Well, possibly. But who, in fact, are the people? Are they the urban latte sipping elites whose top priority appears to be banning anything and everything which offends their delicate, Guardian driven sensibilities? Or are they troglodytes from Far North Queensland, demanding a ban on immigrants whom they have never encountered or had to live with because some idiot has asserted with no evidence whatsoever that their culture is under threat? Or are they the middle citizens, the quiet ones who are generally too busy being the engine of the whole damn country to have or understand political opinions, and who will generally vote based on whatever their mass media of choice tells them is the right way to vote?
This is the biggest issue, really. The people, en masse, are, in fact, critically stupid. Not because of average IQ or educational level - these are generally quite high - but because of the necessarily inchoate nature of a polity deliberately made up of disparate and competing interest groups.
And that's the biggest problem with populism by far. A canny populist - one who knows what they're doing - will generally pick the biggest and/or most coherent interest group and tell them exactly what they want to hear. It's telling that in the Anglophone world, this group tends to be the xenophobic reactionary middle. But that's not the point - the point is, that they'll pick that one. A crap or incompetent populist will try to please everyone, resulting in the ridiculous situation where they'll be applying ten year gaol sentences to strawberry fiddlers one day, bringing children off Nauru the next, and then announcing vague plans to cut immigration while increasing immigration (WTAF) the day after that. The biggest single problem with populism is that it's a signal failure of leadership.
Most people - the vast majority of people, I'd be willing to hazard - are politically indifferent or politically moderate. Right up until the moment you ask them to state their position, at which point they vote Brexit not expecting it to pass, vote Trump in protest against the political establishment in the full knowledge that he's a fucking moron who won't fix anything, engage in flame wars about vaccines, corporate tax, international trade, or any other of the myriad issues which they know exactly nothing about, and generally just act like crazy people until the rush passes momentarily and they go back to work in the system which, once they've finished mindlessly excoriating it, they rely on for their livelihoods and well-being.
So given the incoherent and frankly mindless nature of populist discourse, all a populist leader can actually do, in terms of concrete action, is address how people feel about an issue. Actually fixing it is an impossibility. Because the truth of issues like population, trade, or foreign affairs - the stuff people get really het up about - is that solutions are slow, complex, and usually highly counter-intuitive. So a populist solution is almost always good in the short term as it rubs everyone gently on the bum and tells them how smart they are, but disastrous in the long term, as such gains need to be disproportionately paid for in the world system. An excellent example of this is the trade deficit. Given our position in our region, it's both expected and desirable to run a deficit most years, but every single election both sides of the house will campaign on reducing or eliminating it, whilst shamelessly conflating it with the budget deficit. And we swallow it, for reasons I still can't explain.
I understand that these arguments are probably not going to sway anyone in the populist camp, probably because they're reasoned arguments, and pay scant attention to how the people feel. This is because I don't give a fuck how the people 'feel' about the Iran deal, trade tariffs, price elasticity of demand, or any of the other innumerable things we shout about without knowing a damn thing about. We're really not supposed to know these things. What we're supposed to do is demonstrate at least as much sense as the average family dog, and vote in our own self interest rather than for some idiot who's clearly following us around and trying to stoke irrelevant outrage. Populism is to politics as a three year old child trying to live on sour candies is to healthy lifestyles.
If I approached you in an alley in King's Cross and offered to sell you a diamond ring for a hundred bucks, and then spent the next few hours assiduously agreeing with whatever you had to say, however stupid, you wouldn't then decide to put me in charge of your household finances and career prospects. Or if I lobbed up next to you at a bus stop and started blaming all your problems and mine on mythical outsiders and 'the deep state', or a media conspiracy, I doubt you'd ask me to participate in decisions affecting the welfare of your small children. So please, for the love of all that's holy, can we please apply the same principles to selecting our political leaders?
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