Populism and Racism

We often think of the typical segregationist politician of yore as a genteel member of the white upper crust. But the more common mode was the fiery populist.

(The South’s Lesson for the Tea Party, Curtis Wilkie, New York Times, Aug. 12, 2014)

Is any of that true? To begin with, most liberals and Democrats think of the typical segregationist politician as rabble-rousing hillbilly trailer trash. And second, were populists more prominent in Southern racism than the genteel elite?

The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 and the Tulsa / Greenwood massacre of 1921, two of the bloodiest massacres in white supremacist history, were led respectively by Josephus Daniels (Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Mexico) and Tate Brady (one of Tulsa’s founders and a Democratic National Committeeman).

And while there were unquestionably populist-style bigots, there were also populist-style anti-bigots: Ralph Yarborough, Estes Kefauver, and Huey Long (who incidentally was Huey Newton’s namesake). Even LBJ was called a populist by elite liberals.

As far as I can tell, after 1896 everyone was racist, including the Republicans. (Another instigator of the Tulsa riot, which killed at least a hundred people and probably many more, was Richard Lloyd Jones, a progressive Republican). The Wilmington Insurrection overthrew the legally elected, mixed-race Republican government of Wilmington, N.C., and along with it the N.C. Populist Party. (Ben Tillman, another leader of the insurrection, was populist “in style”, but a loyal anti-Populist Democrat).

The 1896 Republican platform made no mention of voting rights in the South, so it wasn’t completely surprising when President McKinley did not respond to the insurrection. My guess is that for him the destruction of the actual Populist Party made the illegal, violent overthrow of a Republican mayor an unimportant consideration.

McDaniel and dozens of elected officials across the South are very much the descendants of not only Wallace and Faubus, but Tillman and Watson.

(Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns, and Money).

 And Josephus Daniels, Tate Brady, Richard Lloyd Jones, and tacitly, William McKinley.

 

 

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The Sex Life of the Nineteenth Century

Sex Life of the Nineteenth Century: And Autobiographical Approach to the History of Western Civilization

PDF

(Includes “Why Did Henry James Kill Daisy Miller?” and
“Could Friedrich Nietzsche have Married Jane Austen?”)

“The Sex Life of the Nineteenth Century: An Autobiographical Approach to the History of Western Civilization” is looking for its audience. In this apparently random assemblage of egregious code-switching, extravagant whimsy, pedantic smut, and tidbits of obscure trivia, an argument of uncertain affiliation and insidious intent reveals the dark side of truth, love, and seriousness. A perfect book for the right person.

About 80 posts, mostly from  Haquelebac and Idiocentrism. No political, philosophical, or economic rant, and nothing on Chinese philosophy or inner Eurasian history.

 

Sex Life of the Nineteenth Century

An Autobiographical Approach
to the History of Western Civilization

About 80 posts, mostly from  Haquelebac and Idiocentrism. Whimsy, hyperbole, excess, smut, and philosophy. Each title is preceded by an asterisk *, so if you don’t like what you are on you can always page down to the next one with ” find * “.

None of my political, philosophical, or economic polemics are included, not are my more straightforward pieces on Chinese philosophy and inner Eurasian history.

Suggestions consistent with the basic concept of the book are most welcome, and while it would be wrong for me to hope for serious proofreading, reports on bloopers you happen to notice would be appreciated. emersonj at gmail dot com.

 

What’s the big deal about Piketty?

     The main reason why Piketty has made such a big splash is that he strikes at the heart of liberal Democrats’ first principle of political economy: “A rising tide lifts all boats”.  This may be a neoliberal principle, but it’s not at all recent. During the 1940s and 1950s Democrats came to believe that there was no conflict between  rich or poor or between labor and management, and that just by “growing the economy” (Clinton’s later slogan) it would be possible to improve the lives of the poor and labor without  demanding anything from the wealthy, and that for this reason a large part of the Democratic political tradition could be jettisoned without really losing anything. From this point on Democratic “populism” (much less radicalism) was discouraged and almost disappeared, and in 1960 the “rising tide” slogan was a Kennedy campaign slogan.

