Michael Strain explores the prospects for President-elect Donald Trump’s brand of politics.

To me, it did feel like populism was on its way out in 2018. There was growing recognition that the typical working household’s economic outcomes were improving rapidly. America was less angry, and one could imagine facing the future together with more confidence.

But just as America was regaining a step, the COVID-19 pandemic struck in the early months of 2020. As with previous pandemics, political and social disruption followed, and the widespread perception of catastrophic elite failure breathed new life into populism.

Such perceptions were not always incorrect. Restrictions on economic activity chafe in a country so committed to individual liberty, especially when public-health officials seemed at times to make up guidance – like the six-foot rule – on the fly. Even after vaccines and therapeutics had been widely deployed, parents had to deal with ridiculous mandatory quarantine periods for routine childhood illnesses. Tragically, rather than reopening schools in the fall of 2020, elite opinion kept children out of classrooms for far too long; many incurred educational losses from which they will never recover.

For those of us who are troubled by populism, the upside of this recent history is that it confirms the temporary nature of the phenomenon. If US workers can experience, say, four or five years of solid real wage growth, populist sentiment should wane again, like it did before the pandemic.

To be clear, my expectation is not that Trumpian populism will be extinguished, just that it will become less potent and politically consequential. …

… The lesson for the Democrats is that economic management matters. Declining real wage growth in the half decade following the 2008 financial crisis ushered in this populist chapter of US history, and the rapid price inflation (which eroded recent nominal wage gains) of the past four years put Trump back in the White House. …

… There is also a crucial lesson for Republicans. Voters may be in the mood for a president who will experiment with trade wars and draconian immigration measures, but that could change faster than many think.