Wednesday on his radio show, talk show host Mark Levin dissected what he saw as the driving force behind GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s candidacy, which was described as “agrarian national populism” and said it was akin to Richard Nixon’s candidacy in 1968, not Ronald Reagan’s of 1980.

“You and I want to run 1980,” he said. “They want to run 1968. It’s really not that more complicated. ‘Well, what do we have here – an evolution of conservatism. Ah, yes – agrarian national populism.’ The pseudo-morons, phony intellectuals who write this stuff obvious don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re very, very new to conservatism. They want to have an enormous impact. They think they’re going to control events. They will learn otherwise. I don’t pretend to control events. I just give you my opinion.”

Later in segment, Levin said it was his view that populism was in conflict with the Constitution.

“This is this populism thing,” he said. “It’s not populism. It’s pandering. And let me tell you something else – if you believe in our constitutional system and people say they do, the Constitution is not about populism. It’s not about pluralism. It’s about liberty. You cannot have a majority of people voting whether or not you have unalienable rights. You have unalienable rights no matter what anybody says. They belong to you. They’re God-given natural rights and our Constitution recognizes that. Are we supposed to shred it? Are we supposed to give it up? Is that ideological purity, a phrase that everybody is throwing around now? No we want 1980, not 1968 – 1980, not 1968. We’re not ideological purists. We’re conservatives.”

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