Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order

By Kevin D. Roberts ~ President, The Heritage Foundation

The following is adapted from a talk delivered in Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College on October 23, 2024, as part of the Drummond Lectures in Christ Chapel series.

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.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know  Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors. - Benjamin Franklin