Good evening. Welcome. Happy new year. Im matthew spalding. Welcome to the allen b. Kirby campus. Our event is cosponsor idbid real clear politics. And i recognize david, in the back, there he is. The pressurer and John Mcintyre who is with us here as well. Our discussion deals with a collection of essays med on the 35th anniversary of the new cite tieran ming. The title of the book is vox poply, the perils of populism. It means the voice of the people. The old adage, the voice of the people is the voice of god, which was often times used in history to attack monarchs and attack people who said such nonsense. The idea of populism is also not new to america. One thinks of will William Jennings bryan, roosevelts, Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan more recently. Not surprising in a regime of popular consent based on human equality. Theres always been a tension between popular government and constitutional government. That sense of the potential of populist demagogues. Hence, promises and peril. So, populism abounds from ancient rome to brexit england, from Bernie Sanders to donald trump elected president as a populist vote. The speakers will speak four or five minutes. And well have discussion. Well be join by Michael Anton put will start and our first speaker is roger kimball. Editor and publisher of the new cite tier cite tieron. And i would like to draw your attention to broad sites publishly on numerous topics, including one by our good friend, Molly Hemingway on trump and the media, roger, please state us out. Theres been no term that populism. Its a word in search of a definition. For many people, populism is like the term fascism. The redder to cal weapon whose very lack of semantic presomethings precision is part of its attraction because anything you dont like can be effectively impugn evidence you can deemploy the p ford or the p word and get it to stick. What does populism mean . 99 times another of 100 it meanly little more than i dont like this person or policy. Notice the term racism, has a similar, allpurpose, content free aura of save that for another day. Thinking about the term populism reminds us of the curious fact that certain words accumulate a nimbus of positive associations while others sell man tick semantically inknock cause have a portfolio of bad feeling. So, for example, consider two very different careers of the terms, democracy on the one hand and populism on the other hand. Democracy is a word that produces pleasant vibe operations. People veal good about themes when they use the word democracy, but it is unlying with populism. At fir blush this should seem quite odd because the word populism occupies a semantic space very close to democracy. Democracy means what . It means ruled by the people. Populism, at least according to the American Heritage dictionary, describes, quote, political philosophy directed to the needs of the Common People and advancing a more he cannible distribution of wealth and power. Just the kinds of things the people, the democs, were they to rule, would seek. But the fact that populism is ambivalent the fact it that populism is at with leapt at best. Times it is true a care charismatic figure can survive and illuminate. Bernie sanders accomplished this trick. Always my impression that in this case the term populist was addressed by sack desor his followers than by his rivals, and the media, and their effort to establish sanders in the publics mine as one of the many examples of not hillary, who herself was presumed to be popular but not populist. Now, there are at least two sides to the negative association under which the term populist struggles. One hand its the issue of demagoguery. Some say populist and demagogue are synonyms. Pericles was described as a demagogue, popular leader. Its said to forsake reason and moderation in order to stir the dark passions of the semi literal and spiritually unelevated populist. The kind of people who eat mcdonalds hamburgers and that sort of thing. Neared theirs fertile soil on which they work. Looking at the commentary on brexit, the campaign in the first use of the Trump Administration or last summers election in france will have noted this. Populism that is to say, is wielded less as a descriptive than a delegitimizing term. Success any charge someone with populist sympathy and you get free for nothing, both the imputation of demagoguery some what was derided as a deplorable and irredeemable cohort. The element of existential dedepreciation is almost palpable. Calling populist sympathies could delegitimize. When i was in london in june of 2015 to cover the brexit vote, nearly everyone i met was a remainder. The higher up the income and class scale you went, to the more likely you would be in favor of brittons remaining in the european join and the more poignant would argue in favor of brexit. The bricks yeteers were said to be angry, fearful, and racist, and then they moved that program to the United States a little while later. Six the people who were for brexit really werent. For them brexit was a simple question, who rules . Is the ultimate source of british sovereignty parliament as it had been for centuries or brussels . Seat of the European Union if think the iranian people are just now conjuring a similar question. Who rules in iran . The theocratic shia fundamental list mullahs or the iranian people . Well find out. Im con fibsed the issue of sovereignty, what we might call the location of sovereignty, has played a very large role in the rise of the phenomenon we describe as populism. Both in the United States