Last Wednesday, former vice president and current Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence delivered a speech putting a choice before the Right: conservatism or populism? “I ask my fellow Republicans this: In the days to come, will we be the party of conservatism, or will our party follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?” In response, the editors of National Review argued that Pence was a bit off the mark, in part because populism is “hard to define.” It can be either “an emotive, anti-elitist mode of politics or a set of substantive beliefs,” or both. It is, furthermore, hard to separate conservatism from populism. Republican politicians prior to Donald Trump, including Ronald Reagan, have successfully combined the two.
These observations are true enough. But if can be difficult to separate conservatism from populism, it can also be difficult to separate populism’s assets from its liabilities. Take its vagueness, for example. If, at its root, “populism is not a full-spectrum political doctrine” but “much more a rhetorical style,” as Michael Brendan Dougherty argued on The Editors podcast, then that can render it an easy weapon in the arsenal of someone engaging in what Federalist No. 68 called “low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” In his speech, Pence alluded to Trump’s weaponization of populism in this manner when he described how “Republican populists would blatantly erode our constitutional norms — a leading candidate last year called for the ‘termination’ of ‘all rules regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.’”
In fact, Pence could have been even more explicit about this. At the root of Trump’s post-election crusade to establish himself as the winner of the 2020 election was his belief that he had more authentic and direct access to the popular will than our republican institutions did. But while the editorial grants Trump is undoubtedly a populist, it errs by arguing that “there’s nothing inherently populist about, say, his appalling conduct after the 2020 election, which had to do with his character flaws, not any political ideology.” It is, in fact, perfectly consistent with an uninhibited populist posture for Trump to have acted in this way. That there are “high-profile populists who have turned their backs on Trump and gone with Ron DeSantis exactly because of the former president’s terrible judgment and flagrant irresponsibility” seems simply like an instrumental or pragmatic calculation about a particular populist vessel. And that there are self-described populists who have rejected Trump’s behavior for more principled reasons indicates the extent to which they have wisely infused their populism with other precepts and commitments.
Chief among those commitments ought to be to the Constitution, to the Founding, and to the institutions they have bequeathed us, the animating concerns of American conservatism. That populism, in its more undiluted forms, can sit uneasily within the constitutional framework is a strike against it. In 1967, National Review editor Frank Meyer went so far as to argue that “populism is the radical opposite of conservatism.” Confronting George Wallace, a contemporary demagogue, Meyer allowed that populism is not entirely without a place in the Right’s stand against the Left, given that much of elite opinion had been captured by the latter and arrayed against the former. “Populism is one of the elements in the opposition to Liberalism, because the arrogant and naked elitism of the Liberals, isolated from the ethics and tradition of the people, is populism’s polar opposite.” He even granted that populist positions can be “parallel to conservative positions.” He cautioned, however:
But the polar opposite of a political perversion is not necessarily itself a good. Thus, while Liberalism stands for the imposition of Utopian design upon the people because the Liberals know it is right, populism would substitute the tyranny of the majority over the individual, the pure will of “the people,” untrammeled by considerations of freedom and virtue. It is in its own way as alien to the American conservative conception of constitutional republican government as is Liberalism.
It can be awkward for conservatives to stand athwart injurious populist currents that are “alien to the spirit of conservatism,” as Meyer put it, when they appear. In Meyer’s own time, he observed that those who do so “are inevitably criticized on the grounds that those whom we are attacking are also enemies of Liberalism.” But, again, he cautioned:
What such criticism ignores is that there are other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending than the Liberal Establishment, and that to fight Liberalism without guarding against these dangers runs the risk of ending in a situation as bad as or worse than our present one.
It would, of course, be a mistake for conservatism to separate itself from the people or from public sentiment, with which nothing can fail, and without which nothing can succeed, as Abraham Lincoln observed. Pence, notably, did not do this in speech. He claimed to have “always believed in the greatness of America and its people,” and argued that conservatism’s belief in the American people is “at the heart of our movement.” An uncharitable interpretation of Pence’s remarks might view this as a self-defeating concession to the populist posture. A more honest one would accept it as consonant with his designation of today’s populists as “a growing faction” that “would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values for an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
Faction, and factions, are in inevitable part of our or any political system; Federalist No. 10 notes that “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Our system of government is designed to channel those passions productively. “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government,” Publius writes in Federalist No. 51. “But experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Our political institutions supply those precautions, allowing our system to avoid “the excesses of both populism and technocracy,” as Yuval Levin has argued. To the extent that conservatism works through and in defense of those institutions, it serves the people. To the extent that populism works against and in defiance of those institutions, supposedly out of a more authentic representation of the popular will, it serves faction, and is a tool for demagogues. Mike Pence deserves credit for his stance against the excesses of populism, and for the people and conservatism.