Atrios says (in response to this post at Obsidian Wings): But one day I hope this country grows up and recognizes that the fear that maybe someone is getting something I’m not and they don’t deserve shouldn’t be the primary philosophy of governance.
I’ve read two autobiographical books by Nobelist James Buchanan, a major figure in public choice economics and the brains behind Welfare Cadillac Republicanism, and there’s ample evidence that his primary philosophy of governance is exactly what Atrios was talking about. He came from a gentry family in a bigoted area of the former Confederacy, and he left the Democratic party in 1948 during the Dixiecrat rebellion. There’s plenty of evidence besides that, too.
The Welfare Cadillac meme is powerful propaganda because everyone can think of someone they know personally who a.) they hate, b.) is a moocher and a scrounge, and c.) benefits from a government program that many other, better people do not benefit from. It doesn’t have to be racist; it could be an acquaintance, neighbor, or even a relative. (This is the Republican politics of envy).
Because they’re very concrete and vivid, people like that are the ideal anti-welfare state poster children. They are especially useful for the anonymous, faceless scam artists systematically looting the government for much larger amounts of cash. (Public choice economists seem to have been infinitely less vigilant about looting by deregulation and privatization.)
The best way for Democrats to shunt this question aside would be to make examples of a lot of individuals in finance: make them famous, destroy their reputations forever, and repeat a simple story line over and over again for weeks on end, as though they were so many OJ Simpsons.
Of course, that could never happen. First, all of the media are owned by malefactors of great wealth. Second, the Democratic Party itself is owned by malefactors of great wealth. And third, it would be populist to do something like that, and Hofstadter has taught all good Democrats that populists are Nazis.
So we’ll have to make do with the second-best plan, which is to trust ourselves to the “shit happens” theory of history and hope that things turn out well.
Trollblog 
February 22, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Why are you blaming those of great wealth for everything? My experience has been that it really doesn’t take much wealth at all for people to begin thinking this way (i.e. that they should not make examples of people in finance). Let’s call a reluctance to destroy the reputations of people whose reputations deserve to be destroyed, even when this would be politically helpful, “Broderism” for short. Broderism appeals to the professional middle class. It’s like noblesse oblige for the person making $50K / year. They have the feeling that if they are nice and refuse to participate in actual politics, their class position is assured.
The malefactors of great wealth certainly don’t believe in any such thing. Give them that, at least.
February 22, 2009 at 10:35 pm
“Shit happens” does describe the thinking processes of a lot of people, for example my Republican sister. Behind her confused but vehemently held political ideas are unexpressed self-serving motives, and beneath her supposedly self-serving motives are other people’s self-serving motives not generally congruent with hers.
As I say somewhere on this site, a shitty country, a shitty people, a shitty media, and a shitty elite reinforce one another. So I don’t idealized The People.
On the other hand, those who say that The People are just as bad as The Elite seem to blame The People for being influenced by the flood of almost unmixed misinformation they get. One of my sisters trusts me on politics, one doesn’t, but neither has the time, inclination, or abilities to research on their own.
I talk a lot about ambient politics, which is the politics you pick out of the air without paying attention. In 80% of the US that’s center-right to far right politics. What leftism and resistance there is is word-of-mouth, internet, a few surviving institutions such as unions and liberal churches, the cultural left, and minority cultures.
February 22, 2009 at 10:52 pm
“As I say somewhere on this site, a shitty country, a shitty people, a shitty media, and a shitty elite reinforce one another.”
Yes,this is true. But I’m not as willing to cut people slack for “being influenced by the flood of almost unmixed misinformation they get.” People really do have more free time and more ability (i.e. education and basic literacy) than they did in many previous eras. Them not having the inclination is not a virtue.
But I’m not even talking about those people. I’m talking about the kind of people who write blog posts on the blogs you troll. Those people have time, inclination, ability; they post on politics all the time. They are reliably “left”. Yet the idea of destroying someone’s reputation can only be treated, by them, as a joke. Any suggestion that maybe it should be actually done — not in a snarky way, but in a real way — would get you denounced as a hater of some sort.
So we have to make do with second-best plans because the natural people who would ordinarily be concerned with real politics are largely more interested in preserving their class position. The earnest centrists value “bipartisanship”, the older-school liberals “tolerance”, the lefty bloggers “irony”, but it all comes out to be the same thing.
