The wages of populism: political death

Find yourself a socialist who believes in noblesse oblige more than pretensions of equality: who wants to lead and not to follow. People of any class are mostly just peasants.
And Rory the Tory is just Boris without the laziness.

I share your frustration. But there doesn’t seem much point in voting for a bigger bunch of populists to punish them for their populism. The signal sent isn’t helpful.

“…People of any class are mostly just peasants.”
Mmmm surprising then that the people aren’t “mostly” voting for the BNP eh what old boy?

Neil and Chris: as an outsider, it sounds to me that calling this phenomenon “populism” is inaccurate. It’s authoritarianism, plain and simple. Most folk probably don’t care that much about the ins-and-outs drug policy. Of those that do, I would gather that the vast majority are for liberalizing. The end result is that sacking Nutt has cost NuLabor a few votes, but not enough to make a difference at the next election. Most of them go to the LibDems, or abstain.

However, NuLabor (and the Conservatives) probably are under the delusion that toughening the Marijuana laws is popular. Their idea of the median voter is the sort of person who writes “Outraged in Tumbridge Wells” letters to the editor – petty, angry and scared. Just like themselves.

“For that, you would have to look to the Greens…”

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the Green Party’s science policy is anti-scientific:

http://evidencematters.org/2009/06/01/sciencepunk-and-layscience/

Chris and Neil, How is it populism to enact a policy just because the press will attack you if you do not. The press is very much for bailing out Wall Street and pointedly reminds us that attacking their bonuses is pure Blood Lust That Will Create Not a Single Job (the importance of this “blood lust” to the question of moral hazard goes unremarked, of course). By Neil’s logic, then support for the Wall Street Bailout and Bonuses are populist positions because they are positions the politicians are under Press pressure to adopt (almost a tongue twister as well as a logic twister that). In the US, support for medical marijuana is clearly the popular position at this point. Are things so different in the UK?

I’m not so sure that medical marijuana is the popular position. It’s passed on ballot measures in several states, but definitely not most of them. I think most people are probably moderately in favor of the idea of people having access to medicine, but there’s a very strong hard-on-crime populist front, that I think would think of medical marijuana as just a sneaky way to legalize recreational drugs (which does seem to be a major function of the laws in California at least).

The point isn’t about what the folks at the newspaper will say about the policy, but what one or two of them will be able to whip up an angry mob about.

In fact, I would say medical marijuana is the most populist movement we have seen, since, to my knowledge, everywhere in the US it has been established, it has been through popular vote, not legislative or judicial action.

also “most populist movement we have seen” -> “most populist movement we have currently”. I make odd mistakes when I write in a hurry.

Does ‘populist’ mean the same in Europe as the USA? Here in the east of the west it’s a pretty right-wing position, precisely because it relies on a distinction between appealing to prejudice and knee-jerk, and articulating something in the real interests of the general population – in other words populism is opposed to social democracy.

Meanwhile, dope ‘discourages the work ethic’? But how are you going to pay for all those snacks?

“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 an American Populist or a Russian Narodnik.

The generalized use of the word as a throwaway insult seems to be an aspect of the transformation of the left-center into an administrative elite after WWII. Richard Hofstadter’s books, among others, provide an intellectual rationale for the smear and are 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 though 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. Both in the US and in Europe a lot of the energy behind progressive movements was populist (e.g. “obrerismo” in leftist 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 such critical theorists as Adorno, 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 hierarchal 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, though of course they did just switch to different authoritarian leaders). Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free” shows the motives of the Germans who at least passively accepted Naziism: the Nazis were like corrupt urban bosses in the US, and helped out people who needed help when none of the established authorities were willing or able to do anything. The churches, the vanguard left parties, the Austrian economists, the Straussians and the Schmittians were all fervent in their belief that The People should be seen and not heard and that The People existed for the State, Church, Party, or Market, and not vice versa.

Hitler of course was no better, but he successfully exploited a weak spot in the existing authoritarian establishments in order to replace them with a new authoritarian establishment.

“All power to the powerless; to the powerful, the scaffold” is simple and flexible

The administrative left (Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, Reid?) should be demanding gallows for somebody? For the powerful? Come on.

I believe populism is a tactic that attempts to create a movement, but the movement itself is only a means to an end. Think of Mao and his Red Guards, for example: populism, movement, the goal achieved, the movement suppressed and destroyed. It’s all politics.

I’m not sure we disagree, Henri: as a tool, the populist call is inevitably bound up in contradiction. The people who successfully make the call aren’t bothered by this; the people who are bothered never reach for it.

As a black guy’s who’s all too aware of just how fucked up most people are, I have good reasons to perceive populism in a perjoritative light. Genuine populism tends to be *very* unhealthy for minority or oppressed slight majorities, because one of the truest hallmarks of populism is how much conflict permeates its narratives. Not only because populism might arise out of a fustration with moderated administration but also because the language of who you hate is so much simpler than the language of aspiration. Thus the political economy tends to form around killing/oppressing people and taking their shit. It’s how Gandhi’s nationalist populism decayed into the violent seperation of 1947. The structure of populist government is how Californian republicans are still politically able to ideologically cohere despite the dramatically bad consequences of their attitudes to the state as a whole.

Populism might sound really cool for people who haven’t met enough absurdly petty people, but for minorities who have absurdly petty go out of their way to interact negatively with them…

Historically, racism was the biggest blot on the Populists’ record. That’s true of the US as a whole, however. The Democrats, in particular, remained the segregationist party until 1965.

Even though the Populists were not anti-racists, while they were around there was competition for black votes, which had a generally beneficial effect. Once they were gone, the antipopulist Democrats and Republicans cut deals allowing the disenfranchisement of black citizens in the South. The Republicans did this even though the Republican Party was a factor in several southern states, but would no longer be so once these states were lily-white. As Walter Karp has explained, the two parties had very few ideological differences around that time, and were more interested in keeping their own supporters in line than in competing for power. (Bryan was sabotaged by his own party every time he ran as a Democrat, whether or not the Populists were involved.)

The main objection to populism that seems to be arising in this thread is the belief that it tends to simply identify enemies and define itself in opposition to them. But is that not also what a definitionally pejorative application of “populist” does?

Well, OK, you can say “I’m a populist, I believe in articulating policy around the short-term perceived interests of as large a constituency as possible, without regard to the long-term consequences for their well-being”, but it doesn’t sound very good, does it? Because if you’re arguing that ‘populist’ means something different than that, most of the other possibilities for serving the interests of a wide constituency already have other labels – from Social Democrat to Conservative, according to taste.

“I’m a populist, I believe in articulating policy around the short-term perceived interests of as large a constituency as possible, without regard to the long-term consequences for their well-being”

I’m not willing to use a slogan pulled out of your butt. Sorry, dude.

Neither here nor in Europe does “Social Democrat” have any forward motion.

Henri, do you believe, then, that there is no such thing as an authentic popular movement? It also seems quite strange to regard a movement openly advocated by the head of state as populist. It used populist rhetoric as all communist movements did, but are we really to accept such rhetoric at face value?

As I’ve said here and elsewhere, my immediate motive for taking an interest in populism was the principled and dogmatic anti-populism (that’s their word) of the Democratic leadership, which assumes that there is no conflict between big business and the ordinary folk. I ended up taking a side trip through American political history to see where this nti-populism came from, and ended up concluding that it’s based on a tendentious misrepresentation of historical populism, that it leads to bad policy, that it’s motivated by venality (big business pays the Democratic bills), and that the misrepresentation of populism has been accepted by most educated people.

I could have done the same with “soc*alism”—there’s actually an overlap there, since many populists were, or later became soc*alists (e.g. Debs). If there’s someone out there trying to move the Democrats in a soc*alist direction, I’m sure I’ll get along with them fine. “Populism” actually has fewer negatives among Americans than “soc*alism”, except for educated people who are already Democrats. And populist has played a much more important positive role in American political history than soc*alism has.

I don’t affirm anything any populist ever did anywhere, any more than a soc*alist or Democrat affirms anything that any other soc*alist or Democrat ever did.

John Emerson, you’re being an idiot. I know who Tom Watson and Hoke Smith are and what they did and I suspect that I know them better than you. Moreover, when I said that there was no viable Southern Populist party until the time of Long, I was precisely correct. You, however, are entirely welcome to omit the term “viable”, but please do make a note of it, hmmm? I mean, hey, the South was a police state for all intents and purposes –the populists had roughly the same chance as the Muslim Brotherhood Party did in Egypt, only the leadership cared more about the appearance of democracy.

And of course, the remnants, either in the dead party or as Democrats, the populists eventually wound up running on the “We Hate Black People More Than Real Democrats Do” plank. Just like the ultimate outcome of the Progressive Party was the rampant Anti-Catholicism of Prohibition.

