May 31, 2017
We need to develop a samyak-pradhāna (Four Right Strivings) for today’s world:
Right Antagonism
Right Negativity,
Right Resentment,
Right Closedmindedness.
Liberals have been educating their children to be nice and it just doesn’t work. I see them out there like soft-shelled crabs just waiting to be hurt, naked in the lion’s den, helpless in the shark pool. Usually they survive by withdrawing into safe places while the world goes on without them, dominated by sociopaths.
March 10, 2017
Gary Webb’s story can be summed up in three headlines:
GARY WEBB: CIA PROTECTING CONTRA DRUG RING
WEBB’S CIA-CONTRA DRUG STORY FLAWED
SUICIDE OF BLACKBALLED REPORTER WHO BROKE CIA-CONTRA DRUG RING STORY
There are a lot of things that might be said about this story: about how it became a Gary Webb story rather than a CIA story, or about the decentralized formation of politically-driven journalistic lynch mobs, or about the reasons why intelligence services’ black-bag operations inevitably form alliances with organized crime. But one angle is especially relevant today. This enormous Republican scandal was the internet’s first viral story, and not only did the establishment media do what they could to discredit it — thus putting themselves on the wrong side of the biggest revolution in their biz since the invention of the printing press — but the Democratic Party (with a few honorable exceptions) also failed to respond, with the result that this story only lives on as a Bill Clinton scandal: the Mena airport.
And this story is where Alex Jones and Michael Ruppert got their start: if the watchdog media and the opposition party fail to do their jobs, someone else will step in, and they won’t necessarily be high-minded or honest. Conspiracism is the direct result of Katherine Graham’s establishmentarian dictum “The public doesn’t need to know everything”.
Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into the Buzzsaw, Prometheus, 2004.
Michael Levine, Big White Lies, 1993, Thunder’s Mouth Press (almost unavailable when Webb wrote his articles but tells a similar story from the same period).
Michael Levine, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills”, in Into the Buzzsaw, pp. 157-194.
Nicolas Schou, Kill the Messenger, Nation Books, 2006.
Gary Webb, “The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On”, in Into the Buzzsaw, pp. 141-156.
Gary Webb, Dark Alliance, 1998, reissued in 2014 by Seven Stories Press.
March 6, 2017
There is more to want than there is to get, and since democracy came along anybody can want anything they want to want, so nobody is happy. And on top of that, since Freud came along desire is an obligation, so we are filled with a desperate desire to desire. Dissatisfaction is structural, and satisfaction is merely the impossible dimensionless point separating hope and regret, anticipation and loss, and life is the Malthusian proliferation and decimation of swarms of hopes .
March 6, 2017
While the post-WWII leaders American intelligentsia were reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger and glumly accustoming themselves to a post-radical, post-humanist, establishmentarian world of diminished expectations and elite irony, the Americans who really counted were whooping it up as they devised new and better ways of crushing all opposition and founding their empire.
March 5, 2017
September 13, 2015
More or less by definition, decadent aristocrats and populists have more in common than they know. Both are excluded groups, doomed to watch helplessly while the military-financial powers relentessly go about their business. This accounts for Remy de Gourmont’s influence in early 20th c. America, and the European interest in blonde beasts like Sherwood Anderson and Nelson Algren. To say nothing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
As the university is progressively disassembled and discontinued, this will become more clear to everyone. Intellectuals had been lulled into thinking that they were upper-middle-class professionals and part of the power system, but now they’re finding out. This was a transient effect and they made a big mistake.
Hofstadter pretended to be analyzing and describing the intellectual-populist split, but actually he was working to create it and recruiting the intelligentsia into the post-WWII elite. Our present state is much like that of the 1870-1900 period, when the power was unchallenged and electoral politics was dominated by stupid cultural politics.
