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by Jay B. Gaskill
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POPULISM 101
PARTY, POLITY AND POPULISM
By
Jay B. Gaskill
I began this piece as a series of posts in 2006. Those articles are reprised here – slightly
condensed – then I address the current election as it will or will not be
shaped by populist concerns in the last section.
Populism is of two varieties:
Paleo-left (think Chavez in
I’m interested in
Neo-American populism. In Part Eight,
I begin a discussion about the implications for the 2008 presidential contest.
PART ONE
COOPERATING ELITES
Here’s the deal: We’ve evolved two cooperating political
elites, each of which runs one of the two parties and shares three common
traits: (1) high education levels, (2) important wealth (3) a distrust of the
populist vote bordering on fear. Winning
elections for each requires a periodic courting ritual during which the
populist vote (on which success depends) is earnestly sought, followed by a
measure of post-election betrayal.
The corporate country club
conservatives and the Lexus limousine liberals have so far succeeded in
achieving a rough division of the populist center: social populists on one
side, economic populists on then other.
But conditions are rapidly
changing. Democrats finally became desperate
enough to bend the rules of political correctness in order to recapture
congress. Republicans, faced with the
prospective loss of the Reagan democrats (read patriotic, blue collar
populists), are rethinking the “betrayal thing”.
Change is in the air. The divide-the-populist-vote-and-prosper
strategies of each party are coming apart.
In Part Two, I take up the
three populist issues that are causing the political elites the most trouble.
Before doing that, some preliminary observations are
in order:
The general thrust of this
discussion will be the influence of populism in American politics during the
next decade or so, a time when it is very likely that the democratic and
republican parties will undergo significant change.
Two Disclaimers:
1.
Populism
as an ideology has a checkered history for a reason. All populist ideologies eventually betray
populist expectations. Populism as
ideology distorts the populist ethos and exploits it. This is part of the reason (the best part)
that the elites in both parties distrust populism.
2.
Neither
populist issues nor populist candidates always win elections because voters
triage the issues that are of most immediate concern to them at the moment and
local concerns tend to trump general concerns.
A Working Definition:
Populist is meant to
describe the politically relevant precepts, attitudes and core positions that
distinguish an enduring majority of adults from the political elites that
depend on their approval.
In general, populist
positions tend to be dismissed or marginalized by the political elites as
primitive or unenlightened while the elite counter positions are disdained by
populist minds as effete or impractical.
It is a huge mistake for
elites to think of populist positions as the product of the unintelligent or
that all the elite positions of the moment represent the inevitable march of
social progress. The most enduring
populist positions are rooted in field-tested folk wisdom of the kind that has
inspired parables like the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Both elite and popular opinions
are subject to fads. The populist
positions that interest me the most are the ones that endure from election to
election and will be relevant to the specifically American political scene over
the next decade or so. I will identify
and discuss the top three populist issues but several others will necessarily
enter the discussion.
Let me begin with two
predictions:
1.
The
elements in the elite-engendered ethos loosely described as Political correctness (specifically
including racial-ethnic identity politics) that collide most sharply the
populist mindset will be discredited within our lifetimes.
2.
The
political party or parties that do the best job of reconciling their policy
stances with the core populist positions will prevail over those that fail to do
so.
PART TWO
THE THREADS
Here are the three most
prominent threads in the reemerging American populism that will shape the
parties and the political discussion over the next decade.
They
are:
1. Procedural
populism. The signal anti-populist development of the
last 65 years was the emergence of governance via non-elected institutions
under the control of the non-populist elites of the two parties. Principally
the courts and the administrative agencies, these new power centers have
quietly and not so quietly set public policies in motion that never could have
gathered sufficient popular support.
Examples, many obvious, will follow as I expand this discussion. The
signal pro-populist development in the same period was the emergence –
principally in
2. Me-first
nationalism. Starting with Ross Perot several election
cycles ago, this is the many headed hydra that the elites in both parties fear
the most, and it is the most universal form of populism. The failure of the Soviet Empire is an international
model is a classic case of a putative universal ideology hitting the
nationalist wall. Note that party elites
of all stripes tend to be more internationalist than the so called “common
people”.
3. Tough
minded populism vs. the wimp elites. This covers a whole range of issues that will be pivotal in the next
decade, all interesting.
