by Kevin D Roberts at Imprimis
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.
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To see what today’s populists are reacting against,…
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