August 29, 2015
“Everyone is talking about Populism, and no one knows what it is”
Ernest Gellner, Populism: It’s Meaning and National Characteristics, ed. Gellner and Ionescu, 1969
I have mostly retired from the debate about Populism / populism — partly from overall political discouragement and partly from having learned that it is not fruitful to talk to certain sorts of people. However, Eric Rauchway’s response to Jeet Heer’s rather nice article in the New Republic got me started again. AlaRauchway’s squib is not his best work, but his confidence in putting it out there so quickly is presumably an index of the depth of his conviction, which is also the unthought belief of a major Democratic demographic — the wonks.
For the alleged misunderstanding of Trumpism as “populism,” Heer blames the historian Richard Hofstadter, who in the middle 1950s explained he was interested in “that side of Populism” that sounded to Hofstadter a lot like McCarthyism. Hofstadter was right: there was a side of Populism, and not a trivial side, that sounded like McCarthyism—and Trumpism too.
A fluent writer, like Rauchway, Hofstadter succeeded in making it seem that the Populists were McCarthyists, while also making it seem that McCarthy was a Nazi.
The party was strongest in the West, where white people went to farm land taken from the Indians….
Some people I know do think that for this reason, no American political movement has ever had any legitimacy at all, but I am surprised — nay, astonished! — to find that Rauchway is one of them.
I am not trying to say that the Populists were fascists. But they were aggrieved white folks who thought they were entitled to something that they then did not get.
And indeed, most Populists (like most Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists) were white. (Though some were black). Privilege!
…. land taken from the Indians, which the US government gave white people for free, which was supposed to be well served by railroad lines subsidized by the US government… and which turned out to be full of wolves, locusts, and monopolists, and not nearly full enough of rainfall. Loans the settlers had taken, to improve the land or efficiently to plow it, became burdensome in bad years. As the railroads consolidated, the cost of shipping products out of the prairies soared. Promised an Eden and delivered a desert, the pioneers rebelled. They blamed railroad monopolies, international capitalists (not always a code for Jews), and international labor, or immigrants.
None of this was imaginary or frivolous IRL, though Rauchway’s summary of it is. The Populists made specific, intelligible political claims of the type that most political movements make, and they were able to back them up with arguments and facts. They objected to 1.) a deflating dollar which helped keep them in debt 2.) rail monopolies overcharging for freight 3.) milling and jobbing monopolies which kept them from doing well even in good years and 4.) a tariff structure favoring manufacturing over agriculture. And while the farm Populists were often landowners, a lot of them were very poor, and there were many labor Populists (or farmer / labor Populists who alternated by season) who were propertyless.
There is real argument against the Populists, and I will state it here. The case that can be made that things happened just as they should have, and that the farmers and workers had the bad luck to be the fall guys. Development required capital, and if money had gone to farmers or workers instead of to finance and manufacturing, it would have been unavailable for investment. The agricultural sector was receding into the past, and farmers needed to be forced off their farms and into the factories. (The case and the arguments are the same for contemporary and recent American labor.)
Unfortunately, the people I’m arguing against cannot allow themselves to say this, because they are liberals who do not want to be regarded as neoliberals, so they just talk about Populist racism and anti-intellectualism*.
The Populists had many labor members and they had close ties to the first big American union, the Knights of Labor — before the latter were destroyed by establishment violence — and the Populist objection to immigration was inherited from them. This is not a pretty part of the Populist story, but labor has never been enthusiastic about immigration, for obvious reasons, and their reasons cannot just be explained as RACISM!!!
The Democratic Parties of the South, by making legal disfranchisement of black voters their cause and appealing to white racial solidarity, could bring white voters back from the Populist Party.