I don’t include Kos, Atrios, etc. in this, of course. The general dividing line is whether they have a comment section that’s worth trolling. If their comment box is full of impassioned one-sentence remarks by people who seem to have discovered the Internet maybe two years ago, they’re generally doing something well politically. If their comment boxes are interesting in themselves, politically they’re almost sure to be quietists.
February 22, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Somewhere on my site I’ve conjectured that during the next ten years a lot of well-educated, upper-middle-class people will find out that they themselves are part of the suffering masses.
Back twenty years ago the philosophy department of the school I was at gradually was being transformed into an ancillary department for distribution requirements — no more majors, almost all lower-division classes.
Over a period of several years people took sabbaticals and worked half-time and took semesters off, etc., but finally the lowest seniority prof was terminated. He and his wife enjoyed their status a lot, but for various reasons there was nowhere for him to go (he was too old, and the school terminating him was already low-ranking), and he really didn’t have any job skills or connections in any other area. His life was completely ruined.
February 22, 2009 at 11:14 pm
There’s more to it than just being influenced by the flood of misinformation and not having enough time to research. In other countries people get tons of misinformation, do not have time to research, and yet they often recognize the bullshit immediately.
I think it’s also a function of people being generally satisfied by their lives; their current situation and what they foresee in the future. If they are relatively happy, then they will accept all kinds of bullshit – year, whatever. When they are unsatisfied and/or worried about the future, then they become more skeptical of the official propaganda.
February 22, 2009 at 11:51 pm
It may be that for most Americans the problems are still either in the future, or happening to other people.
The contrast I’m making is with the dreaded populist era (1880-1940). The populists had their own media and did not rely on commercial media, and there were various sorts of formal and informal political organizations and community organizations outside the universities and outside the two parties.
One thing I’ve found is that during most of that era, the Democratic Party was no more “left” than the Republican Party, and the Republican Party was not nearly as reactionary as it is today. But before 1932 all of the creative work was done either outside the two parties, or by insurgents within the parties, and Roosevelt had to be dragged most of the way.
Most of the extra-party political groups seem to be single-issue groups, often on issues like genetically-engineered crops, animal rights or sexual minorities which strike me as too boutique and in some cases wrong.
As far as Americans being generally satisfied with their lives, I don’t generally see that. It’s true of prosperous Republicans, and for prosperous liberals, but it’s not general I don’t think.
Not merely the poor, who are fewer today, but also the mediocre are invisible. “The American People” seems to cut off at about the median family income, $50,000, but half tha nation is below that.
February 23, 2009 at 4:57 am
I don’t get the interest in the Populist era, really. Any kind of populism we get from the contemporary American people is probably gong to be reminiscent of the early 20th century in more than just name.
In the near term, I’m hoping that the progressive left starts to come to its senses and realize that it holds power just as much as a couple of obscure centrist Senators do. The GOP is never going to vote for Obama, so if the left threatens to go, they get tremendous leverage. When centrists are ready to hold up the country for whatever they want, and the GOP is ready to sink the country for their interests, the failure of the left to do so as well just makes them unserious: people who don’t have to be listened to. They’re still hoping for gold stars from their mommies for being nice boys and girls, or something.
February 23, 2009 at 5:45 am
Could you elaborate on the claim that James Buchanan was “the brains behind Welfare Cadillac Republicanism”?
eg, do you mean that he was a political consultant who came up with good images like “welfare queen” or that this is a natural outgrowth of “public choice theory”?
What were the two autobiographies? I can only find “Better than Plowing.”
February 23, 2009 at 10:00 am
“Economics from the Outside In” is also semi-autobiographical, or personal at least. In the two books you find his attitudes about almost everything, and “catching cheaters” is high on his list of political / economic goals. He also hates loafers and journalists and deftly makes it clear that he thinks little of MLK, without saying so.
The welfare queen is a nice poster child for public choice theory and objections to transfer payments.
Rich, to me 1880-1940 was a productive era of politics and resistance, whereas 1940-present has been an apolitical era of consensus, managed democracy, expert administration, and the imperial mission. (The little flareup 1963-8 was halted by the imperial mission and very effectively slapped down in the succeeding decades.) I think that you’re characteristically misinformed about the early twentieth century. Hofstadter was full of shit. Most of the New deal was already on the table by 1880. It took 50+ years to get there.