and elsewhere. In this country the question of sovereignty, of who governs, stands behind the rebellion against the Political Correctness of our times, and the moral meddlesomeness that are disfiguring features of our increasingly bureaucratic society. The smothering blanket of regulatory excess has had a wide range of practical and economic effects, stifling entrepreneurship and making any sort of productive innovation difficult. But perhaps its deepest effects are spiritual and psychological. The many assaults against free speech on college campuses, demand for safe spaces, and trigger warnings, are part of this dictatorship of Political Correctness. One of the main points concern what he called the psychological change, the alteration of the character of the people that extensive government control brought in its wake. The alteration involved the process of soften innovation, and in exchange of the challenges of liberty and selfreliance for the coddling missouri dependence. In his 1770 essay, thoughts on the cause of the present discontent, edmund burk criticized the court of george iii by establishing by svelte what amounted 0 a new regime of Royal Prerogative and influence peddling. George and his court injuries main the appearance of parliamentary sprem hsu si but a closer look showed the system was corrupt. I was soon stanford, burk wrote, that the forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government, were things not altogether incompatable. That discovery stands behind the growth of the Administrative State in our society. Under the cloak of democratic institutions, it is essentially undemocratic activities pursue an expansionist agenda that threatens liberty in the most comprehensive way, by circumventing the law. At the same time, however, a growing recognition of totalitarian goal offed the Administrative State have caused a populist uprising here and in europe. Populist is one word for theirs phenomenon, affirmation of sovereignty, underwritten by a passion for freedom, is another and possibly more accurate term. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is [applause] we allow approval. Thank you. Our next speaker is james piereson. The senior fellow at manhattan institute. He authored shatters consensus, the rise and decline of americas post world war political order, and also hassen essay in the january issue of the new criterion. I appreciate it, matthew, and thank you, roger, for assembling this. My essay in this volume is about James Madison, and it addresses the claim made by critics that donald trump is a threat to the constitution. And i like very much to hear many critics now praising the separation of powers and the 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 that theres little chance that donald trump is going to run through the u. S. Constitution with its 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 its even more of a problem today because the government establishment is so huge. This measure did not exist in madisons time until the post war period. We have not only the checks and balances in the storks the elections and we have this large establishment to check donald trump. Now, those who claim that donald trump is going to run roughshod over the constitution take the view that the constitution engraves their policy preferences. And since donald trump speaker takens different preferences this is terrible. The constitution is going to die. The constitution does not engrave anyones policy preferences. Its enshrines a process and a series of rightses, but none of the policy preferences any of the groups hold today, so, i suggest in this essay that all this is badly overblown. The constitution is going to survive donald trump without any difficulty. I do avert at the end to one of James Madisons fears, which i that the American Republic is fur greater threat not from a populist, because it was designed to check a populist, but from disintegration. In his some of his last hers and speech hes and interviews, James Madison was concern about the fate of the union, and in his last letter, which was published after his death, he made a statement that his greaters wish is that the union be preserved and that anyone who would divide the union is similar to a serpent in the garden of eden. Obviously he was thinking of the slavery issue. New, there is a good question as to what kind of a state mad science and his contemporaries envisioned for the United States. Dont believe they envisioned a nation state. Now, if you think about federalist number 10, where madison articulates a theory of the extended republic, he is talking bat policy in which the country is divided into countless different groups, with different points of view and different interests, and its going to be difficult for them to agree on anything, and if they cant agree on something, if they can reach consensus, that will be okay, because its going to be to difficult to achieve that consensus. You can contrast that with the point of view from france at roughly the same time, where the revolutionaries talked about the people was a united front, and democracy is the expression of the people. We need to identify the general will of the people as coherent and united conception of a nation. So, of you look at these two polls, france represents the paradigm of a nation state in the revolution, and the United States represents Something Different. Now, we talk about it as a republic but what was he imagining . Well, the images of the state at that time were not very wide. There is, of course, the idea of the empire. That was