The writer is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and author of ‘The Age of Entitlement’

Americans are patient with their political parties. When they vote out a president after one term, it is usually at the tail-end of a long tenure in the White House for his party. Donald Trump’s defeat marks only the second time since the 19th century that Americans have voted to send a political party packing after a single four-year term. (The other was Jimmy Carter’s Democrats in the late 1970s.) Among the reasons: Mr Trump’s unprecedented failures as a manager.

Populist movements face a Catch-22. They take power arguing that a governing class or even a “deep state”, insulated from the democratic will of the people, has grown snobby, opaque and self-serving. Populists are sometimes right about the corruption of technocracies. Political theorists since Max Weber have understood that. But even an anti-technocratic movement, once in power, needs enough technocratic knowhow to run the government and locate the abuses it has been complaining about.