The
top-down, elitist brand of politics that has dominated the United
States since the end of the Cold War—under Republican and
Democratic administrations alike—has failed. Yes, we are materially
richer than we were in 1991, and our largest corporations are more
profitable. But we are militarily and strategically weaker, fiscally
endangered, and spiritually enervated. As a result, public trust in
the vaunted institutions that our elites control—political,
scientific, journalistic, educational, religious—has evaporated.
And populism—especially on the conservative Right—is on the rise.
Although
I will focus on the U.S., this rise of populism is widespread. From
Argentina to Italy to France to the United Kingdom to Hungary, there
are similarities. The new populism tends to be economically and
politically nationalistic. It tends to be culturally patriotic and
socially conservative. It tends to sympathize with workers over
corporations. It is also self-consciously, defiantly—often
mockingly—anti-establishment.
It is
not a coincidence that so many of the West’s populist
leaders—Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia
Meloni, and Donald Trump—have, shall we say, colorful
personalities. Their political swagger may threaten elite politicians
almost as much as their policy agendas do, because it punctures the
bubble of credentialed, institutional authority that insulates elite
power from public scrutiny.
With
few exceptions, the Left as we know it today has rejected populism
out of hand, embracing instead Big Government, Big Business, Big
Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Labor, Big Ag, Big Media, and Big
Entertainment. For the most part, today’s Left is hard at work
fortifying the power these institutions wield against the rigors of
democratic accountability.
Thus
the only hope for a sustainable, democratically legitimate populist
reform movement today is on the Right. The question is whether the
leaders of the movement can harness the highly negative energy from
which the populism emerges and channel it toward a coherent, positive
politics of national renewal and reform.
***
To see
what today’s populists are reacting against, think back to 1991.
The end of the Cold War appeared to be a great victory for the
Washington establishment—never mind that most leaders of that
establishment opposed Reaganism, which was instrumental in bringing
down the Soviet Union. Regardless, this victory earned Western
institutions a high level of public trust unimaginable today. In
November 1989, for instance, when the Berlin Wall fell, President
George H.W. Bush’s public approval rating hit 70 percent and would
climb to 80 and even 90 percent in subsequent years.
With
the Cold War over, one would have expected a recalibration of
American foreign and domestic policy. It should at least have been a
time for a national debate about those topics. For four decades, we
had strung tripwires for nuclear war around the world to contain a
foe that suddenly no longer existed. Working families who had
invested two generations of blood and treasure during what President
John F. Kennedy called the “long, twilight struggle” were ready
to focus on problems closer to home.
But
the Washington establishment had other ideas. President Bush himself,
in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, pledged allegiance to a “New
World Order” that would be governed by the United Nations and
policed, at its behest, by the U.S. Between that tin-ear approach and
his backtracking on conservative economic policies, Bush squandered
his popular support so badly that he suffered an embarrassing
electoral defeat in 1992.
In
1993, Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, led the fight to
ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement, which gutted
America’s industrial Midwest and lit the fuse on an illegal
immigration bomb still exploding today. In 1994, Congress passed a
law submitting the U.S. to the World Trade Organization, surrendering
America’s economic sovereignty to globalist bureaucrats. Soon
thereafter, a bipartisan majority in Congress granted Most Favored
Nation trading status to the People’s Republic of China, handing
over working Americans’ multi-trillion-dollar peace dividend to our
greatest international rival.
Clinton
also sent U.S. troops into Mogadishu to referee the Somali civil
war—with infamous results in the Black Hawk Down debacle—and
orchestrated a bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia. The climax
of the White House debate about the latter mission is illustrative—it
came when future-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright snapped at
General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “What’s the
point of having this superb military that you’re always talking
about if we can’t use it?” And, of course, this was before
President George W. Bush led America into the successive catastrophes
of Iraq, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the Great
Recession.
In the
decade-and-a-half since then, America’s fiscal situation has
deteriorated. Americans suffered under the Covid pandemic while
government bureaucrats (aided by the media) censored and demonized
anyone who challenged the official (and often provably false)
pandemic narrative. The Supreme Court redefined marriage,
establishing the legal predicate for the trans fanaticism now
responsible for destroying women’s sports and mutilating children
across the country. The Justice Department, including the FBI, has
shown brazen political partisanship in support of the elites and
against the populists. Our nation has been beset by an unprecedented
border crisis, a mental health crisis, and historically low birth
rates. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a national embarrassment,
wars rage on two continents, antisemitism is on the rise on college
campuses, and China is financing its own cold war against the U.S.
with money and technology American executives gave the Chinese in
exchange for corporate profits. Our $35 trillion national debt is now
equal to 124 percent of our gross domestic product. We spend more
every year on interest payments on that debt than we do on national
security.
These
are the conditions that have rightfully discredited the elites and
given rise to conservative populism.
***
Despite
being discredited, the elites do offer a critique of populism that
deserves to be taken seriously: the claim that populism is all style,
lacks substance, and cannot be trusted. Populism, according to this
view, is a rhetorical Trojan Horse that unprincipled demagogues use
to advance their narrow, selfish ambitions. And to be sure, history
is full of corrupt tribunes of the people who abuse their power and
enrich themselves at their nation’s expense.
The
lesson to be drawn from this critique is that legitimate and enduring
change in democracies comes neither from philosophers nor
rabble-rousers. It only comes by strategically fusing populist energy
and principled ideas. That is what Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. He
harnessed popular frustration—frustration with Washington
incompetence, Soviet aggression, and economic stagflation—to a
positive agenda of conservative reform. Richard Nixon before him and
Bill Clinton after him also channeled populist frustrations and
aspirations toward their policy aims. Going back through history, so
did Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Theodore Roosevelt’s early
progressivism, Abraham Lincoln’s unionism and abolitionism, and
Jacksonian and Jeffersonian democracy.
