Why liberal policy savants deplore rule by the people
© Lindsay BallantTHE
LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA HAS MET THE ENEMY, and it is you. As the
shockwaves of Donald Trump’s presidency continue to shudder through our
institutions of elite consensus, a myopic, profoundly self-serving
narrative is taking shape across the politically minded academy: the
rude, irrational, dangerously xenophobic and racist rites of popular
sovereignty have swamped the orderly operations of constitutional
government. What’s more, this upsurge in mass political entitlement
isn’t confined to America’s notoriously demotic, chaotic political
culture. No, the democratic world at large is succumbing to the darker
siren songs of human nature, elevating authoritarian strongman leaders,
dusting off ugly and divisive nationalist slogans, and hastily erecting
trade barriers in the desperate, misguided hope of restoring some
mythic, nostalgia-steeped, ethno-nationalist gemeinschaft
The
name for these distressing, backward-reeling political trends, our
liberal solons agree, is populism. The hallmarks of populist movements,
we’re instructed, involve the rampant scapegoating of racial, religious
or ethnic minorities, and the fierce rejection of mediating institutions
seen to obstruct the popular will—or, in a pinch, the will of this or
that Great Leader. The resulting, chilling political dispensation works
out to an elegant sort of strongman syllogism, in the view of Harvard
government professor Yascha Mounk:
First, populists claim, an
honest leader—one who shares the pure outlook of the people and is
willing to fight on their behalf—needs to win high office. And second,
once this honest leader is in charge, he needs to abolish the
institutional roadblocks that might stop him from carrying out the will
of the people.
And once these populist goons ascend to power, all
bets are off when it comes to preserving the cherished canons of
liberal democracy. They cavalierly pack courts, suppress independent
media, and defy the separation of powers—all in the name of you, the
people. The populists now storming the world historical stage “are
deeply illiberal,” Mounk writes. “Unlike traditional politicians, they
openly say that neither independent institutions nor individual rights
should dampen the people’s voice.”
To be sure, the present world
order doesn’t lack for strongmen, hustlers, and bigoted scoundrels of
all stripes, from Donald Trump and Viktor Orban to Recep Erdogan and
Nigel Farage. But it’s far from clear that anything is gained
analytically from grouping this shambolic array of authoritarian souls
under the rubric of populism. Indeed, by lazily counterposing a crude
and schematic account of populist rebellion to a sober and serenely
procedural image of liberal democratic governance, Mounk and his fellow
academic scourges of new millennial populism do grievous, ahistorical
injury to populist politics and liberal governing traditions alike.
Let’s survey the damage in order, starting with an abbreviated look at
the history of modern populism, chiefly as it took shape here, where
it’s been most influential, in the United States.
Enmity for the People
Ever
since the dismal heyday of Joseph McCarthy, liberal intellectuals have
adopted populism as an all-purpose synonym for cynical, bottom-feeding
demagoguery, particularly when it takes on a racist or nativist guise.
McCarthy himself was undoubtedly a populist in this version of
historical inquiry, as were his many spittle-flecked progeny in the
postwar world, such as George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot. For
that matter, the preceding generation of opportunist panderers outside
the political mainstream were populists as well: the FDR-baiting radio
preacher Charles Coughlin and the quasi-socialist Bayou kingmaker Huey
Long; the definitely socialist Upton Sinclair and a motley array of
Southern Dixiecrats and Klan sympathizers—populists all, and dangerous
augurs of how minority rights, civic respect, and other core
liberal-democratic values can be deformed in the hands of charismatic,
divisive sloganeers.
The only trouble with this brand of
populist-baiting is that it’s ideologically and historically incoherent.
Inconveniently for the prim, hectoring postwar sermons of populist
scourges like Richard Hofstadter and J.L. Talmon, populism originated
not as a readymade platform for strongman demagogues, but as an economic
insurgency of dispossessed farmers and working people. America’s first
(upper-case P) Populist dissenters didn’t set out to traduce and
jettison democratic norms and traditions; they sought, rather, to adapt
and expand them, in order to meet the unprecedented rise of a new
industrial labor regime and the consolidation of monopoly capitalism in
the producers’ republic they described as the “cooperative
commonwealth.”
