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.

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.

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” 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.

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.

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-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.)

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

THE POPULISTS

The Populist Party was a national party only from 1890 to 1896; when they endorsed the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in return for very small concessions – this basically destroyed the party. At that time both the Democratic and the Republican parties were dominated by big business, so that the workers and small farmers who made up 70%+ of the population were effectively unrepresented. (Democratic President Grover Cleveland was perhaps the most anti-labor President of the era). The Populists were strongest among farmers and in the South and West, but they were affiliated with the Knights of Labor, and in 1894 the Populist Frank McBride was elected President of the AFL (Gompers’ only defeat).

Altogether the Populists elected ten governors, six Senators, and about forty Congressmen. In 1892 the Populist candidate got 8.5% of the vote for President and carried four states and parts of two others; Cleveland’s margin of victory in that election was only 3%, so the Populists were a real factor. In 1896 the dissident Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who had some Populist sympathies, got the Democratic nomination. The Populists supported him, but he lost worth 45.8% of the vote and a smaller percentage of the electoral vote, all from the South and West. Bryan ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat two more times, but the Populists never were a factor in a Presidential election again.

Presidential third parties seldom come close to winning, and the populists are no exception. Furthermore, as often as not the third party doesn’t survive the election, and that was essentially the case with the Populists. But the Populists had enormous significance — by bringing poor farmers and labor, and their issues, into the electoral equation for the first time, by stealing voters from some of the Democratic and Republican constituencies, and above all, by disrupting the other two parties’ strategies.

The parties’ response was savage and multifaceted. The Eastern Democrats ran their own candidate in 1896 and boycotted Bryan every time other time he ran. The Spanish American War was fought in part to distract the voters from domestic issues and weaken the Populists, and this distraction was quite effective. And last and worst, because Populists in the South sometimes went into coalition with the Republicans, forcing the Democrats to campaign for the black vote and also threatening the Democratic Solid South, the two established parties made a back-room agreement to disenfranchise Southern blacks. During this period the two parties were in collusion, with very similar principles and goals, and if the South had been thrown into contention the resulting confusion would have threatened both the Republican and the Democratic bosses. (The willingness of the Republicans to sacrifice their own Southern supporters is one of the remarkable facts of American history).

SMALL-P POPULISM AFTER 1896

After the collapse of the Populist Party the attitude of the Democratic Party toward small-p populism was ambiguous. Many of the Populist issues were kept alive by progressives working mostly at the state level — the national campaign organizations in 1912 and 1924 were ad hoc and short-lived. The Democratic leadership was as stodgy and business-dominated as ever, but) if they ever wanted to win they still needed to get as many votes as possible from ex-Populists and their Progressive successors. They mostly resolved this dilemma by not winning, but in 1912 Woodrow Wilson — like Cleveland an honest, independent Democrat who was able to work with the machine — was elected President with the semi-Populist Bryan as his running mate. Wilson had been pretty conservative before his election, but in his first term he signed many populist / progressive bills and paid at least lip service to Bryan’s anti-war principles.

By 1932 the Populist Party itself was a distant memory, but between 1932 and 1938 (Roosevelt’s most progressive period) Roosevelt and the Democrats relied heavily on support from populist / progressive Senators and Representatives – some from third parties, and some from dissident factions of the two major parties. The progressive-populist faction pushed Roosevelt steadily to the left in domestic policy, though it had to contend with stubborn resistance from the much more conservative machine Democrats and Southern Bourbons (and also, of course, orthodox Republicans).

In 1938, however, the approaching war broke up the progressive / Democrat coalition, and many of the progressives, who were often isolationists, deserted Roosevelt. From this point on Roosevelt increasingly governed with regular Democratic support, which he was able to do because the Democratic majorities were huge, and progress on domestic policy slowed (thought the Keynesian effects of war spending had a positive effect). Winning the war became the primary goal, and the Democratic Party became a technocratic / machine party.

ANTI-POPULISM AFTER WWII

By 1945 American society had been transformed by the war effort, and the Democratic Party was dominated by its technocratic wing, Because of the religious appeals, moralism, and majoritarianism of the Populists (and many Progressives), from WWI on the technocratic New Republic liberals held Populists and Progressives in very low regard despite their many valid proposals, and liberal-technocratic social engineers played a role in the New Deal right from the start. Furthermore, after WWII, America’s future course in foreign policy was uncertain, with options ranging from war against the USSR to peaceful coexistence, and the technocrats favored a policy of Realpolitik which was abhorrent both to right and left populists. The Cold War compromise solution pleased no one, since it involved switching from a holy war against Fascism (allied to Communism) to a holy war against Communism allied to the surviving Fascists.