And lastly, assuming that I can only relate to black history is a studied insult. Yes, I introduced myself as black, to put across a personal feel for how scary many populist movements can be. However, I also placed my blackness in an overall context of being a minority and I applied it to a theory of the structure of populism’s decay. The Southern Populists didn’t wind up hating black just because. The Soviets didn’t wind up killing lots of jews just because. These thing happen despite both groups desperate need for minority group alliances (lenin sure tried hard, and we got Stalin for our troubles). It’s just what populist movements do when they are sustained beyond the initial exitement.

Shah8, you’re sort of a jerk yourself. You introduced yourself as a black guy and I responded. I was starting from scratch with no knowledge of who you are or what you know other than#31. The Populisst were racists and so was everyone else in the South and most of the North.

Yeah, sure, populists are Stalin and Hitler and Genghis Khan and you don’t like them. Bug fucking deal.

Chris, I’m sure you know much more about Gordon Brown than I do, but do we really know that that is his motivation. “Marijuana is evil” is the view of every respectable politician but Jesse Ventura in the US (if he is considered respectable). There is a whole complex discussion of why this is so, but I don’t think catering to right-wing newspaper readers covers it.

It seems that Nutt was appointed to make recommendations re. the classification of drugs. Most of the controversy seems to come about due to a confusion over what the classification of drugs is for.

Nutt et. al. seem to think it is about ranking drugs in terms of harm which he assumes, as the scientist who said ecstasy was less dangerous than riding a horse does, means statistical chance of dying due to use or, in the case of cannabis acquiring psycological illness. I’m not sure what I think about this definition of harm or hamrfulness but I don’t want to open that can of worms. Suffice to say this is not what the government think the classification system is.

Presumably the politicians think that the point of the classification system, as part of the publicly recognizable basic structure of society (see M. Ronzoni “what makes the basic structure just” for a pretty good explanation), is to bring about certain social conditions, such as the reduction in the use of that drug either to reduce harm to the user or to reduce other social harms or perhaps just to gain popularity. So the classification system for the politicians is a strategic device either for the pursuit of justice or popularity or whatever.

Nutt’s comments must have been counter-productive given government’s aims, admirable or not. One way this could have happened is if the government was aiming for the realization of some social condition to nudge us closer to a just society, for example reducing the social harms from drugs. This might require communicating a message to citizens that cannabis is really bad, almost definitely with some exageration, but in the name of justice. Nutt’s comments are likely to frustrate the achievement of this aim. Like my Mum said “people will think that its alright to take drugs now that he has said that” because people are, of course, stupid.

If Nutt’s comments did frustrate a genuine attempt at realizing a more just society then they are right to sack him I think. Though they should have been very clear about the purpose of the and, it seems to me, that they should not have employed a scientist if they just wants to reduce user or something. Surely a sociologist would be better situated to achieve this aim.

Finally, Nutt’s intention was to have an honest public debate about the (reletive)harmfulness of drugs. Having a public debate, however, may not be in the public’s interest and may frustrate the achievement of the social conditions neccesary for justice. So, is the truth safe for democracy? I think no. Not if it frustrates the social conditions neccesary for justice.

“Marijuana is evil” is the view of every respectable politician but Jesse Ventura in the US

That’s why 13 states have legalized it for medical use.

Man, those black people are always being so unfair, bringing up the race card…

But still, you know, you still have to kind of respond with logic and examples. Saying that I don’t know populist history is a gambit that might fail if I respond with real examples. Saying that everyone was racist is not a counter. Republicans were just as racist during Reconstruction, yet life was *much* better for black people then compared to 30 years later during the “populist” era by political metrics.

Lastly, you keep implying that I should stick to the “black history” ghetto, and it doesn’t help matters when you suggest I thought Temujin was a populist. Oddly enough, in their way, the Mongols were pretty key to advancing the maturation of a civil society despite the lack of respect for the masses. More pertinently, I never said Stalin or Hitler were populists and suggesting that I thought they were is inappropriate.

Yeah, sure, populist is a perjorative term that’s often applied unfairly to socially just attitudes and rule. However, I consider that populism is a justly perjorative term and I gave quite a bit of evidence which you never truly address. Moreover, in today’s technocratic democracy, populism is only given voice when it allows the nominally subservient governing body greater flexibility to pursue non-populist aims. Oftentimes, it’s plain divide and conquer.

Racism is one of the biggest accusations against the Populists and the hardest one to respond to. You will excuse me for continuing to talk about it. I do not advocate imitating the Populist model on minority questions. Nonetheless I think that they’ve been unfairly maligned. One of the things Democrats hated about the Populist was that they risked breaking up the solid Democratic South by prioritizing other issues over race.

The populist era in the South was over with by 1896, and as you said, they never were very successful. The disenfranchisement took places after the populists had been destroyed:

Republican – Populist fusion:

One of the most interesting aspects of Populist-Republican Fusion rule was the service of African American office holders. There were approximately 1,000 elected or appointed black officials, including Congressman George H. White (1852-1918). Although black Tar Heels were still underrepresented, the presence of black officials troubled Democratic white supremacists.

In the 1898 “White Supremacy Campaign,” led by future U.S. Senator Furnifold M. Simmons (1854-1940), chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, the Democratic Party used identity politics to regain power. “Negro rule” and “Negro domination” became the catchphrases of the campaign. Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, was the unabashed press spokesman for white supremacy. Red Shirts, reminiscent of the Klan, intimidated blacks and thereby limited the number of Republican votes.

Shortly after a resounding victory, Democrats disfranchised African Americans and thereby ended a possible Republican resurgence. Democrats, however, realized they must maintain some of the Fusionist education and business policies and thus acquiesced to school funding demands and business regulation; in 1900, emulating Republican-Populist interest in education, Democrat Charles B. Aycock (1859-1912) became the party’s first “Education Governor.”

Line break tags don’t work I see.

Thanks, Substance! Busy day so I’m lazy about checking facts today. Much appreciated, seriously.

Cameron is clearly so very very much nastier
I’m not sure this is true, it’s more like being fed up with 12 years of New Labour bullshit and having it all repackaged again as New Tory bullshit. Proof – like we needed it – came when the Tory spokesman endorsed the move to sack Nutt*.

*If I’m right about this, the same spokesman who said the appointment of Gen Dannet was a “gimmick”, mistakenly believing it to have been a Lab appointment rather than a Tory one…

There are several problems with expert anti-populism. One is that experts develop professional blind spots, make ideological commitments, and / or become an interest group while continuing to claim to speak for everyone. I’m confident that all three of these things happened within economics and finance during recent decades, and that the results have been a disaster.

Another is that experts wall themselves off from public opinion, with the result that, first, they are blinded to the results of their policies and don’t get feedback, and second that they are unable to muster support for their policies when they need it.

“The ability of the man in the street to understand issues outside his field” increases slowly because no one bothers to talk to him. One of the activities of the actual Populists was public education, which the present Democratic Party doesn’t engage in at all.

Experts love the “we talk — you listen” model of government, but there are objective problems with that approach. They also aren’t too averse to the “baffle them with bullshit” approach, which has even greater problems.

Two resignations from the Advisory Council thus far.

There is a good reason for that: financial services is the bread-and-butter of the British economy.

And Iceland too. Maybe Ireland. A lot of those little island countries.

Chris Bertram just better be glad Gordon’s not like Andrew Jackson! Muscular Populism Revealed By the Smashing of the National Bank! Mervyn thinks HE IS THE KING?! NO!!! Mervyn King Will NOT LORD OVER THE PEOPLE! I have decided to Dismiss Mr. King, and Dissolve the Bank of England!

The Tyranny of Pound Sterling Is Now At An End, And No Longer Will INSIDIOUS BANKERS DIRECT THE FLOW OF MONEY IN OUR COMMUNITIES TO THEIR PRIVATE BENEFIT! No Longer Will They Interfere In Our Elections With Blood Money In Back Rooms!

Huzzah!
Huzzah!

As a historical note, I point out that the great federalization of racist policy happened under Woodrow Wilson, who was and is very much a hero in many ways to the technocratic, managerial tradition in the Democratic Party. And he did it under the auspices of wartime necessity, an example of why I think John’s right to put the issue of war and empire in such a central place. A nation at peace can still get into awful moral messes, but war makes tyranny a whole lot easier.

Well, hopefully my amusement.

And uh, it also amuses me just how much the point elides some of you guys. I’m beyond the whole “you guys are stuck on race while I used it in an attempt to derive a larger point” angst. It’s hard to hold onto that anger as John Emerson does the “No True Scotsman Dance” in reference to the smaller point rather than the larger (and looking around the web, it’s apparent he does this routinely). It’s absurd, Ceri–and I channeled some of that to a modern day possession by the ghost of Andrew Jackson.