Far from rallying to this or that fire-breathing
strongman orator, the Populists of the late nineteenth century summoned
their political insurgency out of a vast network of
purchasing-and-marketing cooperatives, known as the National Farmers’
Alliance and Industrial Union—a movement that would come to employ more
than forty-thousand lecturers nationwide and organize at the precinct
level in forty-three states. Because the Farmers’ Alliance sought to
promote both the economic independence and civic education of its
members, it began life as an urgent campaign of political pedagogy. The
pages of its widely circulated newspaper, the National Economist,
outlined the history of democratic government in the West, harking back
to Aristotle and Polybius. Alliance lecturers also found themselves
advancing not merely political literacy, but literacy itself, since the
gruesome exploitation of Southern tenantry usually involved getting
farmers to sign usurious contracts they were unable to read.
In
time, Populist organizers came to realize that simple economic
cooperation would never, by itself, countermand the kind of economic
power accruing to Gilded Age capitalists. So they began to organize a
political arm, aimed at providing the sort of infrastructure that
economic democracy requires. In addition to advocating the kind of
procedural reforms to be taken up by a later generation of Progressive
era reformers—such as direct election of senators, legislating by
popular initiative, and public ownership of utilities—Alliance
organizers proposed an alternate currency and banking system, known as
the Subtreasury Plan. The idea behind the Subtreasury was to re-engineer
America’s currency—and thereby the American economy at large—to reward
the interests of laborers over those of capital. Economic reward would
be directly weighted to crops harvested, metals mined, and goods
manufactured, as opposed to wealth amassed and/or inherited.
Populists,
in other words, took the country’s founding promise of democratic
self-rule seriously as an economic proposition—and understood, as few
mass political movements have done before or since, how inextricable the
securing of a sustainable and independent livelihood is to the basic
functioning of democratic governance. True to the incorrigibly
procedural form of liberal political appropriation, however, the
Subtreasury Plan would survive as a rough blueprint for the introduction
of the Federal Reserve in 1914—with the significant caveat that the Fed
would serve as a subtreasury network to fortify the nation’s currency
for bankers, manufacturing moguls, and stock plungers, not ordinary
farmers and workers.
Class and the Color Line
As a
movement taking root among tenant farmers in the South and West, the
Farmers’ Alliance also began to defy a foundational taboo of the white
postbellum political order. Alliance lecturers recruited black tenant
farmers into the movement’s rank and file, and began advancing a
sustained attack on the mythology of white supremacy gleefully exploited
by the region’s planter class. This attack was halting and
culture-bound, with many lapses on the part of white Populist leaders
into patrician condescension and (at times) uglier private sentiments.
But the movement’s halting lurch toward an integrationist strategy prior
to the rise of Jim Crow segregation and voting-suppression laws
throughout the South grants a bracing view on the unsettled nature of
racial politics in the region at the height of Populist organizing.
After the Alabama Populist party adopted a plank in its 1892 platform
supporting the black franchise “so that through the means of kindness . .
. a better understanding and more satisfactory condition may exist
between the races,” a white farmer wrote to the Union Springs Herald: “I
wish to God that Uncle Sam could put bayonets around the ballot box in
the black belt on the first Monday in August so that the Negro could get
a fair vote.”
It’s not clear that anything is gained
analytically from grouping today’s shambolic array of authoritarians
under the rubric of populism.
It was also in 1892 that the
national People’s Party was founded—and soon became known as the
Populist Party in the political shorthand of the day. In their landmark
Omaha Platform, the insurgent leaders of the Populist movement declared
“that the civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which
grew out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are
in name, one united brotherhood of free men.” Georgia Populist lawmaker
Tom Watson, who would go on to be the party’s vice-presidential
candidate in 1896, announced that the Populists were determined to “make
lynch law odious to the people.” Addressing white and black working
Americans, he pronounced an indictment of racism that had to sound
ominous indeed for the white planter elite: “You are made to hate each
other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of
financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and
blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a
monetary system which beggars you both.” To black audiences, he pledged
that “if you stand up for your rights and for your manhood, if you stand
shoulder to shoulder with us in this fight,” then Populist allies “will
wipe out the color line and put every man on his citizenship
irrespective of color.”