 

    And wasn’t just a political slogan. Mainstream liberal economists were committed to this principle. In his “Introduction to Positive Economics” (ca. 1950) Milton Friedman claimed that the only differences between liberal and conservative economists were about means: both sides agreed that increasing the size of the economy was the economists’ main (if not only) goal. Few liberal economists disagreed, and by and large this consensus survived until very recently.

 

     Piketty’s “r>g” formula denies specifically this point. And not only did he disprove the liberal economists’ fundamental principle, he did it using the tools of liberal economics. For forty years or so American workers’ incomes have been stagnant or declining, and as the years have gone by this tendency has intensified. But there has been no theoretical explanation for these very evident facts, and without a theoretical explanation liberal economists felt that their hands were tied; these were things that everybody knew, but no one knew it in a proper scientific way.

 

     What Piketty did was to accumulate an enormous amount of data which could be presented in forms acceptable to economists, and then to develop a proper orthodox theory, based on this data, which was not based on heterodox economics or (God forbid) anecdotal data and common sense. At this point, liberal economists, like Nixon going to China, could finally acknowledge the existence of the 500-pound gorilla that had been tearing things up for a few decades.

    P. S. You might also ask: “Did the Rising Tide Theory ever have to meet the rigorous standards required of Piketty’s thesis?” The answer is “No, of course not! The Rising Tide Theory was the null hypothesis — the default position that made economists happy, happy, happy! for sixty years.”

P.P.S. Why now? Because the economic growth part of the Rising Tide Theory failed too, five or six years ago, and the lag time built into professional economics to prevent hasty action is five years.

 

The co-optation of cynicism

I’ve been reading about Ben Hecht recently. He’s almost forgotten, but he scripted some great movies (Scarface, Front Page, Barbary Coast, Wuthering Heights, Monkey Business) and, because he was a complete master of Hollywood cliches, script-doctored a lot more (Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind, His Girl Friday, Roman Holiday, Angels with Dirty Faces). Hecht started out as a Serious Author who wrote novels which tried to be decadent on the European pattern. He also was a newspaperman and his reporter’s cynicism was equal to Mencken’s. In general he thought that film was a debased, stupid medium. And that’s why he was so great! When he finally decided to switch teams and prostitute himself, his sharp awareness of the trite, cliche-ridden crappiness of film meant that he already knew the business. A sharp mind + cynicism + decadence + a complete contempt for the mass + a mercenary attitude = a genius awareness of what is commercially viable. Hecht was not the only decadent in Hollywood, of course. Mercenary European decadents flocked to Hollywood by the boatload. Hollywood’s sophisticated, decadent mixture of puritanism and prurience, with happy endings often tacked on to the end, is one of the wonders of world culture.

 

Ben Hecht, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, Bibliobazaar, 2006 (1923).

Ben Hecht, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, Google Books.

Ben Hecht, Fantazius Mallare, Frugoli and Taylor, 2001 (1922).

Ben Hecht, Fantazius Mallare, Google Books.

William MacAdams, Ben Hecht: A Biography, Barricade Books reprint, 1990.

 

 

Do YOU suffer from “stockyard fever”?

My pop psych self-help book,  Stockyard Fever will be at least as good as the average self-help book! This disease is mostly diagnosed in livestock in pens waiting waiting for the slaughter. It is characterized by an attitude of dejection and is almost always fatal. The only cure is to break out of the pen and escape, and this rarely happens.

Do you suffer from stockyard fever? My simple test will answer that question, and if the answer is “yes”,  my book will tell you what you can do about it!  $100 cheap!

Do you have a persistent “attitude of dejection”? You may be suffering from Stockyard Fever.(Click on image and strike Ctrl++++ to enlarge image.)

 

A Short History of Populism in America

What is involved in such a disdainful rejection [of populism] is, I think, the dismissal of politics tout court.

– Ernesto Laclau

Populism is the exacerbated expression of the people’s place within democratic institutions, particularly at times when the political systems do not function properly, when tensions become too acute, when the channels for expressing discontent work badly, or when the political elites are perceived as breaking faith with those they represent.

