Matthew Goodwin, a British professor who teaches political science at the University of Kent, has spent his career studying populism. And he owes his success to the reluctant admission by English elites that the problem won’t go away. His major demand as a public intellectual is that populism should be understood charitably, reasonably, in an enlightenment mood, and therefore treated with the respect due to any demand by a large number of citizens in a democracy.

Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics; By Matthew Goodwin; Penguin UK; 272 pp., $19.99

Economically, that demand is to become or remain part of the middle class, given the challenges of globalization. Politically, it is to have their views represented by a major party. Goodwin, however, is not merely an analyst of populism among political trends and dynamics. A major new media figure with a big Substack and X following, he has also become the leading intellectual voice for populism in the last decade, with a string of co-authored books that were sometimes far ahead of their time, sometimes topical, always on the topics that are intolerable to elites: Revolt on the Right, UKIP, Brexit, and National Populism. Now, he’s come out with the solo-authored Values, Voice and Virtue. If you want to understand rather than merely quake about the “rise of populism” and see where it comes from and what it portends, his new book is the thing to read.