The Country Party

NRO/The Corner ^ | July 29, 2013 | Yuval Levin

[JSDude1]

In a characteristically superb column yesterday, Ross Douthat described our contemporary political situation in terms of the “court party” and “country party” — terms drawn from 17th-and 18th-century British politics that refer to a party that wields power for the benefit of elite players and institutions and an opposition that seeks more dispersed power for the benefit of a larger public. No historical analogy is ever perfectly apt, but this one is powerfully clarifying.

Particularly as laid out by its foremost intellectual leader, Henry St. John (the Viscount Bolingbroke), the country party’s idea of an organized political opposition as well as its particular policy vision — which combined a commitment to individual liberty and frugal, restrained government with a kind of social traditionalism — were enormously influential in colonial America and have always continued to exert a powerful influence over our politics. It is an influence that we have often, perhaps too loosely, described as populism.

For much of the past four decades, that kind of substantive populism (as opposed to the far more insidious institutional populism advanced by the early progressives) has tended to be divided into cultural and economic populism, and the two parties have tended to break down along a double axis of populism and elitism

[Uncle Miltie]

YOU HEAR THAT, KARL? WE HATE YOUR STINKING GUTS!

[Impy]

The rats populism has always been a sham.

[neverdem]

Thanks for posting!

[GeronL]

interesting idea

[GeronL]

yes it has