Conservatives Should Embrace Principled Populism — and Govern with Trump
By partnering, conservatives can help a President Trump decentralize power.
By Mike Lee — November 24, 2016
‘It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” Calvin Coolidge once said. With a unified federal government soon to be in Republican hands, however, maybe we can do a bit of both.
But how? While congressional Republicans tend to identify as conservatives, President-elect Donald Trump is a populist. Many observers, including some Republicans, see this as an un-squareable circle.
I disagree. For all the challenges a President Trump may present conservatives during his term, his populism need not be one of them. Far from contradictory, conservatism and populism complement each other in ways that can change history — as did the most successful populist in recent decades, Ronald Reagan.
The chief political weakness of conservatism is its difficulty identifying problems that are appropriate for political correction. Conservatism’s view of human nature and history teaches us that problems are inevitable in this world and that attempts to use government to solve them often only make things worse.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442450/print