Populism and Conservatism Agree on Who Gets Ignored, Not on Every Remedy

There are two kinds of people at a conservative dinner party. The first kind thinks the second kind has gone soft on corporations. The second kind thinks the first kind has gone soft on government. Both are right about something, and both are sitting at the same table because they agree on the most important question in politics: who has been ignored.

That agreement is real, and it is worth more than the arguments that follow it. But the arguments are real too. Populism and conservatism are allies, not twins. This post sets out where they meet, where they part, and the one rule that should govern the partnership: the Constitution's limits on power bind the people we like as tightly as the people we do not.

Define the two words

Loose words make for bad fights, so start with terms.

• Populism is a political style and a claim: that ordinary people are being governed against their interests by a distant elite, and that politics should restore the people's voice. It is not, by itself, a program. There have been populists of the left and of the right.
• Conservatism, in the American sense, is the defense of an inheritance: the Declaration's natural rights, the Constitution's limited and divided government, the free economy, and the institutions of civil society, especially family, church and local community. It is suspicious of concentrated power on principle.

Put those definitions side by side and you can see the overlap and the seam. Both distrust a self-dealing elite. Populism asks who should hold power. Conservatism asks how much power anyone should hold.

Where they agree, and it is a lot

Start with the common ground, because it is wider than the commentariat admits.

1. The forgotten citizen is real. Factory towns that lost their employers, rural counties with closing hospitals, families who saw their wages stall while credentialed classes did well: these are not inventions. Conservatives who once spoke only the language of GDP had to relearn that a nation is made of places and people, not of averages.
2. Elites have failed in public. The credentialed class gave us confident predictions about trade, about wars, about public health rules, and about inflation, and was frequently wrong without paying any price for it. Accountability is a conservative value. Populists noticed its absence first and said so loudly.
3. The administrative state is unaccountable. Rules written by agencies that no voter elects, enforced by officials no voter can remove, are a grievance that unites the two camps. The Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), overruling the Chevron doctrine, was cheered on both sides of the coalition.
4. Culture matters. Both camps reject the idea that the job of government and of large institutions is to re-educate ordinary Americans out of their faith, their patriotism and their loyalties.

On those four points there is no conservative case against populism. There is only a conservative case for it.

The history the two camps inherit

The word populist entered American politics through the People's Party, founded by farmers' alliances and labor groups and nominating candidates for the 1892 election. Its platform was adopted at a convention in Omaha on July 4, 1892, and the Omaha Platform remains the founding document of American populism.

In general terms, the platform's diagnosis was conservative-sounding: ordinary producers, farmers and workers, were being squeezed by railroads, banks and a political class bought by both. Its remedies were not. It called for the free coinage of silver to inflate the currency, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads and the telegraph, and the direct election of senators. Several of those ideas later became law. The Sixteenth Amendment, permitting a federal income tax, was ratified in 1913, and the Seventeenth, providing for direct election of senators, the same year.

That history teaches two lessons at once. The first is that the populists were right that the system was ignoring people. The second is that the remedies they reached for, a far larger national government, a nationalized transport network, an inflated currency, would have concentrated the power they hated in a different set of hands. In 1896 the movement largely merged into William Jennings Bryan's Democratic campaign, and its energy fed the Progressive Era, whose architects built much of the administrative state conservatives now spend their lives trying to restrain. See Woodrow Wilson Wanted a Darwinian Constitution, and Conservatives Said No.

Grievance is not a program. A correct diagnosis can still produce a dangerous prescription.

Three disputes, each side heard fairly

Inside today's coalition there are three live arguments. Each deserves to be stated in words its defenders would accept.

Trade

The populist-nationalist case. Decades of trade liberalization, especially after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, shut factories and hollowed out towns, and the gains went mostly to shareholders and consumers far from the damage. A nation that cannot make its own steel, chips and medicines is not secure. Tariffs are a legitimate tool to rebuild industrial capacity, and the Founders used them: Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures of 1791 argued for protecting young American industries. See Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and the conservative case for tariffs.

The free-market conservative case. Tariffs are taxes paid by American buyers. They protect some jobs at the expense of others, especially in industries that use the protected goods. A trade deficit is an accounting identity, not a scorecard of who is winning. Trade with free nations has made ordinary families richer in what their wages buy. See a trade deficit is not a loss, and the accounting identity proves it.

Both camps have evidence. The honest middle position, set out in The China shock was real, and what free traders and tariff hawks each get right, is that the damage to particular places was real and that national security can justify protecting particular industries, while a broad tariff wall is a tax on everyone.

Industrial policy

The case for. Every great power directs investment toward strategic industries. If America does not, its rivals will win by default.

The case against. Government picking winners means politicians allocating capital, and politicians allocate capital toward districts, donors and headlines. The result is often subsidy for the connected rather than strength for the nation. Public choice economics, which studies politicians as people with their own interests, predicts exactly this. See Public Choice Theory Studies Politicians as People, Not as Angels.