– Meny and Surel

“Everyone is talking about populism, but no one can define it.” The opening sentence of Gellner’s introduction to the 1971 anthology Populism: Its National Characteristics remains more or less true today – in Laclau’s words, “A persistent feature of the literature on populism is its reluctance – or difficulty – in giving the concept any precise meaning”.1 As a result, anyone can be a populist. Rush Limbaugh drinks $300 bottles of wine and vacations in the south of France, and he’s a populist. The Koch brothers are two of the ten richest Americans, and they’re populists. Rand Paul is a goldbug, and he’s a populist. The requirements are easy to meet: you just have to be angry, anti-intellectual, bigoted, demagogic, and right wing. (You know who else was a populist? Hitler.) And as I’ve found, all good liberals, Democrats, radicals, and political scientists steer clear of populism.

The received definition (or non-definition) of Populism does not square with what I know about the American Populists, American Populist-like movements and political leaders since that time, or American political history in general, and in my opinion it has had a severely negative effect on American politics and on the Democratic Party since 1948 or so. So I will begin by writing not about the history of Populism, or the history of populism, but the history of the term “populism”.

As common nouns the words “populism” and “populist”came into use rather late, almost always in a polemical context, and social science’s appropriation of this weakly-defined term (generalized from several very dissimilar political movements) was also tendentious and polemical. “Populism”, whatever else it may or not be, is the unthought Other of social science and of the administrative politics dominant in much of the developed world. Most definitions of populism hold that populists define themselves in opposition to the elitist Other, but since elitists also define their work in opposition to the populist’s folk understanding of their lives, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

I.

The 1920 Oxford English Dictionary and the 1988 Webster’s Unabridged take “populism” and “populist” to refer specifically to the American Populist Party of the 1890s (and the slightly-earlier Russian Narodniks). These two groups were similar mostly in name: the Narodniks were revolutionary socialist urban intellectuals who tried unsuccessfully to instigate a peasant uprising, whereas the American Populists were farmers and countryfolk (but not peasants) who worked within the electoral system and merely asked for adjustments to the capitalist system, albeit rather large ones. (The German word volkisch also can be be translated “populist”, but this does not mean, for example, that the American: populists were not volkisch in the continental sense).

To my knowledge the first uses of the term “populist” in the generic sense (rather than as a word designating the historical Populists and Narodniks) came in 1934-5 in two articles in the New York Times used the term to describe Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and Upton Sinclair (who was actually a Socialist). The generic use of the term finally appeared in the Second Edition of the OED, citing a highly-pejorative 1958 reference by Walter Laqueur highlighting populist antisemitism – as well as a rather more sympathetic 1969 use of the term in the book Student Power edited by one Alexander Cockburn.

The generic term made its entry into social science after World War Two, and the classical definitions of the term are to be found in Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955) and Gellner and Ionescu’s Populism: Its National Characteristics (1969), which includes a contribution from Hofstadter. Hofstadter’s revisionist portrait of the Populists has itself required massive revision, but this interpretation is still canonical in political science and within the Democratic Party. Gellner’s anthology, which tries to generalizes the term historically and geographically, has had a comparable influence at the higher academic levels, and by now populism is defined primarily in terms of nationalism, sexism, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism – albeit usually with a pro forma concession that populists often do express real grievances of real people. Supposedly populist national leaders included Peron, Vargas, Sukarno, Nkrumah (and perhaps even Castro!) in the third world, all of them anti-American, and European populists included Poujade, Haider, and many others.

As the debate proceeded, particularly when Europe was in question, Vienna’s late 19th century mayor Karl Lueger came to be taken as another prototypical populist: Lueger did many good things, but was also an antisemite much admired by Hitler. (The “politics of the stammtisch” – or pub — mentioned by Mudde was Lueger’s specialty). This is a very big tent, as many have noted: Narodniks, American Populists, proto-Nazis, third world national leaders, and European malcontents were all lumped together. Populists can be working class or middle class, urban or rural, conservative or radical, militarist or isolationist, pious or secular, left or right, national or local, and almost anything else. It’s like pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”.2

II.

