Thoughts on a New Populism

Some excerpts:

Americans, many of them at least, are awakening to the truth articulated more than 50 years ago by writer Whittaker Chambers: that the modern world's "vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized" does not "make for happiness from day to day" – and further, that it may mean "catastrophe in the end."
...
This tendency of our political and economic culture toward a state of permanent revolution is the hallmark of any modern progressive society. And if there is one deity today to which every politician, right and left, will pay obeisance, it is the god of progress.

...
When Bryan fought for home, family and posterity, he tapped directly into the heart of the American middle classes. But the populist reforms intended to return political and economic power to the ordinary American were fatally flawed.

The introduction of the federal income tax, the nationalization of the railroads and the direct election of U.S. senators were all major reforms accomplished by the progressive populists of Bryan's day. But rather than putting a hedge of protection around home, family and posterity, each exposed the institutions of middle America to further exploitation. By empowering centralized planning authorities to directly control Americans' income, mobility and elections via taxation, bureaucratic infrastructure and national political parties, the populists ended up giving the elites far greater control of the people than they had previously had.

There's an irony inherent in a system like our own that identifies the individual as the fundamental unit of political, social and economic order. Because it shears the individual of the republican virtues cultivated within communities of tradition in the name of empowering him, it actually makes the individual subject to tyranny. Limitless emancipation in the name of progress is, it turns out, the final and most binding mechanism of control.

When the oldest sources of order – which are at root religious – are abandoned along with their traditions and taboos, the resulting void of meaning is by necessity filled with some ideology promising one form or another of perfect happiness in the here and now. And these systems of self-salvation creep not toward liberation, but toward total control.

Populism in its progressive form is not immune from this utopian yearning, which must always end in disaster. So our neopopulist moment ought to be approached with sober awareness that an angry mob is probably worse than a corrupt bureaucrat. The same bureaucrat who has harnessed the anger of the mob with progressive dreams is far more terrible than both.

What is called for is an anti-progressive populism; an anti-movement movement; a return to what is near, known and particular. What is called for is what I think of as regional populism. Its first political task will be to rediscover the ways citizens of the old American republic used to think and talk.

Discuss...