Populism & its critics

Roger Kimball

Populism and current populist movements in the U.S. and Europe are a reaction to an overbearing government run by people who have no visceral understanding, or empathy with, the people they attempt to rule.  As a result they govern against the will of the people while living privileged lifestyles.

.... it is often said that “populism” is “anti- elitist,” but when it comes to phenomena like Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, I am not sure that the effective contrast is between elites, on the one hand, and us common folk, on the other. Often, I believe, the putative “elites” turn out to be neither “elite” nor elevated, merely to be possessed, through no virtue of their own, of an abundance of state power....

My own feeling is that most contemporary examples of what are called “populist” movements are at bottom movements to force the question: “Who rules?” Jeremy Black is doubtless correct that much of what we call “populist” today is at least in part a coefficient of upheavals wrought by technological displacement and homely facts of population change. Behind those realities, however, I would suggest that “populism” is primarily about what I have elsewhere called the location of sovereignty. For one thing, the question of sovereignty, of “Who governs?” stands behind the rebellion against the political correctness and moral meddlesomeness that are such conspicuous and disfiguring features of our increasingly bureaucratic society. The smothering, Tocquevillian blanket of regulatory excess has had a wide range of practical and economic effects, stifling entrepreneurship and making any sort of productive innovation difficult....

The issue of sovereignty also stands behind the debates over the relative advantages and moral weather of “globalism” vs. “nationalism” as well as the correlative economic issues of underemployment and wage stagnation. In Federalist 10, Madison warned against the schemes of “theoretic” politicians. “Globalism” may sound attractive in the abstract. But the spirit of local control tempers the cosmopolitan project of a borderless world with a recognition that the nation state has been the best guarantor not only of sovereignty but also of broadly shared prosperity. What we might call the ideology of free trade—the globalist aspiration to transcend the impediments of national identity and control—is an abstraction that principally benefits its architects.

Behind the various moods and movements that have been described as “populist” is a growing recognition that the goals of the administrative state are inimical to freedom. “Populist,” indeed, is one word for those phenomena. An affirmation of sovereignty, underwritten by a passion for freedom, is another, possibly more accurate, phrase. If that is correct, then I’d say that conservatives ought to respond to the “populist challenge” by embracing it wholeheartedly.

Its the rebellion of the country class against the ruling class.  The anger of the country class is made greater by the realization that the ruling class has stacked the deck; that elections are a charade where the winner is pre-determined.  And if the "dark horse" should actually win - a dark horse like Donald Trump - the ruling class will do everything in its power to destroy him.

That will not stand.

No, Trump’s not a populist – he’s a breed all by himself

I have called Trump a Populist in other essays, like this one, becaue I didn't associate poplism with evil.  I may have been wrong.  Here's an intersting - and valid - take by F. H. Buckley (no relation to William F. Buckley - or Natioanl Review, thank God).

You should never let your opponents define you, because they’re not looking to do you any favors. That’s why Republicans, especially those who voted for President Trump, should object to being called populists.

Populism was one of the nastiest of American political movements. It was inevitable, therefore, that Trump would be called a populist. But that doesn’t describe Trump, or the Republican Party he re-invented.

It’s true that, like most populists, Trump thinks that tariff walls that keep foreign goods out of the country might help American workers. But then Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley thought so, too, and they weren’t populists.

It’s also true that, like most populists, Trump championed an underclass unjustly held back by an aristocracy of wealth. But then Karl Marx and socialist Eugene V. Debs thought the same thing, and they weren’t populists. And like most populists, Trump decried the influence of money in politics. But then so did Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren, and nobody called them populists.

Here’s what the accusation of populism really means. It’s a smear meant to link one to people like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, one of the vilest characters in American political history. Tillman was the governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and served as the state’s representative in the US Senate for the next 23 years. He invented Jim Crow laws in his state, defended lynch mobs and boasted of the African-Americans he had killed.

Trump is something new in American politics. He’s not Andrew Jackson, or a plain-speaking Harry Truman. He’s not Ronald Reagan. He’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, for the simple reason that he’s up against something we’ve never seen before: a left that’s given up on the American dream of a mobile and classless society, that defends economic immobility and aristocracy.

Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a conservative nationalist. As a conservative he favors socially conservative institutions and free-market solutions to political questions. As a nationalist he is middle of the road or liberal when it comes to taking care of Americans who have fallen behind, through a generous safety net.

That might sound like an unnatural union of opposites, but similar parties have had a long history in our sister parliamentary governments. Benjamin Disraeli was another conservative nationalist. As a parliamentarian, he opposed Sir Robert Peel’s free-trade policies and in the process created a new Tory party.

And a year before Friedrich Engels shocked readers with his description of the wretchedness of East End London in “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), Disraeli had written no less passionately about economic inequality.

Then, as the Conservative prime minister, Disraeli extended the franchise to all adult male heads of households in the 1867 Reform Bill.

In a speech on the bill, Disraeli described what he thought the Tory Party should be, in terms that also define Trump’s Republican Worker’s Party:

“I have always considered that the Tory party was the national party of England . . . It is formed of all classes, from the highest to the most homely, and it upholds a series of institutions that are in theory, and ought to be in practice, an embodiment of the national requirements and the security of the national rights.”

