by Michael Lind
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IN CARRYING OUT their counterrevolution from outside and below, today’s populist demagogues target their overclass establishment enemies in all three realms of social power: politics, the economy, and the culture.
In politics, today’s populists champion majoritarian democracy against decision-making by the unelected, technocratic bodies to which much authority has been transferred during the recent neoliberal revolution. In Europe, this means “Euroskepticism” and “sovereigntism,” the assertion of the sovereignty of the democratic nation-state and the democratic national legislature against the power of the transnational bureaucracies of the European Union. In the United States, the equivalent is the Trump administration’s transactional approach to treaties and international organizations, which tend to be venerated by technocratic neoliberals as pillars of a “liberal world order.”
In the economy, today’s populist leaders tend to be economic nationalists, opposing global labor arbitrage policies of offshoring and mass immigration, which the overclass establishment claims are both inevitable and beneficial. Populist constituencies include many workers in manufacturing districts hit hard by foreign competition, including China’s subsidized “social dumping,” and others who view immigrants as competitors for jobs, public services, or status.
In the culture, populist politicians deliberately flout the elaborate etiquette of overclass corporations and universities by using crude and belligerent language. They mock “political correctness,” the artificial dialect devised by leftist activists and spread by university and corporate bureaucrats that serves as a class marker distinguishing the college-educated from the vulgar majority below them.
At its worst, the majoritarianism of Western populists blurs into what the sociologist Pierre van den Berghe calls “Herrenvolk democracy,” the identification of “the nation” or “the people” with the numerically largest racial or religious community in a nation-state. Donald Trump’s defiant use of “Merry Christmas” instead of the more inclusive “Happy Holidays” and Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini’s order that public buildings in Italy display Catholic crucifixes are examples of Herrenvolk populism with a religious tinge. Trump’s contemptuous references to the ancestral countries of nonwhite American political opponents and his description of African nations as “shithole countries” are blatantly racist. Such rhetoric, and the fact that some parties with fascist roots like Marine Le Pen’s National Front and the Sweden Democrats have succeeded in tapping into populist discontent, has made it easy for defenders of the embattled neoliberal establishment to dismiss all populist voters as white supremacists.
But equating most populist voters with far-right extremists is as absurd as efforts by right-wingers to lump center-left neoliberals and social democrats together with communists. Only a tiny number of Europeans or Americans are white supremacist radicals who dream of racially pure “ethnostates” or anti-Semites who believe that immigration is a part of a global Jewish conspiracy to “replace” Western nations. Many populist voters until recently voted for prolabor, center-left parties like the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and the Social Democrats in Germany, before “leftism” and “progressivism” were redefined to mean a combination of open-borders globalism, antinationalism, and radical race- and gender-based identity politics. For example, in Britain, in the 2019 elections for the European Parliament, an estimated 14 percent of voters who supported Labour in 2017 defected to vote for Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party. It is more plausible to assume that they did so out of concerns about national and popular sovereignty than to believe that before 2019 one in seven Labour voters was a cryptofascist white supremacist.13
The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012.
In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights.
This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican.
In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.14 Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.
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THE WEAKNESS OF populism is that it is literally reactionary. Populists react against what the dominant overclass establishment does, rather than having a positive and constructive agenda of their own.
Today’s populism is a counterculture, not a counterestablishment. A counterculture defines itself in opposition to the establishment. A counterestablishment wants to be the establishment. Members of a counterculture relish their outsider status. Members of a counterestablishment regret their outsider status. A counterculture is the heckler in the audience. A counterestablishment is the understudy, waiting in the wings for a chance to play the title role.
Populists are better at campaigning than at governing, as President-Elect Trump discovered when he found it difficult to staff his administration with competent technocrats willing to serve under a politician despised by many experts and officials. Demagogues are good at channeling popular grievances and bad at redressing them. Populist movements that deride expertise and bureaucracy naturally tend to have few experts of their own to formulate policies and administer agencies. The vacuum of experienced talent is often filled by cronies or relatives of the populist demagogue.
