A reply to Understanding Conservative Populism and review of Dueck’s Age of Iron about American populism, a little long but an interesting topic.

...Populism in America has been a part of our politics and has not resulted in authoritarian policies. He observes, “perhaps the single most striking feature of American populism historically is its sheer variety in terms of attitudes, platforms, and specific issues of concern.” From William Jennings Bryan’s late 19th-century agrarian movement, FDR’s New Deal, and the Nixon conservative populism that came to remake the GOP, populism has constantly been at work in our politics, with “these power struggles tak[ing] place—as America’s founders believed they would—within the framework of a federal constitutional republic.”

...The relative benignity of American populism—that it is a part of our politics and it remakes our parties from time to time—turns on whether the framework of the Constitution remains in place. If we are going to consider American populism, then we must understand how our institutions are currently faring. Our constitutional order is built on popular sovereignty, but also the filtering mechanisms of representation in institutions designed to produce deliberated outcomes, more or less acceptable to a broad range of Americans. But this constitutional system no longer works as intended.

...It took President Obama until the second term of his presidency to tout his “pen and phone” strategy of ignoring congressional constitutional power, but Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris openly proclaims her willingness to prohibit certain firearms with an executive order, the Constitution be damned, because “we can’t wait.” While Dueck’s observations on the populisms of the past ring true, once these crucial pieces of our constitutional architecture are eliminated, can they be put back together?

...“This refounding,” Knott [author of The Lost Soul of the American Presidency] notes, shifted the presidency from its intended role as a check on majority rule to a spokesman for and implementer of the majority’s wishes.” From it has come a new politics that departs from deliberation, compromise, and limits on government. If the president, as Wilson intoned, “is free to be as big a man as he can,” then we get aggressive, anointed executives and perpetual agitation.

...President Trump represents a near majority of Americans who disagree with the post-Cold War political consensus, which has taken on fierce elements of political correctness in the past decade. They rightly believe that much of the consensus did not affirm their communities and beliefs, even perhaps looking away as they fell further behind socially and economically. There is also the matter that this same group wants Trump and the Republicans to uphold the Constitution—and to do so in the name of the country as a whole against abstract ideals for foreign policy, transnational interests, or notions of multiculturalism that obliterate the natural rights of the Declaration because said multiculturalism disputes the existence of a human nature.

The problem that remains is how to build constitutionally this conservative populist movement, even as it seems most loyal to President Trump, who is a creature of the populist presidency that itself represents a threat to the constitutional order. A new Republican party is being born, but the ultimate task is to make sure that its politics and strategy shores up our Constitution.