Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is featured in the most recent edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. The topic is “Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order.” He opens with this.
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.
Roberts looks at the roots of the current populism and the players (Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, and Donald Trump). As well as the circumstances that have driven people to look for change from these ‘colorful personalities.’
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.
The institutions in which we were told to place our faith not only failed us, they harmed us, and the current populism is the response—a response with potential for danger. Populist politics, in the absence of principle or constraints, led to what we experienced in the early half of the 20th century—the thing Democrats tried to paint Trump with as well as his supporters. But in the wake of the Dems political overreach, this projection rang hollow. They were notoriously and publicly intolerant of ideas and opinions that questioned or challenged their orthodoxy. The COVID tyranny shadow is long. Crying about banned books anyone can buy with a click while censoring and canceling people for speaking out of turn is not just discrediting but ridiculous.
Another accusation leveled at the conservatarian “movement,” for lack of a better term, is that we are rigid traditionalists looking to drag us screaming and wailing back to the 12th century or the 1950s or wherever. Robert’s answers this, in my mind, here.
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 Constitution works as written without regard to modernity because it has but one job. To define and constrain the government so it might not oppress the people. That is the tradition, the fire we tend in a field choked with the weeds of federal overreach. The challenge is not to burn everything down – which, ironically, is the foundation of the Marxist revolution embraced by progressives – but to manage a controlled burn that clears away the weeds and the damaged bits so that productive growth from the private sector can take its place – if there is any value in what was there before.
If not, resources are freed to find value elsewhere.
Democrats and Republicans have to share the blame. Both party’s leaders have entangled the people and the states to benefit the interests of an elite few. Those so disconnected from the world they created that they have no sense of how miserable it has become for so many. And while the populists have been elevated to fix what was broken, the institutions and their advocates will not go quietly. They will cling to their traditions and resist change. Worshipping the ashes, if you prefer.
We are the keepers of that flame. Do not let it go out before the work is done, with the understanding that the work is never done.