This is quite an astonishing misrepresentation. (Hofstadter was a Democrat when he wrote his books, and in 1955 the Democrats were still the White Supremacy party). Democrats, who had been White Supremacists or slavers all the way back to the beginning, weakened the Populists by also making sure that certain white voters would be disenfranchised along with the black. (One of the Democrats’ major arguments all along had been that the Populists had been weakening the Solid White Supremacist South). In the South the Populists were allied to the biracial Republican Party, and the Democrats destroyed the Southern Populists the same way they destroyed the Southern Republicans, with murderous violence. (Look up the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection). Ben Tillman of South Carolina, a Democrat often thought to have been a Populist just because he was a racist, recruited and organized one of the armed bands (“Red Shirts”) which destroyed North Carolina democracy and the North Carolina Populist and Republican Parties.** (The black North Carolina Congressman George Henry White had been elected with Populist support, and when he left office in 1900 there would not be another black Southern Congressman from the South for 70 years).***
None of which is to say that the Populists—who eventually came under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and joined with the Democratic Party, where they lost, and lost, and lost—were fascists. [ This is the second time he says this: “But they were all honorable men”.] But the discontent that led to Populism could easily have become fascism, or something like it: and that is what Hofstadter correctly sensed.
This is the first time I’ve seen alt history used in an argument of this type. But let’s continue the game. Could enlightenment values have led to antisemitism? Yes, Voltaire. Could liberal values have led to slaveowning? Yes, Jefferson. Could socialist humanism have become genocidal? Yes, Stalin. Could a victorious anti-Nazi army end up fighting murderous imperial wars in all corners of the globe? …. You get the idea.
Nothing I have said makes any difference. The Populists will be Nazis forever.
For the record, it is my conviction that it is impossible for an anti-populist Left to succeed, though it is quite possible for anti-Populist liberalism / neoliberalism to succeed. And lo! What do we see before us?
TO BE CONTINUED
NOTES
* Let me just throw this in re anti-intellectualism: the Populist involved in the Scopes trial was Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes. The pious William Jennings Bryan prosecuting the case had always been a Democrat. H. L. Mencken, the cynical reporter beloved by all good liberals — and one of the few American decadents, along with Huneker and Hecht — was a little-government freemarketer who admired Grover Cleveland, waving away the Pullman massacre (Mencken Chrestomathy, ed. Mencken).
** Just to pile it on: another leader of the Wilmington Insurrection besides Senator-to-be Tillman was Josephus Daniels, later to be Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Mexico. The 1922 “Tulsa Race Riot” was led by Tate Brady, a local Democratic leader and former member of the Democratic National Committee. These were lynchings on the mass, triple-figure scale which totally transformed life in the states in which they took place.
*** From BillWAF 08.28.15 at 4:01 am (Crooked Timber Comments)
Eric,
The next time you try to write about Populism, read the scholarship first. J. Morgan Kousser pointed out in his seminal work “The Shaping Of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910″ that in each Southern state, Southern elites turned to disfranchisement in response to an inter-racial insurgency, such as a Black Republican and white Populist alliance (or white Greenback). As I recall, twenty-five percent of white voters were also disfranchised.
The white voters who were targeted had voted Populist or Greenback. I am sure that white Populists voted to disfranchise themselves. Do the work next time before you claim to understand anything.
BTW, Kousser’s book started as his Ph.D. dissertation for C. Vann Woodward at Yale.
Rauchway, “Trump and Populism”
Jeet Heer, “Trump is not a Populist”
Me, long ago, What is populism and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?
Me, long ago on Crooked Timber.
December 25, 2014
A cultural history of inflation in America
In the course of researching higher education costs in America back to the middle of the 19th century, I discovered something that flew in the face of what I had always assumed about how inflation works in a money economy. What I assumed was that a moderate amount of price inflation is normal — that is, continual rather than episodic — in such economies, and that deflation is rare. Furthermore, I thought (to the extent that unexamined assumptions can be called thinking) any significant or prolonged deflation is an economic disaster, and is something to be feared and avoided even more than hyper-inflation…..As many readers no doubt already know, this historical view of inflation and deflation in America — which I suspect, based on my study featuring an N = 1, is quite widespread — is totally wrong.
