Good evening. Welcome. Happy new year. I am david azerrad, dean of hillsdale college, welcome to the center for constitutional studies and citizenship which is our campus in the nations capital. This event is sponsored by real clear politics, realclearpolitics. Com. David dozier who is hiding in the back is the publisher, jan mcintyre, the cofounder is with us as well. Our discussion deals with a collection of essays the list on the 35th anniversary of the new criterion magazine in which those essays were originally published, the title of the book is vox populi the perils promises of populism. Which is also our topic. That is not a new idea. The voice of the people is the voice of god which was often times use not only to attack monarchs but to attack the people who says such nonsense. It is not new to america, andrew jackson, previously. Not surprising in a regime of popular consent and you any quality. There has always been tension between popular covenant and constitutional government, that potential of populist demagogues and. Promises and perils, so populism abounds from ancient rome to brexit england to Bernie Sanders to donald trump, elected in a populist revolt. Our speakers speak for five minutes or so. Brevity is the soul of wit and discussion afterwards, we will be joined by Michael Antone but we will start in our first is our first speaker is roger kimball, editor and publisher of the new criterion, president and publisher of counter books. The author of numerous fine works, great things being published by encounter and i would like to draw your attention to sites that have been publishing for a while on numerous topics including one by Molly Hemingway on trump and the media. Roger, please start us out. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I dont suppose any term has been more productive of confusion over the last couple years than populism. In many ways, it is a word in search of a definition. For many it is like the term fascism according to george orwell. That is to say the handy negative epithet, rhetorical weapon whose lack of semantic precision, promotes attraction because anyone or anything you dont like can be impugned if you can deploy the f word or the word and get it to stick. But what does populism mean . 99 times out of 100 it means little more i dont like this person or this policy. Connoisseurs not to be confused with the german philosopher cant will have noticed the term racism has a similar allpurpose content free malignant. Exploring that will take us further afield. Thinking about the term populism reminds us that certain words accumulates positive associations and others semantically just as innocuous wind up shouldering a portfolio of bad feelings. A few different careers the terms democracy on the one hand and populism on the other hand. And produces pleasant vibrations, people feel good about themselves when they use the word democracy but otherwise populism. This should seem quite odd because the word populism occupies a semantic space very close to democracy. Democracy means what . By the people. Populism according to the American Heritage dictionary describes, quote, a political philosophy directed to the needs of the Common People advancing a more equitable distribution of wealth and power, just the kinds of things for people where they too, would see. The fact that populism is ambivalent, the fact is populism is ambivalent at best sometimes is true, a charismatic figure can survive and illuminate the term populism, Bernie Sanders managed this trick among the racially sensitive nongender stereotyping anticapitalist beneficiaries of capitalism in the last election. It was my impression that in this case the term populist was fielded left by sanders and his followers, their effort to establish vendors sanders in the publics might as an example of not hillary who herself was presumed to be popular but not populist. At least two sides of the negative association under which it struggles, the issue of demagoguery. And citizens, and the popular meaner like pericles. The populist leader, the for sake reason in moderation, and semi literate and spiritually an elevated populist, the kind of people, mcdonalds hamburgers. And the soil of that populism, the demagogic leader said to work. And a commentary on brexit and the first year of the trump investigation. And they noted this. Populism is to say, less descriptive than a delegitimizing term. And you get free and for nothing, the imputation of demagoguery and was famously derided as a deplorable and irredeemable cohort. And depreciation is possible. I was first aware the charge of populist sympathy would have a powerful political moral and class delegitimizing, in june of 2015 to cover the brexit vote. Nearly everyone i met, more likely it was your interlocutor could be in favor of britains remaining in the European Union and the more pointed would be his experiment of those arguing, they are said to be angry, ignorant, fearful, the enough phobic and racist. A little while later. Except that the people for brexit wouldnt work, at least the ones i met. For them brexit turned on a simple question, who rules . A source of british sovereignty, parliament, for centuries, or is it brussels, the European Union and the iranian people be on a similar question. Who rules in iran . Theocratic shia fundamentalist allahs or the iranian people . We will find out. And the location of sovereignty, a very large role in the lies of the phenomena in, populism. The United States and elsewhere. The question of sovereignty, who govern stands behind the rebellion against the political correctness. And the conspicuous and features of the bureaucratic society. A wide range of practical and economic effects stifling entrepreneurship and any productive innovation difficult. And the deepest effect our spiritual