Background and a Reprise: The Larger
Populist “Program” and the prospects of a “Populist reformation”
In
the wake of the democratic defeat of 2002, I wrote about the coming populist
reformation. It will be an interesting
exercise to review just how far the democrats have moved – given their recent
reversal of fortunes, because that will determine – at least in my opinion – how durable or evanescent their
victory will be over the next three election cycles.
This
is what I wrote then:
The democrats and the republicans each need a
leader whose visceral commitment to a muscular and farsighted defense of the
homeland is immediately recognized as authentic, a leader who speaks with a
distinctly American voice, the voice of a modern
populist. This must be content
not stylistic populism because Americans can tell the difference.
Here’s what the post 9-11 version of a
renewed American populism would look like:
·
Populism
speaks with the confident assertion of American exceptionalism,
the ideal of
·
Populism
is rooted in our common American social values, especially the historically
pro-family social traditions that govern in the heartland. These values trump all the non-democratic
institutions of governance. While I still believe that a legitimate populist
movement can accommodate local custom (when popular sentiment clearly differs
from the mainstream, thinking of the accommodations for gay marriage in Vermont
for example), I also believe that there can be no accommodation for the anti-democratic reversal of the popular
will in the rest of the country in this important area of life, especially by judicial fiat. When judges abuse their trust by overriding
the popular will on essential “family values” issues, a populist rebellion is
inevitable.
·
Populism
values the contribution of all newly arrived Americans but recognizes that the
current very low rate of assimilation
poses a threat to American cultural integrity.
There is an emerging populist consensus about immigration: the rigorous
exclusion of illegals coupled with robust restrictive border control and a very
high priority for assimilation into American culture and values.
·
Populism
is authentically tough on crime and
terrorism. National and domestic security considerations (especially during the
current wartime conditions -- think of FDR’s “Freedom from Fear”) trump all
bureaucratic processes, political correctness, isolationist obstructionism, and
fractious interest group politics. A self confident populist administration
would overcome the narrow civil libertarian objections to “racial” profiling to
exclude terrorist suspects and to the use biometric identification technologies
and terrorist lists for all those entering the
·
A
populist environmental policy is explicitly pro-human, with equal emphasis on
resource preservation and people access. Environmentalism by the people
and for the people prevails over those who worship the environment as some
quasi-deity or who elevate the protection of obscure species at the expense of
the concerns of ordinary people.
·
Populists
favor and honor productive work (which includes the critically important
work of child rearing) over all forms of subsidized idleness. Few living
democrats seem to honor the pro-work ethos of FDR’s New Deal except in hollow
rhetoric.
·
Populists
agree that the burdens of taxes must be meaningfully reduced on those who are actually working for a living. This issue transcends all the other
left-right, partisan issues on tax policy.
·
Populist
economic and social policy is governed by the goal of promoting upward mobility
without undermining the value of the goal:
to be successful, financially secure, and to be allowed pass on those benefits
to one’s family. Liberals find it
incomprehensible that “ordinary” working people, who (from the perspective of
the Euro-centric left) have no prospect of gaining great wealth, would
nevertheless oppose confiscatory taxation of estates. This is because these liberals don’t take the
American dream as seriously as do the so called “common” people.
In other words, there is a core populist
agenda the departure from which vitiates all populist rhetoric.
PART THREE
FRACTURES
ON THE LEFT AND RIGHT
It is increasingly the case
that neither major
THE
DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S INTERNAL FRACTURES
The big tent party that once
held hawks like
I’m applying the term
“political liberal” to the partisan liberal left, those people for whom being a
“liberal”: (a) is kind of a calling, in which some one’s declaration that “I’m
a liberal” sounds very much like “I’m a Seventh Day Adventist” (my apologies to
all SDA’s – this is just an illustration); (b) the
liberal self-identification is meant to immediately imply a specific litany –
dare I say catechism -- of specific doctrines.
In general these are the positions that are shared by the left wing of
the Democratic Party and the Green party.
A short list of the defining
“positions” of political liberals would include the common liberal sentiments shared
by most conservatives (opposition to racism, the devaluation of women and the
concern for the protection of the quality of the natural environment, which are
mainstream issues and sentiments widely shared by almost everyone). But in the “fevered minds” of political
liberals, these sentiments become conflated into an epic struggle against the
grotesque foes of all that is good and true.