the dominant view of the state at the time, an empire. Jefferson called his vision of the United States an empire of liberty, and when the United States acquired the louisiana purchase, jefferson didnt seem to care if the New Territories were organized within the United States or they were organized aspirate states so long as they were republics. He envisioned an empire on the continent, not necessarily a nation state, with a united people. Now, of course, they talk more about union. Union was the idea. Union of the states. Thus delved a sacred view, sacred image as time went on. Daniel webster talk about that and Abraham Lincoln talked about that. The United States is fortunatelied into a nation state as a conference of three wars that took place between 1860 and 1945. Those events were communal events. Everyone participated. Everyone sacrificed, and out of those events we created a nation state of a kind of united people. And Abraham Lincoln speck about this, fdr spoke about this. Itself one were to look at the developments taking place since world war , unone can see an attenuation of the american nation state. The american nation state was astem september belled under great stress and with great difficulty, and through the course of these events, the United States, as a nation state, developed a heroic image of itself. The pilgrims camer to escape religious persecution, settled the wilderness, built schools and colleges. We have a revolution, created a constitution, acquire a continent, settle the continent, fight a civil war ask destroy slavery. Intervene in european wars and saves them froms until we are the great super pour in the world. The heroic version of the american nation. All being tan apart as we now from various sources, what is happening on the college campus, the idea that this spire enterprise is a negative enterprise. We oppress the indians and oppress minority groups and women, destroyed the environment. We did all these terrible things. Thats counternarrative of the american nation. So, the United States, i would say, some echoing madison, is beginning more and more to look less like a nation state more and like an empire with a powerful administrative sentence, an attenuated relationship to all the groups across the country. Nothing uniting these groups, multicultural groups, many languages, open borders. Begins to look a lot like the empires that fell across europe in the 20th century. Now, we have lived through a century in which empires have collapsed and disintegritied. Thats the story of the 20th 20th center, from the austrian empire and the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire and the soviet empire. Theyre disintegrating. Donald trump, i would say, was elected to try to somehow reconstitute this nation state against the centrifugal forces that its now encountering. Is this something that can be accomplished . Its going to be extremely difficult, i think, but i think thats what it represents. Im not sure that donald trump has articulated this question all that well. But that is somehow how i interpret it, and for that reason i wish him well. But i think its going to be a difficult enterprise to bring off for a lot of reasons. Thank you, jim. [applause] our commentator is david azerrad. The director of the Beacon Center for principles and politic, the heritage foundation. David. Lets be honest. If donald trump hadnt run for office, we wouldnt be here tonight. Populism would exist but would be a european thing. Roger maybe would have commissioned a couple of short species on defense, brexit, but not a yearlong sear of in depth essays analyzing the phenomenon of populism which are now collected in this excellent book. Now, trump, as matt pointed out, is not the First American populist. We had a Peoples Party in the u. S. That coined the term populist in he 1890s but trump is the most successful populist we ever had. To the best modify knowledge, though, never called himself a populist. But its pretty clear the cornerstone of trumpism is the following claim, that the American People have been betrayed and taken advantage of by corrupt and incompetent elite from both parties. Its interesting to note that early in his campaign he mostly called the elites incompetent, but he soon made his case more compelling by starting to attack them for being corrupt and for taking advantage of the American People. Now, not surprisingly, these elites reacted in kind. And they warned us in the strongest possible terms that a Trump Presidency would bring about the end of america and quite possibly the rest of the world. I really cant resist sharing with you some of the most hyperbolic predictions made by leading pundits on the right and left on the eve of trumps election. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Andrew Sullivan wrote, trump is an extinction level event, end quote. His election would mark the end of the democracy and the beginning of tyranny in america. Paul krugman with his characteristic subtlety, warned america we would soon become trump istan with contempt for the rule of law, with no restrain whatsoever. His conservative colleague, the usually very sensible ross, was no more reassuring. He offered his three, i quote, basen dangers for Trump Administration. These were not farflung predictions but the called them perils that we would very likely face, and 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 full year into the Trump Presidency, and america and the world are somehow still standing. Not a single one [applause] not a single one of these dooms day overblown scenario t