“They don’t know what time it is.”

This has been a shopworn phrase among the new Right for some time. It’s been lampooned, and dissected, and thrown back in the face of the people who say it. For my part, I’ve tried never to use it or be bothered by its use because I don’t think anyone ever defined it.

But today, it occurred to me what people might mean by it, if they mean anything. It came to me while reading a report that Mike Pence is going to be given $20 million to save conservatism from populism. From RCP:

Former Vice President Mike Pence has a $20 million blueprint for building out an organization meant to defend the sentiment that conservatism, when properly defined, “is bigger than any one moment, election, or person,” RealClearPolitics is first to report.

This was part of the Pence platform while a presidential candidate when he was warning against “unprincipled populism.” It was not a political winner, but it remains the mission of his group, Advancing American Freedom, as they launch what they call the “American Solutions Project.”

Pence has taken this up as his project, as evidenced by his campaign speech denouncing populism and contrasting it with conservatism.

The speech tries to cast populism as entirely a left-wing phenomenon and dead set against conservatism. This does an injustice to both populism and conservatism.

Conservatism is a positive and protective disposition toward our civilizational and cultural inheritance, our traditions, our Constitution. Populism is a rhetorical style that champions the virtuous people, or the producers in society, against feckless elites, or scrounging parasites. They have different objects.

But as soon as mass democracy came about under Disraeli in the U.K. or Jackson in the U.S., conservatism found itself with at least some populist edge. Why? Because common people were still for the monarchy in the U.K., and the Constitution in the U.S. Conservatism tends to stand with common sense against intellectual fads. Liberalism has always been associated with elites, as it always promised to emancipate them from customs and the traditional duties they had toward the crown, the church, and the poor.

I think when people demand that conservative elites learn “what time it is,” they are essentially asking them to recognize that the major sense-making institutions of the United States, and many other civic institutions, or power-exercising bodies, are in the hands of liberal and progressive elites. Conservatives are sometimes slow to abandon institutional authorities, as conservatism likes institutions.

Consequently, populists were faster than conservatives in sniffing out the progressive political gambits that lay behind some of the Covid restrictions imposed by public-health institutions.

Mike Pence is a decent man and should be well remembered in our history for quietly and undramatically doing his duty on January 6, 2021, and for calmly explaining his constitutional role in certifying the results of the 2020 election.

But Pence has always had trouble understanding that business and the conservative values he champions are at odds. Pence makes a big noise about caring about religious freedom. But when Apple, led by Tim Cook, made the slightest threat to Indiana over its RFRA bill, Pence immediately caved. He fundamentally trusts that business institutions are just looking after their business interests, and that in doing so, they are looking out for all of us the best they can. He doesn’t really understand the depth of progressive institutional capture, and that is why he was ineffective in opposing it. In the words of Catholic lingo, he can’t read the signs of the times. Or as populists would say: He doesn’t know what time it is.