This is a mythic “liberal” construct in which all middle class whites
are inherently racist; all heterosexual males are irredeemably sexist; and all
businesses (save a select few who donate heavily to liberal causes) are bent on
raping the environment.
It
is no coincidence that political liberals thickly populate some of the
wealthiest and best educated coastal and urban communities in
·
A comfortable hedonism enjoyed by predominantly well educated post-religious
middle class and upper class sub-populations;
·
A “hip”
social outlook that tends to mask or anesthetize moral qualms about the
enjoyment of their position; effect this is a shared social milieu in which
“style” and social “sophistication” operate to confer on their life styles a
sort of gentile veneer of social virtue, one characterized by “tolerance”;
·
Compartmentalized morality, especially in the arts, an attitude that holds that
the arts are generally to be free of all traditional moral stances and
constraints, except for a small sub-component (honored more by gesture than
actually patronized) in which the condemnation of oppression and the
celebration of the oppressed are featured elements;
·
Non judgmental attitudes about “sins” of
the educated and tolerant,
overlooking drug abuse, “life-style” motivated abortions, serial divorces and a
whole range sexual behavior typically condemned in less “sophisticated”
cultures;[1]
·
The tendency to see morality as the
avoidance of social criticism,
resulting in a cinematic definition of the moral “stand”, where morality is
understood primarily in terms of appearances;
·
The notion that morality is properly and
even sufficiently manifested by moral gestures. As a result, “correct” positions and stances trump
all gritty engagement with the world, even at the expense of practical results.
How
do we explain the fierce grip maintained by the religion of political
liberalism over its adherents?
Liberalism’s
tendency to elevate “correct” stances and gestures creates an extraordinary
ability to shield the comfortable hedonist life styles of its main adherents
from moral criticism. Thus the religion
of liberalism represents a form of social détente and clever camouflage.
The
religion of political liberalism has three principal canons:
1. Nationalization
of charity. Humanitarian endeavors cannot be effectively
performed, nor equitably supported unless they are done by government
agencies. This has the virtue of
insulating its adherents from real moral claims on their personal
resources. In effect, the
political-moral stance that begins with the phrase-- “I support….(you can fill
in the blanks with a liberal cause here)” becomes the equivalent of “I gave at
the office.”
2. Social
Marxism. This stance (going by
various other names of course) dictates that a doctrine of (pretended) social
equality substitutes for the now discredited ruthless redistribution of all
wealth. This stance (which was really
the ur-source of political correctness) allows its
adherents to accomplish (or at least favor)
the humiliation and social repression of those whom its shifting fashions might
choose to label oppressors. This is a low cost approach to egalitarianism and
protects those whose sophisticated hedonism would otherwise be criticized. The
appropriately expressed politically correct bromides are the camouflage of
“undeserved” well off.
3. Collective
Expiation of guilt. Social
survivor guilt, the inevitable result of a sense of “unearned” well being, is
expiated by this religion’s ritual practices.
These rituals, for the most part, consist of bumper stickers, public
gestures, cocktail party banter, and occasional political activity in support
of liberal causes.
The
psychological strength of the liberal religion derives from four related
developments in the human condition, mostly confined to the highly developed
and prosperous communities in
(1) The collapse of traditional religious
and other transcendent moral claims on the individual among the dominant
intelligentsia of the developed world;
(2) The persistent, nagging voice of
residual conscience, still suffered by those anti-traditional secularists who
have not yet succumbed to outright nihilism;
(3) The emperor-has-no-clothes fragility of
the whole act, such that any invalidation or repudiation of a part of the
doctrine threatens the whole;
(4) The deep psychological dread of any
prospective return to individual accountability measured by an authoritative
moral system.
FRACTURES AND HINTS OF
FRACTURES IN THE LIBERAL CAMP
No every liberal minded
person buys into the conventional liberal catechism. Religious liberals remain alienated,
pro-military liberals are rarely welcome – except as token “showpieces”. In the post-civil rights movement era, many
liberals have jumped ship when confronted by the excesses of identity politics
and the occasional overreaching of remedial, reparations-motivated actions of
courts, regulatory agencies, academic institutions and employers. Others,
former blue collar members of the FDR coalition, are irritated at welfare
abuses, the seemingly unlimited influx of foreign workers and the outsourcing
of good jobs.
