For more than two years, the United States has been living through the political equivalent of a volcanic eruption. The volume of volcanic ash that it has generated—in the form of media coverage, blogposts, and tweets—has been staggering. In these tumultuous circumstances it is hard to think afresh about our condition. Nevertheless, we must try.

First, a brief definition of terms. By “conservatives” in the essay that follows, I shall refer primarily to American conservatives who grew up in, or are the products of, the conservative intellectual and political movement that developed in the era of William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. In other words, those conservatives who, until quite recently, saw themselves as inhabiting the conservative mainstream. By “populism” I shall refer simply to a recurrent phenomenon in American politics concisely defined as the revolt of ordinary people against overbearing and self-serving elites.

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Populistic sentiments—characterized by celebration of the virtue of ordinary people and distrust of their so-called “betters”—are nothing new in American history. Indeed, such impulses may be a feature of all democratic societies, governed as they are in principle by universal suffrage and by a division of labor between the governors and the governed. These sentiments form a kind of backdrop to our daily political life—a muttering undercurrent in the ongoing political conversation.

Populistic sentiments are nothing new in American history.

Most of the time these mutterings do not rise to