In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other conservatives like him] soil themselves.” Schlichter’s paean to the downhome values of Kid Rock is typical of the populist right that has emerged in recent years, a movement that fueled the rise of Donald Trump from longshot candidate to president of the United States.
The basic grievance of the populist right is that politicians no longer represent the values and interests of ordinary people, so a radical change in personnel is necessary. This claim certainly has some merit. Our government seems unresponsive to and even uninterested in the citizenry. However, as its enthusiastic embrace of the likes of Trump and Kid Rock demonstrates, the populist right is a movement that thoughtful advocates of limited government should be wary of.
The Anglophone world has been trying to tame its rulers since rebel barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. And the American Revolution was not really a fight against taxation, but about taxation without representation—the colonists were tired of being governed by a distant sovereign that did not reflect their interests.
In making their arguments against the British Crown, the revolutionary generation relied heavily on the British “opposition ideology” of the early 1700s. British polemicists like Lord Bolingbroke and “Cato” complained that the king’s ministers were using patronage and emoluments to bribe members of Parliament to support the Crown’s initiatives, against the interests of the people. What was needed, these “Country” Whigs argued, was a return to first principles—rooting out corruption and restoring the people (or at least, the landowning gentry) as the backbone of British liberty.
The colonists found this theory a helpful way to explain why the Crown’s actions violated their rights as Englishmen. The Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800 was built at least in part on this same opposition ideology. When James Madison and Thomas Jefferson resolved to fight the economic policies of Alexander Hamilton, they returned to the arguments of the Country Whigs. Andrew Jackson found this thinking useful as well. His veto of the Second Bank of the United States was heavily influenced by these ideas, and he justified the spoils system in part on the notion that it is bad for public administrators to be too distant from the people.
Though the names of Bolingbroke and Cato have mostly been forgotten, Americans are still suspicious that politicians in Washington are governing not for the general welfare but for themselves and their cronies. Most populist movements have been built on this idea, and insofar as Trumpism has any coherence, this is its main source.
Even if we admit that the political class has failed the people, it remains an open question what to do about it. There are good and bad solutions, and the populist right seems to be adopting bad ones, owing to two crucial errors in judgment.
The first is to presume that no experience in government is actually necessary to govern. This is simply not true, as President Trump is learning (or at least should be). Our system of government is extremely complicated. Public policy is even more so. And the byways of actual political authority in Washington are so circuitous that neophytes are bound to struggle to learn how to get around. As in any modern endeavor, expertise is rewarded in government.
The populist right has dismissed such practical considerations, and indeed many consider experience a mark against a candidate. Instead, they are in search of people with whom they identify on a personal level. Trump has a disarming, man-of-the-people way of communicating that endears him to many folks. But that mistakes a style of representation with its substance. Does it really matter if a representative uses the same diction as I do, or eats his steak well done as I do, so long as he is an able defender of my values and interests in government? That is the point of republican government—it is not to have representatives who are superficially like the people but who will actually do the people’s business.
The second error is more subtle and more pernicious: Populism looks an awful lot like a twisted version of aristocracy. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams made this trenchant point:
Adams was in many respects the odd man out among the founding generation. His philosophical chops were the equal of Jefferson’s and Madison’s, but he drew from them such wildly divergent conclusions that it is hard to situate him with his colleagues. Yet his analysis was penetrating, and in this passage he offers a dire warning for republican government—one that the populist right has ignored.
Adams might ask, why Trump? Is it because he reflects the values and interests of the common man, or is it because he has projected the image of a “winner” for more than a quarter-century? It is the latter, obviously. He lives in a 11,000-square-foot penthouse high above Fifth Avenue in New York City, not a two-bedroom apartment on Main Street in Uniontown. His populist shtick notwithstanding, people are drawn to him for exactly the reason that Adams suggested: The social and economic elite exert a natural power over the rest of mankind. That this has been wedded to an everyman routine does not alter the reality that Trump is fabulously wealthy, and people are drawn to that.
The same goes for Kid Rock. Why is the populist right interested in him? At first blush, it may seem that he is just an average fellow. But there are plenty of average fellows in Michigan who are available to run—that is what makes them average! The underlying appeal is that he is famous, a member of what Adams called the aristoi, and such people are alluring.
Adams was fearful of this attraction and thought it had to be quarantined. This is why his system of government seemed so aristocratic to the other Founders. He feared that unless the wealthy and well-born were placed somewhere in government, like the Senate, they would eventually spread everywhere and undermine the republican quality of the new government.
Similarly, those of us who desire a return to founding principles—namely, a republic of limited authority that governs honestly for the people—should be wary of populism, even if we share the critique that our representatives in government have badly misbehaved. Elevating inexperienced celebrities who have manners similar to our own is no solution. It is, rather, a pathway to a twisted version of aristocracy.
And it will ultimately redound to the benefit of the progressive left. Inexperience is the handmaid of mismanagement, after all, and if the Republican party is seen as incapable of managing the basic functions of government, power will swing back to the Democrats. Rest assured, they will use the occasion to expand the authority of the state even more.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