Many others jump ship when
confronted with mandatory social liberalism.
These are among the latent fractures in the democratic party – once the
grand FDR coalition of “working people” and intellectuals – papered over at
election time via the attempted demonization of the
right.
THE
GOP’S FISSURES
In 2006, I wrote
that –
“The last
election may or may not expose the growing ideological fractures in the
conservative ranks. We can assume, for the purposes of this analysis,
that the
“That depends, in
my analysis, on the extent to which the conservatives recapture their earlier
populist momentum (that was driven by mostly populist rejection of elitist
democratic liberals). The GOP lost its populist identification in
2006. This debacle was driven by a popular revulsion at the ruling
congressional republicans who were seen as phony populists. To understand how
this happened we need to review the surfacing cracks in the conservative
movement.”
As a coherent
belief system, conservatism is in flux. Revulsion at the excesses of the
left no longer fully or adequately defines “conservative”.
Here is my short
list of the conflicts and overlapping sub-movements within this loosely defined
conservative alliance:
1. The religious
vs. secular conservatives (the latter unconcerned about God in the pledge or
the Decalogue in the public square);
2. The “social”
conservatives vs. the “socially tolerant” ones (generating issues like abortion
vs. free choice and traditional marriage vs. “new paradigm”);
3. The
libertarian conservatives vs. the public order conservatives (this fuels the
drug legalization conflict, among others);
4. The
isolationists vs. interventionists (isolationists went silent when the
5. Between the
nationalists and internationalists (of which the free trade vs. American
protectionism is but one example).
The President first
identified himself as a possible populist political leader when he was the
governor of
The President’s
populist persona reemerged post 911 in the rubble of the
As I wrote in 2006
–
“The [“
In the
immediate wake of the 911 attacks, the fractures on the right were healed, and
the left was silenced. Then the American response became complicated,
protracted and victory “in the cinematic sense” seemed far, far away…
PART FOUR
THE IMPACT OF THE BUSH
PRESIDENCY
The liberal intelligentsia
who woke up on
When the republican Texas
governor, whose occupation of the White House on that occasion was an
historical fluke (from their point of view), suddenly became a credible
populist, tremors of real fear rippled though the entire democratic
establishment. The democrats had endured
a previous republican populist under the movie star turned Great Communicator,
Ronald Reagan. A repeat performance by
RR II could well have ended the democratic dominance of the American political
scene for decades. These democrats knew,
but were loath to publicly acknowledge, just how far their party had strayed
from the blue collar roots of the FDR coalition – hence the “Reagan democrat”
phenomenon and the Democratic Party’s ongoing vulnerability.
Insiders in the Democratic
Party knew all too well that a majority of their former “working class” allies
were not in favor of the abolition of the death penalty for murder, had
absolutely no pacifist inclinations when it came to anyone who would dare
attack America, and no longer responded like red diaper baby ‘neo-com’s to the anti-capitalist, class bating that had served
their European labor counterparts so well.
I believe that the original
impulse that fueled the liberal campaign to stoke hatred of George W. Bush was
fear. The democratic inner circle knew
that this president must be stopped from gaining real traction among their
“natural constituencies” at all costs.
When President Bush – who had
relied on the same intelligence that had led President Clinton to the same conclusion
– was confronted with the post invasion failure to find Saddam’s large stocks
of WMD’s, the democrats were quick to exploit the
issue: They instinctively knew that the
weak link of any populist leader is a betrayal of trust.
Had “W” been a more
effective, visceral populist, instead of the inherently decent son of George
and Barbara, he would have turned on
The populist mind is
combative and loves a decisive victory.
This president’s troubles flowed from his inability to deliver victory
quickly enough. As I wrote in early
2006: “I am certain that the
Eventually the political
landscape will be formed by the larger war, the jihad against the West, by the
energy production independence issue and by that sleeper issue that won’t go
away: Who will be working in this country at what jobs, for whom and at what
pay?
PART FIVE
THE COMING
POPULIST REFORMATION
As the conservative and
liberal elites grapple with the implications of coming populist reformation,
everyone should remember that the main populist strands of opinion, concerns and
perspectives are not the only such threads in American politics, just the ones
most often neglected by the elites of the left and right. This is why populism tends to erupt from time
to time, instead of congealing around a particular party or set of interest
groups.
