It is weird that people think the crude logic of populism drifts anywhere but reactive? It has a simpleton's notions of self-interest and takes nations as political entities as somehow beyond their classed nature. So all they can do is react.

Hell, Christopher Lasch, a person the new round of populists seemed to love, devoted large portions of his first books on the forgotten history of the US left (even in the 1960s) to missing this point.

Furthermore, and perhaps worse, it acts as a form of resentment for politico grifters who could not get in on the "overproduced elites" (a reality but one in which sometimes they include everyone with a degree and sometimes they mean actual products of elite education)

So the complainers about the PMC are also dancing in the resentment that they accuse the PMC of their own class and pretend that if they are right, somehow their vaguely soc-dem nationalism and want of popular power would justify that they failed at their grift.