Culture critic: Populism Won’t Die Anytime Soon

Just as the “1960s” (as a zeitgeist) didn’t begin until JFK’s 1963 assassination and end until Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, so the “populist epoch” of the 2010s “may be only beginning,” argues Matthew Continetti in Commentary. Popular rage against elites began with the Great Recession, boiled over under President Barack Obama and will likely continue to rage so long as there is “cultural despair” and the sense “that one’s community is under assault by external forces.” Worries about “immigration, terrorism and the perception of an unresponsive political elite” won’t fade any time soon — and, therefore, nor will the populist age.

Trade watch: You Can’t Beat Cheaters

“Contrary to the old adage,” quips Nathanael Blake at The Federalist, “cheaters frequently prosper.” Witness America’s Chinese trading partners, who for years have taken advantage of our free-trade dogmatism — and naiveté. It raises the question: “What sort of fools keep dealing with known, unreformed cheaters,” aware that “there are significant costs to doing business with cheaters and scofflaws”? The Beijing regime is obviously “uninterested in the fair and free exchange of goods and services,” because trade to the Communists is “a form of leverage and a way to procure technology.” Trade with such regimes, then, “is never free, because the government is always in control of business.” Instead of mouthing tired slogans, free-trade advocates would do well to come up with “solutions to the problems created by making deals with such tyrants.”

Science beat: Turf Wars

In the early 1990s, note Marjie Lundstrom and Eli Wolfe at The Atlantic, the Environmental Protection Agency voiced support for using scrap tires to make artificial turf, creating a “dynamic new industry” of “perfectly green, cushioning, year-round fields for schools, parks and sports teams.” Environmentalists touted this as a clever way to deal with the pile-up of scrap tires. The problem: Nowadays, “millions of square feet of synthetic turf” are going to “landfills, rural and urban stockpiles, and ravines, deserts, woods and empty lots.” In fact, turf fields, far from being “recyclable and environmentally friendly,” as manufacturers insist, can lead to rubber fires and, according to some studies, pose potential health risks. Talk about unintended consequences.

Conservative: Twilight of the Experts

Surveying the economic boom, syndicated columnist Adriana Cohen declares: “It’s time to fire the so-called experts.” Nobel-winning, Ivy-credentialed experts like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman “told us that if Donald Trump were to get elected president in 2016, the economy would crash.” Three years later, “more than $17 trillion in value has been added to the global stock market” and America has reaped “the biggest gains, according to a recent analysis by Deutsche Bank.” Plus, “the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 have all seen massive growth in the Trump economy — more than 20 percent this year — with American tech companies leading the pack.” And it’s not just Wall Street that’s happy: Ordinary Americans “are benefitting from historically low unemployment — including minorities and women — and the jobs bonanza, which is lifting millions out of poverty and revitalizing the American dream.” So who should we trust when it comes to the 2020 election, Krugman & Co. — or our “own instincts, pay stubs and 401(k)s?”

From the right: The FBI’s FISA Frauds

In a Dec. 17 ruling, Judge Rosemary Collyer castigated the FBI, which intentionally misled her foreign-intelligence court to get a warrant against a Trump campaign adviser, and ordered that the agency file “a statement of what it has done.” Unfortunately, The American Spectator’s Jed Babbin frets, her decision may be “far from adequate” to prevent future FBI misconduct: For one thing, the court is still “entirely dependent on the sworn statements of the FBI, NSA and CIA in determining whether to issue a warrant.” The good news, though, is that US Attorney John Durham is investigating intelligence officials who abused their powers — a probe that is “the only hope that America will again be able to trust the FBI and the other intelligence agencies.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board