Populism And Policy
Posted on October 10th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today. First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer” remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as a matter of policy. These are the “nihilists” he denounced earlier this month for opposing an absolutely indefensible bailout (which now appears all the more indefensible for its inadequacy and its outrageous nature). It should go without saying that after the last few years of technocrats and experts getting so many things so magnificently wrong that this is an unusually poor time to declare the return of a technocratic establishment and the bankruptcy of populism, but this gets at the main problem of populism that is defined as little more than a style or a reflex rather than a more or less coherent set of policies. The basic truth behind the populist skepticism of experts, or at least self-declared, well-placed experts, is that there is no accountability for most of them, which consequently results in the sort of long-term poor performance that a lack of accountability will create. To the degree that failed or compromised oversight was responsible for much of this calamity–in Congress, at the SEC and elsewhere in government–the basic populist demand for oversight and accountability seems more important than ever. The glorification of Palin’s lack of policy knowledge in some quarters should not excuse the failures of all those people in positions of authority and power who should have understood the situation and did not. Here’s the thing–it helps the establishment remain unaccountable if it can label as populist any politician that uses lifestyle and cultural cues as a substitute for policy arguments. As I hope to explain, Palin’s lack of policy knowledge is clear evidence that she is not just a bad populist, but rather not a populist in any meaningful sense at all.
Even in his digs against Mr. Bush’s visceral decisionmaking, his prizing of instincts over intellect, Brooks feels compelled to attack such “populist excesses” as “the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism.” The latter would come as news to those of us who are usually branded as “isolationist,” since it has never been clear when this “excess” was threatening to dominate anything. Certainly no one looking back on the Republican Party of the last eight or ten years could have perceived an excess of isolationism. Indeed, I think most people would be hard-pressed today to understand why a rather more “isolationist,” or rather America First, foreign policy would be either dangerous or excessive. Certainly a foreign policy that recognizes the limits of American power and does not try to overreach with ludicrous security pledges and declarations of Sakartvelian solidarity seems much more appropriate to our present predicament.
It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess” of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform” championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans. The alienation of the GOP leadership from its constituents over immigration demonstrates how empty and meaningless Mr. Bush’s quasi-populist poses have always been. Palin does represent a continuation down the path charted by Mr. Bush, which is the substitution of symbolic lifestyle politics for policies that will serve the constituencies that support the party. In our debased political discourse, what Palin does on the stump is defined as populism. Meanwhile, she serves as the running mate for an establishment fixture who has opposed every so-called “populist excess” that would have served his constituents and the national interest. Everyone criticizes or praises Palin’s “populism” in terms that stress the absolute absence of policy substance, but this is rather like saying that you can have religion without worship or science without knowledge.
Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism. To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions. It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose. It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated. The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess. Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the “successes” of our managerial democracy around the world.
Rod also has a long post on the question of class warfare and anti-intellectualism on the right that is worth reading.
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Thoughtful stuff, Daniel. Speaking as someone who, at the same, agrees with you with regard to the problems with relying upon the “experts”, but also is ambivalent, to say the least, with regard to populism (that’s why I’m a libertarian, I guess), I think that populism inherently has a … difficult relationship with policy substance. I guess what I’m saying is that given the inherent nature of populism, where is the policy substance supposed to come from? When populism does have policy substance (and sometimes it does), it’s when a charismatic leader channels the inchoate concerns of the masses into a coherent policy program. However, more often than not, the policy platforms of these charismatic leaders are problematic, to say the least. See, e.g., Huey Long, though I could name more than a few other examples.
I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts are regarding this. Do you think that there are alternate sources of policy substance available to populist movements? If so, what are they? If not, do you think I’m being unfair regarding the type of leader that often emerges to harness populist movements?
To ask the last question a little differently, let’s imagine a Sarah Palin with the instincts and rhetoric of the real Sarah Palin, but with some policy substance behind her populist rhetoric. Wouldn’t that, in some ways, be worse (as you could imagine such a creature actually gaining power)?
“Sakartvelian solidarity” means … ?
‘It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess†of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform†championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans. ‘
IMO the GOP is never going to do anything to slow illegal immigration. Not as long as they represent business interests which want to control salaries. They’ll side with the anti-immigration people in order to appear populist and to stay on the side of the people who believe the real America has lost it’s way but they love the cheap labor.