Oh, and if you are curious about the larger point? It’s simple. There isn’t such a thing as benign populism. Do you know why? The political economy doesn’t work. Do you know why? Populism is nominally about egalitarianism one way or another. The payoff structure for people who participate in an egalitarian political economy has only a very narrow band of Nash potential equilibria–and most of them require highly altruistic people in concentrations that don’t exist in the wild. The payoffs, once a movement actually has a beaurocracy and a concrete long-term outlook, is usually looted from someone else–hence aboriginal genocide-for-land, periodic pogroms, even the occasional arrival of Madame Gullitine for those too good for traditional dismemberment.

I don’t have to look within my own theories–as John Emerson might think. All I really have to do is look at the various populist movements that took over various governments worldwide as a result of the Third World financial crisis during the latter 70s. All of them (It seems like) turned into governments that effectively destroyed their countries. Oh hell yes the governments they replaced were often corrupt and abusive to the point of evil, but they at least had something like a functional political economy and were capable of governing. The new ones did not, and faced the same sort of crisis that Republican/Napoleonic France did. No neighboring states accepted the new regime, wars, nobody in the government knew how to do the basics of governing like redistribute resources and keeping local elites from killing each other, and half of the people in office didn’t think their shit stank and couldn’t be advised otherwise.

Taking this stuff in account is part and parcel of being a responsible agent of change so that your momma doesn’t die in a common and random terrorist attack. The failure of the Missouri Compromise, for example, is a direct result of no more valuable land to steal. No more other people’s property to satisfy your own elites so that you have a coherent government. That centralization of power process as a part of the Civil War is a response to the greater need for coercion, a need that did not exist during the 1812 war or the war against Mexico–because there was no loot to be had at the end of the war, no Canada, no Mexico. Populism did terrible things to people who weren’t WASP (or were Canadian, English, Spanish, or French– as Walter Nugent might explain), and from the very frickin’ beginning, it were those cold blooded corrupt technocrats in one way or another, freed the slaves, and forced the South to allow their descendents to vote.

PoliSci 101 people do have rational basis for, uh, not liking populism. Slandering something unfairly as populist is entirely a different kettle of fish.

So nominally isn’t a proper adverb?

Duuuuuuude, seriously…

I understand what John Emerson means by populism, and anyone would grow to love the Wobblies had they got to know one. The popular movements in SA which resulted in leaders like Chavez, Morales, Lula de Silva have had at least minimally positive outcomes for many people living in those countries. At the same time, there were real costs taken out. Chavez is autocratic like Omar Torrijos. Morales is facing what is ultimately a mini-race war, Lula has had to compromise away most of his populism. Others like Bechelet ran straight up against the essentially reactionary nature of the little guy. These movements all change, and usually as a result, becomes anti-populist, whether that is a necessity for aquiring compliance or aquiescence from an elite, or they became detatched from their populist roots, or whatnot–it comes to some kind of end. Conflict must come to a settlement, and I’ll shout down any fool that believes in permanent revolution.

It’s getting too late for me to think straight, so I’ll stop here…

Well, may I suggest this, as a compromise: when you’re trying to achieve a radical change, populism is the worst approach, except for all the others that have been tried.

But that’s not right; when we say Brown is populist, we don’t mean he wants to be popular — because, of course, all politicians want to be popular, all political parties want the populace — but rather that he wants to be popular the easy route.

That is generally speaking what people are using populist to mean: to be popular by the low road. Emerson seems to feel that the people are right etc etc and that if only the Democrats would give up on technocracy and follow the dictates of the opinion polls — or something, for I do not in fact think Emerson really does believe in opinion polls, but anyway, if only they find the will of the people and echo back to it the right things — then they will be led into the land of milk and honey, being both substantively and politically correct on the issues.

I dare say that is a damn fool notion, but it is not in anyway different to what Brown is doing. Brown feels that Nutt is an expert who is going against the will of the people, so rather than try and explain that Nutt’s reasons are grounded in science etc, Brown has thrown him into the outer void because that is what he thinks will be popular. (Or maybe not, maybe the dour old Fifer is finally making a principled stand, maybe the man who’d make the North Sea fog look colourful has found a thing he is agin body and soul — fun. But no matter, for it acts like populism, and a distinction without difference etc.)

It is not being popular that is the sin of populism; it is rather being easy.

Being populist isn’t easier than being popular; it requires massive planning to take what are real concerns in the population and make them into piggy-back devices of what are the real concerns of the (old or new order) establishment.

The most Brown can be accused of is of trying to be populist; his inability to project an elementary concern of the population’s concern is emblematical.

We all risk to be populist here, by the way, preaching to the own choir based on what it is our belief that the general public thinks or should think. It’s a rather populist type of charge, really, to call somebody a populist.

In the present case it would probably be less entertaining but more to the point to give it the name of “spineless”.

When Chris says ‘Nulab’ is ‘populist’ he means ‘it follows the dictates of the right wing press’ or to put it even more plainly the accusation is: ‘Gordon Brown takes his ‘orders’ from media owned by corporations show aim is to promote an extreme right wing social and political agenda’.

Am I permitted to object to this use of the word? Or is that just more of my True Scotsman Dance?

One of my points has been that everything progressive that’s been done in the US since the Civil War, with “progressive” meaning something like “protecting the majority of the people against the unrestrained power of capital”, has been a rather reluctant response of the Democratic or the Republican Party to popular movements describable as populist. But then, Shah8 apparently opposes all movements of that kind, and furthermore will presumably use his own negative version of the No True Scotsman dance against any even partially successful and benevolent populist movements that there ever might have been.

And as a white guy, I still think that people who begin comments with “As a black guy’s who’s all too aware of just how fucked up most people are…. ” when attacking a political movement routinely accused of racism shouldn’t get all whiny when the person they’re addressing to starts talking about race.

In general, anyone who wants to affiliate with any movement that has a past is going to want to stress the positive side of that movement, and minimize the negative side. This is true both in rhetoric and in behavior: Wilsonians do not plan to reinstutute segregation in the Post Office and send the police out to jail radicals without trial, Jeffersonians do not want to raise families by slave girls, and admirers of Lincoln do not want to sent the army out to lay waste to Georgia. These dilemmas can be avoided by rejecting the entire past and presenting your politics in a totally ahistorical way, but problems arise from that approach too.

Shah8’s version of the No True Populist is official Democratic Party doctrine, more or less, and I oppose it because it’s unfair, leads to bad policy and weak politics, and is conducive to venality.

Populism is not about following the polls, issue by issue. Populism is about identifying a group of evildoers who are responsible for all calamities. It could be Yankee Imperialism, for example. Or Wall Street. Or The Federal Government. Or The Russkies. What, Russkies? Oops, already slipping into ethnic categories…

Someone’s going to talk to the ignorant mob, and if it isn’t us it will be them.

Yes, but frankly, if you’re going to talk to them you don’t want to start with 5000 words about nineteenth/early twentieth century history. There are two problems here. One is how you encourage popular anti-capitalism without it being taken as meaning that someone should attack the immigrants running the local corner shop.

The second is, if you’re going to use the language of class warfare (which seems to be what you want in dealing with the bankers), you’re likely to come across as a communist, unless you can put some clear fire-break between yourself and communist ideas. And what everybody knows about communism (even the ignorant mob) is that it produced really horrible societies.

The British Labour party (before its mutation into New Labour) relied on a kind of Christian socialism/Trade Union Methodism by its leaders, in which equality and justice for all was implicitly based on the Christian values of caring for all; thus it could separate itself from godless Communism. The current green/anti-capitalist movement tends to distinguish itself not only by its ecological credentials (very un-Marxist), but also its vague New Ageiness. How does the kind of populism you want prove that its core values are something different from communism? What are its core values, anyhow?

Ans anyway, the Nutt cases always make a come-back. They always do. They are there to ‘test’ stuff on the public; the risk is that they have to disappear for a while in some or other well paid function.

Nutt’s position as an advisor to the government was unpaid, it seems unlikely they will reward him in the interim with a well paid function if they didn’t pay anything for the original position.

On a lighter note,

Vox populi, vox dei. :)

Small island peoples have that defensiveness.

Hofstadter, Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bell were a recognized group of “consensus theorists” who formulated the anti-populist, big-business-friendly line of the Democratic Party during the post WWII period. I mentioned the bunch of them because I got flak for mentioning only Hofstadter. Of the bunch, Galbraith was the best, but his pluralist theory of countervailing powers is a bit weak in that labor only countervails business if it has government support, so government really couldn’t mediate between business and labor, they either support labor or they don’t.

My anger is mostly because the Democrats, in some formal sense the American left party, have been either not left or unsuccessful or both during the last 40 years, and at the present moment, when they are successful, they’re showing a vigorous determination to be not even a little left. I’ve been trying to figure out the reasons for this, and five decades or more of principled anti-populism is the one I’m working on. The abusive and historically skewed use of the word “Populism” is part of the problem.