I don’t see that there is a progressive left now that amounts to anything, so the question of what they/we should do is moot. I don’t see much of anything coming from an elite left of comfortable credentialed experts which disdains and refuses to communicate with its inferiors.
It ends up being the Washington Generals perpetually losing to the Globetrotters of America’s real elites in finance, the media, business, and (I would say) International Relations.
I’m not more optimistic than you are, but the form my optimism would have taken would have been populist. As I’ve learned more about the abhorrence that elite liberals and Democratic political pros feel for all popular appeals, mass movements, and most actual Americans, I decided to go solo and be a man without a party.
But as I’ve said, a lot of smart people are going to be forced into the lower classes pretty soon, it would seem. Maybe minds will change. Or maybe they’ll just find ways to distinguish themselves from the uneducated people digging around in the dumpsters with them. (There was an story awhile back about a homeless PhD who had fallen through the cracks.)
February 23, 2009 at 10:49 am
Yeah, and not only smart people might be going into the lower classes, but also a lot of those not smart, those currently with incomes below $50K who nevertheless have been so far living quite comfortably, because of the wealth accumulated by the previous generations, with inherited houses, inherited businesses, well-off relatives and so on.
As all this stuff gets spent and slowly disappears, they will become anxious and it will have to be channeled into something, against something.
Could very well be the elite, if the elite becomes unskilled and reckless (as it looks like now), but not necessarily; it can be anything, really – minorities, some equivalent of the hippies, anything.
February 23, 2009 at 11:17 am
Oops. The spam filter again.
February 23, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I’ll be checking my spam filter at least daily. Don’t despair. I really don’t have the chops to fix this.
Liberals are against againstness, so the leadership won’t come from them.
Where I live, Minnesota, had a genuinely radical populist Farmer Labor government 1930–1938 which led the new deal in most respects. (For just one example, MN Sen. Lundeen’s alternative to Social Security and unemployment insurance was explicitly race blind and gave help to long-term unemployed; Southern Senators made sure that Roosevelt didn’t make those mistakes).
In 1948 the Democrats under Hubert Humphrey absorbed the remnants of the FL party, and 20 years later he destroyed his reputation by standing behind LBJ’s war. The DFL is just another bureaucratic party now, since Wellstone died anyway, though more liberal than most.
I live in what was one of the militant areas of the radical period, and it’s Republican now. There are plenty of angry people, but they’re basically all right-wingers, though not really conservatives. We’ve even had two different terrorist / saboteur groups in the area, but Democrats no longer speak to popular discontent.
February 23, 2009 at 1:57 pm
“to me 1880-1940 was a productive era of politics and resistance”
I guess I think that’s because Marxism was alive then. Not that it was right, but it provided another narrative, legitimating socialism even for the unionists and so on that weren’t Marxists. That’s why the New Deal was on the table by 1880, after all. Without an ideology like that, populism now seems to me to mean Sarah Palin’s crowds, essentially.
Progressivism was happening during the same time period, after all. A popular movement is not necessarily populist. If the netroots got large enough to become a popular movement, I’d call if progressive rather than populist.
February 23, 2009 at 2:56 pm
There was never a time, to my knowledge, when progressives and populists were side by side and competing. Some populists became progressives and some didn’t. Some progressives were populist and some were anti-populist. Look at LaFollette, who was both. The progressives were successful mostly in formerly populist areas. Most of the progressive issues were populist issues first.
Some populists were racists, and some became racists, but the same is true of the progressives, and of every other goddamn group in the US, including abolitionists, all the way back to Plymouth Rock. In Minnesota the populist-left FL party had heavy Jewish involvement in its upper leadership, and favored an end to segregation, and it was destroyed to a very considerable extent by Republican Jewbaiting.
Hofstadter was a slime artist as far as I’m concerned. His three books have misinformed people about populism until the present day and control the Democratic orthodoxy. Populism == racism is the conventional wisdom.
Roosevelt needed the populists and progressives in his first two terms, but many of them opposed WWII, and for that reason were purged. John Dewey counts a progressive and he opposed the war and wasn’t listened to much from then on.