The post-WWII debate about populism took place during an embattled period of transition. America’s anti-fascist war liberalism was being replaced by anti-Communist war liberalism, and many people had to purge their resumes or be purged themselves. In the aftermath of Hitler and under the shadow of Stalin, many radicals and liberals inclined to pessimism, in particular pessimism about majoritarian politics, while positively working to develop an anti-majoritarian, elitist form of Democratic liberalism on the model of technocratic war liberalism and urban machine politics. The intellectual founders of this new politics were mostly social scientists, and many of them were tempted by the siren of value-free anti-ideology and flew that flag, but at the distance of half a century they can clearly be seen to be engagé ideologues. Important figures included Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Chester Bowles, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Hofstadter, and Walter Lippmann (the father of them all, and also the father of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society). Some of these men had ties with the “New York Intellectuals” and with such emigres as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno and (more distantly) Hayek, von Mises, Leo Strauss, and their coteries. Hofstadter was the American history expert of the group and was most responsible for the negative view of the Populists and the pejorative definition of “populism” which have been dominant (in a rather simplified and dogmatic forms less nuanced than Hofstadter’s) in the Democratic Party and the American intelligentsia since then.3

The embattled context colored Hofstadter’s writing. To Hofstadter, populism was Joe McCarthy destroying the careers of people like himself. Populism was Hitler. Populism was lynch mobs. Populism was the Union Party running against Roosevelt in 1936, and the progressives who withdrew support from Roosevelt after Roosevelt’s 1937 austerity budget and the court-packing plan. Populism was the isolationists who failed to support American involvement in WWII, even though Hofstadter himself had dabbled in isolationism. Populism was the Progressive Party refusing to support Truman. Hofstadter’s populism wasn’t really about the Populist Party, much less the Narodniks, but about the terrible Crowd, Mob, or Mass which was feared both by conservative and by liberal theorists of the time (and which was blamed for Hitler)

Hofstadter adored Adlai Stevenson, above all when Stevenson described himself as a conservative, and Hofstadter’s political dream was an elitist, semi-technocratic anti-majoritarian party led by intellectuals on the model of what he thought the “wet” British Conservative party to be – a gentlemanly party without agitators, dissidents, and other such inconveniences. And by and large, some version of his view became canonical, both in the intellectual world and in the Democratic Party.3

After the 1948 election the Democrats no longer fought big business: “Liberals are not afraid of bigness” and “A rising tide lifts all boats” were the slogans. Rather than supporting labor, the Democrats mediated between their labor friends and their corporate friends, and when necessary they busted the unions. All opposition to military adventures was rejected by the Democrats as isolationist or pinko. The Democrats had already conducted their own purge of the American sympathizers of America’s former Eastasian ally when McCarthy came along, and while not all Democrats supported Joe McCarthy the way the Kennedys did, Democratic opposition was feeble and late. In many respects the neocons and the neoliberals were already there in 1948.

III

After 1948 or thereabouts populism has primarily been defined as “anti-elitism” — often simply as a demagogic political style or as an inarticulate political mood. However, both the Narodniks and the American Populists defined themselves in terms of class and power and had concrete political goals, not just opposition to a sinister elite, and despite some of the rhetoric of these two groups, I doubt that that the contemporary definition of “populism” applies to them at all. The concocted “populist” label, an artifact of post-WWII politics, was applied backwards in history by Hofstadter and others, to serve as the underpinning for their justification of the antipopular postwar, post-New-Deal Democratic party as it had developed between 1937 and 1948; and after that it was easy enough to fit in various European and international groups not in conformity with the postwar brand of liberalism / socialism.

The postwar transformation of the Democratic Party was part and parcel of the technocratic transformation both of government and the university, and a concommitant development was a technocratic-academic-cultural voting demographic. During WWII the university’s role mushroomed – even literary critics and anthropologists were able to get on the gravy train. All during the 20th century the political role of the university had been increasing, and even though the New Deal was driven politically to a considerable degree by populist / radical pressure, and (along with the urban machines and the white supremacist bosses) Roosevelt relied heavily on his technocratic brain trust Coming out of the war, the US had a new political-managerial-scientific-academic elite — both an integral part of the government and a voting demographic.

Hofstadter and his friends belonged to this elite, and “populism” was its most feared enemy. The various, often mutually-incompatible definitions of populism, and the disparate examples scavenged from history, all are intelligible once you ask who the enemies of the “populists” were. Populists are the Other of the liberal / left intelligentsia, and all populists are guilty of all of the crimes of any populist. (Leninists are as anti-populist as liberals, and Hofstadter , an ex-pinko, was able to retrofit many of the Communist anti-populist slurs for liberal use).

