Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts. They also stopped treating tax policy as a delicate matter for economists to discuss behind closed doors and started treating it as a set of punchy talking points for the public. They built organizations with names like Americans for Tax Reform and Americans for Prosperity that campaigned for income tax cuts with demonstrations and postcards from far outside the beltway. Those organizations eventually grew strong enough to threaten that Republicans would face primary challengers if they ever increased income taxes.

The essence of this strategy is to take tax policy out of the hands of experts and entrust it to activists. These campaigns do not usually have much credibility with card-carrying economists. But the Republicans in Congress do not seem to want that credibility.

Those of us who oppose the present tax bill have sometimes swung too far in the other direction. Some of our complaints make it sound as if we think tax policy should be made by an exclusive club of people with Ph.D.s. Secretary Mnuchin did not commission a thorough economic analysis! The Senate did not wait for a Joint Tax Committee analysis of the bill’s effects!

The idea behind complaints like these is that the bill is bad because it is amateurish. The unspoken afterthought: Tax policy should be left to the experts.

If the original populists were right about one thing, it is that tax policy is too important to be left to the experts alone. The process of drafting this tax bill was outrageous, but the outrage is not that the economists were shut out of the process. It is that almost everyone was shut out of the process.

Democracy does not demand that we defer to experts wielding scientific models that almost no one understands. What it demands is that we have a full and open discussion — in which the people, including experts among us, have access to accurate information about the policies under discussion. In a good process, we would all have an opportunity to educate ourselves and one another, and our elected officials would have access to the best wisdom of a well-informed public. Taxation really is the people’s business.

Opponents of this tax bill should embrace that vision of democracy and reclaim their own populist roots. It will not be hard. The tax bill pays for corporate tax cuts by increasing individual income taxes on poor and middle-class Americans in the long run. That tax increase will make people hopping mad. Another wave of economic populism is coming, and people who favor progressive taxation should not retreat to the seminar room.