As I say: Republican populism is fake, Democratic elitism is real. I’m also convinced that one of the main reasons why Democrats reject populism (besides the apparatchiks’ worry that they’ll lose control of the party if they let popular movements in) is that Democrats are repelled by the idea of associating with people who eat boring food and wear tacky clothes.
February 23, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Regarding populism, there are three intertwined issues – two tactical and one substantive – that I’d like to tease apart.
The first is populism as a political tactic – as something that would win elections. I’m agnostic on this question, mostly because I don’t see any Democrat actually succeeding as a populist. Jim Webb? Kind of, I guess. What kind of campaign did Franken run?
In presidential politics, Edwards came the closest, and he never got off the ground, despite the considerable advantages that attach to being a white guy.
Then there’s the question of populism as a tactic of governance. Would Obama be more effective if he stirred up populist resentments? Again, I’m agnostic.
As a tactical matter, it’s hard to criticize Obama, who, after all, won the election, and who keeps winning on policy, in the sense that he seems to be getting more-or-less the things he wants.
Then there’s the substantive question of policy: Should our policies reflect more anger at elites? I think I can sign on for this – there are a lot of people I think should be in jail – but I share Emerson’s belief that the Democratic Party ain’t interested.
Moreover, this country isn’t like the old DFL Minnesota. I think Rich is right:
Any modern populism, for example, is likely to be profoundly racist – and therefore something that would be pretty difficult for Obama to exploit.
As I think we all agree, the case for liberal populism – on merit and as a tactic – becomes stronger as the economy melts down. I’m still hoping that things can be straightened out short of societal collapse, though.
February 23, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Regarding the issue of posts getting blocked, after I found I was being blocked on wordpress sites, I located this web site:
http://podz.wordpress.com/
It contains a test to see if Akismet is blocking your comments. If it is, they recommend that you contact “akismet support,” but I don’t think they provide a link or an e-mail. I remember I found an e-mail easily enough through Googling, though, and as you can see, here I am, commenting away (though it took several days and two attempts by the akismet support guy).
February 23, 2009 at 3:20 pm
It’s not only about fanning resentments. Both in Minnesota and in Oregon, I’ve found the Democratic parties keeping their own supporters at arm’s length, and these are two of the relatively open, clean-politics states. It’s elite managerial machine politics all the way down. Democrats prefer to meet the voters via TV — requiring enormous fundraising efforts and the required policy tradeoffs, and subsidizing media which insure that political dialogue is stupid and right wing.
I give Obama credit for having a ground game, but his promise of an end to partisanship was not conducive to strong policymaking. I find it hard to be impressed by his passage of the disaster relief stimulus package, given that it was an inadequate response to an unprecedented emergency, and that he made concessions to please a bunch of zombie fanatics who didn’t even vote for it. (The imbecile Blue Dogs, 20% of the Democrats, are lying in wait next, and he seems to have already made concessions to them).
I don’t see how Obama will be able to govern well or successfully without being oppositional to the same malefactors of great wealth the populists and progressives both opposed, but he can’t go oppositional without going to the voters and getting popular support, and if he went to the voters to get support for an oppositional program of that type, that would be populism. But Democrats are opposed in principle to that and incapable of doing it anyway, so it’s not going to happen. Obama has even frozen out the weenie progressives on the internet.
I suspect that, besides misreading populism, you guys are also misreading the new religious right. A big chunk of them are educated, smug, and upper-middle class. They’re not populists, they’re prosperity Christians blessed by God. Racism might work with them, but populism wouldn’t.
Bu as I’ve said, I’m always willing to recognize that the game is over. If you think I was grumpy before Obama was elected, watch me now.
February 23, 2009 at 3:23 pm
What would be wrong with that? The Populists were defeated, but they put a lot of issues on the table and got a certain amount of response from the Democratic Party.
February 23, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I don’t know enough about the early 20th century progressive and populist movements, so I’ll try to rephrase my opinion in present-day terms. If you look at Daily Kos, let’s say, they do a lot of things that I’d guess that a contemporary populism would do. They even were one of the venues that largely opposed the bank bailout, which I think is a good sign. But they also have all of these science bits, on global warming and flu preparedness and just general science policy.
