The previous rule was designed to unclog the courts from endless litigation over legislative interpretations that was making life difficult for business. The unintended consequence of the shift in 1984 was to increase interventions but not from Congress or judges but from agencies, which blew up in size and authority over the course of 40 years. This was ripe for a hard challenge, and the Supreme Court certainly stepped up.

The new rule (from Loper Bright v. Secretary of Commerce) is that agencies cannot interpret laws as they wish but rather are restrained by the words of legislation from the people’s representatives.

The implications are profound. Above all else, it means transferring responsibility back to the people and their representatives. It is part of a new form of populism that has come about in response to obvious calamities.

Think back to four years ago when agency deference was riding high, imposing an astonishing number of instant laws about medical matters, social distancing, business closures, masking, and even mail-in voting. It was all pushed through by agency authority having nothing to do with Congressional mandate.

Americans suddenly found themselves ruled by a system of government they did not know they had. Consider the declaration that essential workers could work but nonessential workers would need to stay home. Was that a law? Not really. It was more like an edict. No one knew who would enforce it or what the penalties were for noncompliance.

We know now that the declaration came from the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, a division within the Department of Homeland Security created in 2018. Its declaration was even more powerful and decisive over national life than the Department of Labor, which was never even consulted.

Again, this was not law and not legislation. It was edict and no one really knew how it came to be that this agency, about which no one knew anything, possessed this kind of power. The offending legal basis was precisely this Chevron deference, which tempted every agency just to go rogue and test out its powers whenever it wanted to.

In those months and years, we came to be ruled by credentialed experts, not all and not even most but those experts who had close access to powerful agencies. They overrode scientific consensus, popular will, and even settled law. It all happened so suddenly. The goal of crushing the virus through force was never plausible and neither was the notion that we could vaccinate our way out of a fast-moving respiratory infection.

For those still suffering from those days, and that includes nearly everyone, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper (reversing Chevron) should provide some sense of relief. It will take time for the court decision to have a practical impact but the reality is that if the new rule had been in force four years ago, the nation would have been spared the pain of lockdowns and closures, and probably even the forced vaccination campaign.

The new rule is also consistent with a new governing ethos that is sweeping the world today, against arbitrary rule by powerful elites and toward more democratic accountability. That one idea is now unsettling political systems in the United States, UK, and EU, and beyond. It provides no light to describe this movement as “far-right,” as the New York Times says daily. It is something different.

We might call the ethos the new populism. It is neither left nor right, but it borrows themes from both in the past. From the so-called “right,” it derives the confidence that people in their own lives and communities have a better capacity for wise decision-making than trusting the authorities at the top. From the old left, the new populism takes the demand for free speech, fundamental rights, and deep suspicion of corporate and government power.

The theme of being skeptical of empowered and entrenched elites is the salient point. This applies across the board. It is not only about politics. It hits media, medicine, courts, academia, and every other high-end sector. And this is in every country.

This really does amount to a paradigmatic shift. It seems not temporary but substantial and likely lasting. What happened over four years unleashed this mass wave of incredulity that had been building for decades before. The final straw was the coercive pandemic response in which governments in the world issued stay-at-home orders, closed small businesses, restricted travel, forced masks on the population, and then mandated shots of an experimental technology.

All of this was generally celebrated by most large media outlets, endorsed by academia, and cheered by all respectable opinion. But this was not actually “common-sense public health.” It was radical and far-reaching, and there never was a clear statement of the end goal. Many jurisdictions locked us down until vaccination became available, and then made an effort to inoculate most everyone in the population.

That’s a big plan and it all turned on one key assumption, namely that the shot would work to end the pandemic. It did not work particularly well. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Nor did the experts anticipate the levels of injury that would result from repeated uses of the same shot, even though the existing literature warned against that exact strategy.

Here’s the problem with blaming all experts for this fiasco. Many people with high credentials were warning against this approach the entire time. They were shouted down and censored. Many others believed that this was the wrong approach but they were prevented for career reasons from telling the truth.

This is the reason why the new populism is strongly committed to free speech. Without the opportunity to discuss and consider the evidence, we miss important truths and find ourselves blindly following the opinions of the most powerful.

