Populism vs Progressivism pertinent essay by law professor Jack Balkin I want to talk about constitutional theory s relationship to popular attitudes and popular culture in terms of two opposed positions one I shall call populist and the other progressivist 23 The distinction between populism and progressivism is orthogonal to the more familiar distinction between left and right An opposition between progressivism and populism exists wholly within left liberal discourse just as one exists within the discourse of conservatives we might say that the two sets of oppositions form a box of four 24 However for purposes of this essay I want to focus primarily on the discourse of left liberals because it is the ideological community in which both Sunstein and I and a great many other legal academics are located 25 Lots of good stuff in there