You have to give Campos credit for writing this. But what interests me is the question of why there’s been this forgetting. My guess is that it’s mostly because of decades of unanswered anti-inflation propaganda from the right, combined with the standard contempt of educated liberals for the inflationist (I say “reflationist”) Populist Party.
The most important single issue for the 1890s Populists was their opposition to the deliberate deflation of the American currency under the slogan “sound currency”. Enabling foreign trade and protecting the fortunes of property-owners and creditors were the conservatives’ political goal, and deflation was their method. The mainstream theoretical understanding of the issue was very poor, but they could deflate the currency passively just by letting the money supply grow more slowly than the economy as a whole. The gold standard did this, because the supply of gold was fairly static. (With a fetishism worthy of the Huns who buried golden artifacts with their great kings, many credited gold itself with this result). Deflation gave the past (old money) control over the future,kept debtors in bondage or drove them to bankruptcy, and also slowed the growth of the economy. (Discovery of gold in Alaska actually did slightly reinflate the currency after 1898, which relieved the pressure and was one of the factors leading to the demise of the Populists).
The Populists have been ridiculed for a century as funny-money cultists, but the real cultists were the mainstream gold standard thinkers, whereas the greenbackers among the Populists were precursors of contemporary money policies. (That’s why it’s so annoying when goldbugs like Ron and Rand Paul are allowed to portray themselves as populists).
But above all, we’ve been barraged with decades of rightwing propaganda about the horrors of inflation, but no public attention at all has been paid to the equal horrors of deflation. Elite Democrats are enthusiastic about the gap between the politics of consent and the politics of governance and renounced populism long ago, so they don’t go public about their reasons for whatever it is that they’re doing, and many of them are inflation hawks anyway. But when you do this kind of thing, there’s always the chance that your concealment will confuse the elite of the future.
Greider, William, Secrets of the Temple, Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Nugent, Walter, Money and American Society, 1865-1880, Free Press, 1968.
Friedman, Milton, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Princeton, 1963.
Friedman, Milton, Bimetallism Reconsidered, Hoover Institute, 1989.
Mihm, Stephen, A Nation of Counterfeiters, Harvard, 2007.
Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, Cambridge, 1997.
September 17, 2014
Trollblog 
UPDATE:
This piece is not clear about who it is that I’m addressing. The Democratic money people, the mercenary pros, most of the Democratic elected officials, the media, and part of the Democratic rank and file are quite happy with the neocon / neoliberal Democratic party we now have. (These people think that the Democrats are winning when they elect neoliberals, and from a purely partisan point of view they are right). However, a considerable proportion of the rank and file (and probably some of the pros and elected officials) wish for a different, less centrist, less passive party, and these are the ones who are being misled by bad social science.
For the Democratic leadership, the bad social science is an indispensable tool. They do not want to give their left wing anything at all, but they need that demographic to win elections, and to a considerable degree this accounts for the stupidity, dishonesty, and negativity of the uninterrupted succession of lesser-evil election campaigns.
**********************************************************
As my few readers know, in my political writing I have especially advocated left populism. I have been relatively silent over the last year or two, partly for personal reasons but mostly because of discouragement. The Democratic Party, the media, and the intelligentsia seem irrevocably committed to anti-populist pluralist liberalism, the national security state and neoliberalism seem impregnable, and even the populace itself may be hopeless. (By this I do not mean the caricature redneck bigots, but the large bloc of voters who have thrown in their lot with interest-group liberalism, and thus have become incapable of majoritarian or populist politics: “Get along, go along”, “What’s in it for me”, and “Can’t fight City Hall”.)
Oddly enough, however, populism never quite disappears, and recently there’s been a 4 against 1 pile-on with Thomas Frank on one side and Ezra Klein, Nate Cohn, John Chait, and The Economist on the other — see links below. I will make my usual points here, with only a few citations from these sources.
