Eliot Spitzer claims that 2 + 2 = 4. Most Democrats disagree.

Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, meta- investor George Soros, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page will be in agreement on this point.

A few brave souls on the Right — recognizing that the Republican Party has been bereft of ideas in its attacks on President Obama — will then try to re-define a populist, conservative attack by asserting that the White House has been captured by Wall Street. Real populism and change, they will argue, will come from the Republican, not the Democratic, party…..

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy? If the Republicans pick up this issue before we do, the elections of 2010 could be even worse than we are now fearing.

Other Democrats say that if we shut our eyes and think happy thoughts, everything will turn out beautifully. Above all, they say, “we cannot allow ourselves to become like them. If the Republicans decide to behave despicably, we should let them hang themselves with their own rope. The American people know that populists are nothing but demagogues and charlatans.”

Who is right and who is wrong? It’s too early to be sure, and the truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes.

 

The Ivy Tweeds

If populism is defined as “building mass-support for meaningful policies”, then why would anyone be against it?

I don’t think that anyone has defined it that way. I think the populist idea is that good political ideas can come from below, from unsanctioned, unofficial, uncredentialed oppositional groups. The Democratic Party leadership does not believe this.

Populism involves some degree of breaking down the barriers between citizens and government. The Constitution was designed to suppress direct democracy in favor of representative democracy via checks and balances, the separation of powers, federalism, and the other stuff you learned about in eighth grade civics. The two-party system puts another intermediary in there, the party, and usually the parties and the candidates work through still another layer of vote-contracting intermediaries, the organized interest groups and the mass media. Populists want to get rid of some of those layers. (Populists are sometimes portrayed as Jeffersonian constitutionalists, but they generally advocated more simplified procedures and spent a lot of time fighting the Supreme Court, and that interpretation is incomplete at best.).

When elitist liberals or socialists get upset upon finding that their representatives are lying and unresponsive, they’re populists whether they know it or not. Elitism is institutional, not intellectual. To a political player, a Nobelist is one vote, the way a HS dropout is one vote, and a famous Nobelist is an opinion-leader, on a par with a comparably famous stoner celebrity (and far outranked by a really serious opinion-leader like Bill Kristol.)

The difference is that when they’re lied to, populists know what’s happening and get mad, whereas left intellectuals are baffled and mostly just whine. My mission in this world is to convince liberal intellectuals that they are People too, salt-of-the-earth folk scorned by the powers that be. But most intellectuals find this offensive — they think of themselves as unappreciated elite units, like princes switched in the cradle and raised by peasants. They’re sure that some day they will be recognized and restored to their rightful status.

Our political elite is well-educated but tough-minded. The Democratic Party’s pious renunciation of ideology, populism, and demagoguery has been accompanied by a rehabilitation of graft, corruption, and subservience to big money. (The post-WWII pluralists and consensus theorists were fairly open about this). What we have now is a spiffy, modern, Ivy-educated Tweed Ring*. And Boss Tweed and the others, when the chips were down, were reactionary servants of big money (“Bourbon Democrats“.) They used part of the graft to help out their voters, but they supported policies which hurt these same voters), and they made sure that whatever help the voters got was controlled by vote-contractors and received only by reliable supporters.

The suffering PhD masses have nothing to lose but their chains, but they’re mired in the toils of servility and ancient prejudice. An unpromising lot indeed, but be they ever so humble, we cannot afford to write off even the least of our brethren.

* The Moonies have Ivy-educated leadership now. The Mafia and the drug cartels send their kids to the best schools. Ahmed Chalibi, Ted Kaczynski, Jerome Corsi, Bill Kristol — all PhDs from the best schools. We humble folk just don’t know what to think.

 

Zombies Walk Among Us

The zombie “fiscal conservatism” slogan will never die, even though the ones who use it most (Reagan, Dubya) always blatantly cheat when the chips are down. It’s true that if your personal income goes down you should make cuts in your household budget, but that isn’t a national fiscal plan.

FDR campaigned as a fiscal conservative and had to be bullied into mild Keynesianism, and he almost destroyed his Presidency by returning to fiscal conservativism in 1937. Conservatives say that the New Deal didn’t end the depression, WWII did, and they’re right; but when they say that they’re conceding Keynesian economics. Roosevelt only went really Keynesian after the war started.

Unfortunately, Obama started off deep in the hole, since Dubya had already deliberately ballooned the national debt with non-Keynesian spending. The Republicans are authoritarians rather than anarchists, but their governing philosophy is sabotage. They don’t want a stateless society, they want a crippled state. Look at California.

(A response to this post)

 

Populism One More Goddamn Time

“Populism” isn’t really a term of art or science. At best it means any popular movement or opinion that conflicts with the center-left consensus. More often it’s used just to label any bit of ignorant demagoguery whatsoever. (The fact that the word “populism” is mostly just a smear word doesn’t prevent it from being used in the vast netherworld of social science literature, of course.) Until at least the 80s dictionaries did not include the generic term “populist”, but defined the term to mean either an American Populist or a Russian Narodnik.

