Populism is having a moment.

Most associate it with Trump’s MAGA movement, but consider Kamala Harris’s constant insistence that she was “raised in a middle-class family” and Gavin Newsom’s “everyman” persona despite the elite upbringing of both.

The elites in politics, entertainment, academia and even corporate America are infected with the desire to be seen as the everyman. Our social media feeds are full of multimillionaires and legacy Ivy League graduates trying to convince us that they are just like us. Our elites are hiding their elitism from us.

This class play-acting is strategic. It allows the elites of our society – the people who have real power to change things for the better – to shirk responsibility and shift blame. And it is time we stop letting them off the hook.

My first memory of politics was my friend’s father saying he just wanted a middle-class person to become president, because he would actually get stuff done. That is the attitude among many working-class and even middle-class Americans: they want someone from their socioeconomic background leading the country.

Deep down, we know this is absurd. A 40-year-old plumber would be a terrible president. What my friend’s father was really saying was that he wanted to be led by a man who understood him and was looking out for him.

What the populace wants is an elite that fights for their interests and shares their values. This might happen through classic American meritocracy – a poor kid from Appalachia goes to Yale and becomes vice president, to come up with a random example – or through existing elites recognising their status and listening to the lower classes.

This is one reason Donald Trump ascended to the presidency. He won because he did not hide his wealth, his power or his influence. He did not pretend to be the average, everyday working American. That is why the commentariat was completely flummoxed: they were under the impression the population wanted an everyman.

The working class was not confused. They knew exactly what they were getting. And that tells us something important: people do not want a president who pretends to pump his own gas. They want elites who use their power for them.

Patrick Deneen, in his book Regime Change, calls for something he names “aristopopulism” – a “muscular” populism that forces an aristocratic elite to serve the public good.

We do not have a true “aristocracy”. We have a meritocratic system where individuals rise and fall based on their God-given gifts and talents. Fine, but the elites – old or new – do not get to just keep their spoils for themselves. The elites need to teach, educate and lift up the populace so that the average standard of living in our communities is higher. The nobility of old had noblesse oblige; our meritocratic system needs a mérite oblige.

On the other side, the people need to be okay with elites existing. We need to come to grips with the fact that there is unimaginable wealth out there that most of us will never possess. There is a trillionaire in the world right now with an obscene amount of wealth and influence, and we have to be okay with that – as long as we are forceful in our insistence that he use that private good for the sake of the common good.

Without this mutual understanding, the elites coerce the populace for their private gain, and the populace tears down the elites and leaves a power vacuum where social decay rushes in.

Aristopopulism cannot survive on political willpower alone. A stable class structure – elites serving commoners, commoners holding elites accountable – requires a shared moral framework underneath it. Both sides have to agree on what the good is and who they owe it to.

This kind of agreement can only be brokered by the Church. The Church has the responsibility to broker the peace between the elites and the commoners. When it has failed to do this, we have paid a brutal price. During the French Revolution, the bishops came from elite families and sided with the ancien régime; the parish priests came from the commoners and sided with the people. Because the Church was divided, we were therefore conquered.

The Church needs to recognise when elites are using the populace as pawns, and when populist anger is being weaponised against the institutions that protect the poor. It needs to be the bridge. And to do that, the bishops, the priests and the people in the pews need to examine their own populism or elitism and make sure it exists for the common good rather than personal gain.

The Church needs to place itself in front of the powerful on behalf of the poor. It also needs to hold society together when the grievances of the poor start to undo it.

For our part, if we are persons of means, of education, of influence – and relatively speaking all of us are – then we have an obligation. Not to feel guilty about what we have or hide it, but to actually use what God gave us for the people around us.

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