The Origins of Populism

A great essay on the Russian intellectual parents of American academics:

Populism fed on guilt, and everything about Likharev, down to his very gestures, expressed a consciousness of guilt about something. The populist ideologists insisted that all high culture depends on wealth stolen from the common people and is therefore tainted by a sort of original sin. . . Not knowledge but pity became the moral touchstone.

We all know what kind of a political system came out of these ideas, don’t we?