Or to put it in more contemporary terms, populists are the Other of the dominated fraction of the the dominant class: the intellectuals and the political-managerial-scientific-academic elite. Populists are the less-educated mass of the poor and middling (lower middle) classes – the people without taste, class, and style – or more simply, the majority. Even today a certain proportion of the intelligentsia have plebian backgrounds (though this is less true by the year). Anyone who has made the jump can remember the hazing period at the start of introductory classes, when the student finds out that everything that he knows (and everything anyone in his reference group knows) is wrong.To be admitted into the elite, you have to believe three impossible things before breakfast, and those who fail to do this are squeezed out, usually in an especially humiliating fashion. In PolSci 101 you learn that “By the people, for the people, and of the people” is pure disastrous nonsense. The “counterfactual assumptions” of Ecpon 101 are too many to count, but since there’s a lot of money in econ, Students eagerly play along. Examples can be multiplied from other disciplines.

Distancing the student from his own experience and from his origins is not incidental to education, but one education’s main purposes. Bourdieu speaks of expressing the “particular existence” in a “misrecognizable form” at an “objective [neutralizing] distance from necessity and from those trapped within it”. Academic “political ‘alienation’….like the aesthetic ‘alienation’, can neutralize the immediate presence, the urgency and the functions of the object.” Even secondary schooling “by at least slightly initiating its pupils into legitimate culture and its values, introduces a break with the popular world view.” (Distinction: pp. 54-55, 446-447).

So The People and the intelligentsia are at war, and it wasn’t The People who started it. When Hofstadter cites the Jacksonian Davy Crockett (“This college system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society – it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor”) he almost could be citing Bourdieu.

IV.

I got interested in Populism / populism around 2002 when I found out how aggressively anti-populist many Democrats were – both party pros and the more educated rank and file. I started reading the literature on populism and the Populists and came to feel that the Populists had been misrepresented. Up until that point I had taken some degree of populism as being a defining trait of the Democratic Party, but as I found out, this is hardly true at all except opportunistically during campaigns (and, I may say, locally in Minnesota). Meanwhile, Republican populism was all over the place – someone who only watched TV might end up thinking that the typical Republican was a construction worker, cowboy, or plumber. I summed up the initial phase of my investigation with the phrase “Republican populism is fake, but democratic elitism is real”, and I still think that this characterization is accurate.

The anti-populism of the Democratic machine is not mysterious: the Democratic Party has chosen to rely on media-heavy campaigns requiring massive fundraising from plutocrats in finance, Hollywood, and elsewhere. (Needless to say, the Democratic pros get a tasty cut of this fundraising). I ended up concluding that this was not recent, however, and that the roots of neoliberal, neocon, “centrist” Democratic Party go all the way back to the 1940s, and furthermore, that a major Democratic voting demographic was, in fact, highly educated elitists. (Almost 10% of the American electorate has a postgraduate degree, most of them Democrats).

My concern is not for the future of the Democratic Party. It’s quite possible that the present pluralist, neoliberal, neocon alliance of big money, the educated elite, and the various sorts of minorities might be victorious in the future, especially if the Tea Party succeeds in destructing the Republican Party. My concern is with the consequences of the continued domination of big money and antipopular ideology. We are very close to the situation in 1890 and before, when two plutocratic parties fought out elections on the basis of cultural differences which were politically rather irrelevant – Northern Protestants and Southern blacks vs. Southern whites and Northern ethnics). During this period the average American, especially in the West, had no representation, and that’s where Populism came from. And that’s where we are today. 4

As might be guessed, I favor a more populist Democratic Party, and a return to the “us against them” / “poor against rich” political strategy.5 Whether this is possible I do not know. A big chunk of the Democratic Party would just as soon be socially-liberal Republicans, if such a thing were possible, and these Democrats are horrified by the possibility of white trash populism (as they see it). At the same time, a big chunk of the target “poor” demographic (though not as big a chunk as people think) has been recruited into conservative bigotry, and an even bigger chunk is apolitical and demoralized; and a big chunk of the not-yet-poor seem to have decided to ride things out while everyone else gets screwed – neoliberalism is good at backloading problems and putting the pain into the future. (But no, the Tea Party is not made up of the white trash poor. They tend to be middle class and even educated).

