Peronism is another example. Argentina has the dubious distinction of being the only country that managed to “un-develop” itself after reaching standards of living equivalent to those in developed countries. Prolonged national enthusiasm for Peronism in its many forms is largely to blame for this devolution. President Juan Domingo Perón, who led the country in the 1940s and 50s, and then again in the 70s, was a prodigy of the populism that has become so prominent in Latin America and beyond. He and his imitators stoked nationalism, made promises that were impossible to keep, exploited wedge issues along racial, ethnic, or religious lines, and distributed resources in the name of the poor in ways that in the long run made everyone poorer.

Of course, politicians everywhere say what people want to hear. But populists take this much further. Consider, for example, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, a great 21st-century exponent of extreme populism. Before his death in 2013, he doggedly pursued policies known to have failed in Venezuela and elsewhere: fixing prices of goods and services at levels below their costs of production; wresting private companies from their owners and giving them to politically appointed operatives; allowing government spending and indebtedness to skyrocket; promoting consumer spending through unsustainable handouts, subsidies, and credits; discouraging investment; stimulating imports rather than exports; and imposing strict foreign-exchange controls.

The result: The country with the largest oil reserves on the planet is now importing gasoline. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation rate and critical shortages of food, medicine, spare parts, and much else. A nation that used to have the highest income per capita in Latin America is now in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. What used to be one of the longest-running democracies in the region is now a failed state run by a government that relies on the military to indulge in all kinds of authoritarian abuses. And yet, Chávez’s ideas and policies continue to attract admirers in Venezuela and abroad.

Ideological necrophilia can be found in all schools of thought: on the right and the left, among environmentalists, secessionists, and nationalists, faith-based politicians and atheists, defenders of the free market, champions of big government, or supporters of economic austerity.

In the United States, Donald Trump has proposed deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants en masse, building a wall along the Mexican-American border, and enacting a moratorium on all Muslims wishing to visit or immigrate to the U.S. His plans echo Europe’s tragic history of singling out “dangerous” social groups for discrimination and expulsion from their homes. For years, the United States has constructed walls and fences to keep immigrants from crossing the border, without solving the problem of illegal immigration. The assumption that, in the age of globalization, a larger, longer, higher wall will deter migrants is deeply flawed as well. Not only would these ideas fail to deliver their promised results, but they are also close to impossible to implement. Yet it is now obvious that this is irrelevant. In fact, these bad ideas are precisely the reason Trump’s followers are drawn to him.