Avoiding Easy Pseudo-Populism
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Ross is right that populist conservatism needs elites who are not in denial about political realities. One reason why this is necessary is so that populist conservatism acquires some substance and definition beyond the reflex of deriding Beltway insiders and their all-important cocktails. What has been amazing to me as I watch and participate in the back-and-forth between Palinites and Palin critics is how readily the admirers of Palin’s so-called populism adopt the definition of populism set by those establishmentarians most instinctively hostile to it. Under this hostile definition, populism is necessarily loud, proud and ignorant, because this flatters establishmentarian assumptions about their own views. According to establishmentarians, populists typically know little or nothing about policy, to which those who rally around anyone remotely resembling a populist often reply, “Yes, our candidate knows nothing–isn’t it great?” The candidate’s admirers think they are sticking it to poncy elitists when they revel in their candidate’s cluelessness and “good instincts,” but they are just helping to confirm the prejudices of anti-populists and reinforce the status quo.
Rather than offering a coherent alternative on behalf of the many, this kind of populism is readily co-opted and deployed in the service of established interests that have no intention of changing anything important. In the end, this pseudo-populism anoints existing policy, no matter how flawed and directed to serving particular interests, with the chrism of popular enthusiasm for a certain candidate. As I said before, populism without policy substance is not populism at all, but a reflex doomed to being rejected as the hollow protest that it is. The Palinites who want to identify populist conservatism with her are setting up populist conservatism for failure by defining it as little more than lifestyle politics, contempt for mainstream media and the occasional flag-waving.
This is called populism because crowds will always respond favorably to generic appeals to patriotism, having government work for them and being represented by “one of us,” but in the absence of anything more it grows old pretty quickly. One way to recognize pseudo-populism is how easy it is, and how quickly it loses its lustre. One of the most important populist goals ought to be entitlement reform, since there are few things more threatening to the long-term well-being of the people than exploding entitlement costs, but that would entail controversy, political risk and telling the public unpleasant truths about the unsustainability of existing entitlements and the folly of adding on more. What distinguishes real populism from cheap demaoguery, among other things, is the willingness to tell people that they cannot have it all and to govern as if that were true.
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12 Responses to “Avoiding Easy Pseudo-Populism”
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The reality that you can’t have it all is the antithesis of our consumer culture. For a politician of any stripe to tell the crowds the unpleasant truth would be political suicide. Ever since Reagan denounced Carter’s malaise as insufficiently American, politicians have been outdoing each other to see who can be the most optimistic about the country’s future.We need to regain a tragic sense, a Niebuhrian recognition of limits. I’m not sure most Americans want that big a dose of reality.
I agree that the populism I’m proposing goes against the grain of modern American culture and it offends against the mental disturbance that is optimism, but if ever there were a time for making an appeal to long-term interests and living within our means this would seem to be it. Everything that the government has been doing over the last month is to delay the reckoning and defer responsibility, which are the basic elements of the have-it-all mentality that contributed to the current predicament. A populism that can understand solidarity only in terms of scapegoating others for collective failures is not, to my mind, a politics that serves the interests of the many. Whether that kind of populism can win elections, I don’t know. Probably not. That is one reason why I think as poorly of mass democracy as I think highly of a rightly-ordered populism.
Daniel, the “willingness to tell people that they cannot have it all and to govern as if that were true” is not populism, it’s conservatism. And I disagree with your assertion that populism without substance grows old quickly – because for Palin’s partisans, substance seems quite beside the point. She’s one of them, and that’s all that really matters; get her in office and the decisions she would make will necessarily be good and true and right BECAUSE she is one of them. So we need no policies, no plans, nothing beyond “character” and faith. That is enough – and, whether the fate of the ticket on which Palin serves, will continue to be enough for her most ardent fans.
I think what Daniel is saying is that persona-driven pseudo-populism is unsustainable as a political force, and he’s right. Which is not to say it isn’t constantly recycled and repackaged to make it appear new and interesting. But one can make a clear distinction between the superficial, platitudinous populism of Palin, and the genuine, substantial populism, for example, that Ron Paul inspired in the republican primary. Clearly, Ron Paul’s agenda was not a trojan horse for a slightly tweaked status quo, and there was a real vigor for ideas, for a coherent, substantial platform, however unrealistic it was.
This in contrast to the vapid sloganeering of Palin, and it’s obvious why the so called “elite” conservatives prefer to use Palin’s model as their reference—it’s quite easy for anybody to feel superior to that drivel, but they will be blindsided by real populism if they fixate on the lowest hanging fruit.
If it’s so unpopular, what makes it populist? I know the Populist Party lost elections, but they came closer to the shiny brass ring than paleos. And why should a conservative (an admirer of the Byzantine Empire, right?) be a populist rather than some variety of elitist? Isn’t exalting vox populi over prudence or perhaps vox dei an unfortunate byproduct of democratic modernity?
Good to see some righties are keeping alive the “Revolt Against the Masses” tradition:
http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/hl_mencken_club_the_egalitarian_temptation/
Yes, the folks who lauded Palin just a few weeks ago as a crypto-Buchananite heroine are really the spokesmen of hard-core anti-democratic sentiment because they named a club after a man who hated one of the greatest American populists. Isn’t there a Bryan Club someone would like to establish? I would join.
As for your earlier question, I’ll just say it is remarkable how few people seem to understand that governing in the interest of the people need has no necessary connection to mass democracy or popularity.
“Governing in the interests of the people” != “populism”. There’s nothing inconsistent about being an elitist and governing in the interests of the people, but you can’t be both a populist and an elitist.
‘One of the most important populist goals ought to be entitlement reform, since there are few things more threatening to the long-term well-being of the people than exploding entitlement costs’
As I said last week, no one writes an article saying they want to rescind the New Deal but….
Of course I would say that I want to rescind the New Deal, but I am not at all representative.
So you think entitlement reform is unimportant?
I do think it’s important. I believe we can make meaningful reforms that allow the spirit of the New deal to remain. I am a product of the New Deal also so I have a soft spot in my heart for it I guess.
I think we need to stop using the word entitlement. It feels like a made up polling term like Death Tax. Just because the wealthy don’t want to pay taxes to fund a program no one they know will ever use doesn’t mean I should be made to feel like an ass for partaking. I thank them for paying for my education. I thank them for providing my public housing and the food stamps we were using for a short time when I was young. But fuck them also for making me feel like shit and portraying people like me as welfare ‘queens’* who just want a check for doing nothing. Frankly a lot of bitching about entitlements sounds like the old saying that you shouldn’t teach your slaves to read.
*I’m neither black nor a woman but I couldn’t think of a more apt term.
I think we have to think carefully about what it means to take away the New Deal and going to a much smaller government. What would America look like without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid? Who really thinks that education would get the kind of investment it needs to keep America competitive? We’d look like a Banana Republic. We’ve already seen how the market works when something big is left unchecked. Do we really want that again?
One place where we can save is to abolish DHS – Homeland Security. That just created a huge bureaucracy to fix a communication problem between the FBI and the CIA. And it hasn’t fixed anything. TSA is a joke, if you read Goldberg’s blog at The Atlantic.
I think that getting more people off welfare should be the goal, and getting manufacturing back in the US. Some also say that we should institute our own value added tax, like Europe and other nations have. If they can be protectionist with VAT, why shouldn’t we?