Whether anyone knows it or not, since 2008 we have been in the longest and deepest recession (in terms of unemployment) since 1937, and tens of millions have lost their homes and/or their retirement savings. The major players are using these present problems as a pretext for the restructuring the American class system on the 19th century model, with an uneducated, disenfranchised, servile, impoverished working class. This should be a time for pitchforks, but the political response has been feeble. The Democratic Party in its present antipopular form, and any left party as antipopular as most leftists seem to be, could hardly respond effectively to a crisis of this type.

And indeed, they haven’t.

John Emerson lives in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at: John Emerson emersonj@gmail.com.

FOOTNOTES

1. Attempts to define populism have been made since by Canovan (1981, 1984, and 2005), Taggart (2000), Mény and Surel (2002), and Mudde (2004) – though some of these authors virtually concede defeat. Deiwiks (2009) claims that Mudde’s definition (cited below) has settled the question, but not everyone would agree. The non-Freudian parts of Laclau’s On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005) are fairly good, but Mouffe’s “The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-Wing Populism” is better (pp. 50-71 in Panizza’s Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, Verso,2005). See also Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation”: http://www.lacan.com/zizpopulism.htm. (My longer bibliography, mostly dedicated to American Populism, is at https://trollblog.wordpress.com/956-2/).

2. It was around this time that people stopped talking about class and power, sometimes even claiming that these terms were obsolete, speaking instead in terms of elites, status, style, culture, or ethnicity: high, middle, and low brow, masscult, midcult, and highcult. U and non-U. The “Great Compression” brought about by the New Deal (in response to populist agitations) and by war liberalism indeed did reduce inequality; and this bothered people, because many in the new middle class had very poor taste.

The roots of identity politics and “cultural liberalism” can be found here, organized like machine politics to play the various subcultures off against one another, the way the bosses played off the Poles, the Jews, the Italians, and the Irish against one another (or, as far as that goes, the way the Austro Hungarian elites pluralistically played off the Germans, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Italians, the Czechs, the Croats, the Slovaks, the Ruthenians, the Romanians, the Slovenes, the Serbs, and the Jews against one another).

3. Hofstadter and the others were simultaneously scholars and Democrats. Their scholarly positions were more nuanced than my summaries show. I have not found, however, that the PolSci 101 sorts who dominate the Democratic Party have given Hofstadter et. al. a reading even as nuanced as mine.

4. Though I have not cited him earlier, my view of party politics comes from Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies.

5. It should be unnecessary to say that since I do not accept the expansive current definition of populism, I am not proposing a politics modeled on the politics, e.g., of Karl Lueger, Juan Peron, or Adolf Hitler. I do believe that it is legitimate to speak of “populism” if you mean the American Populist Party and its successors – the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party, various freelancing politicians in both parties, and even the Wisconsin Progressives and the Debs Socialists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deiwiks, Christa, “Populism”, Living Reviews in Democracy, June, 2009. http://democracy.livingreviews.org/index.php/lrd/article/view/lrd-2009-3/11

Emerson, John, https://trollblog.wordpress.com/956-2/).

Gellner, Ernest, and Ionescu, Ghija (eds.), Populism: Its National Characteristics, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959.

Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform, Knopf, 1955. `

Karp, Walter, Indispensable Enemies, Franklin Square, 2010.

Laclau, Ernesto, On Populist Reason, 2005, Verso.

Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, Vintage, 1965.

Lasch, Christopher, The Agony of the American Left, Vintage, 1966.

Lippmann, Public Opinion, Dover, 2004 (1922).

Mény, Yves, and Surel, Yves (eds.), Democracy and the Populist Challenge, Palgrave, 2002.

Mouffe, Chantal, “The ‘End of Politics” and the Challenge of Right-Wing Populism”, in Panizza (below), pp. 50-71.

Mudde, Cas, “The Populist Zeitgeist”, Government and Opposition, vol. 39 #4, August 2004, pp. 542-563. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x/full

Panizza, Francisco, Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, Verso,2005.

Rogin, Michael Paul, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter, MIT, 1967.