and psychological. In any assault against free speech on college campuses, safe spaces and trigger warnings are part of this dictatorship. And one of the main arguments concerned the psychological change, the alteration of the character of the people, extensive government control brought in its wake. The process is softening, innovation, exchange of the challenges of liberty and selfreliance for the pleasures of dependence. His 1770 as a, causing discontent, criticize the port of george iii for circumventing parliament and establishing by still what amounted to a new regime of Royal Prerogative and influence peddling. And the appearance of parliamentary supremacy. A closer look showed the system was corrupt. And a slight understatement that performs, at the end of an arbitrary government. Was not incompatible. That discovery stands behind the Administrative State in our society under the cloak of democratic institutions, essentially undemocratic activities pursuing expansionist agenda, and the most comprehensive way by circumventing the law. At the same time a growing recognition, totalitarian goals, and a populist uprising in europe. Populist is one word for this phenomena and. And affirmation of sovereignty underwritten by a passion for freedom, another more accurate term. Thank you. Our next speaker. [applause] we allow approval. Our next speaker is james pearson. And the simon foundation, he is the author of many great books including shattered consensus, the rise and decline of the postwar political order and an is a in the new criterion. Appreciate it, thank you, roger, for assembling this. My essay in this volume is by James Madison and it addresses the claim made by critics, donald trump is a threat to the constitution. I liked very much to hear many critics now praising the separation of powers and checks and balances in the u. S. Constitution because typically they have not liked those aspects of the constitution. Basically the theme of this paper is there is little chance donald trump is going to run through the u. S. Constitution with various checks and balances. The constitution was drafted by James Madison to deal expressly with a situation like donald trump and to tie him down in a quagmire of conflicting political pressures from the congress to the various branches of government, and even more of a problem today because the government is so huge, it did not exist in this measure in madisons time and anyones time until the postwar period. We have not only the checks and balances of the constitution, the elections and large establishment to check donald trump. Those who claim donald trump will run roughshod over the constitution take the view that the constitution engraves their policy preferences, donald trump entertains different preferences, the constitution is going to die. The constitution does not engrave anyones policy preferences. It enshrined a process and a series of rights but none of the policy preferences any of the groups hold today. I suggest in this essay that all of this is badly overblown, the constitution will survive donald trump without difficulty. I river at the end to one of James Madisons years which is the American Republic is under greater threat not from a populist, designed to check a populist but from disintegration. In his, some of his last letters and speeches and interviews James Madison was concerned about the fate of the union. And published after his death, he made a statement that his greatest wish is the union the preserved. Anyone who would divide the union is similar to a serpent in the garden of eden. He was thinking the slavery issue. There was a good question as to what kind of a state madison and his contemporaries envisioned for the United States. I dont believe they envisioned a nationstate. If you think about federalist number 10 where madison articulates a theory of the extended republic, he is talking about a polity in which the country is divided in countless different groups with different points of view and different interests. It is difficult to agree on anything and if they cant agree on something, they reach a consensus, that will be okay because it will be so difficult to do that consensus. You can contrast that with a deck of you taking place in france where the revolutionaries talk about the people of the united front, democracy is an expression of the people. We need to identify the general will of the people is coherent and united conception of a nation so if you look at these two polls, france represents the paradigm of a nationstate in the revolution and the United States are present something different. We talk about it as a republic but what was he imagining. The images of the state, were not very wide, there was the idea of an empire. That was the dominant view of the state at the time. Jefferson called his vision of the United States and empire of liberty. They acquired the louisiana purchase, jefferson didnt seem to care if the New Territories were organized within the United States or if they were organized in separate states, he envisioned an empire on the continent. Not necessarily a nationstate with a united people. Of course they talked more about the union. Union with the idea, union of the states developing a sacred view, sacred image as time went on. Webster talked about that and Abraham Lincoln talked about that. The United States was forged into a nationstate as a consequence of three wars that took place from 1860 to 1949. Those events were communal events. Everyone participated, everyone sacrificed, they created a nationstate. And the united people. And Abraham Lincoln spoke about this, fdr spoke about this. If you look at the Development Taking place since world war ii, one can see an attenuation of the american nationstate that was assembled. This was assembled, the american nationstate, with