The center of gravity of
American populism is located among those who are too busy working, earning and
living real lives (elites would say “mundane” lives, here) to become political
junkies. They periodically awake -- like
the mythical sleeping giant – only when provoked by prolonged policy neglect or
irritated into sufficient anger by repeated disregard of their core values and
concerns. When the elites forget who really serves whom for long enough, there
is hell to pay.
Populism has a sharply
different look and feel in the USA as opposed to, say, Venezuela or Iran
because the American middle class is so well entrenched and numerous that its
numbers overwhelm those who cling to hereditary privilege.
While ours is not a fully
“classless” society, its various divisions tend to be blurry and membership
levels very fluid as people and families migrate from hardship to wealth and
back again. This is the country where
the less wealthy can reasonably aspire to wealth and the wealthy can reasonably
worry about losing everything.
In this milieu, there are
only two great “class” divisions in the populist mind that really matter: those who work, create value and
struggle to make productive things happen for themselves, their families and the
community at large, and those who manipulate the former group.
In the populist mind, the
manipulative class includes the idle rich, the idle poor, and the political and
cultural leaders who exploit the productive “class”.
As I wrote in 2006 --
“The coming populist
reformation will be driven by the events and exigencies of the next few years
because these challenges will bring the failures of elites of right and left to
address the core populist values and concerns into sharp relief.
“The elites could have seen
this coming. Think of the California tax
revolt, the popular resistance in many states to judicial or administrative
attempts to impose political correctness (as in the aborted attempt to conflate
gay rights with the earlier post-slavery struggles of the civil rights era) and
the abrupt right turn by the democrats on the border security issue.
“What are the challenging
events and exigencies of the next few years?
The broad outlines are already clear.
The pattern was first evident with the oil and hostage crisis under the
non-populist President Jimmie Carter and became blatant with the
“Incidentally, when one is
discussing disaster in the context of growing populism, ‘disaster’ can take one
or both of two forms: (1) The trigger event that inaugurates a true populist
eruption – through neglect or deception – actually happens; (2) We get a
powerful, irresponsible populist figure on the stage bent on ‘sticking it to’
the elites. The notion of a ‘populist
reformation’ is that the elites will be able to reconcile rational policy to
the main populist concerns before a triggering disaster takes place. The game so far has been one of obfuscation,
placation and deception. In the hyper
information age, this game is now over.
Information flow has been democratized.”
The list of hot button
populist issues and pending challenges to our elites is longer than this, of
course. I’ll get to several more as this discussion progresses.
PART SIX
THE
BLUE DOGS OF
As I observed in 2006:
Political junkies know
that “Blue Dog Democrats” are the party’s moderates and semi-conservatives. They have been locked out of the building so
long that they have turned blue in the cold, hence the term.
Well,
as a result of the last Congressional election, there are more of them. And as a group, they are less politically
correct than the dominant democrat species. Within the small group of original
Blue Dogs we find Representative Jane Harmon, ranking democrat of the House
Intelligence Committee, by all accounts an intelligent and effective moderate.
The new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a quintessentially politically correct liberal
had twice snubbed Ms. Harmon. The Class
of 06 will give this Speaker much more trouble.
And there is more trouble still in the making.
I
am predicting that the worst excesses of political correctness will be rejected
by the American people first then by their representatives. We are beginning to
see the first signs of this trend; the coming populist reformation begins to
gain traction in Congress.
The Populist
Reformation vs. the Political Correctness Imposed by the Elites
By this time in history, the term PC (or Political
Correctness) should require little explanation. Yet I’ve discovered a large
variation among audiences; often --while a plurality “gets it” -- a substantial number of people –
especially on the “left coast” have never actually given the matter any thought;
for them the whole idea is dismissed as some “talk show” construct.
Political Correctness is a form of social Marxism in
which the role of the proletariat is replaced by an ever expanding victim
class, including groups that are “entitled” to redress of grievances. These grievances can include mere slights,
among other things, the offense of speaking ill of them (an offense determined
solely by the victim class). This places
open discussion, free speech and normal social interaction hostage to the most
overheated victim-sensitive souls among us, and opens up an avenue for a form
of blackmail by persons or groups posing as victims.