The generalized use of the word as a throwaway insult seems to be an function of the transformation of the left-center into an administrative elite after WWII. Richard Hofstadter’s books, among others, provided an intellectual rationale for the smear, and they are still heavily used in indoctrinating young American wonks, but his portrait of the Populists and Progressives is polemical, not based on primary research, and presentist (he thought Joe McCarthy was a populist). A case could be made that the American Populists were not populist in the current sense of the term, even though the term traces back specifically to them.

A neutral definition of populism allowing for both benevolent and malign forms might be OK, but I don’t see anyone using it that way. Historically, both in the US and in Europe a lot of the energy behind progressive movements was populist (e.g. “obrerismo” in leftist labor movements), but the administrative left today seems to be committed to an anti-populist , gradually-retreating defensive holding action preserving their positions of influence, with The People serving as the enemy.

Anti-popular politics in the Democratic goes back a long way; the era of popular politics only lasted from about 1890 to 1941, with dwindling aftershocks up until 1968, and even during that era there was fierce internal resistance. After WWII anti-populist ideology got big boosts from the Straussians, from Adorno and the critical theorists, and from the neoliberals (on whom see Mirowski’s “Road From Mont Pelerin”.) Hofstadter was watered-down pop-Freudian Adorno.

The root anti-populist argument is simple: Hitler was a populist, and look what happened. Another reading of the same data might argue that Germany in 1918 was so hierarchical and authoritarian that it couldn’t make the transition to democracy or even liberalism. (Adorno seems to have been crushed by German labor’s refusal to obey its wise Communist leaders). Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free” describes Germans who had at least passively accepted Naziism: for them the Nazis were like urban political bosses in the US, who helped out people who needed help when none of the established authorities were willing or able to do anything. During the 20s and early 30s the German churches, vanguard left parties, and conservative parties, as well as the Austrian economists, the Straussians, and the Schmittians were all firm in their belief that The People should be seen and not heard and that The People existed to serve the State, the Church, the Party, or the Market, and not the other way around.

Hitler of course was no better, but he successfully exploited a weak spot in the existing authoritarian establishments in order to replace the lot of them with a single new authoritarian establishment.

(A response to this Crooked Timber post, which casually uses the term “populism” as a smear word.

 

Send Bernie Kerik a rope

They say that Bernie Kerik is suicidal. I have made it my mission to help the man, but it’s not just a matter of buying a $3 length of rope. You know how it is in New York — getting the rope to where it will do the most good is going to cost real money. Please donate here.

 

My thoughts are too profound even for Facebook

Sarah Palin is so incredibly small-time. She’s being blackmailed by stoner Levi Johnston, and she deserves him. This is reality-show People-magazine self-help pyramid-scam rehab-Christian politics. The two of them are both good looking and that’s all they’ve got. Sarah got a bunch of dirty old men aroused for the first time in awhile, so they nominated her for VP.

Nothing new there, but WTF are conservatives and Christians thinking? They want one of the most ignorant people in the world to hold the nuclear trigger. It’s like an Abbie Hoffman mindfuck with live ammunition. Is shameless, heedless nihilism now a necessary constituent of conservativism?

Sorry, this is all old hat but the Levi Johnston interview just tore off the scab. I’d numbed myself, as we all have, and I’d forgotten what’s really happening. It’s like waking up from a bad dream and finding out that it’s real. We have a Presidential candidate who’s one degree of separation away from the Alaskan petty crime scene and millions of miles away from reality.

I’ve been there too, more or less, and I’ve always thought that that is one of the reasons why I’m not a Republican Presidential candidate. But I was so wrong.

Conservatives should all be wearing paper bags over their heads. They did this.

 

Free-market social theory

Free-marketers are utopian optimists about the market and technological progress, but apocalyptic pessimists about social and political action.

Unsurprisingly, many free-market economic models leave out society and government entirely, as though they were epiphenomenal and derivative.

Also unsurprisingly, free-market economists analyze society and government as though they were markets — most egregiously Becker on the family, but also a lot of public choice theory.

And still unsurprisingly, a lot of freemarketers wish that government, and to a lesser extent society, would just go away, since what they really are is just defective, distorted, inefficient markets. (Though the wiser ones acknowledge that in this fallen world these archaic survivals retain some residual function.)

However,  whenever the market fails freemarketers blame individual or group psychology, society, or the state.  (To my knowledge, free-market economists do not blame the family for anything, but if more of them were gay or single I bet they would.)

 

What is populism, and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?

Democrats, Populism and Insurgent Populists (a response)

Michael Moore’s latest film and Alan Grayson’s “die quickly” speech in the House have revived interest in an old question: What is populism, and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?

