This conversation is drawn from an episode of The Editors podcast.
Rich Lowry: So, Michael, we had this big Mike Pence speech in New Hampshire going after populism hammer and tongs, saying the party has a fundamental choice between conservatism and populism. And at the end of the speech, I heard it heavily implied — he didn’t actually say it, but I could hear it was heavy in the air — “Take that, MBD.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Yeah, listen, I like Mike Pence as a human being. I think he has a great many virtues, and I think he deserves an honored placed in history for the way he stood up on January 6th and did his duty. So this doesn’t give me any pleasure whatsoever to disagree with him on these matters.
I don’t think Mike Pence thinks very deeply about populism, what it is, or sometimes, he doesn’t think that deeply about conservatism, given the way he contrasted the two in this speech. . . .
He basically defines populism as something that’s long been a left-wing phenomenon, and there’s some truth to that. But for him, populism is surrendering limited government and American leadership in the geopolitical sphere, eroding our constitutional norms, and casting in time-honored principles for passing public opinion.
Populism is not a full-spectrum political doctrine. It is much more a rhetorical style. And it’s a rhetorical style that pits the virtuous producers against the unvirtuous elites, or against a parasitic underclass, in some of its nastier forms.
And ideas that are populist are just ideas that are out of fashion. He talks about how it’s been associated with Democrats and leftists such as William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Bernie Sanders. Okay, those are all populist figures, but the populist movement that grew up to eventually support William Jennings Bryan was mostly a free-trading movement promoting economists like Henry George, who now is considered like a canonical free-trading, establishmentarian type of economist.
Lowry: I think somewhere in Manhattan, not too far from our old office, there’s the headquarters of the Henry George Society, still going.
Dougherty: Right. Henry George’s ideas, which are now what most conservatives say are our principles, were in fact like Democrat Party principles in the 19th century. They were upstart, they were seen as outre, they were set against what was then the ascendant American School of economics that derived from Hamilton and went on through [Matthew] Carey and was championed by Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, those figures.
So populism is really about ideas and their relationship to elites. And the people’s relationship to elites. And conservatism has always had some populist element into it as long as there’s been mass democracy. As soon as the masses could vote, and the Tory Party under Disraeli found it could champion patriotism, it found that there was a little bit of a populist edge to conservatism because it was liberal elites who felt that they had the education, the breeding, the grooming to lead society and to plan society. And the conservatives tended to put at least some stock, not in the passing opinions of majorities, but in the enduring wisdom and common sense of the people at large. There’s always been that kind of element at the edge of the Right.
I understand Pence is trying to draw a contrast between himself and Trump. This is a useful one. I think it’s good to kick off a debate, but I just found [the speech] not all that satisfying.
Lowry: Right.
Dougherty: Some of these ideas he’s championing as conservatism are in tension, right? There’s times when the Republican Party’s commitment to strong national defense and global leadership is clearly in tension with constitutional norms and liberties. We’ve seen that in the War on Terror.
Lowry: My take is that he says near the top of the speech that there’s this fundamental choice between conservatism and populism. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. One, populism as you point out, a large element of it, is a mode of politics and one that successful Republican politicians have mobilized or used to their ends for a very long time.
You could see it in Nixon. You could see it in Reagan. You could see it in George W. Bush, obviously. You can see it in Trump.
And to the extent that populism is a substantive phenomenon, which is also true, on a lot of issues it’s kind of hard to disentangle from conservatism. Is opposition to the elites who run our educational system, is that conservative or is that populist? Opposition to the lockdowns and the rule by experts during Covid, was that conservative or populist? . . . So these lines can be blurred.
And I also think Trump is a separate phenomenon. Obviously he’s a populist, but if you’re a populist, it doesn’t necessarily mean you support Trump. Some of the most extremely online populists now are opposed to Trump because they can’t bear the personal conduct and think he’s electorally radioactive. . . .
All that said, clearly populists are more friendly to using government for ends that they think are important. They are more skeptical of intervention overseas. . . . And they really don’t care about the debt at all, something that Pence underlined quite strongly in the speech.