To be sure, the word populism has something of a sordid history in the 20th century, mostly due to the political upheavals in the interwar period that profoundly affected industrialized economies. FDR spoke like a populist but so did emergent leaders in fascist Europe. This form of populism was very different from that in our own time. It rallied around the ability of experts to plan the economy and manage the culture.

For example, FDR’s first inaugural address struck populist notes by denouncing “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” and “the unscrupulous money changers” who “stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” In practice, he drew on credentialed expertise and agency power to remake many features of the U.S. economy, imposing price controls, industrial subsidies, tight rules on all commercial transactions, all with the goal of lifting prices under the mistaken belief that low prices were causing the depression.

The grand theory that drove the response to the Great Depression was rooted in the emergent thoughts of John Maynard Keynes, who flipped many features of classical economics on their head. In essence, his theory was that government itself should be empowered to manage the whole through careful manipulation of aggregate supply and demand, a dream that was never realizable or desirable.

In many ways, the New Deal ended up not as a populist effort but one that empowered an elite class of social and economic managers. The pattern grew worse and worse through the decades. The Chevron decision of 1984 codified it into law. But we saw the same patterns in the UK and in European countries. The movements were called populist but they all drew on scientistic schemes for improved economic and social management by imposition from the top.

We’ve been told to “trust the science” for the better part of a century. The push back against that paradigm had to wait until the apotheosis of central planning with the pandemic lockdowns, which were followed very quickly by efforts to use government power to control the climate. Together with that, and all over the world, the mass migration crisis unfolded as governments shifted from their core duties to aspirations of virus and climate control.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift, a new populism that rejects the idea that a powerful elite knows what is better for societies than the people themselves. In this view, the new populism is not a return to the interwar variety but something much earlier.

What comes to mind in the American context is the movement by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. He stood against the National Bank, fought for the rights of the states against the federal government (except on the tariff), and generally sided with the people over elites. In other words, he embraced the original idea of democracy. If you want to understand what’s happening in the world today in light of American history, that’s a great place to begin.

(1) Good vs. evil

Not long ago, it was common for conservatives to see the Marxist left as foolishly mistaken — a collection of young and inexperienced troublemakers who would eventually “snap out” of their common delusions once forced to confront reality.

Now people understand that the left’s real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not “healthy.”  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not “justice.”  Imposing a “woke” State religion over personal conscience is not “moral.”  Aiding and abetting child sex–trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not “compassionate.”  Stealing property is not “equitable.”  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today’s leftism is evil.

(2) Parties vs. uniparty

There has been a seismic shift in the way Republican voters see political parties.  After Obama forced government-controlled health care on America, the Tea Party movement began a desperate fight against socialism’s advances.  From the energy of that movement, Republicans eventually took back the House and Senate.  Despite those triumphs, Paul Ryan rubber-stamped Obama’s budgets, while refusing to build Trump’s border wall.  McConnell’s Senate Republicans, who had run on repealing Obamacare, cemented socialized medicine with McCain’s decisive betrayal.

Grassroots voters finally rejected Establishment Republicans and catapulted outsider Donald Trump into office.  In response, Republicans quietly assisted Democrats in their attempt to remove Trump through the Russia hoax.  In the space of a decade, most Republican officeholders were outed as RINOs, before voters properly concluded that they were actually part of a single D.C. Uniparty all along.

(3) Science vs. political manipulation

The only good thing to come out of the government’s COVID lockdowns, forced medical experimentation, and masking theater was its inadvertent creation of a Eureka! moment for tens of millions of Americans who realized that “science” has become irredeemably politicized.  When health authorities opted for experimental injections over known medical treatments, they sacrificed lives to push an agenda.  When hospitals separated families and forced vulnerable patients onto ventilators, they acted inhumanely.  When politicians and corporations censored public dissent, destroyed livelihoods, hobbled childhood development, and terrified the public with known lies, they not only proved that objective science is dead, but also committed crimes against humanity.