This is not to say that Populists, in
launching such salvos against the battlements of racist identity in the
South, were remotely successful. Indeed, Watson himself, having seen
conservative Bourbon forces cynically marshal black voting support
behind segregation platforms in repeated election cycles, would go on to
become a hateful paranoiac bigot in the mold of other racist Southern
demagogues. C. Vann Woodward chronicles this hideous transformation in
his biography Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, which stands eighty years on
as one of the most heartbreaking and unflinching studies of an American
political career ever published.
Watson’s career is also
significant because, in the hands of Richard Hofstadter’s revisionist
portrait of Populists in his 1955 book The Age of Reform, figures such
as Watson—in his late-career moral dotage—are made to stand in for the
entire Populist movement. By selectively quoting the outbursts of Watson
and other bigoted Populist orators, Hofstadter veers right by the
Alliance’s legacy of mass political education and financial reform, and
depicts the Populists as nothing more than a downwardly mobile
assortment of racist and xenophobic cranks. What ailed these unhinged
souls, Hofstadter argued, was a condition he diagnosed as “status
anxiety”—together with other demented reveries arising from their own
terminally waning cultural prestige. Without Populists, the clear
implication of his argument runs, you’d never have the whole backward,
bigoted spectacle of the modern Southern regime of racial apartheid,
hellbent on subverting any movement toward black self-rule in the name
of a sainted white Protestant Populist tradition.
Here’s the
thing, though: the institutionalized system of postbellum white
supremacy in the South came in response to the threat of the
cross-racial class alliances that Populists sought to build—not as an
outgrowth of any pre-existing bigotries on the part of Populist leaders.
Hofstadter and his many latter-day epigones like Yascha Mounk get the
causation here precisely backwards—and in the process, misdiagnose just
how and why the regime of Jim Crow took hold so deeply in the American
South. It’s not that the Populists were losing status in the South after
Reconstruction had been dismantled; it’s that they were gaining
political power on an explicit platform of cross-racial solidarity to
combat the market forces that were dispossessing poor white and black
tenant farmers alike. Given how readily Northern liberals and
Progressives of the era adapted to the reign of Jim Crow and endorsed
its racist underpinnings, it’s curious—though, alas, not surprising—to
see how populism has become the byword of choice for racist demagoguery
in respectable liberal debate.
By 1896—nearly two decades after
the Alliance’s emergence out of the earlier agrarian Grange
movement—national Populist leaders agreed to fuse with the Democratic
ticket, which nominated the free-silver boy orator from Nebraska,
William Jennings Bryan, for president.
Bryan’s thunderous “Cross
of Gold” nomination speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention served in
the popular imagination to anoint the idea of (small-p) populism as an
emotional exercise in high-voltage speechifying. But as Lawrence Goodwyn
made clear in his masterful 1976 history of the movement, Democratic
Promise (a work that neither Yascha Mounk nor any of today’s other
name-brand populism-baiters has apparently bothered to consult), the
radical, grassroots phase of Populist organizing had crested four years
prior to the 1896 fusion ticket—and while Bryan was undoubtedly a breath
of fresh air in the economically reactionary Democratic Party of Grover
Cleveland, his free-silver crusade was but a faint shadow of Populist
reform. Free Silverites had assumed national leadership of the party via
the financial support of Western mining interests keen to see the
United States go off the gold standard—and so what had been an ambitious
bid to realign the entire orientation of the nation’s political economy
became dumbed down into the sort of money-driven shadowplay all too
familiar to students of major party politics: via the alchemy of
campaign cash, the domesticated hobby horse of a cherished set of donors
becomes tricked out into the spontaneous expression of the popular
will. Free-silver was no more likely to deliver long-term prosperity to
the toiling masses than today’s Republican tax-cutting boondoggles do
(particularly since the price of gold declined shortly after the
election in the wake of newly discovered global reserves, easing
financial pressure on debt-burdened farmers and industrial workers). And
yet there it was, marketed as the panacea of first resort to the many
economic and political derangements of Gilded Age capitalism. The
Populist insurgency was likely always doomed to fail at the national
level, but to have it fail in such an inert, compromised form was a
gratuitously cruel body blow to the Alliance-aligned side of the
movement. In this light, it was somehow fitting that Bryan would end his
long public career as a fundamentalist crank and a Florida real estate
tout-for-hire at the height of the 1920s stock market boom.
