(RNS) Like any political movement, populism has a light side and a dark side.

The light side is taking power back from the moneyed elites who manipulate systems to get their way no matter who is in power.

Our democracy needs a movement to say ‘no’ to the vast disparities of wealth that have opened in recent decades. It needs a movement that rejects bailing out the wealthy.

We need a movement against lobbyists who game our democracy. We need a movement for regular folks who actually bear the burden of unemployment, skyrocketing health costs, inadequate schools and sordid cultural life.

The dark side of populism is that the clever and deceitful have a genius for hijacking populism and turning it to their own ends, while undermining the very people whose frustration feeds the movement.

Racist ideologues turn populism into scapegoating of minorities. Just as Southern property owners turned landless whites and former slaves against each other on the basis of race, industrialists fought labor unions by scapegoating immigrants and blaming “socialists.”

People who should have found common cause — African-Americans, poor whites, unemployed factory workers, victims of abuse, immigrants fleeing oppression, the exploited, the naive herded into cattle pens of consumer debt — are turned into a mob shouting at each other.

If latter-day populists massing under the new Tea Party umbrella actually calculated their best interests, they would demand more health care reform, not less. Cynical politicians make sure that such a candid assessment gets lost in false propaganda and grandstanding by media stars claiming to represent “real people.”

So went the original Boston Tea Party. That populist uprising ignited an American revolution. But it had to fight through the propertied class, who saw British rule as guarantor of their wealth. And it had to fight through politicians like Samuel Adams, a failed businessman who tried to control the movement for his own benefit, failed to stop the famous dumping of tea on December 16, 1773, and then immediately asserted himself as its public face.

Years later, when Adams was part of the new nation’s political establishment, he called for brutal suppression of populist anti-tax uprisings known as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion.

A century later, a powerful orator named William Jennings Bryan rode populist fervor into three tries at the presidency as a Democrat who cherry-picked populist ideas but rejected the Populist Movement.

Populist rage that should have targeted the bankers who caused the Great Depression was turned into race riots and hatred of labor unions. Poor fought poor, while the wealthy lived large.

I remember driving through downtown Indianapolis when a Tea Party rally was taking place outside the State Capitol. While people wounded by decades of economic decline vented their frustration, political operatives steered discontent into votes for leaders who routinely ignore these very citizens except at election time.

We Christians know about such manipulation. When Jesus suffered in the wilderness, Satan tried to turn Jesus against himself. By giving up his freedom, said Satan, Jesus could win wealth. By giving up his identity, he could win power. Jesus saw through Satan’s deceit and remained true to himself.

I hope that today’s populists, who face their own hunger for hope, will shun easy escapes like scapegoating, and instead bring their true interests into a political arena where wealth rules at their expense.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)