Populist demagogues cannot even be truly representative. No single charismatic individual or party can substitute for institutionalized representation of a pluralistic society in all its variety in all three spheres of politics, the economy, and the culture.
From the perspective of democratic pluralism, technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism represent different highways to the hell of autocracy. According to technocratic neoliberalism, an elite of experts insulated from mass prejudice and ignorance can best promote the public interest. According to populism, a single Caesarist or Bonapartist figure with a mystical, personal co
nnection to the masses can represent the people as a whole.
Both minoritarian rule by enlightened technocrats and pseudo-majoritarian rule by charismatic tribunes of the people are rejected by democratic pluralism, based as it is on a vision of society as a complex whole composed of many legitimate communities, each with its own institutions and representatives, rather than a fluctuating mass of atomized individuals. In 1999 the British politician and scholar David Marquand wrote:
Pluralists rejoice in variety. They are sceptical about theories—Marxism, economic liberalism, globalisation—that presuppose uniformity. Pluralists like the clash and clang of argument; the monochrome sameness of the big battalions horrifies them; so does the sugary conformism of the politically correct. Instinctively, they are for the “little platoons” that Edmund Burke saw as the nurseries of “public affections,” and they want to protect them from the homogenising pressures of state, market and opinion. For them, a good society is a mosaic of vibrant smaller collectivities—trade unions, universities, business associations, local authorities, miners’ welfares, churches, mosques, Women’s Institutes, NGOs—each with its own identity, tradition, values and rituals. Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of absolute sovereignty, famously compared such collectivities to “worms in the entrails of a natural man.” Pluralists see them as antibodies protecting the culture of democracy from infection.15
Half a century earlier in 1953, the American thinker Robert Nisbet made a similar argument:
[T]he role of political government becomes clear in the democracies. Not to sterilize the normal authorities of associations, as does the total State through a pre-emption of function, deprivation of authority, and a monopolization of allegiance, but to reinforce these associations, to provide, administratively, a means whereby the normal competition of group differences is held in bounds and an environment of law in which no single authority, religious or economic, shall attain a repressive and monopolistic influence—this is the role of government in a democracy.16
Genuine democracy requires never-ending, institutionalized negotiations among many major social groups in politics, the economy, and the culture, each equipped with substantial bargaining power and the ability to defend its interests and values. By this definition, technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism are not forms of democracy at all.
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THE HISTORICAL RECORD in many countries shows that when populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. The oligarchs may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege.
Oscillation among oligarchy and populism has long been the dynamic in much of Latin America.17 In the American South in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights revolution, when politics was contested by oligarchs and demagogues, most populist politicians gave up or sold out. In some cases, like that of Texas governor and US senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a country music singer, they were simply folksy fronts for corporate and upper-class interests all along.
The few populists in the American South who maintained some independence were those who could finance themselves, usually by corrupt means. Louisiana governor Huey Long could battle the ruling families and the powerful corporations because he skimmed money from state employee checks and kept it in a locked “deduct box.”18 In Texas, anti-Klan populist governor James “Pa” Ferguson, along with his wife, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who, following the impeachment of her husband, was elected governor on the slogan “Two Governors for the Price of One,” sold pardons to the relatives of convicted criminals.19 As billionaires who could finance their own campaigns, Ross Perot and Donald Trump could claim to be free to run against the American establishment.
The rise of charismatic populist tribunes as a response to the increasing social and epistemic closure of Western elites was entirely to be expected. Now that access to political influence depends not on decentralized grassroots party organizations and farm associations and unions and civic and church federations but on donations from billionaires or personal media celebrity, it is only natural that working-class outsiders will turn to champions who are rich business executives like Ross Perot, TV celebrities like Italy’s Beppe Grillo, or a combination of both, like billionaire and reality television star Donald Trump or media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. Absent advocates like these, many disconnected voters would have little or no voice at all.
