Result: The poet would spend years as a mental patient at St. Elizabeth’s rest home, asylum and depository for embarrassing political cases. (It wasn’t just the Soviets who practiced political psychiatry.) Hospitalizing the eccentric — but scarcely insane — old poet seemed a more humane and less embarrassing way to deal with him than having to try him for treason.

Political stupidity, it was decided in his case, should not be a capital crime. At least for poets; the rest of us may be held responsible. What he was really guilty of was taking his populism too seriously. Ideas have consequences, especially in wartime.

American populism wasn’t just a reform movement in American history but a search for a conspiracy to blame for all of America’s — and the world’s — troubles. Ron Paul isn’t so much a libertarian as an hysterian able to say the most preposterous things in the dullest, calmest way. And there will always be good people, especially naive young people innocent of history’s context, attracted to simple explanations for complicated problems. That was the principal attraction of populism — and still is. When you start digging into the American psyche, Ron Paul becomes an instantly recognizable American type, and a disturbing one.

Cautionary notes: Single-cause theories may be easy enough to dismiss, but now and then one comes along and revolutionizes a whole field, the way Milton Friedman’s monetarism did today’s economics. His views are now as accepted as Keynesianism once was.

America is still full of village explainers even in these more urbanized times, and every garage seems to contain an amateur inventor who’s working away at a completely unworkable idea. But how do we know that one of them won’t turn out to be the next Bill Gates?

Back in the Thirties, there was a Ron Paul type out in California, a doctor named Francis E. Townsend, who came up with a screwy plan to give every American 60 years of age or older the then-grand sum of $200 a month on the condition that every last penny of it would have to be spent before the month was out.

The Townsend Plan became the inspiration for one of the simplest and most effective social programs in American history: Social Security. You just can never tell where a great idea will come from.

Also, while most populists were inflationists, whether of the Greenback or Free Silver brand, Dr. Paul is a deflationist of the goldbug variety, which is what an economy trying to stave off a recession doesn’t need just now.

A good argument could be made that a touch of inflation was just what the late-19th century American economy could have used to avoid its recurrent panics. While its economic theories may have been cockeyed, populism’s actual effect when it loosened the money supply may have been beneficial.

The moral of the story: Criticism of populism, like populism itself, can be oversimplified.