© Lindsay BallantSystem of a Down
All
this bears revisiting in such detail because today’s anti-populist
writers have shown themselves to be every bit as ignorant of Populist
political economy, and its richly instructive course in American
history, as Hofstadter had proven to be back in 1955. Far from
addressing the real scourges of economic privilege, the populism of
liberal lore is, as Hofstadter taught, first and foremost a movement of
ugly and intolerant cultural reaction. Even a writer like UC Berkeley
economist Barry Eichengreen, who manages to descry legitimate economic
grievances in today’s political revolt against neoliberal orthodoxy,
delivers up this magisterially nonsensical gloss on the immediate legacy
of Bryan: “Whether William Jennings Bryan is properly viewed as a
populist is disputed . . . since Bryan, while positioning himself as
anti-elite, did not prominently exhibit the authoritarian and nativist
tendencies of classic populism.”
To begin with the least risible
part first: there was of course no such thing as “classic populism” at
the time of Bryan’s elevation to the Populist-Democratic presidential
ticket, since the Populists had only emerged as a national political
force four years earlier. Not even FM radio franchises or cable
art-house channels throw around “classic” with such militant
indifference to the word’s actual meaning. But more damning, of course,
is Eichengreen’s casual ascription of authoritarian and nativist
sentiments as the essence of American populism—a tic everywhere on
display in the contemporary liberal effort to diagnose the baneful
spread of populism across the globe. The Populist movement is here
indicted for helping to originate the very apartheid system of class
rule that, as the historical record plainly shows, it had originally
sworn to dismantle; to claim that Populist figures are by definition
sowers of racial resentment is a bit like reading the modern GOP’s
full-frontal assaults on voting rights back into the historical record
to proclaim the Republicans as the party of the Confederacy.
The
late-Populist descent into race-baiting is instead better understood as
the embittered, tail-chasing phase of moral inquiry that awaits all too
many disappointed reformers in our Kabukified two-party political scene.
To hold these excrescences of Populist failure forth as first-order
definitions of populist political leadership is more than sloppy
scholarship; it’s an interested falsification of the past, directly in
line with the discredited Hofstadter school of drive-by populist
caricature.
And alas, Eichengreen is only getting started; the
unsupportable generalizations billow on and on. Ticking off the alleged
anti-democratic, “antisystem” perils of contemporary “populist”
movements, he rears back and delivers this word-picture:
Because
populism as a social theory defines the people as unitary and their
interests as homogeneous, populists are temperamentally impatient with
the deliberations of pluralist democracy, insofar as this gives voice to
diverse viewpoints and seeks to balance the interests of different
groups. Since the people are defined in opposition to racial, religious,
and ethnic minorities, populists are intolerant of institutions that
protect minority rights. To the extent that populism as a political
style emphasizes forceful leadership, it comes with a natural
inclination toward autocratic, even authoritarian rule.
No, no,
and again no. Far from displaying a telltale impatience with the
protocols of representative democracy and the delicate balancing of
“diverse viewpoints,” the People’s Party of the 1890s sought to
expandsuch deliberations and such political participation, at a time of
virulent white racism and class privilege in every other sanctum of
American political leadership. Eichengreen doesn’t say much about
alleged populist hostility toward minority rights and the populist
masses’ swooning predilection for authoritarian leaders, but none of his
sympathetic readers will much expect him to. As is the case in all
these tracts, it’s sufficient to name check a few global strongmen, a
Hugo Chavez here, a Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage there, and the specter
of intolerant strongman populists on the march across the globe is
effectively conjured, in much the same way that saying “Candyman” in
front of the mirror three times will cause a bug-filled supernatural
predator to materialize out of thin air.