Populism is politics which opposes wealth and power in the name of the common folk. It takes both left wing and right wing forms and sometimes degenerates into bigotry and attacks on minorities. Populism can be faked, and that is being done right now – e.g., Limbaugh and Beck. Populist appeals can be made by spokesmen for special interests who have no intention of fulfilling their democratic promises, but who are just opportunistically faking populism as part of an attack on some enemy. (As I never get tired of saying: Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real).

Since the Fifties the Democratic Party, whose populist wing was critically important during the New Deal, has avoided and repressed populism. Individual populists such as Paul Wellstone have occasionally been elected, often in defiance of the party machine, but they have never had much influence in the party. The Democratic strategy has been cooperation with big business, and their slogan has been “a rising tide lifts all boats” — “win-win” solutions where everyone wins and nobody loses. This worked pretty well until about 1970, when business started to pull away from the deal, and since that time it’s been mostly downhill for the Democrats, for labor, and for the average American.

When they made their deal with big business, the Democrats became a wonky party of technocrats and expert administrators who balanced all the various interests and came up with the answer which was best for everyone, and they distanced themselves from their earlier party-of-the-common-man pretensions. Rather than to represent the majority of the electorate, they increasingly defined their constituency as a hodgepodge of special interest. Political parties inevitably do represent plural interests, as the Democrats certainly had done ever since the Civil War, but the post-Fifties Democrats made a fractionated constituency a deliberate goal and did everything they could to avoid majoritarian appeals and to marginalize majoritarianism within the party.

As part of this transformation of the party, the Democrats needed to misrepresent populism. Since then there’s been an almost unmixed stream of slanders coming from both parties, until by now anyone counts as a populist as long as they’re abusive, ignorant, racist, and dishonest. (The Nazi David Duke sometimes calls himself a Populist, and he was allowed to get away with it). Almost everyone comes out of Pol Sci 100 knowing that the Populists were bad guys, and the Pol Sci 101 attitude is pervasive among party leaders, wonk staffers, and a big chunk of the Democratic electorate.

However, during most of the period since the Civil War, however, progressive energy in this country has mostly come from movements of the Populist typeworking outside the parties or against the party leadership: Greenbackers, Progressives (three kinds), Socialists, Farmer-Laborites, Nonpartisan-Leaguers, and independents — to say nothing of unions, farm organizations, and civil rights groups. (Martin Luther King’s movement was essentially populism, albeit minority populism).

Below I will sketch the history of the Democratic Party in its relations with the Populist Party, small-p populism, and the various sorts of progressivism during the period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1950s, and suggest that many of the problems the Democrats have now can be traced back to the redefinition of the Democratic Party that took place at the end of this period.

Below:
THE POPULISTS
SMALL-P POPULISM AFTER 1896
ANTI-POPULISM AFTER WWII
SOME CONCLUSIONS

 

How to Lose, Part Two

According to Brad Delong, the best judgment at the time was that a trillion dollar stimulus would be about right — though new information makes that seem too low now. Everyone knew that a trillion would be too much for Congress, so what they asked for was 800 million. What they actually got was 600 million.

Rahm seems like a tough guy, but only when he’s talking to liberals. Otherwise he’s just like any other Democrat.

Democrats always start the bidding with their final offer. They’re scientists of politics, after all, and they know that the future is written (as it says the the Koran) and that “negotiations” are epiphenomenal and illusory. That’s what game theory is for — why waste time playing games when science can tell you what the final score will be?

But the vulgar, stupid, brutish Republicans keep on fighting, wrongly believing that you can accomplish something that way. Bad Republicans!

 

How to Lose, Part One

Allan Grayson’s recent “Die Now” speech got me thinking again about one of my favorite topics: the Democrats’ refusal to use “populist” language.

Decades ago the Democratic committed itself to a weird form of cool, unemotional, above-the-battle wonk politics. It’s a weird mix of Gandhi, Orwell, genteel mugwumpery, value-neutral ideology, and trust in manipulative administration by experts. Democrats think that they’re 17-dimensional Zen chess masters who can defeat their enemy without moving a muscle. Which they might be, for all I know, except for the winning part.

Since 1968 that strategy hasn’t worked at all well, and since the coronation of Speaker Gingrich in 1992 it hasn’t worked at all. The Republicans have been having tremendous fun teasing Democrats with lies and insults to see if they’ll stamp their little feet and start crying in frustration , or maybe send a stiffly worded letter.

Historically, most of America’s progressive energy has come from borderline demagogues who often worked outside and against the two parties. FDR started off planning to be a horrible president, but he didn’t get his way.

P.S. Lest I seem unsophisticated, the onset of the Democrats’ weird mental deficiencies coincided with their decision to cozy up to big business and ask for money — “Liberals are not afraid of bigness”, as Hofstadter said.

The party pros are actually tough guys who’re getting theirs. It’s the rank and file who are weenies.