Executive power

The case for a strong executive. The administrative state is a fourth branch that ignores elected leaders. A president who has won an election should be able to direct the executive branch, fire its officers, and override its bureaucracy. Article II says "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," not in a committee of civil servants.

The case for restraint. The same power a conservative president uses to cut regulations, a progressive president will use to impose them. Unilateral action is easy to undo and easy to imitate.

On the first half of this dispute, conservatives of both camps agree: the President, not unaccountable officials, should run the executive branch. The disagreement is over the second half: what a president may do when Congress has not acted.

The rule that settles it: limits bind friends too

Here is the argument, in numbered premises.

1. The Constitution divides power on purpose. It vests legislative power in Congress (Article I, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States"), executive power in a President, and judicial power in courts. The Founders did this because they believed concentrated power is dangerous in anyone's hands. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47 that accumulating all powers in the same hands "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
2. The division protects liberty only if it holds when the stakes are high. A rule observed only when it is convenient is not a rule. It is a preference.
3. Power used by one side becomes a precedent for the other. Every expansion of executive authority a conservative president claims will pass, by inheritance, to the next president, who may not be a conservative.
4. Therefore conservatives must judge the means, not only the ends. A good policy enacted by an unconstitutional route is a bad bargain, because the route outlasts the policy.
5. The remedy for an unresponsive government is to make the accountable branches work, not to route around them. That means Congress legislating, including on trade, where Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations."

The best illustration comes from the Supreme Court. In 1952, during the Korean War, President Truman ordered the seizure of the nation's steel mills to head off a strike, citing the war emergency. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Court struck down the seizure because Congress had not authorized it. Justice Robert Jackson's concurrence set out the framework still used today: a president's power is at its height when he acts with Congress's authorization, at its lowest when he acts against Congress's will, and in a twilight zone in between. Conservatives cheered that ruling for decades, and should, because it stopped a president of the other party. It would be a strange principle that applied only to him.

On trade specifically, much of the president's tariff authority rests on statutes in which Congress delegated power, such as Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows tariffs on national security grounds after an investigation. Whether those delegations are wise is a fair question for both camps. Who can raise tariffs? Article I, Section 232 and the delegated power lays out the mechanics.

The strongest objection, answered

The populist objection runs like this: "You restraint conservatives have been playing by the rules for fifty years while the other side ignored them. The administrative state was built by executive action and agency rule. Insisting on scruples now is unilateral disarmament."

It is a fair objection, and it gets three answers.

First, the premise is half true. The administrative state was built largely by Congress delegating power to agencies, from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 onward, and by courts deferring to those agencies. The remedy for that is not more unchecked power in the presidency but the reassertion of Congress's role and the courts' duty to say what the law is, which is precisely what West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and Loper Bright (2024) began.

Second, the tools do not stay put. A president who declares an emergency to do something good teaches the country that emergencies are how things get done. The next president will have a list of emergencies of his own. If you think that is far-fetched, follow the logic one step further: the national debt is an emergency, so is the climate, so is gun violence, so is every issue with a cable segment. Before long the emergency is the constitution and the Constitution is the decoration.

Third, conservatives win the long argument only if they are believed. The case against the administrative state is that unelected power is illegitimate. That case collapses if conservatives turn out to love unaccountable power whenever it is theirs. Consistency is not naivety. It is the price of credibility.

What each camp should learn from the other

Free-market conservatives should learn from populists that a free economy must be defended to the people living in it, not only to economists, and that a political movement that cannot say what it offers a laid-off machinist in Ohio does not deserve to win his vote.

Populists should learn from constitutional conservatives that the people's voice is best protected by the institutions the Founders built, not by a single strong leader. Tocqueville warned of a soft despotism that would govern a people gently, for their own good, until they forgot how to govern themselves. See Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No. That warning applies no matter who holds the reins.

The coalition works when it holds both truths. The forgotten citizen deserves a hearing. And a government strong enough to give him everything he wants is strong enough to take everything he has.

The case in brief

1. Populism and conservatism agree on the essential diagnosis: ordinary citizens have been ignored by a credentialed elite that failed without consequence.
2. They differ on remedies, especially trade, industrial policy and executive power, and each side's best case deserves a fair hearing.
3. The People's Party of 1892 diagnosed real grievances but reached for remedies that enlarged national power, which shows that a correct diagnosis can still yield a dangerous prescription.
4. The Constitution divides power so that no one, friend or foe, holds too much, and Youngstown (1952) shows why conservatives cheered that principle when it bound a president of the other party.
5. Constitutional limits must bind our side as tightly as theirs, because every power we claim will pass to our opponents.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 tonight, then ask your members of Congress, through my representatives, which trade and emergency powers they think Congress should take back.