In 1948 the Democrats purged its left, much of which had populist roots, and the right populists mostly ended in the Republican Party. Truman’s purge wasn’t thorough enough for the right, and an anti-elitist McCarthyism strain emerged which survives to this day, (for example with the teabaggers). Meanwhile, Democratic intellectuals, partly following the leftist German refugee Adorno, developed a theory holding that all populism is ultimately totalitarian, either Fascist or Communist.

The liberals described McCarthy as a populist and hinted that he was a Fascist. This was actually a very peculiar move. First, while McCarthy was anti-elitist and demagogic and appealed to the common man, he also was a fairly standard conservative Republican whose support did not come mostly from populists or progressives. Second, calling McCarthy a populist did not hurt him with anyone who had not read Adorno and who still admired the Populists. And finally, by the time these criticisms of McCarthy came out, McCarthy had been censured and had died in disgrace.

The target was not McCarthy at all. McCarthy had had a lot of Democratic support, including the Kennedys, but in any case he had been defeated. Tthe technocratic Cold War liberals had won – they controlled the Democratic Party and expected to win the Presidency in 1960. The real goal of these attacks was to preclude the re-emergence of a populist wing within the Democratic Party, so that the Democrats could redefine themselves as a neutral, non-majoritarian elite of experts. While in office, Democrats conduct a realistic, militaristic foreign policy while domestically dividing the goodies between the nation’s many and varied interest groups without identifying with any one of them — and above all without responding to majoritarian anti-business or anti-war popular movements.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

My main conclusion is that the Democrats have crippled themselves by renouncing populist and majoritarian appeals while presenting themselves as expert administrators and effectively allowing the Republican Party to cash in on fake populism. This strategy hasn’t worked since 1968, and it has crippled the Democrats by making them incapable of counterattacking against blatantly dishonest fake-populist appeals by the Republicans. At the level of the high-level party pros and a lot of elected officials, this isn’t a problem at all – they are business Democrats on the take from the plutocratic malefactors, and they do very well for themselves even when the Democrats lose.

But the elitist strategy is disastrous in its effects at the lower levels – the sincere, wonkish party workers who have been indoctrinated with anti-populism in Pol Sci 101, and even more so the enormous contingent of Democratic voters who have also taken Pol Sci 101 and think of themselves as wonks. On the internet and elsewhere, far too often rank and file Democratic discussions of politics, rather than concentrating on the reasons why the Democratic position is the right one (in the cases when it really is), end up with wonky discussions about process, and these discussions always seem to end with a lesser-evil slide to the center. And while this is exactly what the Democratic leadership wants, this is usually not what rank and file Democrats, Democratic volunteers, and idealistic low-level workers want.

It’s noticeable that racial issues and foreign wars repeatedly derailed past populist initiatives, and this is the main problem we have to battle against. The fake populists of today (militaristic little-government goldbugs) are, in fact, the very opposite of the populists of history, and almost identical to the McKinley Republicans who defeated populism. All they share with the Populists is angry rhetoric and the racism of which the Populists have been rather unfairly accused. (Many Populists were racists, especially in the South, but it’s hard to show that the Populists were more racist than the other two parties, and considering that the Democratic Party was the segregationist party right up until 1965, this isn’t really a criticism that Democrats should so easily make).

We also have to remember that, while the Populist Party had a lot of labor support and was not exclusively agrarian, the majority of its supporters were dirt farmers, who at that time constituted 50% or so of the population. The demographics have changed enormously since then, and farmers by now are less than 5% of the population, and even factory workers are a rather small demographic. Obviously populist appeals in our time have to define the majority in some other way, without agrarian or proletarian nostalgia.

And finally, the institutional Democratic Party is not anti-populist by accident. In order to change its direction, we will have to take it over from the bottom up and bounce the present leadership. To do this will be labor-intensive, involving a lot of face to face contact and a lot of time in meetings, and it will also require money. It’s my impression that fake Republican populists, driven by a sense of religious duty, are more devoted to the cause than most liberals are; in part, this may in fact be a function of elite complacency (Republicans are stupid, uneducated, velveeta-cheese-eating trailer trash, right?)

But imagine a million (or ten million) Democrats donating $50 a year each (not really a lot) and volunteering 5 hours a week to a dissident progressive group. This would be a substantial force. With a genuine populist appeal, you could form such a group. It would steal support from the Democratic machine, and you’d also have people switching away from single-issue groups whose goals are unattainable under Republicans or conservative Democrats.

But in order to do this, you’d have to define, find and persuade an actual majority.

(This piece is part of a longer piece which mushroomed out of control. A follow-up piece will defend the Populists of the Populist Party against the criticisms from 1950s liberals, and will include an annotated bibliography.)

Democrats, Populism and Insurgent Populists (a response)

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!

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.