From Populism To Paranoia

Packer sees the danger:

...If interest politics turns into the kind of populism that rejects all forms of institutional authorityand we’re closer than we’ve been since at least the nineteen-seventiesthe public mood will sweep aside Obama’s program of reforms and quite possibly turn into a new sort of reaction: anti-bank, anti-Washington, anti-immigrant, anti-global. The populist temper and the paranoid style are not the same thing, but they are related in obvious ways: when the former loses its bearings, it can degenerate into the latter. For example, the (populist) idea that Timothy Geithner is too close to Wall Street to protect the taxpayers could eventually turn into the (paranoid) idea that Timothy Geithner was appointed in order to protect the bankers at the expense of the taxpayers.

Ask Glenn Beck.