I’ll scratch Keir of my list of potential recruits, though.

There were still black voters in the South in the 1890a. In 1896 North Carolina the Republicans and Populists were in cooperation and elected three Republican Congressmen, five Populists, and only one Democrat. This was done with the help of black votes. The Populist threat to white supremacy was one of the accusations against them, not because they weren’t white supremacists, because the fact of having real party competition in the South meant that black votes still could swing and election. Essentially the Populists were trying to push other issues ahead of white Supremacy.

lonk

The defeat of the Force Bill marked the end of any attempt by the North and the Republican Party to do anything about disenfranchisement, which soon did become almost total.

Karl Lüger is considered by some IIRC to be a prime example of the consequences of populism.

It’s interesting that the meaning of populism is so different in the UK than in the US. I read Chris’ original post as meaning populist in the Hofstadter sense, as most USians would. I’m curious what the history of the term in the UK is.

I forgot the important point: Gellner’s introduction begins something like “Everyone is talking about populism, but no one is quite sure what it is.” The conclusion of the book is by an ordinary-language philosopher who basically say “The meaning of the word “populism” is mushy, but that’s no big deal because the meanings of lots of political words are mushy”. How very ordinary-language!

Off the top of my head I can’t of a historically successful British political party or movement that was describable as Populist, as opposed to tactics that were adopted by parties that weren’t at all Populist. The first thing that popped into my mind when Walt asked that question were the Church and King mobs, as turned on dissenters and agitators in the 17th and 18th centuries (also Joseph Priestley, but for his religous views, not for discovering oxygen); they seem to diminish in force and presence round about the start of the 19th century.

Actually the word “mob” isn’t so very far from populus as I defined it above: short for “the mobility” coined as a counter to the nobility… But the assumption in Brit politics is that the mob when active politically is always only ever manipulated and exploited by some invisible nob, to good or evil end…

(Agatha Christie’s very first novel features a villain who turns out to be the “man behind the man behind the Bolsheviks”: naturally he is in the House of Lords…)

Belle, I think that the Chartists of “People’s Charter” come close. But I don’t know a lot about them.

100 – like Professor Nutt for instance?

Belle: as I said, I don’t know much about the Chartists.

Engels, I’ll let that be your own project.

In the context of a more successful, less corrupt democratic socialism / left-liberalism the anti-populist dogma would be a lot harder to argue against.

the body of people who by definition do not form any part of the ruling class, whose collective interests can therefore be calculated or imagined by considering them to be in conflict to those of the ruling class, and extrapolating

If I might be indulged in a little egg-headed intellectual complexity: that doesn’t work because not all interactions are zero-sum. (And because the ruling and non-ruling classes can collude against minorities, foreigners, and other groups not identified solely by their place in the class divide.) The idea that all interactions actually *are* zero-sum and every appearance of mutual benefit is just a smokescreen to hide who is getting screwed has strong emotional appeal and is the basis for a lot of populist appeals (including, e.g., a current US political ad that states “If the insurance companies win, you lose”, which sure as hell sounds populist to me and I doubt it’s coming from the Republicans), but it turns out to be, in fact, false.

Populism is about identifying a group of evildoers who are responsible for all calamities.

But that’s exactly the kind of issue where truth tends to part company with mass appeal, and throwing nuance out the window leads to very bad results.

I suppose Emerson wants to wash populism’s hands of that too. On the one hand it seems reasonable to try to improve a political movement by refusing to repeat its mistakes, and claiming Populism 2.0 isn’t going to produce another Reign of Terror or whatever is understandable, but I do sort of wonder what is left of populism to which the name can sensibly be applied, if you’re going to steer clear of anti-intellectual appeal to gut checks and paranoid-style conspiracy theories about the inherent perfidy of elites.

P.S. @67: Casting economic pseudoscience out of the temple is definitely an important task, and pointing out that it is maintained by the patronage of those who benefit from jokes like Lafferism might help, but ISTM that it can be better done by pointing out that it *is* pseudoscience than by attacking the idea of science or expert opinion per se.

Shorter Chris: any discussion of my class interests is an attack on science.

My discussion of populism keys on the American Populist Party and their ancestral and descendant groups: Greenbackers, Grange, Knights of Labor, the Debs Socialists, the LaFollette and prairie Progressives, The Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, and the non-Partisan League in Minnesota. I am willing to acknowledge their actual flaws and am also willing to acknowledge that some populist-descended individuals were pretty generally bad: the later Tom Watson, Huey Long and his Gerald L K Smith , and Father Coughlin.

I am not willing to let people discuss populism in terms of a tendentious generalized definition derived mostly from Watson, Long, Smith, and Coughlin at their worst. (At their best all of these supported the New Deal, which according to Jonah G. makes FDR and Hillary Cli8nton fascists).

Except by Abb1, someone who declares themself a Democrat or who supports the Democratic Party isn’t immediately accused of supporting the Indian Expulsion Act, Cleveland’s assault on the Pullman strikers, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese-Americans, and a century of segregation and lynching. But advocates of populism have to expect comparable challenges on a regular basis.

Repeating an error over and over again doesn’t make it true, guys.

Well, technically, I’m not a fan of democracy–in something like the spirit of the comment at 109.

Anyways, I understand that Emerson is just going to talk over his opponents and mislead with selective slices of history. Nothing he’s saying about black history around the turn of the century is wrong, for example, but it’s presented in an incoherent and inappropriate light. Same thing when he dances among Populism, Populist Party, In the Vein of Populist Party, etc, etc. However, I don’t think engaging him will get anything other than what he does to his opposition at OpenLeft.

There is no golden age of American Politics to bring back, and there never was. Populism sucks because it always winds up being about in the name of the people and not truly the voice of the people–and preferably so because, well, how about looking at a sophisticated football or finance blog/forum with open comments? Unless the site is small, the vast majority of comments are utterly crap, with a significant majority of commenters thinking that their crap is gold. A popular movement based on being sensitive to how the public views a wide variety of topic is going to have problems forming coherent and responsive answers to public problems.

The issues with technocratic rent-seeking is that it’s a feature of democracy, not some woolly haired mountain cousin. Oh, thee of little brains, take it from a non polisci geek Democracy is a way to subvert popular participation. It’s redeeming value, and what assists Western political dominance in my mind, is how much it drives the creation of para-governmental bodies such as urban political machines, lobbying groups like the AARP, various NGOs, etc, etc, etc. The enhancement of a civil society with organs that digest public opinion, both nutritious and fibrous, into outcomes that nourish most people much of the time. Populism, on the other hand, ultimately does mean anti-intellectualism in the bad sense. It’s basis is nonintermediated control of the government’s apparatus by the undifferentiated lot of people, whether they are interested in or competent for the task. It’s a good thing on a specific issue and helps beats back corruption by specialists a bit. It’s a bad thing when it’s driving policy on a wide range of issues.

As I understand, per Brad DeLong and other, economic science is inreal turmoil today. It now seems more like a collection of mathematized proverbs whose applications to actuality can never be positively known. Don’t ever go to economi8cs hoping for a definite answer to anything unless you’re willing to be skinned.

If I were trying to devise an anti-democratic politics that rejects the entire American tradition, certainly I would pay attention to the ideas of shah8. His assertions about the essence of populism are just reiterations of the received opinion I’m arguing against, however.

Myles SG @69: There is a good reason for that: financial services is the bread-and-butter of the British economy.

Not clear if you mean that’s a good reason for not ‘crushing’ the banks, or for the neo-liberal market policies (ignore subsidies to the weapons industry, etc) of Thatcherism. Those policies did of course include shifting the economy into financial services. So it may be the case that the financiers have us by the short and curlies now and in the medium term, but that outcome is not (was not) a reason for following the Thatcherite policies in the first place.

Britain has not had a competitive industrial in 150 years

Bafflement or counterexamples (as above) aside, we wouldn’t of course forget that what we actually want is a productive economy, and having a ‘competitive’ one is only of interest insofar as it subserves that end. (In fact, to go the whole hog, what we really want is consumption, and everything else subserves that. I won’t go into the hidden-because-unmonetised items in the national accounts just now, but a proper account would include for example consumption of political freedom and quality of life more generally. Welfare economics is supposed to be at the foundation, and neoclassical theory might well be considerably less offensive – and would probably be unrecognisable – if that fact were observed. I do not, obviously, suggest that’s the only thing seriously wrong with NC economics, of course. That would be insane. But many of the issues like the glaring ‘revealed preference’ fudge are quite intimately related to it.

and frankly, absent finance, Britain is not likely to have a competitive economy of any sort.