This procedure is the
globally minded academics’ version of one of the pet talking points
favored among lazy pundits during the 2016 presidential primaries:
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both appear to champion the cause of
forgotten citizens in the face of corrupt and self-dealing political
establishments, ergo, they must be the same kind of troublemaking
rebel!Never mind that Trump’s substantive platform departed radically
from Sanders’s governing plan in nearly every particular, from health
care provision to foreign policy to marginal tax rates; no, the notion
of a shared populist birthright binding the Queens-bred Prince Hal
figure of Trump and the Brooklyn-bred movement socialist Sanders was
simply too irresistible to pundits weaned on a historical frame of
reference that lasts about as long as your average cable commercial
break.
Brexit Ghost
In the same way, liberal political
savants are now marketing a one-size-fits-all explanation of the
spreading mood of disenchantment with the Eurozone and globalizing
capital more generally, the challenges of immigrant assimilation, the
rise of tech monopoly and the decline of social mobility and fairly
rewarded wage labor. In the brisk, mansplaining chronicles of Mounk,
Eichengreen, et al., current uprisings now get reflexively written off
to the irrational forces of mystic, metastasizing global populism, and
all the thorny, substantive questions of policy and political persuasion
that might otherwise be marshaled to address each in its turn likewise
get swept under the general heading of populist reaction. Among other
things, this interpretive schema is a bizarre brand of political
fatalism, offering little more in the way of concrete remedy to these
challenges to neoliberal governance than a prayerful hope that the
misguided souls making up the base of global “populism” will return
spontaneously to their appointed roles as rational, norms-abiding
endorsers of the neoliberal status quo.
To get some rough idea of
this procedure’s intellectual bankruptcy, consider the 2016 Brexit
vote. Here was, yes, a brashly nativist campaign to roll back the
Eurozone—but by all accounts the pitch that put the Leave vote over the
top was Nigel Farage’s canny though deeply dishonest argument that
exiting the Euro would free up vast sums of money for Britain’s national
health service. In other words, the would-be “populist” merchants of
invidious ethnic, racial, and cultural division were egged on to victory
by an appeal to continue funding at a lavish level . . . the most
successful social-democratic model of universal health care provision in
the industrialized West. Yes, there was no small amount of Leave-camp
agitprop targeting immigrant populations as a drain on the NHS’s
resources and quality of care—but the fact remains that no one, after a
decade-plus of senseless austerity cuts to the British social safety
net, was down for even a right-wing culture crusade that might reduce
health care expenditures. Indeed, the Yes campaign prevailed in no small
part by latching on to NHS spending as a badge of British cultural
identity, which might itself suggest a fertile brand of forward-looking
organizing for leftists and social democrats possessed with a scintilla
of imagination.
In lieu of any such analysis, Eichengreen dotes
on the higher rates of unemployment and the lower rates of support for
“multiculturalism and social liberalism” in the Leave camp. This is, in
part, fair enough—and as an economist, Eichengreen is properly attuned
to larger economic forces at play behind shifts in popular opinion. At
the same time, though, there’s no clear historical basis to contend, as
he does, that the downwardly mobile makeup of Leave supporters is in
line with “other instances of populism,” which plainly “suggest that an
incumbent group will react most violently—that its members will be most
inclined to feel that their core values are threatened—when they are
falling behind economically.” That is, at most, just half the picture in
any “instance of populism”—or in any broad economic mandate put before a
popular vote, which is, in reality, what was up for discussion in the
Brexit campaign. As the NHS part of the Brexit campaign made all too
plain, aggrieved Leave voters were upset about more than declining
incomes, immigrant demands on social services, and the putative excesses
of multiculturalism: they intensely disliked the legacies of
neoliberalism, as Labour and Conservative governments alike have
packaged and promoted them over the past three decades.
Second Time Farage
Indeed,
there is no more potent symbol of neoliberal governance and its many
social-democratic blindspots than the EU itself, which all but commanded
the bankruptcy of the Greek economy and denied Greece’s leftist Syriza
party functional control over the nation’s own currency so as to the
bolster the EU’s own preferred terms of maximum austerity in the
comically misnamed Greek bailout. Yet it’s easy to forget in postmortems
like Eichengreen’s that membership in the EU was precisely the question
at stake in the Brexit vote. Eichengreen does cite the sluggish
performance of the British economy in the wake of its admission to the
EU, but notes in a bizarre footnote that, among the “big three”
continental economies of France, Germany, and the UK, the fact “that
[economic growth] decelerated by less in Britain suggests the EU
membership and Thatcher-era reforms had a positive effect.” That would
be in the same sense, one supposes, that it’s a “positive effect” to be
kicked in the shins rather than strangled from behind.