For their part, would-be tribunes of the people like Trump, Farage, Berlusconi, and Salvini benefit from the wrath of the establishments that condemn them. The more they are denounced, the more plausible is their claim that, despite their celebrity or riches, they too are outsiders despised by the insiders, just like their nonelite constituents.
Populism is a symptom of a sick body politic, not a cure. In a formally democratic oligarchy, a nepotistic elite runs things for the benefit of its members most of the time. On the rare occasions when a demagogue is elected to office, he or she will be less likely to reform the system than to join the establishment or build a corrupt personal political machine, steering government patronage to supporters.
Those who favor democracy can look on this kind of political order only with dismay. Formal democracy may survive, but its spirit has fled. No matter who wins, the insiders or outsiders, the majority will lose. When a society is trapped in a vicious circle in which selfish oligarchs alternate with populist hucksters, economic growth and the rule of law are all likely to be casualties.
Is this the future of the West—never-ending clashes between North Atlantic versions of Juan Perón and the equivalent of the Buenos Aires Jockey Club? This is not as grim a fate as the breakdown of the Weimar Republic in Germany followed by the rise of National Socialism. But a world of decaying democracies dominated by oligarchic factions, in which alienated mobs now and then use elections as an excuse to demonstrate inchoate rage, is dystopian enough.
CHAPTER SIX
Russian Puppets and Nazis: How the Managerial Elite Demonizes Populist Voters
THE POPULIST WAVE IN politics on both sides of the Atlantic is a defensive reaction against the technocratic neoliberal revolution from above that has been carried out in the last half century by national managerial elites. Over the last half century, the weakening or destruction by neoliberal policy makers of the intermediary institutions of mid-twentieth century democratic pluralism, particularly labor unions, has deprived much of the working class of effective voice or agency in government, the economy, and culture. Populist demagogues can channel the legitimate grievances of many working-class voters, but they cannot create a stable, institutionalized alternative to overclass-dominated neoliberalism. Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.
That is the thesis of this book. It is a minority viewpoint within overclass circles in the US and Europe. A far more common view among transatlantic elites interprets the success of populist and nationalist candidates in today’s Western democracies not as a predictable and disruptive backlash against oligarchic misrule, but as a revival of Nazi or Soviet-style totalitarianism. One narrative holds that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime, by cleverly manipulating public opinion in the West through selective leaks to the media or Internet advertisements and memes, is responsible for Brexit, the election of Trump in 2016, and perhaps other major political events. A rival narrative sees no need to invoke Russian machinations; in this view, without aid from abroad, demagogues can trigger the latent “authoritarian personalities” of voters, particularly white working-class native voters, many of whom, it is claimed, will turn overnight in
to a fascist army if properly mobilized. These two elite narratives, promulgated by antipopulist politicians, journalists, and academics, can be called the Russia Scare and the Brown Scare (after earlier “brown scares” in Western democracies, with the color referring to Hitler’s Brownshirts).1
The reductio ad absurdum of this kind of mythological thinking is the adoption of the term “Resistance” by domestic opponents of President Donald Trump, which implies an equation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and the heroic anti-Nazis of the French Resistance. The anti-fascist theme also provides the name for the Antifa movement which, like the earlier “black bloc” anarchist movement, is made up chiefly of the privileged children of the white overclass who abuse leftist ideology as an excuse to dress up as movie-style ninjas, vandalize property, and harass people.2
It is no doubt emotionally satisfying for members of the embattled managerial overclass to identify antiestablishment populism with pro-Russian treason, fascism, or both. But this kind of paranoid demonological thinking has the potential to be a greater danger to liberal democracy in the West than any particular populist movements.
To begin with, both the Russia Scare and the Brown Scare betray a profound contempt on the part of members of technocratic neoliberal national establishments for voters who support populist causes or candidates. These voters are assumed to be gullible dimwits who are easily manipulated by foreign propaganda or domestic demagogues. Even worse, attributing populism to the irrational impulses of maladjusted voters prevents embattled establishments on both sides of the Atlantic from treating specific grievances of those voters as legitimate.