It’s good that your surmise is at least made frankly – do you have expertise? If so, is it the unpaid, independent, ‘loose cannon’ type, or the compliant ‘safe pair of hands’ type, displayed by those I’ll call (big-E) Experts? In any case, not quite sure how competitive the domestic banking industry is. Doing a bit of browsing on the general topic, I discovered a rather baffling fact: the 2007 blue book shows (for 2004) 81bn net ‘value added’ for financial corporations, of which 50bn is something called FISIM . A non-Expert like me would never have spotted just how much FISIM is being produced and consumed, and would thus have been unable to resolve the “paradox of a prosperous industry showing a negligible positive, or even negative, contribution to the national product”! What a paradox!

From 2008, FISIM has been removed from the main accounts, and buried in a separate section which purports to apportion the ‘indirectly measured’ (no longer referred to as ‘imputed’) benefits of FISIM to various industries, and gives total ‘contribution’ to national income, though well away from any aggregate figures for same that could give perspective. As the Experts learn to stop worrying and love it, I suppose it will disappear as a separate item altogether. After all, we know the butter is on the bread, because the butter dish is empty. In any case the 37bn ‘compensation for employees’ will no doubt trickle down in lovely buttery rivulets.

Chris @117: paranoid-style conspiracy theories about the inherent perfidy of elites.

Wondered when that one would be wheeled out. An excellent addition to any serious conversation. Thanks, Hoff.

(I think I’ve I’ve actually been modded for ‘foul language’, I think! It should go through on artistic merit, though…)

114 – so you think he was bid from below?

John E.@21: not based on primary research

WTF? Can we pick some nits here for a change?

(Working my way back through the thread.)

Sure, let C. Vann Woodward make those arguments against Hofstadter if in his judgment they’re necessary. For you and me, who really cares? Even speaking as a former grad student in history, I don’t see what it matters that a middlebrow historical synthesis is based on research drawn from secondary sources or on the completed research of others.

Maybe, in fifty years, one of the two will have been proven right at the expense of the others, and then we laypersons can start to ignore the loser.

But not boring enough to make the ever-so-easy easy “ignore” option tempting.

Doesn’t it seem to anyone else that after WWII, and after the German disaster, German scholars should take over the American university. They seem to have been welcomed because they brought the deep European wisdom, but what evidence was there in 1945 that ther was a deep European wisdom? Leo Strauss declared himself a fascist in 1932. Adorno came from the wreckage of the German left and retained his sublime assurance that he was right after all evidence for that had been destroyed.

As for the New York Intellectuals, I know nothing specifically about Clement Greenberg, but as a group they seem to have greatly overestimated themselves, and their permanent contribution seems to have been slight.

I don’t see how these ideas are unthinkable or even very contrarian. We have a bit of historical depth now, and maybe it’s time to reevaluate Strauss, Hayek, Adorno, and the rest of them.

Keir, you want to know an excellent way to make a thread not be about John Emerson? Don’t bring up things he said that annoyed you in other threads. It is touching that you weep for the dishonor to pre-WW2 German intellectuals, though.

We are currently in a situation we it is absolutely necessary on the merits to punish the financiers who created this mess and to do so severely. They have profitted immensely, and if they do not experience a pain that far exceeds their gain they will, as the rational utility maximizers that their own economic theories say they are, take such risks again. They would be crazy not to.

Nonetheless, the Democratic, Labour, and most similar parties are extremely loathe to do this. Many well-meaning liberals outside the party structure are hesistant or want to find a way to split the difference or consider the cure worse than the disease. Why? Because rage against the banks is populist. Opposition to populism is so strong that objectively necessary policies are opposed simply because they are populist. Is the problem the rage? How do you expect to achieve anything this difficult without rage? We evolved emotions for a reason and part of it seems to be to force decisions and motivate action. You can analyse problems forever, and people with the emotional centers of their brains cut off find it almost impossible to make even trivial decisions. Asking us to address moral hazard at the banks coldly and technocratically, amounts to wanting something but not wanting the necessary condition of achieving it. Not that cold, technocracy will not be involved. There is no other way such a thing can be designed and implemented. But the driving force will be populist rage and, since liberals are horrified by that, there is no impetus for the necessary action.

Nobody sane is arguing that the government shouldn’t be responsive to the needs of the citizenry so long as it doesn’t violate the central ideology, like the Bill of Rights. Just because there is a justified populist rage over unaddressed issues that affect every American doesn’t mean that populism as a mode of political interaction is a good thing. It just means that people should vote on these issues (my personal feeling is that some kind of national strike is in order) or otherwise make these issues as part of a national conversation. Rustling up a crowd and sending a spokesperson isn’t my idea of a productive path to change.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say this again–Populism, in the actual, genuine meaning of the term, and not the spliced together Frankennarrative that Emerson enspouses, has a well deserved bad name, especially looking at it from non-white perspectives. Democratic Party insiders that use that bad name to slander good and popular policies should be coerced, in the way all of the empowered factions of our political system accepts, to repudiate that mentality and push through better policies that benefit most or all of us. If my mentality doesn’t meet certain people’s requirements for ideological purity, I’m sorry, but I really don’t care.

Keir thinks that I really am a farmer. I’m of half a mind to feed him to my hogs.

Keir, what if I say all Americans Nazis? Will it be OK for me to to question the German influx then? I certainly am hostile enough to the American Straussians and Austrians, but can’t I also say something about the Germans and Austrians themselves?

I have a very delicate relationship to the Adornists, so I’ll have to leave them out of this.

Martin: We are currently in a situation we it is absolutely necessary on the merits to punish the financiers who created this mess and to do so severely.

See, punishing financiers is a typical populist appeal. The problem is that punishing financiers is not going to achieve much (if anything) on the grand scale of things, because the problem is structural; financiers are just a bunch of people who will soon be replaced by another bunch of people.

Hopefully the (hypothetical) crew that launches this campaign understands it and intends to use the movement they create to make structural changes, but unfortunately it’s not guaranteed, and not even very likely.

My last comment was addressed to shah8. Others slipped in between.

No, not “pissant”.

We just need one team to restructure, and a different team to immolate and impale. We’ll have to pay money to the first team, whereas we can charge fees of the second.

Keir, you’re dragging unrelated other opinions of John’s to use as a stick to beat him with.

Check with engels on that one.

@131: Uh, did you perhaps miss the qualifier “inherent”? I thought it was pretty important. Some particular elites are perfidious, but they should be opposed on the basis of their actual deeds, not merely their elite status. Otherwise you end up with populist (or pseudo-populist?) rage against people *who are trying to help*. Populists are quite capable of attacking people that are working *for* their interests if they display the wrong class signals.

#126: Not to be too tedious about this, but to take two easy examples, it’s not the meanness of the masses that makes it impossible for anyone with mass media access to express support for the US public’s preferences on the war in Iraq and health care without coming under immediate sustained attack and marginalization.

No, it’s not the masses — it’s a specific movement which is largely top-down controlled, but populist in its messaging. Populism under the secret control of elites, yes, but as long as the foot soldiers don’t know that, it still works. The whole point of trying to expose astroturfing is the assumption that the people following that message will actually care who it came from (and who is hiding their own involvement in it). Do you think that’s all wasted effort because the average teabagger on the street already knows who is backing their movement and doesn’t care?

And in regard to the US’s current debate over health care in particular, any government attempt to help poor and working-class people, particularly the sick ones, afford better health care is specifically painted as a sinister conspiracy of government elites. That’s a very populist attack, and the emotional impact on the followers of believing that they are the targets of such a conspiracy allows the movement leaders (or, if you prefer, puppetmasters) to paper over the factual shortcomings of their argument in a way that they just couldn’t do if they were relying on cool rationality.

It’s precisely the fact that rationality is harder to use to support a lie that is the reason for my preference for it. Rational discourse based on evidence has a far better track record at uncovering actual truths about the way the world works than any other method known to human beings.

There’s populism—seeing that the people who are affected by policy have a voice in making those policies—and there’s demogogery, no?

I thought the former was called “democracy”. If there’s no consensus on what (if anything) distinguishes democracy, populism, and demagoguery, well, it’s no wonder this thread has a whole lot of disagreement.

Harold, you need to look up the word ‘populist’ in a dictionary.

‘Populism’ does not mean ‘democracy’, Harold. It also does not mean the same thing as ‘demagogy’ but it is usually used as a pejorative, to distinguish polices which draw mass support but are not genuinely leftwing, perhaps because they appeal to people’s passions or prejudices, from genuinely leftwing polices. The Republican party currently has a lot of ‘populist’ polices, eg. on issues on like gay marriage. As Shah8 says ‘populism’ has a well-deserved bad reputation, especially among minorities but also among the Left, who are interested in transforming sociial conditions for the better, not just in giving vent to our rage.

If the goddamn left existed I wouldn’t be talking about populism.

Dede Scozzafava doesn’t count?

Homework: find one obnoxious plank in this platform.

