Populism gets a bad name but it's not a bad thing unless it is taken to the extreme (which can be said about pretty much anything).
It also has a lot of inherent value. So often, career politicians are just serving the elite and avoiding issues that are important to the working and middle class, and even politicians on opposite sides will strike an unofficial deal where these topics are not brought up because they're too tangly or divisive.
A populist politician can bring these kinds of issues to the table and force the hand of these politicians to actually acknowledge and take a stance on them.
People also erroneously think populism is confined to the right wing. Not so. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are populists.
Both Trump and Sanders brought issues to the table that NONE of the career politicians they ran against wanted to take a stance on.
If populism has any coherent definition, it is this: the desire for simple answers to complex problems and the conviction that expertise has no value.
So, yeah. It’s not a good thing. See the awesome state of Brexit for an example of what happens when people actually try to apply populist “methods” to actual problems.
“Populist method” is actually an oxymoron. Populism has no method. It is not able to actually design and implement any policy to actually
help any situation.
It is just blind, dumb impulse.
You say Trump and Sanders brought issues to the table that no one has talked about... really? We haven’t been talking about immigration for decades? And healthcare? And the economic effects of globalism?
Talking about these things is easy. Actually figuring out something effective to
do is where it gets tricky.
And yeah, politicians are often in bed with special interests, but here’s the dirty secret: the population is is often tacitly aboard.
You see this in the current healthcare debate. The populist policies poll great... except when people find out that their current coverage might actually be affected in some way. Same with economic globalization. Everybody wants good American jobs; no one wants to give up cheap shit from other countries.
But hey, you sure can get a crowd riled up. Populism is great for that.
What could possibly go wrong?