Speaker Pelosi addressed the Oxford Union at Oxford University in England ten days ago on the motion “This house believes populism is a threat to democracy.” Her comments were the clearest expression anyone could have asked for as to why almost all the current Western governments that have been in office for more than a few years have failed and are just somnambulating toward the political gallows of the next election. 

Mrs. Pelosi’s argument consisted of the assertion that populists are idiots responding to lies that have been told by demagogues who aspire to become dictators. They are just “ethno-nationalists” and if sufficiently educated and conscient to express their concerns at all, they are merely about the economy. Her opponent in the debate, Winston Marshall, responded that the elite class, of which Mrs. Pelosi is such a prominent member, has aroused and provoked the population by its constant acidulous derision of tens of millions of their fellow citizens as rednecks, corn-cobbers, deplorables, Nazis, xenophobes, and lesser racists.

Mr. Marshall rightly made the point that the elites who have governed us have opened up the opportunities for President Trump and Marine LePen and Prime Minister Meloni in Italy and President Milei in Argentina by presiding over a long sequence of ghastly blunders and acts of inexcusable negligence, from creating the conditions for the global financial crash of 2008 and greedily ignoring the accumulating warnings of what was coming to opening up borders to indiscriminate influxes of masses of people including large numbers of undesirables, to smearing opponents: British Brexit voters as witless isolationists, protesting Canadian truckers as sexually maladjusted fascists; generally rightly discontented European farmers as extremists, all the while imposing outrageous and intolerable net zero and environment-social justice-governance policies with no thought to the consequences. 

Mr. Marshall emphasizes some particularly conspicuous hypocrisies in the elite class: they berate the populists while accepting astonishing amounts of money from large corporations that lobby heavily, including the big pharmaceutical and technological companies and defense contractors.

They’re still trying to sell January 6, 2021, as an attempted insurrection even as they continue to extinguish recollections of the “Summer of Love” of 2020 in which the “peaceful protesters” inflicted billions of dollars of damage and killed scores and injured hundreds of people across America. They impute an anti-democratic ethos to the populists while silencing their critics with unconstitutional hate laws and spurious prosecutions and encouraging their big tech allies to restrain free speech on social media as incitement of hatred or disinformation. 

In America they locked arms to denounce Mr. Trump for refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election as legitimate, despite the unsolicited expedition of millions ballots according to partially obsolete voters lists, raising concerns about ballot harvesting and the inability to verify the validity of the votes; all this in an election where 50,000 switched votes in Pennsylvania and two other states would have produced a different winner.   

The corresponding phenomenon in Europe is the European Union administration at Brussels forcing countries to hold a second referendum when the first did not produce the result desired. The inevitable consequence of this authoritarian hypocrisy is to drive the population into the arms of the populists. 

The elections for the European Parliament next month, according to all polls, will generate a tremendous rise in the votes for opposition parties provoked by the failure of elites to secure the borders, reduce immigration, curtail Islamist extremism, reduce crime rates, moderate their extreme and aggressive ecological policies, and by the general current tendency to overtax and misgovern.

Mrs. Pelosi was naturally unable to give a serious explanation for the steady rise in Mr. Trump’s polling numbers; it is particularly noteworthy that if ethno-nationalism is at the root of populist support, it is difficult to explain Mr. Trump’s very substantial rise in African-American and Hispanic American voting patterns. 

Mr. Marshall concluded his remarks at Oxford with the comment that the populist age could easily be brought to a close if instead of deriding and dismissing that immense section of the electorate, the elites rediscovered the virtues and the pleasures of trying to govern with some respect for President Nixon’s famous silent majority that obey the law, pay their taxes, love their country, and do their best to get on. The perverse refusal of the elites to do anything that the populists want: strengthen the border, reduce immigration, lower crime, and apply their penchant for heavy-handed measures to Islamist extremists, is the reason for populist strength. 

In the Oxford debate, Mrs. Pelosi continually interrupted Mr. Marshall, and mouthed the question “Who are you?” She made, deservedly, a poor impression on her learned Oxford audience and made no attempt to explain how our standards of education and of media professionalism have deteriorated, why we are attempting to promote radical sex changes among children without consulting their parents, why we have done nothing about the bloated inefficiency of our universities and the cult of national self-hate that they largely propagate, or why they seek national self-impoverishment through a net zero emissions policy that would oppress Western society, enrich its enemies, and achieve nothing for the world’s climate security. 

These are only a few of the more egregious hypocrisies of the elite governing left, now galloping toward decisive electoral rejection. The former speaker returned inexplicably unenlightened about the catastrophically failed political option that she personifies and that she crossed the ocean to defend, with conspicuous lack of success.