Done: 4. Resolved, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world, and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.

Second – Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical.

What should I construe this to mean?

Perhaps a better exercize would be to compare the Populist platform to the Democratic and Republican ones of the same time and see which seems least objectionable overall. Finding things to dislike in any 19th century platform is absurdly easy.

Certainly it would be irrational for me to object to a well-understood meaning just because it was pejorative, imprecise, and inaccurate (whatever “well-understood” might mean in that context). Because we certainly do need to have perjoratives to slap on things, and the more undefined they are, the more fun.

I hadn’t heard of the hundred-year obscure location rule before, but certainly it will free up a lot of musty old words for reapplication to targets of opportunity. All we need to do is find a new word to designate the people formerly known as Populists.

Division?

The Government was bitterly divided last night over the sacking of the Home Office’s chief drugs adviser after its Science Minister said that he was appalled by Alan Johnson’s decision.

What America needs today is a Draconian approach to criminal justice…

100 years, 2500 years, same difference.

German academics and the American university: Hans Rosenberg, at Berkeley, and George Mosse, at UW Madison. Either one, on his worst day, did more to advance the understanding and practice of history than Emerson could do on steroids.

Tom, I’ve absolved these individuals of guilt. Go in peace. All future applications for absolution will be treated equally fairly.

Tom, in response to your petition I have proclaimed Rothenberg, Mosse, and the two Momsens to be perfectly OK. They are neither Nazis nor in any way implicated in the rise of Hitler by their misfeasance or nonfeasance.

Chris, you keep opposing the populist approaches to the elitist ones, but the two can be complementary. So there is no reason punishment has to exclude regulation. But to blandly assert that no punishment can be effective is wrong; it is regulation whose effectiveness is in doubt. Punishment is how we convetionally deal with wrongdoing, and it is not perfectly effective, but we rely on it because we have found nothing better; in fact, regulation is only going to be effective if it is backed up with punishment in any case. Whether it is possible to design regulations to prevent not just the current problems but others that may emerge is not at all clear. And, no, it was not all Glass-Steigal. AIG would not have been touched by that at all, for example, because insurance companies were not part of the previous crisis, so they were not designed into the regulation. Now we will include them, but if we think we can foresee all posibilities we are kidding ourselves, an occupational hazard of pointy-headedness. I’m all for both, but punishment does not have the tractability problems of regulation. Unless you want fundamental change, in which case: revolution – but you’ll never get that without an angry mob.

@184 (and the like): If perpetrators of institutionalized loot can expect that when caught, they will lose more than they looted, that right there would help tip the balance toward people being unwilling to try it.

But here you already have some rudimentary structural change, some sort of plan. Populist impulse, as I understand it, is to blame Madoff personally; it’s like this: let’s grab pitchforks, storm the castle, break the gate, tear the bastard into pieces, kill his staff, his family, his dog, his cat, – and then back to the tavern; hopefully the next Count will be a nice man. If I am the next Count, my reaction is: “hmm, need a stronger gate, definitely.”

As Pushkin said somewhere: God save us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Senseless, you see.

Well, then it’s just a matter of definition. If populism is defined as “building mass-support for meaningful policies”, then why would anyone be against it?

Chris, the prevailing problem, though, is not positive-sum situations interpreted as zero-sum by the populace – do you even have a recent example of that? – it is substantially zero sum situations being presented as positive sum by elites. The entire series of economic reforms of the last several decades, which obviously benefited the rich directly, gained popular support largely because the credentialed experts said they would benefit the general public as well – rising tide lifts all boats, and all that. Overall, this has turned out to be quite false. Had the public just taken the attitude you deride – if it’s good for the rich, it must be bad for us – they might not have captured the entire truth either, but they would have been much closer than expert opinion was, and the likely consequence for public policy would have been much better.

And we’re seeing this with Health Care too. Obama is going to make everyone a winner! The Health Insurance companies suport it – they must benefit. Big Pharma supports it – they must benefit. The doctors support it – they must benefit. The deficit won’t go up – so the government isn’t paying a price either. And the consumer is going to benefit immensely, in accordance with big promises. Why do people have trouble understanding or believing this? Because it is transparently horsesh*t! If Health Care Reform passes, someone will get hurt. There may be some efficiencies at the margin, but the situation is substantially zero sum: there is no way all players can benefit (after all, positive sum does not necessarily mean win-win because that depends on distribution, and the amount of good that has been promised to the population exceeds any pure gains available. Someone is going to pay). If people look at this poker hand and do not see who the mark is, they will naturally suspect that they are the mark. And it may end up so, but if it does not it will only be because the insurance industry was the mark instead, and maybe providers too.

The Democratic Party even believed supporting the Iraq War was good for them. Of course, the Republican Party also thought Democratic support was good for them. That was hilarious because electoral contests are intrinsically zero sum: a win for one must be a loss for another. Someone had to be simply wrong, and it was the Democrats. Indeed, to the degree politics amounts to struggles for power it is always zero sum, as power is measured relative to others, and therefore someone can only rise if someone else falls.

And anyway, whatever else may be the case, this isn’t a case of populism and the way it is being portrayed here is populist – although probably for a different populum ;-)

I do dislike my British socialists as well but we really don’t need to be unfair to them to be well-founded in our dislike.

I’m going to defend John’s positions, since he’s too busy wandering the streets selling indulgences for Nazi guilt.

By the preferred definitions of this thread, the actual historical Populist Party was not populist. They used anti-elite, “people versus the powerful” rhetoric, but that doesn’t distinguish them from other left-wing movements. They were not anti-intellectual, and had a well-developed intellectual program of their own. In many ways, they were a prototype pre-WWI social democratic party, favoring reforms such as the 40-hour work week. They did not have a terrific record on race, but it was not any worse than other American parties of the time.

The fact that “populist” is now a smear in the United States is not an accident, but part of a deliberate political program to disempower average citizens in favor of a technocratic elite, even though American history is full of popular movements that led to positive change. The Democratic party has completely adopted this technocratic-elite-centric view of the proper role of government, and abandoned the use of moralistic, “people versus the powerful” attacks. The result is that the rhetoric, which naturally resonates, is free to be used by the Republicans as a tool to re-enforce elite power.

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 the below, from unsanctioned, unofficial, uncredentialed oppositional groups. The Democratic Party leadership does not believe this.

Another aspect of populism is some degree of breaking down the barriers between citizens and government. The Constitution was designed to suppress direct democracy in favor of representataive democracy and various checks and balances, separations of powers, and other stuff learned in eighth grade civics. The two-party system puts another intermediary in there, and usually the parties and candidates deal with voter groups via another layer of intermediaries—interest groups such as unions. Populists generally wanted to get rid of some of those deliberate layers.

Incidentally, when elitist liberal or soc*alists find that their governments are completely unresponsive and are lying to them,and get angry, they’re in the populist place. The definition of elitism is institutional, not intellectual. To a poltiical leader, a Nobelist is one vote, just like a HS dropout. A famous Nobelist is the equivalent of an comparably famous movie star —one more opinion leader. The difference is that populists understand what’s happening, whereas left intellectuals are baffled.

So you see, my mission (besides absolving Nazis) is to convince liberal intellectuals that they’re People too, salt-of-the-earth folk who are ignored by the powers that be. But few intellectuals think that— they think that they’re unappreciated elitists, like princes switched in the cradle and raised by peasants. They’re sure that some day they will be recognized some day and restored to their rightful status.

The Democratic party’s scrupulous renunciation of populism, demagoguery, and ideology was accompanied by a rehabilitation of graft and corruption. (This was fairly explicit among some of the tough-minded post-WWII “consensus theorists”). What we have now is a spiffy, modern, Ivy-educated Tweed Ring. And the urban bosses, when the chips were down, were reactionary servants of big money. They used some of their graft to help their voters, but supported policies which hurt their voters, and they needed to make sure that whatever help the voters got was distributed by the vote-contractors.

Henri, where do you get your definition of populism? It’s a figment of bad, tendentious social science done by social scientists who have a vested interest in administrative liberalism (in the US) or social democracy (in Europe).

I am not willing for the word “populist” to be misleadingly used in such a way that no sane human being would ever call himself a populist. There actually have been people who called themselves populists, and some of them were good guys.

Suppose “Catholic” were defined to mean “any idol-worshipper who persecutes Jews”. By the standards of Muslims, Jews, and many Protestants, Catholics are idol-worshippers, and during certain periods many of them persecuted Jews. But that wouldn’t be a valid definition of the word.

Intellectuals are peasants because they’re powerless and whine about it all the time without doing anything about it.

Actually, intellectuals within the system are more like lackeys. My bad, I guess.

Henri, the political cartoons of any political group tend to use a bit of hyperbole. The Populists (properly speaking) did publish some overdone stuff, but their goldbug opponents were equally paranoid and more deluded on the issue.

