How to Be a Populist Republican Conservative
What is the real alternative to liberalism? There is a general agreement that we now live in a ‘post-liberal’ era, but there is very little clarity or agreement about what replaces liberalism or what liberalism is evolving into. At most it seems that some core elements of liberalism are surviving into the new era anyway, so it still debatable whether we are indeed superseding liberalism (or indeed if we should) or simply helping it survive in a new guise. In recent years three alternatives have appeared as possible rivals to liberalism as a general ideological principle of our societies (albeit with more specific programmatic recommendations remaining still very vague). The first is populism, which emerged in 2016 because of Brexit and Trump as the new major topic of discussion. Populism is generally seen as antithetical to almost all of liberalism’s prescriptions: it opposes independent and counter-majoritarian institutions, it favours political meddling in the field of the economy, i...