Indeed,
what was the Founding itself—and the Constitution in particular—but
the thoughtful harnessing of populist frustration on behalf of clear,
positive political principles?
Speaking
of which, it is still the case that legitimate and enduring change in
the U.S. will only be accomplished through the
Constitution. It’s too bad that this point needs to be made, but
there are anti-establishment voices within the populist
movement—especially among the young and online—who reject the
Constitution as an artifact of liberal, Enlightenment errors that
must be replaced with a pre-Enlightenment form of government. But the
American people are not interested in thrones and altars. They want a
secure border, safe streets, economic autonomy and opportunity, a
family-friendly culture, and a government that works for them instead
of the other way around.
It
would be a strange populism that haughtily dismisses the values of
the populace. It would be a strange nationalism that promises
citizens sovereignty only to turn around and rule them like subjects.
Indeed, that is precisely what the elite establishment does today—and
why it is failing.
None
of our problems are beyond our constitutional order’s power to
solve. What is it we need, after all? We need a Congress that acts
like a legislature rather than a company of moralizing performance
artists. We need a president who acts like a responsible chief
executive rather than a drunken king. We need a judiciary that acts
impartially in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the
land rather than in a partisan manner. And we need to disperse the
political power that is now concentrated in the hands of the
Washington establishment.
In
short, the solution to our problems is not to scrap or transcend the
Constitution, but to start obeying and applying it again. Under that
document, “We the People” already possess every power we need to
reestablish majority rule, minority rights, democratic
accountability, equal justice under law, and national sovereignty.
Writing
my recent book on this topic, I kept coming back to a quotation from
composer Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but
the preservation of fire.” The preservation of fire strikes me as a
good metaphor for conservatism. It’s not rose-tinted nostalgia of
an idealized past. It preserves the best of the past and applies its
lessons to the present—maintaining a controlled burn as a way to a
better future.
The
greatest challenges we face today are fairly straightforward. The
necessary solutions, as Reagan said, may not be easy, but they are
simple. It is clearly possible for a nation to control its borders,
to prosecute criminals, to reclaim its sovereignty as it pertains to
war, peace, and trade, and to protect and promote the values that
most Americans espouse.
Step
back from the Left’s Oz-like faux-authority and think for a moment
about its legal fragility. Almost everything organizations of the
Left do is either funded by taxpayers or ignored by prosecutors. A
principled, populist conservative government could undo huge swaths
of it with—in the immortal words of President Barack Obama—“a
phone and a pen.” The supposedly un-fireable bureaucrats of the
federal Deep State are nothing of the sort. The president could
reclassify, reassign, or simply dismiss thousands of them. Moreover,
agencies that have gone all-in on woke claptrap in the last decade
have advertised their own irrelevance to budget-conscious
congressional appropriators.
The
U.S. Border Patrol could secure the border today if the president
ordered them to. Energy companies already know where to drill—they
just need permission. We already know which treaty loopholes China
exploits to steal our jobs and trade secrets. The loopholes could be
closed, or we could withdraw from the treaties altogether.
Cities
and states that refuse to prosecute crimes or protect girls’
privacy can be disqualified from federal aid. Corporations that
practice ideological discrimination can be prohibited from federal
contracting. The Justice Department now harassing Christians and
conservatives could start exploring Big Tech’s deliberate attempts
to addict children to harmful online content. We could reform the tax
code to prioritize families and workers instead of globalist
corporations. We could do the same with education, labor, housing,
and transportation policy.
Instead
of funneling more money into DEI offices on campus, we could invest
in trade apprenticeships. Instead of wasting money on global green
energy boondoggles, we could build nuclear power plants. We could
reclaim our sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Trade
Organization and the United Nations and by clarifying our strategic
alliances. And the institutions we need to revive—marriage and
family, church and community, private enterprise and public
spirit—already exist. Like flowers in a garden choked by weeds,
they just need room, light, and water to grow again.
Returning
to my metaphor of a controlled burn, we will need to ignite several
of those to fix institutions like the Department of Homeland
Security, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the Department of
Education, the military-industrial complex, and apparently now FEMA.
Today these institutions function as anti-American,
anti-constitutional predators, serving their own interests at the
expense of the national interest. Their institutional status quo is
inconsistent with freedom and self-government. America must break and
reform them before they break and destroy us.
Not
only in America but across the West, not-so-silent majorities today
consist of citizens that the elites, by nature and ideology, look
down on and treat as deplorables—those who believe in the rights of
the individual, the virtue of local communities, the centrality of
the family, and the sovereignty of the nation-state. This new
conservative populist coalition is not as ideological as past
iterations. But conservatism isn’t supposed to be ideological. Yes,
America was founded on the basis of ideas, but it is a people and a
nation first.
American
conservatism exists to serve the people and the nation through the
Constitution. This includes defending them against enemies foreign
and domestic. And the fact is, elite institutions have become the
people’s and the nation’s enemies. They are openly waging
cultural war on those they ostensibly serve. They cannot be
negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded,
and disempowered. The rewards for doing so—for putting American
families first again—will be greater than we can know.
This
is the fight before us. If we thoughtfully and tenaciously combine
populist energy with conservative principles, it is a fight we can
win.
by
Kevin D. Roberts at imprimis.hillsdale.edu in the October 2024
Imprimis issue