You are right, however, that I think that populists of today should be outraged at the behavior of finance and of the enablers of finance (including the Obama administration, alas.) This includes anger, exposure, blaming, denunciation, the destruction of reputations, prosecution to the extent possible, the ending of political and business careers, and so on. In addition to that, it should also include structural and legal reforms. There is actually no paradox here. It really is possible for people to walk and chew gum at the same time! That’s not a pomo New Age idea, it’s really true. The choice does not have to be made.

I often find administrative liberal ideas unintelligible, but there does seem to be an idea that no one ever does anything, that no one ever should be blamed, that all events are the result of complex unknowable forces, and so on. That kind of thinking strikes me as silly, pseudo-profound to the point of mysticism and delusion, mad dog positivism, and it also is presumably the result of a nearly- medieval elite solidarity.

First of all, the health insurance companies are in fact opposing it tooth and nail, with every weapon at their disposal, by fair means or foul.

They’re hammering it into shape. They’d probably prefer nothing at all, but if there’s going to be something, they’ll work to optimize it. They’ve had a lot of success too.

I agree with whoever you cited. Obama really tied his hands at the beginning by bringing the insurance companies into the game. They’re really going to have to lose; that should be one of the goals.

Tom Bach@165: George Mosse

I know he was very influential, but I found a lot of his work unconvincing, especially when he approached very closely to the bounds of Godwin’s Law, arguing that such and such a writer was in essence a proto-Hitler (which happens to have been where my master’s thesis took me). I think it is telling that his earliest research before moving on to the study of fascism and “the German ideology” was on the Tudors; there is an antimodern, promedievalish strain in some research on the period that I find antiliberal and unappealing despite the effort with which it strains to be liberal in the face of all temptations otherwise. For example, it really should be possible to dislike Wagner, Ibsen, and Nietzsche for political reasons without being accused of Nazi-style censorship, especially in the late nineteenth century–but this gets into questions of political correctness again.

John, I think you’ll just have to accept that not everyone uses the word “populism” to denote the same thing you use it to denote. Specifically, it is extremely unlikely you’re going to persuade essentially everyone in Europe to think warm things about the LaFollettes – who nobody in Europe has heard of – when they say it rather than cold things about Jörg Haider. You can’t order people to use your language, and especially not when they don’t necessarily speak the same damn language.

This is a case of the well-known phenomenon that even radical opposition people who are used to being part of a great power tend to think like one.

I believe that John Emerson is correct here in his definition of populism. As I remember it is not a Southern phenomenon but arose in the West as a reaction to the alliance between Southern big agriculture with its ruinous tenant farming and the Wall Street Banks which was immiserating farmers and had driven them westward.

Use of hate rhetoric and government through referendum rather than due process is how I would define demagoguery, not populism.

That grass roots movements can be derailed by demagoguery is a danger, but in fact it is the moneyed interests who typically combin to derail populism (union organizing) in the South and elsewhere by resorting to appeals “to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes.” We see the same at work in the fight against health care with people like Sarah Palin, who did not arise from the grass roots, but was plucked from thence by groups with deep pockets.

Chris, you don’t want any simplification of your position, but your entire attack on populist attributes to them absolute positions not evidently grounded in anything anyone has actually said. Populist resist structural solutions – so how did they have party platforms full of structural proposals. Populists react with emotion not thought.

And I’m all for a more independent judiciary, but we don’t have that. What we have is a judicial system the most elite body of which imposed Bush over Gore despite the will of the ignorant masses as expressed in the popular vote. If you think the reason we have not seen criminal investigations of the ratings agencies for uprating junk, of Goldman for selling overrated bonds and having insurance against them through another subsidiary, of Goldman for frontrunning for that matter, has nothing to do with politics, you are frankly naive. Politics is blocking this, and only politics will move it forward.

Let’s get down to this: what is populism? I would say that populism is the conviction that the interests of the elite and the general population are in conflict to a degree that matters seriously. “Elite” here means primarily the elite that counts – the political and monetary elite, those with actual power. The intellectual elite is a minor adjunct, but usually serves the elite that counts,or some faction of it.

Is it true that there is this conflict? Not always, but it is not necessarily false either. The interest of the elite and the populace coincide when grave threats to the society are present: conquest, evironmental disaster. Both will generally have an interest in technological development, though there are caveats there. But in many cases, the interests are not aligned. In the current situation, the interests of the elite financial class and of the population diverge sharply. For a moment they were probably shared in averting catastrophe, but given how that was achieved and what has happened since, they are not aligned now. But the necessary structural changes will require dramatically disempowering the financial sector and reducing the share of global wealth that it controls. This will not be achieved by tinkering around the edges.

There’s a good article here that indicates what the meaning of the word ‘populist’ in the original post was, whatever John Emerson might think.

‘I served on the 2000 police foundation committee on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, the only exhaustive study of the act ever undertaken. It was set up with the government’s blessing and members included David Nutt, distinguished pharmacologists and two chief police officers. Our conclusions were mild, embracing a redirection of drugs policy towards harm reduction and a partial decriminalisation of cannabis use.

Polling evidence showed a wide gulf between a public desire for toughness on hard drugs on the one hand; and on the other, two-thirds of opinion that regarded cannabis as “least harmful”. An overwhelming majority thought chasing cannabis users was “not a police priority”, and a significant majority, from all ages and social groups, favoured cannabis decriminalisation. That was confirmed in other similar polls.

What happened next was a textbook case of Tony Blair’s governing style. The home secretary, Jack Straw, went ape, reputedly on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, then at the height of his Downing Street ascendancy. They feared that the slightest welcome for the report’s findings might have the government castigated by the rightwing press, of which Campbell lived in perpetual fear. The committee’s chairman, Ruth Runciman, was summoned in advance of publication and castigated by Straw in front of his team, until Mo Mowlam had to suggest it might be better if they all read the document first.

When the report appeared it was well received. The Daily Mail, in a front-page editorial, welcomed it and said it had delivered “a mature and serious national debate”. The Telegraph was even more favourable and criticised Straw for “misjudging the public mood”. The head of the Metropolitan police was supportive.

In other words it was quite untrue that the public and press were opposed to drugs law reform. Realising this, Straw performed a U-turn and was induced, apparently by Campbell, to write an article full of wishy-washy assertions for the News of the World. It warmly welcomed the report and further debate. There was none. The subject was buried.

The incident was a classic example of public policy determined by ministers trying to second-guess Fleet Street.’

This makes it absolutely clear that David Nutt was not sacked because he was ‘populist’ in the American sense. He was, instead, being ‘populist’ in the European sense, which means trying to ‘second guess Fleet Street’ or the extreme right wing press generally (and, in the UK, with the exception of the Mirror, the Guardian and the Independent, all British newspapers are on the hard right). David Nutt does not oppose ‘ordinary people’s’ views on soft drugs. He supports those views.

It’s often been pointed out that the fashionable opinion that Tony Blair was a ‘post-ideological’ PM or ‘wish washy’ or ‘apolitical’ or whatever is about as false a view as you can get. On the contrary, he was an aggressively ideological PM, tirelessly supporting the views of the rich and powerful as opposed to those without power or money, who he openly despised. And Brown follows him in this.

Do you really think the rich & powerful care one way or the other on this issue? Polling is as scientific as it gets in this matter, I guess, even if science would suggest not to rely on polling results from before something hit the new (and consequently the reflections of the people being polled).

I can agree on Blair. As far as Brown goes – wait until he is ousted and Boris can remind David C. who is one of the most popular opinionators.

This is about drugs, not health care reform. Even Marx was quite certain that drugs are popularly understood to be a pejorative term to associate with.

All John is trying to do is reclaim a term that he thinks has been unfairly maligned. I think that’s fair enough; on the other hand, I’ll just note that “liberal” was a term that the modern US “left blogosphere” tried to reclaim proudly as a label rather than epithet, but swiftly gave up for “progressive” (and in the process harking back to another late 19th/early 20th century US political movement. Next up, Greenbackers.)

It’s interesting how that use of “progressive” has leaked over to some New Labour politicians and thinktanks in the past year or so; David Miliband seems to be the worst offender. Is there a particular reason for this?

I would say that populism is the conviction that the interests of the elite and the general population are in conflict to a degree that matters seriously.

Doesn’t this cover everything other than pure Reaganite trickle-down and maybe the divine right of kings? (That is, if you don’t impose a zero-sum-all-the-time requirement on the conflict.) I find it hard to imagine someone believing that the interests of different classes don’t conflict *at all*, or to only a trivial degree, and only a few people are brazen enough to try to sell that.

The interests of different classes are in conflict in some ways, and in other ways, they’re all in the same boat. The Great Recession is not good for the common man simply because it is bad for elites (and, in fact, the postwar boom was not bad for elites simply because it was good for the common man, either).

