Each is partly constituted by what it denounces.
The deeper unity is older than either movement. Both inherit a picture of politics in which antagonism is not a problem to be managed but the substance of political life itself. Mouffe theorized this explicitly, drawing on Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction. The new right arrives at the same place from a different door, often reading some of the same authors. The classical liberal tradition spent three centuries trying to neutralize political antagonism by building procedural, constitutional, and market layers designed to convert combat into negotiation, vendetta into law, competition into cooperation, and victory into pluralism. Both populisms experience those neutralizations as betrayals. For either of them, liberalism’s patient, impersonal machinery is what stands between the people and justice.
In past newsletters, I’ve written about Paul Rubin’s work on folk economics, where he argues that the human mind is wired with zero-sum default narratives. Our intuitions about exchange, wealth, and trade were calibrated for small-band life, where one person’s gain typically came at another’s expense. The discovery that voluntary exchange can be positive-sum is genuinely counterintuitive. It is one of the great achievements of modern thought, and it remains, for most people most of the time, hard to feel as obvious.
The Smithian and Hayekian traditions saw civilization as the slow, fragile project of converting zero-sum encounters into positive-sum exchange. The market, the rule of law, and the culture of human dignity are the works of art from that civilizational project. Populism rediscovers the older, more visceral picture in which someone must be winning at someone else’s expense. Both populisms rely on anti-economic thinking.
Despite their stylistic opposition, both populisms slide so easily into similar policy commitments: protectionism, expanded state power against designated villains, personalism, regulatory and price-control instincts aimed at punishing exploitation. They share a worldview in which exploitation is the default and procedure is its mask. The right response, in such a world, is always to identify the villain and punish them. Personalism is the political form of zero-sum thinking. If the world is constitutive struggle, what you need is not rules, but a champion.
This is why economic thinking is a civic necessity. Economists do not have all the answers. But economic thinking, properly taught, is the most accessible discipline we have for inhabiting positive-sum reality. It is the slow training of an intuition Smith and Hayek spent their lives trying to articulate: that strangers can cooperate without coercion, that institutions can know more than any of their members, that property rights protect individual agency, and that the wealth of nations is something we make together rather than something we win from each other.
The Hayekian discernment Heath gestures toward is the willingness to suspect both unaided intuition and rationalist hubris. That is hard work. It cannot be acquired by following common sense, and it cannot be acquired by deconstruction. It has to be cultivated through the slow, unglamorous work of education.
This is the wager FEE has been making for eighty years, and it is the wager I think a free society has no choice but to keep making. Both populisms will keep producing each other so long as the zero-sum picture of human life goes unchallenged. The task is to teach a generation, and then another, to feel positive-sum exchange as obvious. Educators should recover the Hayekian humility about emergent institutions without collapsing into either constructivist hubris or anti-cognitive grievance.
Education is what comes after populism.