Two of Franks’ points seem quite solid. First, the Democratic Party has been a party of experts since the 1950s — if not the 1930s. The change Klein notices is merely a change in political journalism — partly the result of the new scientific methods he’s celebrating, and partly because an actual change in how politics works. Second, this party of experts hasn’t been doing too well since 1968, and the only wisdom the wonks have to offer is to say that the Democrats should move to the right and wait for the demographics to change.
The Economist:
This strategy has been tried before. In 1960 Chester Bowles published The Coming Political Breakthrough as part of the Kennedy campaign. His major thesis is that demographics would make the Democrats invulnerable and that they would stay in power for a long time. By 1968 his theory was in shambles. The Democratic coalition had dissolved, and the Republicans had picked up the pieces. It’s been getting worse ever since.
For Chait this is science against anti-science, and he is incredulous that Frank wants to disagree with the scientists who have explained that things are hopeless:
Chait and probably the others portray Frank as a science denier, but Pol Sci is a limited science heavily corrupted both by academic politics and by external interests. It is good at what it does, but terrible at what it does not try to do. It describes what has already been and projects that into the future. It even tries to predict some future changes (e.g. demographics), but it does not really take into account the remaining unpredictability (which is where the opportunities lie). And that is why the wisest Democratic advisers are at their finest when explaining that nothing much could have been done or can be done, and that defeat was and is inevitable.
Contrast the Republicans. They have hired plenty of PhDs, but they keep them under their thumb. The Republican leaders are opportunist demagogues, ideologues, scam artists, and petty criminals, and their politics is venturesome, opportunistic and experimental rather than realistic and passive. When public opinion goes against them they try to change public opinion. When they’re losing they don’t accept defeat but try to change the game. In short, they are political actors rather than normalizing administrators. Many of the wise men of the Democratic Party seem to be against political action in principle. (Might this not be a necessary characteristic of anti-majoritarian, anti-populist, pluralist liberalism?)
Republican methods have obviously not led to good government, but they have led to victory. The realist wonks of the Democratic Party never tire of telling us that you have to win elections in order to get anything done, but then they immediately also tell us that the only way to win elections is to forget about trying to do anything. Is this really the wisdom we need? Shouldn’t we hope for a less passive, more experimental social science which would test hypotheses in action and not only in studies of the past?
Chait-type sophisticated liberals purport to regret the rightward slide, but this slide hasn’t really harmed anything they really care about, at least not so far. They don’t necessarily want the national security state, permanent state of war, mushrooming inequality, etc., etc., but none of these issues is at the top of their priority list, and in fact, many quasi-liberal Democrats have tacitly accepted the permanent state of war and the dominance of finance as either inevitable or positively good or both. For them, Obama is doing things just right, and his critics on the left are simply enemies. They pretend to want the same things we want (damn those Republicans who force them to be conservative!), but that’s because they need our votes.
There’s more to this, of course. The most influential Democrats and the most influential media are very well off and have little to gain from more populist policies. The party pros don’t care at all about issues and only want to keep their jobs. And finally, the majority of Democratic donors are out and out bad guys.
So we’re doomed.
PS.
Another way to think of “political science” would be to define it as an applied science like engineering. Engineering is about desired results, not scientific truths, and experimental proposals are expressed something like “Find a way to do X”. Negative results are noted but merely motivate a further search for positive results. Thomas Edison discovered 10,000 things that didn’t work before he found the one that did. You would hope that Democrats, liberals, and radicals would be less radically empiricist than Edison, but it’s much more important that they don’t quit after the first unsuccessful trial.
PPS.
I’ve wondered at times whether some of the incapacities of political science come from adherence to an obsolete model of determinist, predictive science, from the time before chaos, complexity, fat tails, fractals, etc. were thought of. The future can be known, it is real, and we must accept reality. Short term electoral results are in fact one of the things that can often be predicted if you have enough data, but only if you hold the really important political factors constant. This is very convenient for political pros who want to limit politics to immediate term electoral politics, and avoid (and prevent) big politics.
Ezra Klein, Thomas Frank, Nate Cohn, Jonathan Chait, The Economist