Bill Buckley’s vision of the conservative movement as a loosely-held coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists — three groups who shared certain tangential concerns but held very little else in common — has endured in some form or another all the way through our current political moment.
Family farmers, religious fundamentalists, commodities traders and oil rig workers are all represented under the GOP tent, despite the fact that these groups often share little in the way of common values or life experiences. Appealing to factions within a coalitional party often leads to the pursuit of individual policy prerogatives that are relatively unpopular but nevertheless help band together a viable electoral coalition.
Part also of movement politics, which conservatism has been since at least Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, involves pursuing unpopular doctrinal policies with the goal of winning converts if (and in the ideologue’s belief, when) the policy outperforms the expectations of skeptics. Better still than either of these justifications for the occasional (or not so occasional) preference for ideology over popular sentiment is that it’s possible for a policy to be simultaneously popular and wrong-headed. The fact that cutting spending, for example, is relatively unpopular doesn’t per se render the policy unnecessary or immoral.
This all ought not dissuade Republicans from harnessing the electoral efficacy of populist fervor; populism, broadly defined, has been made significant hay internationally for the political right. But it is at their own peril that conservatives ignore the fact that mainstream elements in the Democrat party deem illegitimate the very existence of small-r republican institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate as their base consolidates in urban metropolitan centers.
For Republicans to claim the mantle of populist fervor while having lost the popular vote is of little service to the central argument conservatives have made for generations: federalism and state’s rights matter greatly to the American experiment, and the United States is, at root, a republican democracy.
Jay Cost of National Review laid out the fundamental conservative arguments against the abolition of the Senate quite well in his 2017 piece “In Defense of the Senate”. “Progressives,” Cost begins “wish to restore a balance by nationalizing our institutions, but the better response is to devolve certain powers back to the states and communities.”
In rightfully enjoying the fruits of a conservative-populist presidency, conservatives should not forget the principles of federalism and localism that have sustained their movement for a generation.