One current side effect is the notion of
“multiculturalism” a construct based on an ethos of tolerance so extreme that
we are now expected to tolerate as “equally valid” groups and individuals whose
intolerance poses an actual danger to our essential freedoms.
Former British Labor PM, Tony Blair, a brave man with
common sense, made the following observation in 2006, to the consternation of
the left on his side of the
“If outsiders wishing to settle in
“If you come here lawfully,
we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an
equal member of our community and become one of us. The right to be different.
The duty to integrate. That is what being British means.”
A major American public figure giving a similar
speech might well be required to apologize for his or her violation of “PC”
rules.
PC is a socio-political
ideology based on four elements:
1.
A
radical egalitarianism, the notion that all human differences are arbitrary and
accidental and that the proper goal of society is: (a) to pretend these
differences don’t exist; and/or (b) to force social reality to conform to the
construct in which they don’t exist.
2.
Systems
of legal, peer, and cultural repression designed to punish those who deny or
oppose #1.
3.
A
“victim” coalition to implement #2 against all who resist (who now become, by
definition, the oppressors).
4.
A
style of implementation that conceals the hard edges of the forgoing by
promoting fictional voluntary compliance,
forms of social “reeducation”, and “consensus building.”
This amounts to a thinly
disguised return to tribalism (whose membership is defined by PC
victim/oppressor categories), a de facto
repeal of the gains for the individualism and rationalism of the
Enlightenment. The latent incoherence of
the PC agenda becomes evident when conflicts emerge – as they already have–
among the various “victim” groups, and when membership of one or more such
victim groups must be narrowed, eliminated, or the excluded members even
redefined as oppressors. The group of favored minorities resembles an exclusive
social club. The exclusion of the Jews
in the decades after their active leadership participation in the American Civil
Right’s movement coupled with the growing anti-Semitism among some
African-American leaders is one case in point.
The attempt to exclude hard
working, “over-achieving” Asian-American students in the affirmative action
context is another. The prospective
exclusion of Hispanic-American males (as “too Catholic” and “too macho”) is the
newest trend. Well educated, high achieving African-Americans are not far
behind.
The growing tribalism has
actually prompted some to self identify as “Euro-Americans” but I doubt that
membership in “club victim” will be open to them.
The populists are now
laughing at the PC elites. Think how
they/we will look to some future generation:
All this will change. The PC
elites are about to be rescued by the coming populist reformation.
As I write this, the burgeoning
presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a post-movement “black” male, seem for
the first time in American politics to transcend ethnic identity politics.
PART SEVEN
WHY
AMERICAN POPULISM IS UNIQUE
There is an apparent
contradiction for anyone who tries to write sympathetically about populism,
because doing that is an “elite” activity.
Or is it? My favorite populist thinker of the 20th
century was Eric Hoffer, the immigrant longshoreman.
He was self educated, trenchant and brilliant. His signature work, “The True
Believer” was a classic takedown of the elites of communism, Nazism and the
religious authorities whose organizational structure these two bloody secular
religions of the last century copied. I had the privilege of seeing this
passionate, coherent longshoreman twice when I was a student in the Bay Area.
He was a man who maintained from life experience that the common people were
“lumpy with talent” and that the idle intellectuals were a dangerous
combination of skill and lack of judgment.
As a student, I worked in
road construction and enjoyed the company these older guys for whom a 10 hour
day with a shovel or jackhammer was a career, as opposed to a source of tuition
money. As a lawyer, I’m now unable to deny my “elite station” in life.
My predicted populist
reformation is not a populist revolution.
We’ve seen far too many of those events; they end badly for the working
people these revolutions purport to help.
Instead I’m predicting (and
supporting) a mutual adjustment of the relationship between the manipulative
elites and the productive men and women who actually make things happen.
This reformation is only possible in contemporary
Ours is a unique situation,
the product of three converging social forces:
(1) the democratization of
information flow (note that the cyber-revolution is already changing the
information dominance of the academy);
(2) the democratization of
economic processes (success of the pricing systems and entrepreneurial models
of modern capitalism that are copied within socialist economies produce a sort
of quick-entry elite group and destabilize the older ideological and hereditary
elites);
(3) the decline of the
authority of the manipulative elites because of the corrosive effects of an
overly-fluid relativistic value perspective that has caused the withering away
of the traditional moral underpinnings of all ruling cliques everywhere that
the post-modern ethos has penetrated.