(4) Self-determination vs. global government

Just as “RINO” and “Uniparty” have entered our lexicon as profanities, so too has “globalism.”  Without respect for the Constitution’s express prohibitions or the American public’s wishes, Deep State bureaucrats and politicians continue to surrender national sovereignty to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and their globalist brethren.  Americans have lost their self-determination and are now ruled by an alliance of spy agencies, central banks, multinational corporations, and transnational interest groups posing as charities.  In order to thwart a hegemonic global aristocracy, citizens must defend their national interests.

(5) Elections vs. selections

Every presidential election this century has been tainted by allegations of fraud.  Instead of remedying this public perception, election officials and courts have made things worse.  Voting has turned into a months-long affair that begins before candidates have even debated and often extends many weeks past Election “Day.”  Electronic voting machines remain vulnerable to hacks.  Mail-in balloting devoid of fundamental security, identity checks, or signature verification has transformed contests into ballot-stuffing fraud-fests orchestrated by paid political operatives.  Secretaries of state refrain from enforcing election law; attorneys general refrain from prosecuting crimes; courts rewrite statutory law to tilt elections.  Battleground states routinely suffer from inexplicable counting problems that delay the timely reporting of results.  Vote-counting lacks transparency and reproducibility.  When lawyers attempt to challenge results, their professional licenses are often threatened.  Americans overwhelmingly believe that election cheating is pervasive.

(6) Free speech vs. propaganda

Western governments are so terrified of losing control over their citizens that they attack freedom of speech as a threat to their continued monopolies over information.  Words and ideas are now labeled as “hateful” whenever they contradict official State dogma.  Debate and argument are censored as “misinformation” so as to stifle dissent.  Corporations and bureaucrats have anointed themselves as high priests for assessing “truth” or “disinformation.”  Their anti-Enlightenment efforts to smother freethinking have exposed the political Establishment as mere propagandists and bullies.

(7) Money vs. control

More and more people realize that free markets cannot exist alongside central banks that engage in rank manipulation of the economy.  Fiat currencies unbacked by precious metals are dying.  While private investment bankers and multinational corporations have benefited generously, central bank policies have destroyed ordinary Americans’ economic security.  Before the privately run Federal Reserve came into existence, Americans’ intergenerational social mobility was the highest in the world.  A century after its creation, income inequality has never been higher.  Now, in order to avert a looming economic Armageddon caused by a century of profligate spending, private banks and coercive governments seek to force everyone into a surveillance system based on central bank digital currencies.  Until we free our money from government control, totalitarian governments will use money to enslave the people.

(8) Impartial justice vs. targeted persecution

There is no faster way to destroy trust in a nation’s institutions than to use the criminal justice system as a machine for targeting political enemies.  Yet that is exactly what the FBI, the Department of (in)Justice, and their unethical allies donning black robes, have done.  In any country suffering from corruption, a telltale sign is when agency heads choose to rebuke ordinary citizens for no longer having faith in the system.  A healthy system, in contrast, never fears public challenge.  The people, upon whose consent government legitimacy rests, have a duty to call out corruption.  Consider it an admission of guilt, then, when FBI director Wray or Attorney General Garland condemns Americans for correctly noticing their two-tiered application of “justice.”

(9) Republic vs. empire

As Mark Twain succinctly noted, “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.”  It did not work for the Romans, and it has not worked for American citizens since the end of WWII.  The U.S. Constitution severely limits the powers of the federal government while maximizing the powers of the states and the people.  Congress alone has the power to declare war.  The vast administrative bureaucracy has been divined from thin air.  The states have no obligation to obey the federal government when it acts unconstitutionally.  D.C. has transformed its limited powers into a global juggernaut beyond accountability.  In the process, Americans’ inherent rights and liberties have been abandoned.

(10) Civil war vs. revolution for independence

As Americans have come to terms with these revelations, they have also realized something else: the federal government spends an awful lot of time and resources dividing Americans against one another.  Should ordinary citizens ever seek to reclaim their liberties, that future conflict will resemble not America’s regional Civil War, but rather the Revolutionary War’s struggle against government tyranny.

We are living through a combustible era in which common Establishment illusions shatter daily.  Paradigm shifts in the way people see their world advance in short years, rather than over decades or centuries.  Is this revolution of the mind uncomfortable?  Absolutely.  It is also the quintessential feature of every great awakening.