great stress and great difficulty. Through the course of these events, the United States as a nationstate developed a heroic image of itself, pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution and settled the wilderness, built schools and colleges. We have a revolution, create a constitution, acquire a continent, settler continent, fight a civil war and the story slavery, intervening european wars and save them from themselves until we had a great superpower in the world. That was all being taken apart as we know from various sources, what is happening in the college campus, the idea that this entire enterprise is a negative enterprise which we oppress the indians, minority groups, women, we destroy the environment, we did all the terrible things, that is the common narrative of the american nation. So the United States, i would say, getting more and more to look less like a nationstate and more like an empire with a powerful administrative center, with an attenuated relationship to all the groups across the country. Nothing uniting these groups. Multicultural troops, many leg wouldve, open borders. This begins to look a lot like the empires across europe in the 20th century. We lived through a century in which empires collapsed and disintegrated. That is the story of the 20th century from the austrian empire and the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire and the soviet empire, disintegrating. Donald trump, i would say, was elected to somehow reconstitute this nationstate against the centrifugal forces it is now encountering. Is this something that would be accomplished . Extremely difficult. That is what it represents, not sure donald trump has articulated this question all that well but that is how i interpreted it. I wish him well but it is a difficult enterprise to bring on for a lot of reasons. Thank you. [applause] commentator, first commentator is david azerrad, director of the beacon Assignment Center for principles and politics, Heritage Foundation and finances can be found at heritage. Org. Lets be honest. Of donald trump hadnt run for office populism would still exist but the european theme. That would have been some short pieces on brexit but not a yearlong series of indepth essays analyzing the phenomena and of populism which are collected in this excellent book that i highly recommend. Trump is not the First American populist. We had a Peoples Party in the us that coined the term populist in the 1890s but trump is the most successful populist we ever had. To the best of my knowledge he never called himself a populist but it is pretty clear that the cornerstone of trumps him is the following claim, that the American People have been betrayed and taken advantage of by corrupt and incompetent elites from both parties. Interesting to note that early in his campaign he called the elites incompetent but made his case more compelling by starting to attack them for being corrupt and taking advantage of the American People. Not surprisingly these elites reacted in kind and warns us in the strongest terms that a Trump Presidency would bring about the end of america and quite possibly the rest of the world. I cant resist sharing with you the most hyperbolic predictions made by leading pundits on the right and on the left on the eve of trumps election. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Andy Sullivan wrote in new york magazine, trump is an extinction level event. His election would mark the end of democracy and the beginning of tierney in america. Paul krugman, with his characteristic subtlety, warned america that and become trumpistand with trump issuing in an era of epic corruption and contempt for the rule of law, with no restraint whatsoever. His conservative colleague, the usually very sensible rod was no more reassuring. He offered his three, quote, baseline dangers for a trump administration. These were not farflung prediction but he called them perils that we would very likely face. They were sustained market jitters leading to an economic slump, major civil unrest, and a rapid escalation of risk in every geopolitical theater. And yet we are here, a 4year into the Trump Presidency and america and the world are somehow still standing. Not a single one. [applause] not a single one of the doomsday overblown scenarios trump was supposed to unleash on america and the world has panned out. Quite the contrary, in fact. The stock market is roaring and we should have our third consecutive 2 45 economic growth. America last time i checked remains a democracy with an independent judiciary and a free press. We have had by one count more than 70 free and fair special elections since trump has been elected, many have been won by democrats. Isiss caliphate is no more and north korea is at the negotiating table. Trump, of course, cannot claim credit for all these things although he has done so, but he can point to real accomplishments of his own. He has appointed a Record Number of good appellate judges to the federal bench and contrary to the warnings, he appointed neil gore such and not his sister to the Supreme Court, enacted a Major Overhaul of the tax code and has been pursuing a very aggressive deregulatory agenda on all fronts that is doing much good for the economy and the constitution. I think it is hard to imagine any of the other 16 republican candidates he ran against doing more. It is particularly hard to imagine any other republican candidates displaying the boldness to pull out of the paris climate accord, decertify the iran deal and to recognize jerusalem as the capital of israel. Judged by the conventional nonpopulist standards of the Republican Party donald trump has had a pretty successful first year. He had less success, made some progress, as and called to remind us on a daily basis, border crossings are at an almo