Eichengreen
puzzles over why issues of inequality loomed larger over the Brexit
ballot than they had during the retrograde policy reign of Margaret
Thatcher. He notes greater maldistribution of per capita income in
Britain as opposed to other major EU member nations and briefly
references the disastrous austerity-driven response to the 2008 meltdown
orchestrated by the Cameron government. Still, it’s principally the
familiar Hofstadter specter of “status anxiety” and tribally fomented
economic nationalism that drive Eichengreen’s anatomy of the Brexit
campaign—so much so that he depicts Tony Blair’s vastly liberalized
immigration policy at the EU’s behest not as an inflection point in the
consolidation of labor markets under the aegis of global capitalism, but
rather as the natural continuation of the market revolution ushered in
under Thatcher. England had already, by the late 1990s, been taking in a
greater share of its population growth from former UK colonies than it
had through natural biological increase—with new immigrants mostly from
former colonial holdings of the former British empire. But, Eichengreen
notes:
This changed . . . with Tony Blair’s decision in 2004
to allow unrestricted access to the U.K. labor market for citizens of
the EU’s eight new Central and Eastern European member states. The U.K.
labor market was tight, and Blair had the backing of business. The
policy was part of his strategy to reposition the Labour Party as
business friendly and pro-globalization. The decision to open the doors
to the new EU8 was, in fact, part of a broader set of government
initiatives that included also more permits and visas for young people
seeking work in the tourist trade and for seasonal agriculture
The
reason that wages for all workers have been stagnant for so very long
is that our predatory managerial and owning classes have kept the vast
share of economic gains in this country for themselves.
Put
another way: after Margaret Thatcher spent the better part of a
generation cutting the once-robust British union movement off at its
knees, Tony Blair pledged his fealty to global capital by casualizing
his country’s low-wage service economy. But Eichengreen, in spite of his
own economic bona fides, dismisses any class-based animus in the
backlash to the immigration wave that followed hard upon Blair’s
decision. EU8 immigrants were comparatively better educated than their
forerunners in the former British colonial sphere and so couldn’t be
seen as a threat to low-skilled, native-born job holders, he argues—and
besides, “the foreign-born share and the proportion of a region’s voters
supporting Leave were in fact negatively correlated. It’s as if regions
where knowledge of immigrants was least, fear of immigration was
greatest.”
Here we are again, in other words, in the reassuring
liberal world of declining cultural status. Populists are nativists by
definition, and nativists are hostile to immigration because they simply
don’t know any better; they live in regions where the presence of a
smattering of immigrants is likely to be more upsetting or disorienting
than in higher-density outposts of the global knowledge economy. It’s
hard not to note the affinities here between Eichengreen’s culturally
determinist gloss on the Brexit outcome and Hillary Clinton’s principal
alibi for her 2016 election defeat: that Democratic voters are
clustered, via their own assortative genius, in places that “are
optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” while the sad-sack,
downwardly mobile Trump base “was looking backwards” in its Ghost-Dance
style mission to make America great again.
Meanwhile,
Eichengreen’s other telltale metric of populist distemper—the
weak-at-the-knees reaction to strongman leaders retailing sagas of
cultural restoration—is quite comically absent from the Brexit
referendum and its aftermath. Nigel Farage was a C-list media
personality prior to the Brexit vote and now resides much further back
in the celebrity alphabet. Theresa May nearly lost a heretofore
ironclad-seeming Conservative majority by trying to jerryrig an early
vote on her party’s Leave agenda, while mop-topped demagogue Boris
Johnson, the former mayor of London, was driven into premature
private-sector retirement by the sheer political unworkability of any
and all Brexit plans presently on the books.