That’s really where I think the contemporary dividing line between a sort-of-progressivism and a sort-of-populism is. Does the rejection of elites extend to all elites? Or are people willing to believe that scientists actually know something about physical and biological science? Because that last is something we can’t afford to give up.
February 23, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Radicalism and populism both are adversarial to big money and depend on organized groups outside the party. Labor politics can be adversarial or not, but to be very effective at least needs a strong union independent of the party. Some of the progressives were adversarial and some not, some sought popular support and some did not, but the progressives also worked outside the party.
The phrase “malefactors of great wealth” came from the Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and LaFollette used similar language. Progressives trusted the people less than populists did, and some were elite technocrats, but some of them were firebreathers too.
Radical politics and progressive politics both rely on adversarial popular movements, and labor and progressive politics often do to. At this point the Democrats have decisively rejected the first two and are only grudgingly willing to accept the second to under certain limited conditions.
Frankly,if any of the other three varieties of independent, popular politics were firmly in place, I probably wouldn’t be talking about populism. But the typical Democrat is neither radical nor populist, only very weakly progressive, and in many cases not even pro-labor.
And as far as I’m concerned, elitist progressivism without a popular outreach will be stillborn.
February 26, 2009 at 3:50 am
The very first verse of the hymn Farther Along laments that the righteous suffer even while those in the wrong prosper.
Don’t worry, Emerson. We’ll understand it all by and by.
March 1, 2009 at 8:59 pm
c.) benefits from a government program that many other, better people do not benefit from.
I know bunches of them! They benefit from Federal or Military retirement, and often they are double-dippers. Lots of them work the disability scam, too.
March 2, 2009 at 9:23 am
I think of populism as depending on widespread public engagement in politics. Sometimes that happens. It was happening at the end of the Bush administration, for instance. Say what you will about Obama, either in his political style or his actual governance, but many people became very engaged in the whole project. I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect many people to be politically engaged all of the time, though.
Most people aren’t interested in politics, because most people aren’t interested in most things. Most people are interested in a few things. For some people, it’s politics. For others, it’s home renovation. I’m personally not into home renovation. I mean, my interest would suddenly increase a lot if my pipes started leaking, but if not, it just doesn’t interest me much.
Like leaking pipes and water damage, political crises — like that of he mid-late 2000s Bush administration — get otherwise politically apathetic people to care about politics. That is the window of opportunity for populism (or progressivism, radicalism, etc). What happens when the masses rise in populist revolt, throw out the financial nigromancers and other villains, and install a regime that truly has the public interest in mind?
I don’t think they’ll stay politically engaged in the long term. I don’t think most of them will want to. They want politics to be taken care of, so that they can focus on what they’re interested in: fixing up vintage cars, helping their kids through troubles understanding trigonometry, reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, spending time with their ailing parents — the thousands of other things that consume our time.
So when the Good Guys have won, and the malefactors have been overthrown, the majority of people, politically engaged by necessity thanks to the state of crisis, return to political apathy. Perhaps its a different type of apathy — for instance, perhaps the ancien régime fostered an apathy of despair (“We’re ruled by bandits, but what can a serf like me do about it?”) which the populist reformers have turned into an apathy of contentment (“The ship of state’s in good hands. I don’t need to worry about it.”) — but at any rate, I doubt most people will stay engaged.
What do the Good Guys do, then? Well, possibly, with most people’s attention elsewhere, the minority who are still politically engaged includes disproportionate political influence from the well-connected, leading to ever-increasing rule by special interests, starting the whole cycle over again. Even more optimistically, though, I think that the when the mass engagement that enabled the populists in the first place ends, the new leadership turns into administrative, managerial elites: perhaps the sort of people Brad DeLong likes, but a bit further to the left, and a bit less likely to be econ Ph. Ds.
I guess I can’t see how the type of populism you seem to envision can be anything more than temporarily successful. It can survive a long time while it’s thwarted. Once it succeeds, though, I have a tough time imagining that the large fraction of the populace which it engages — who are engaged mainly because of the manifest unacceptability of the current goverment — will stay engaged.
Do you think that I’m too pessimistic from a civic perspective, and that if our politics served ordinary people more effectively, that ordinary people would become more engaged in politics on a permanent basis?
March 23, 2011 at 12:22 pm
[…] Welfare Cadillac Republicans […]