If you’re going to define populism that broadly, maybe populism and technocracy aren’t usefully thought of as distinct camps anyway, but as some sort of political Venn diagram, or vaguely defined clouds in a hypothetical space of political positions and/or tactics. After all, there’s nothing in your definition about anti-intellectualism; even though it’s very common in populism, you apparently don’t consider it a requirement.

That suggests that there may be room for some kind of synthesis, but really, I’m not sure what populism brings to the table. When elites really are the problem, examining the facts is sufficient to discover that, and when they’re not, populist convictions can operate as a prejudice and hinder the need to pull together against a threat that isn’t the result of class conflict.

The experts told us at each point of the deregulation that, though the direct beneficiaries would be the rich, we would all benefit. They said the same at each tax cut. The said the same at each liberalization of the labor market.

This is a serious mischaracterization (specifically, the way the use of the phrase “the experts” implies homogeneity). All of those promises were denounced as snake oil, at the time, *by other experts*.

In fact, one of the ways the actual Reaganite movement attempted to discredit experts who refuted their claims was to make populist attacks on them as out-of-touch ivory-tower intellectuals, limousine liberals, nattering nabobs of negativism, etc.

Not all experts are pro-Reagan/Thatcher any more than all populists are Jacobins.

Populism as you have defined it has no means of resolving competing claims. Which problems are being caused by elites and not by external/common threats? Which elites are the problem, and in what way? What should be done about it? Answering those questions calls for knowledge specific to the subject matter of the problem, or in other words, expertise. A conviction that some elite, somewhere, must be causing the problem is too vague to help, and might lead to elites being falsely blamed for problems they aren’t even causing (which, in addition to being unjust, also leaves the real problem unsolved as long as attention remains focused on the scapegoat).

The Reagan Republcans made made appeals to identity, not interest. That is classic demoguogery.

Henry Wallace is usually referred to as populist and it is his memory that the Democrats are allergic to. Wallace did not specialize in attacks on expert opinion and ivory tower intellectual, as I recall, and neither did Eugene McCarthy, Ralph Nader, of Howard Dean. Au contraire.

Ross Perot was a sort of populist, too, I believe. He appealed to people’s common sense. Whether he really represented common sense is another story, but the point is the sin of these genuine (IMO) populist figures was to attempt to make runs around established political power brokers, not expert opinion.

The only slight point of disagreement I have with Martin Bento is the use of the word “elite”, which I think has become a demogoguic word, if there can be such a thing, since it seems excessively value laden.

He is quite right that Edwards is the perfect example of a populist — who can spring up from everywhere.

I do think it is entrenched power groups rather than elites that populists should be described as opposing. Look, everyone really loves elites (sort of by definition). They are the society’s prize winners. The best. Let’s not dignify entrenched interest groups , whoever they may be, with that appellation. And it’s really sad that we have invidiously taken to using that term for college professors, whose “power,” such as it is, (in hiring and firing each other, giving marks, etc.) has a rather limited social reach.

In what way are the “intelligensia” an elite interest? I mean, who are they exactly, and what is meant by “elite”.

Chris @117: I do sort of wonder what is left of populism to which the name can sensibly be applied, if you’re going to steer clear of anti-intellectual appeal to gut checks and paranoid-style conspiracy theories about the inherent perfidy of elites.

Me @131: Wondered when that one [paranoid-style conspiracy theories about the inherent perfidy of elites] would be wheeled out. An excellent addition to any serious conversation. Thanks, Hoff.

Chris @161: Uh, did you perhaps miss the qualifier “inherent”? I thought it was pretty important. Some particular elites are perfidious, but they should be opposed on the basis of their actual deeds, not merely their elite status. Otherwise you end up with populist (or pseudo-populist?) rage against people who are trying to help.

Recalcitrance, eh? My rebuke was that ‘Paranoid style’ is a crude slur and so, less obviously, is ‘conspiracy theory’, the use of which no longer bears much relation to the plain, compositional meaning of that phrase. Drop the slurs, which you do not mention (thus indirectly acknowledging that their use was attributive rather than referential*), then we can discuss whether ‘Populism’ tends to rely on positing ‘the inherent perfidy of elites’.

Such a discussion should clarify how much weight (and what meaning) you intend to place on the word ‘inherent’, whether you are talking about perfidy of a group and/or the individuals who embody it, and how much (or how many layers of) self-awareness are required for behaviour to count as manifesting perfidy. And of course whether you suggest that populism really adverts to a universal (perhaps what you mean by ‘inherent’) theory of elite perfidy, rather than specific claims about particular elites’ behaviour.

*i.e. a univocal paraphrase might be: ‘theories about the inherent perfidy of elites (which are, by the way, paranoid style conspiracy theories)’, rather than: ‘theories which are not only about the inherent perfidy of elites but are also paranoid style conspiracy theories.’

What conspiracy? What paranoia?

Well, the legitimacy of Hofstadter’s ideas in and of themselves is a whole other complicated discussion. I don’t have a lot of time right now, and I think this thread is petering out (even Emerson is gone, I think) and going to be closed soon anyway. Suffice it to say, it is true that nothing I said in the last few comments necessarily implies a critique of Hofstadter himself, just of how his ideas are applied to the current political discourse, That said, there is a lot wrong with Hofstadter himself.

Well, Tim, you are opening the whole can of worms on Hofstadter there, while I’m thinking this thread is going to close any minute. Just to clarify my last comment: I said that nothing in my recent comments was an attack on Hofstadter per se. I see now that Chris was probably referring to my comment that there was a consensus that Hofstadter was unfair to Populism. That was the upshot I got from the discussion between Alpers and Emerson upthread. What I meant is that my own argument in that last few comments, about the rhetorical games made possible by the multiple meanings of “populist”, is independent on any attack on Hofstadter’s ideas as such. Nonetheless, I have many objections to Hofstadter’s ideas as such.

Martin, I certainly have no argument with your comments, nor a great deal to say about the specifics of Hofstadter’s more serious writings. I’m just on a mission to eliminate the facile use of ‘conspiracy theory’ (and the more spec1alised but basically similar ‘paranoid style’, ‘cultic milieu’ etc), which people often assume they have a good enough handle on to use in serious discussion, but which are actually little more than name-calling – and amazingly effective at closing down debate. Chris – perhaps somewhat unfairly – bore the – eminently bearable – brunt of my irritation at the general phenomenon.

test…

Clearly a conspiracy to prevent these important remarks from being posted

An example I remember from I trying this a while ago this was the cut internet cables in the middle east in Feb 08. MSM reports mentioned unspecified ‘conspiracy theories’ in passing, end of story. I on the other hand think it eminently reasonable to suppose that these cables were in fact cut in order to disrupt the launch of the Iranian petrodollar-free oil bourse. Why bother? I don’t know, and it’s not very consequential. Maybe just a general harrying policy, maybe a failed attempt at something else, maybe a play for time, who knows. What do know is that undersea cables do not cut themselves and are generally placed so as not to be cut accidentally, that some action against the Iranian outrage by pro-US actors was very likely, and that sending a guy down to cut some cables is an utterly anodyne example of international politics carried on by unexceptional means. But in the MSM, this strong possibility was never even mentioned in any detail, just indirectly dismissed by reference to unspecified CTs.

In any case the attitude I report is a prevalent one, *not entirely exceptionless. The business of keeping things semi-secret (hence ‘plausible deniability’ rather than ‘total indetectability’) is an interesting one in itself – I’m toying with using epidemiology and prevention of infection as an analogy – ‘sterility’ only needs to be below a certain threshhold, not total. (Also esoteric/exoteric, etc – the Iranian oil bourse was of course mentioned – briefly – in semi-insider publications like the Financial Times.)

Of course all this could sound rather ‘conspiracy-minded’, when saner folk are more ‘coincidence-minded’ or ‘cock-up-minded’. I don’t actually regard it as just a matter of master plans – and not at all a matter of master plans of the vast, ancient, all-encompassing, omnipotent, monolithic, occult, extra-terrestrial etc varieties. But for now I’ll leave the models of merely quasi- or partly- conspiratorial media control to the Glasgow Media Group, uncle Noam Chomsky and all.

Well they are about all, actually, as far as I have been able to discover without current Athens credentials. If anyone can recommend any reasonably rigorous readings in sociology, psychology – or whatever – dealing with informal, distributed, unconscious, emergent, or otherwise non-smoky-room-based group action (‘quasi-conspiracy’) in the media or anywhere else, please please speak now. I don’t really include 70s-vintage Marxian a prioricities about class action since these seem to lack microfoundations – and for the most part empirical rigour. I am, though, willing to have my mind changed on that, and indeed – to seat myself more firmly on my high epistemic horse – on anything else.

some very odd stuff going on with unexplained failed posts and now moderation. What a frightful bore.