When Populism Loses Its Constitutional Compass

Here is a truth that makes both establishment Republicans and progressive Democrats deeply uncomfortable: populism is not a political ideology. It is a raw, corrective force. And like any raw force, it can either repair a broken system or knock down the guardrails that keep us free. The difference depends entirely on whether the people wielding that force remember why the guardrails exist in the first place.

Let me be clear about something from the start: I understand the anger. I share it. For decades, the bipartisan elite in Washington has treated the American people as subjects to be managed, not citizens to be respected. They sold us trade deals that gutted our manufacturing base, opened our borders to millions of people without any plan for assimilation, and racked up debts that our children will spend a lifetime repaying. The smugness of the credentialed class, the think-tank economists, the Ivy League lawyers, the donor-class consultants, has been a constant insult to the hardworking, taxpaying Americans who built this country.

When Rush Limbaugh railed against the drive-by media in the 1990s, he was giving voice to a people who had been lied to and condescended to. When Charlie Kirk today stands on college campuses and exposes the hypocrisy of the speech police, he is speaking for a generation that has been told their heritage is shameful and their aspirations are illegitimate. When Vivek Ramaswamy calls out the woke Inc. apparatus that has taken over our corporations and institutions, he is channeling the fury of millions who watched their country be transformed without their consent. This is populism. And it is not wrong.

But here is the paradox that the Founders understood better than any modern pundit or cable-news host: the people can be just as dangerous as the elites. A majority united by passion and grievance is no more trustworthy than an oligarchy united by self-interest. Both are capable of trampling the rights of the minority, of ignoring the rule of law, and of concentrating power in ways that destroy liberty.

James Madison warned us about this in Federalist No. 10. He called it the problem of faction, a group of citizens, whether a majority or a minority, driven by a common impulse of passion or interest that is adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. Madison's great insight was that a pure democracy, what he called a democracy in the classical sense, where the people vote directly on every issue, was the most fertile ground for faction. Such democracies, he wrote, have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

That is why the Constitution is not a charter of pure democracy. It is a republic, a system of government designed to filter popular passions through a structure of representation, separated powers, checks and balances, federalism, and an independent judiciary. The Constitution does not trust anyone with too much power. Not the elites. Not the masses. Not the president. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Everyone gets a little power, and each branch has the tools to check the others.

This is not an accident. It is the hard-won lesson of thousands of years of human history, from the Greek city-states to the Roman Republic to the warring factions of eighteenth-century Europe. The Founders knew that even virtuous people, when inflamed by passion, could be led to commit terrible injustices. They designed a system that would make it hard to act on impulse, slow, deliberate, requiring supermajorities and inter-branch consensus.

The unique angle that almost no one talks about, the one that makes both left-wing and right-wing populists squirm, is this: populism, in its purest form, is a rebellion against the constitutional order itself. It demands immediate, direct action from a leader who gets it. It hates slow processes, committee hearings, judicial review, states' rights, and the separation of powers, because those things get in the way of what the people want right now. And yet those very structures are the only things that protect us from a tyranny of the majority.

Consider the current populist impulse on the Right. I am sympathetic to many of its goals: securing the border, draining the swamp, ending the censorship of conservative voices by big tech, restoring national sovereignty. But the means matter just as much as the ends. Do we want to secure the border by passing a law through Congress, as the Constitution requires? Or do we want to do it by executive order, which can be reversed by the next president? Do we want to drain the swamp by restoring the separation of powers and reining in the administrative state? Or do we want to empower a single strong leader to break the rules on our behalf? Do we want to punish big tech censors by enforcing the First Amendment through the courts, or by creating a government commission to police speech?

The distinction between those two paths is the difference between preserving liberty and undermining it.

Thomas Sowell taught us to judge policies by their consequences, not their intentions. A populist leader may intend to restore national sovereignty. But if he does it by ignoring the separation of powers, he inadvertently teaches the public that the Constitution is an obstacle, not a foundation. The next populist, from the Left, will use that same playbook, but for a very different purpose. And when that happens, the people who cheered the first round of constitutional shortcuts will have no principled ground to stand on.

This is not hypothetical. We have seen it before. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt, a populist in his own right, challenging the economic royalists, tried to pack the Supreme Court because it kept striking down his New Deal programs. He was frustrated by the constitutional guardrails, and he wanted them removed. The public was largely with him. But cooler heads in his own party prevailed, and the court-packing scheme failed. The guardrails held. That was a near miss.

On the other side, look at Huey Long, the Louisiana populist who built a near-dictatorship in his state using the language of taking on the corporate elites. Long's Share Our Wealth program was popular, but his methods, ignoring the state legislature, controlling the judiciary, using armed force against political opponents, were a textbook case of how populism can curdle into tyranny. He was assassinated before he could run for president, and we may owe our republic to a single bullet.

The lesson is clear: populism without constitutional principle is a recipe for authoritarianism.

Now, let me address my friends on the Right who may be bristling at this. I am not saying that the populist anger is wrong, or that we should go back to the polite, donor-class conservatism of the pre-2016 era. That conservatism was a failure. It gave us endless foreign wars, exploding debt, and a leadership class that treated conservatism as a country-club membership rather than a fight for liberty.

But a truly conservative populism must be constitutionalist first. It must channel popular anger into restoring the original limits on government, not shattering them for short-term victories. It must demand that Congress do its job, write laws, take votes, bear the responsibility. It must insist that the courts respect the text of the law and the Constitution as written, not invent new rights or ignore old ones. It must say no when its own side wants to cut corners, because the precedent will be used against us the next time the political winds shift.

This is the populism of the Tea Party at its best, before it was co-opted by anyone. The Tea Party said: we are angry at the spending, the debt, the bailouts, the bailout of Wall Street. But our solution is to elect people who will obey the Constitution, not ignore it. That is a populism anchored in principle, not grievance. It is a populism that seeks to restore the constitutional order, not overthrow it.

Compare that to the populism of the progressive Left. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are also populists. They rail against billionaires, Wall Street, and the establishment. Their followers are as passionate as any on the Right. But their solution is always the same: more centralized government power. They want to bypass the states, bypass the courts, and use the federal leviathan to impose their vision of social justice. That is not populism rising to defend liberty, it is populism demanding a new master.

The populism that separates itself from the Constitution is just mob rule dressed in a MAGA hat or a Bernie button. The populism that submits itself to the Constitution is the only kind that preserves the liberty we claim to love.

So by all means, let the people rise. Let them demand accountability. Let them sweep out the elites who have treated this country as a personal ATM, who have ignored the rule of law when it suited them, who have governed from the bench and the bureaucracy rather than from the ballot box. But let them do it within the framework of liberty, a framework that protects the lone dissenter, the small business owner, the religious believer, and the minority community from the passion of the moment.

The Constitution is not the enemy of the people. It is the people's last, best defense against their own worst impulses. The populist who forgets that is not a champion of liberty, he is a would-be tyrant in waiting. And the republic cannot afford another one. Let us be populist. Let us be angry. But let us be constitutionalist first.