Russell Arben Fox, in a call for "left conservatism", skillfully phrases its call for government assistance to the right people:

... the wealth that really matters is one that can be generated and held by the productive arts of a community of working people.

Those communities are mostly gone now. If the ideals behind them are to be realized again, it certain won't be the government or a new progressive program which will recreate them--that will happen family by family, community by community, away from the rush to modern media and markets. But families and communities are no longer, if they ever were in our theoretically classless and mobile society, locked in one place, able to allow their dynamism who work them deeper into the land they occupy. To provide some security for those few who do try to lock themselves down for the sake of the future and more permanent things, some assistance will be needed.

The ends thus defined will serve to define "populism" for our purposes.

Note that this populism is explicitly aligned against "creative destruction", which it portrays as the conversion of man to mere homo economicus:

"Oh, the places you'll go," crooned Dr. Seuss, and Americans went and went and went until we became a rootless itinerant people – which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of workers required by an economy built on creative destruction. Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-entitlement economy with its instantly mobile and fetter-free worker and 100 percent out-of-the-home servitude.
There is a tremendous cost to the health of the republic, to the common good, that comes with the creative yet destructive power of unlimited economic and political progressivism.

The idea of community-centered life is certainly appealing, and the case that we should attempt to make such a life possible for those who choose it seems compelling. This is the stated aim of modern populism: not enforced agrarian living for all, but a palatable option for those who choose to exit the rat race.

But there is one salient feature about converting people to mobile, insecure economic engines: it works. And governments at all levels now depend on that new plateau of productivity to pay for an increasingly comprehensive buffet of services. The more Messrs. Fox and Stegall and their cohorts manage to extract government financial assistance for those who live differently, the more that same government must demand maximum productivity from all its citizens. This is the paradox which populist leaders have not faced: that their prescriptions, which entail increased governmental outlays, will be self-defeating unless the growth of government dependency is reversed.

It is worth mentioning that this same argument is sufficient to justify the "fusionism" between social conservatives and small-government libertarians -- big government is intrinsically inimical to any way of living that is not maximally productive in measured GDP terms.

President Gerald Ford said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." This is in fact understated: a government big enough to support your preferred lifestyle is big enough to prefer that you live so as to support it in style.

[HT: Ross Douthat]