As a nationalist, Disraeli and his party wanted all Britons to prosper. He could never have called one group of his countrymen deplorable, or ignored half the voters because they were in the wrong identity group.

By reaching out to all Britons, he took the Whig’s issues away from them, just as Trump did in dishing the Democrats.

Not much has changed, and the American who wishes to understand the shape of things to come might do well to read up on the “Tory Democracy” of Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) or observe the similarities between Trump’s agenda and the National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald’s Tory Party in Canada.

They were conservative, but because they supported generous social-welfare policies they were sometimes called Red Tories. And they’re the ancestors of Trump’s Republican Party.

That's a definition of Donald Trump I can agree with.

Pat Buchanan: Donald Trump’s Rise Is Rejection of a Quarter Century of Bush Republicanism

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East.

“In the GOP nomination race, the chickens of a quarter century of Bush Republicanism have come home to roost,” Buchanan told Breitbart. “Trump’s triumphs to date are due to his recognition of, and identification with, the Middle American revolt against Bush family ideology and policy, and what it has produced.”

Buchanan explained that “America is rejecting the Bush immigration policy,” which has “proffered amnesty” to “12 million illegals… because it said the United States is helpless to do anything about their presence here.”

“America’s establishment has failed America,” Buchanan said, “The single clearest message in the presidential campaign of 2015-2016 is that the American people would like to cleanse our capital city of its ruling class.”

Buchanan exemplifies the strain of American culture that identifies with Middle America, populism and nationalism. The Bush family is part of the Ruling Class, Trump (despite his wealth) is part of the Country Class.  Trump is the beneficiary of the vision Pat articulated in 2008. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

By a margin of nearly five-to-one, the American people believe these so-called free trade deals lower wages rather than raise them, according to Pew polling data.

Read the whole thing.

A Beat-up, Exhausted, and Terrified Republican Establishment

Victor Davis Hansen gives us a populist set of talking points for Republicans.

On almost every contemporary issue there is a populist, middle-class argument to be made against elite liberalism. Yet the Republican class in charge seems ossified in its inability to make a counter-argument for the middle class. Never has the liberal agenda been so vulnerable, a logical development when bad ideas have had five years to prove themselves as very bad ideas. ...

On illegal immigration and amnesty.

We know the entry of 11 million illegal aliens depresses the wages of the poor and entry-level working class. Illegal immigration overwhelms state services, and that too hurts citizens most in need of help. The lower-middle classes do not have low-paid nannies, gardeners, and house-keepers....

We also know that cheap labor in the shadows benefits corporate business, eager for low-wage laborers. So how hard is it for a Republican simply to say, “I oppose illegal immigration because (1) it is illegal. It undermines the sanctity of the law and discriminates against the law-abiding waiting in line to enter the U.S. legally. (2) It benefits corporate grandees at the expense of working people. (3) It is driven by self-serving elites of the ethnic-grievance industry to enhance their own advantage, rather than to help poor folks struggling to find decent wages and schools. Illegal immigration, in short, is the most illiberal issue of our time....

On energy

Fracking and horizontal drilling help the middle class. Stopping them on federal lands or banning Keystone makes the lower classes pay for the pipe dreams of the upper class. The Berkeley Sierra Club professor doesn’t worry whether he can find a job welding on a pipeline. He does not drive along the Westside 50 miles to work and so cares little about the price of gas for his third-hand pick-up. It is about 70 degrees year round in Menlo Park, so it is easy to jack power bills up to subsidize wind and solar, when you don’t need to survive 105 degree temperatures in Bakersfield.

Gun Control

How hard it is for Republicans to say to liberals, “I accuse! The wealthy have their security details, most of them armed. The underclass has access to illegal weaponry as the armed crime sprees in a Detroit or Chicago attest. Why then go after the middle class, who neither outsource their security nor break the law? Before we issue sweeping edicts aimed at the law-abiding, let us disarm all the security guards of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., and put away for good the criminals who use illegal firearms to hurt the innocent.”

Young People

Obamacare is a gift to the old and affluent, who use subsidized health care from the young and poor. It is the greatest tax on the youthful cohort in the history of the republic at a time when student debt already exceeds $1 trillion. How liberal is that? Or for that matter, how liberal were colleges to up their annual tuition rates higher than inflation,

“Fairness”

We talk about fairness. Do men and women make the same on the president’s own staff? Why does Kobe Bryant make so much and some of his gifted colleagues make so little in comparison? Does Johnny Depp really need $40 million a year when the Hollywood sound tech cannot afford a cottage in South Central L.A.? Did not the Malibu grandees hear their president say that they did not build their film careers, and at some point long ago had made enough money?

Diversity

Yes, let us all hail diversity and insist that it be applied across the board. Cannot California find a senior elected leader other than Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi? How diverse, given California’s trumpeted diversity, are three elderly multimillionaire women, with hyper-capitalist spouses, who live within commuting distance of each other in the Bay Area? Should the United States Postal service base correct its current labor profile by hiring in accordance with ethnic percentages within the population? Should Asians depart from UC Berkeley so more whites, blacks, and Latinos might enroll commensurately with their percentages in the population? Should the NFL have quotas for non-African-Americans, to give others a chance ...

Read the whole thing.