Zizek, Slavo, “Against the Populist Temptation”, http://www.lacan.com/zizpopulism.htm.

 

What is Rauchway Saying Here?

America’s unquestioned economic authority began to ebb in the 1960s and vanished completely when President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971. Since then globalization has begun to work without a guarantor, and America has returned to its older ways….. Yet it is also true that today, as before WWI, American military potential remains untapped. If the US were to spend as high a proportion of its money on defense as it did at the height of the cold war around 1960 it would account for about 2/3 of the military spending around the globe. The American power to fight, as with the American power to fight disease, remains in reserve…. The case of the world crisis of 1915-1945 teaches us that powerful nations must act occasionally, if not continuously, to preserve global openness if it is to last  (Eric Rauchway, Favored Among Nations, pp. 170-172; abridged and paraphrased).

It seem to me he is saying 1.) that WWI and WWII were the result of America’s refusal to participate fully in the world system, 2.) that when Nixon went of the gold standard he did something terrible, 3.) that in recent years the US has been too passive with regard to the world economic order, and 4.) the US needs to more fully develop its military potential, despite spending more on the military than the next five or so nations combined.

None of this makes any sense at all. So what is Rauchway really saying? To me he sounds like Niall Ferguson.

 

Nate Silver the shithead savant

ABSTRACT: “Shithead savant” should become a technical term in the social science branch of Science Studies, along with “trained incapacity” and “occupational psychosis”.

EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT JOHN EMERSON!

Nate Silver is a shithead savant — he’s much brighter than you and me but he’s capable of missing the point even when it’s crawling up his ass. For some reason, the Republicans have been spending millions a year on voter discouragement for decades, and for some reason, for the last several years they’ve been running a nationally coordinated voter discouragement campaign involving every Republican governor, Secretary of State, or state legislature in the country — but don’t worry, it won’t make much difference, says Silver.

College Republican crooks like Karl Rove are ten times smarter than PolSci PhDs like Nate Silver. That counterintuitive fact should be carved in the tombstone of the Democratic Party. (If you call Silver media and not political — well, the media need their own tombstone.)

“Only 2%”. 2% isn’t even a close election, it’s a solid victory.

Chris Hayes on this topic.

 

Reasonable conspiracy theories

I am not one for conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor generally leads one to prefer explanations involving incompetence or individual malfeasance over larger, complex, well-orchestrated wrong-doing.

That’s a malicious caricature of what a conspiracy is. A conspiracy is several people secretly working together toward a wrongful goal, using wrongful methods.

Conspiracies are common in history. Not only do criminals and revolutionaries often work secretly, so do many legitimate organizations (intelligence organizations, secret police, political groups) and these often act wrongfully.

Conspirators are gamblers.  Sometimes conspiracies succeed and sometimes they fail.  Conspirators don’t expect to get total control of everything; they just intervene secretly and maliciously in a situation in the hopes of getting whatever they hope to get.   It’s like baseball — batting .333 is success. There’s plenty of stupidity and chance and incompetence involved in any situation, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t conspiracy too..

Some of the things Enron did were conspiratorial. Secrecy, dishonesty, lawbreaking, coordinated activity. Their scheme almost worked. Examples can be multiplied.

Liberals have brainwashed themselves into laughing scornfully whenever a conspiracy is spoken of, and they also are too willing to grant the intellectual honesty of their opponents. Often a political argument consists of one side saying whatever is  necessary to buy time until a fait accompli has been achieved. Spokesmen who seem stupid aren’t necessarily stupid themselves; they’ve just correctly estimated the stupidity of their audience.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and post-WWII anti-communist conspiracy theories  led liberals to assume that all conspiracy theories are false. They also had an ulterior motive. People who talk about conspiracies are thereby confessing that they’re outsiders. But liberals all think that they’re insiders, and it’s uncool for insiders to get all upset about business as usual (i.e., the normal dishonesty which makes the system function) . Conspiracists are ejected from the old boys network because they threaten to blow the cover of some of the other insiders.

Conspiracism starts with the conviction that the system is stacked against you and that you can never win, and liberals don’t want to believe that. As the conservative triumph starts to bite, maybe some of them will wise up.

From a comment  here.