If they really wanted to stop it they would have taken steps by now. Real steps. Not lip service about building walls. They got the tax cuts they wanted, they got their wars, they got Bush to fly to DC to sign the Schiavo law, what they really want they get. And in the case of illegal immigration, what they’ve got is a wedge issue that sends the base and a lot of ‘the biggest idiots in the world’ (undecideds - Brian Griffin, Family Guy) into a lather. Trust me it’s bad. We have a sheriff here in AZ who does nothing but have weekly immigrant roundups and this allows him to coast to relection everytime. The right has lots of little two minute hate items it can use to fire up the bitters. Why campaign on issues and make promises you’ll have to blame the media for not keeping? Just dredge up some hate.
” “Sakartvelian solidarity†means … ?”
Well, what is Georgia’s actual name in Georgian, and of which nation did McCain declare us all to be members?
Rawshark, your assessment is probably right, at least as far as the prospects of real action are concerned. Besides the interests that demand cheap labor, there is an advantage in keeping restrictionists on the hook just enough to retain their support. It’s the same way with pro-life activists–throw them a little something, maybe even a judicial appointment they’ll like, and they’ll keep coming back. Why deliver on larger promises when constituencies seem to be happy just to have a seat at the table?
Populism and cosmopolitanism were united only briefly during the eras of W.J. Bryan (NE) and FDR (NY). Bryan’s populism was forged by the robber barons and FDR’s by the Depression. Those were distinctly economic issues that demanded economic responses because America had a consensus on social issues. However, Sen. McCarthy (WI) introduced modern populist demogoguery during the Red Scare and Gov. Wallace (AL) warmed the nation up to Southern style populist demogoguery during the Civil Rights movement. To this day, all liberals are smeared as some form of communist (now “terrorist” sypathizer) and n****r lovers. Bill Ayers represents a nice merger of the two memes in Obama’s case. The themes that were promulgated by McCarthy and Wallace were distinctly non-economic because they emerged during an era of economic prosperity (but social turmoil) for dominant white middle class men. So, the “pilot light” for the economic component of populism was extinguished. When economic decline set in for the white middle class male in the 70s, many saw it as vindication of McCarthy and Wallace who had warned us that pinkos, coloreds, and feminists were going to bring us down. Culture was the cause of the economic decline for the white man–not big business or globalization or a lack of regulation. Only now are people beginning to scratch their heads and wonder. Everyone has become quite comfortable with all of the old cultural bugaboos, so it can’t be that–and no one seriously believes there is any “going back.” Hell, the governor of Alaska’s daughter got knocked up and turned into a prop at the GOP convention. All we have left is to defend the Stone Henge-like ruins of the “institution of marriage” from gays.
Jingoism is still very much alive. Just look at The Corner! All this McCarthyistic crypto-Marxist, neo-Marxist, Socialist smearing is ridiculous. Americans by and large enjoy the fact that there is a safety net for the elderly in Social Security, Medicare, etc. because it has helped people that they know. It’s not even a philosophical question anymore except for the conservative purist. You have several generations that have grown up with it. Most people want it to stay. Until the last couple of weeks, I would not have considered us a socialist state, and even now I still do not. But you would think that the world was ending the way some people see the coming Obama presidency. I swear, it feels like we are in the 1950s.
So then Sarah Palin is actually a cancer on right-wing populism, no?
[...] But there is something odd about Brooks’s column, and my discomfort with it goes beyond the sorts of (quite important) criticisms that Daniel Larison has raised about the ease with which Brooks conflates a merely rhetorical “populism” with support for policy measures that are actually populist in the truer sense of the word. As Matt Welch pointed out in response to the infamous “revolt of the nihilists” column of a couple of weeks ago, it is arguably David Brooks’s ideas - the very ideas that he promised in 2002 could make Bush “one of the great transformational presidents of the age” - that have been hard at work over the past seven-plus years, and the present mess is arguably their very direct consequence. Compassionate conservatism? Check. An aggressive foreign policy? Doublecheck. “National greatness”? Well, at least we tried. And yet - or, one might insist, and so - here we are, with the economy collapsing, our troops stuck in a pair of nasty quagmires abroad, and David Brooks’s party facing a 1980-like scenario come this November 4. [...]