Just how dramatically
different is the American situation?
Compare just two examples:
In
rural
In
this country, a late term unborn male, heart beating, just short of unassisted
viability outside the womb, is dismembered at the prospective mother’s
request. Some of our elites defend this
as a “therapeutic medical procedure” and as a “proper exercise of female
autonomy”. Some of our populists condemn
the practice as “barbaric, approaching infanticide” or even as “murder”.
Leaving aside all of the constitutional law arguments
and nuanced public policy debate on the abortion issue, we elites might
reasonably concede that it is not at all clear whether the elite position
always represents the more enlightened moral perspective.
This raises the major reason
that our current circumstances auger a populist reformation that will soon
effect a transformation in one or both of this country’s political
parties.
The older established elites
operated openly, sustained by a mantle of moral authority grounded in deep
tradition and/or universal moral principles commonly accepted as normative by
an overwhelming majority.
The post modern elites are so disconnected from the
popular ethos that the must attempt to operate in the background, their actual
attitudes and positions cloaked with three well honed opinion shaping
“technologies”: deception, obfuscation and distraction. This is a hard act to maintain in the
information age, much like that of the emperor who thought none of his subjects
would notice that he was naked.
A necessary caveat: At this point I will seem to have romanticized the populist
ethos. This is really the contrast
effect. The modern populist perspective
looks very good next to the post modern moral ambivalence and narcissistic
indulgence (including a tendency to faux moral posturing) that prevail among
the manipulative elites.
Naturally, there are aspects
of the populist mindset (especially on the fringes) that I don’t share. For example, I am much more inclined to
support changes in public policy and private practice that include our gay and
lesbian friends in the mainstream than is typically acceptable within the
populist mindset. But I differ with the
typical elite perspective that dismisses American populist thinking as
retrograde or barbaric. I agree with the
populists who would not conflate the full social integration of our tiny gay
subpopulation with the struggles against slavery. In the main, the distinctively American
version of populism has captured a great deal of folk wisdom and common sense
morality that the elites should dismiss only at their peril.
A special qualification: By
contrasting the manipulative, non-productive elites with the much larger group
of us who are engaged in productive work, I have radically changed the contours
of the normal populist-elite divide, and effectively reduced the number of
issues held in common that define the populist perspective.
I would specifically include among the populist cohort
those of us who toil at creative tasks.
The creative-productive among us have their own set of “issues” with the
manipulative, non-productive elites.
Modern American
populism, in this expanded and general sense, is much more functionally
egalitarian than non-American populists and much more so than our own
manipulative elites who profess an ideal utopian equality that is functionally
empty.
At the deepest, often
unexamined level, our elites have a very strange egalitarian notion indeed, one
driven by the psychological contradiction between an ingrained narcissism and
the need to be “well thought of”. I see
three elements operating in the manipulative elite mindset:
(1) Those who think alike are
morally equal.
(2) Material inequalities of
all kinds should be redressed by some kind of compensation.
(3) The manipulative elites
manage to feel insulated against the (truthful) allegation that they’re part of
the “inequality problem” by selectively demonizing the people who don’t think
like them. After all (these elites typically think) that retrograde,
unenlightened mindset is the root cause of all the world’s ills.
Our home grown populists are
united by a common experience of productive struggle. That experience validates of the value of earning
which leads quickly to the idea that all men and women are entitled to keep the
fruits of their productive efforts.
Inequalities tend to be readily accepted by the populist mind when they
are not accomplished by fraud and are not accompanied by hypocrisy.
There are conscientious and
reasonable members of the manipulative elites who will be able accommodate the
coming populist reformation. But this
will require some self-reassessment. I
see two takeaway points that will be central to this process:
1.
All
of the most salient and durable populist positions represent “field tested”
values, enduring social norms whose utility is well established. These include tough “rule-consequences”
policies for crime control, the obvious morality of retribution against our
enemies on the foreign policy stage, the need for robust protection of the
earned fruits of the productive efforts of “the people”, and for strong,
effective policies to protect the health and stability of the families who make
and rear children.
2.
The
elites owe respect for all strongly held populist positions such that major
reversals or changes should never be accomplished via deception or
manipulation.