Norms Follow Function
So
again: if these omniscient accounts of the latter-day scourge of global
populism aren’t actually about populism, what are they about? Well,
they’re doing what neoliberal intellectual work has been doing for the
better part of a generation now—making the logic of market-driven policy
appear to be a species of the highest political wisdom. This mission is
at the heart of Mounk’s puzzlingly influential book, which tilts again
and again at straw-man avatars of the “populist” menace in order to
confirm what he and his cohort of think-tank apparatchiks knew all
along: that the expert-administered dictates of the neoliberal market
order are not simply the optimal arrangements for global capitalist
enterprise; they are also, and far more urgently, the last, best hope
for rescuing our fragile, Trump-battered democratic norms from the
populist abyss. It’s right there in the book’s subtitle: Why Our Freedom
Is in Danger and How to Save It.
However, on closer inspection,
the task of saving our freedom isn’t a call to the barricades, the town
hall, or the picket line; it is, rather, a closely modulated accord
among postideological elites to keep all currents of opinion within
their appointed lines. This pronounced and insular vision of elite
governance for its own sake explains why Mounk and other self-appointed
prophets of the gathering populist storm consistently fail to highlight
what is in fact a central, and deeply anti-populist, bulwark of
conservative rule over the past generation—the activist right’s militant
embrace of state-based voter suppression, which has no remote
historical affinity with a movement devoted to the expansion of the
franchise via direct election of senators, legislation by initiative,
and preliminary challenges to racist disenfranchisement of postbellum
black voters. Astonishingly, Mounk devotes a section of his book to
bemoaning the decline of judicial review in Western democracies without
coming to grips with the substantive impact of the Roberts Court’s
irresponsible gutting of the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and
the staggeringly counter-empirical Trumpist obsession with the threat of
race-based “voter fraud.” Then again, such first-order assaults on
basic democratic participation at the grassroots level have no clear
place in a tract devoted to what Mounk is pleased to call “the
miraculous transubstantiation between elite control and popular appeal.”
It
gets worse. Highlighting the penchant of strongman demagogues to
translate power relations into conspiracy theories, Mounk surreally
argues that the best rejoinder to such unhinged public reveries is “to
re-establish traditional forms of good government.” And the way to do
this, it turns out, is to bow once more before the well-worn
governmental shibboleths of the neoliberal information age:
To
regain the trust of the population once Trump leaves office,
politicians will have to stick to the truth in their campaigns; avoid
the perception of a conflict of interest; and be transparent about their
dealings with lobbyists at home and government officials abroad.
Politicians and journalists in countries where norms have not eroded to
the same degree should, meanwhile, double down with renewed zeal: As the
American case shows, such norms can erode frighteningly quickly—and
with terrible consequences.
After Trump won the 2016
election, Barack and Michelle Obama were mocked in some quarters for
having insisted throughout the campaign that “when they go low, we go
high.” It is, of course, easy to mock a team that continues to play by
the rules when the opposing team turns up with goons in tow and clubs in
their hands. But for anyone who wishes to keep playing the game, it’s
not clear what the alternative is: if both sides take up arms, its
nature changes irrevocably. Unlikely as it might seem at the moment, the
only realistic solution to the crisis in government accountability (and
most likely the larger crisis in democratic norms) is therefore a
negotiated settlement in which both sides agree to disarm.
It’s
hard to conjure a better rhetorical example of high-church proceduralism
in the neoliberal age. There’s the notion that the excesses of Trumpism
can be effectively dispelled by the self-policing moral rehabilitation
of our leadership caste, as opposed to any expansion of
political-economic freedoms that an aggrieved citizenry might demand on
their own behalf. There’s the fanciful notion that Democrats blew the
2016 election by “going high” and adopting a morally superior campaign
rhetoric, when in point of fact the Clinton campaign devoted its final
general election push to a blizzard of harsh negative attacks on
Trump—in part because even at that late date, Clinton couldn’t give a
clear account of why she wanted to be president beyond it being the next
logical entry on her resume. (Anyone who thinks “going high” is second
nature to Hillary Clinton in campaign mode clearly slumbered through the
2008 primary season, when she and her surrogates mounted an
unrelentingly vicious counteroffensive against her upstart opponent
Obama.) Finally, there’s the broader depiction of political discourse as
a formalist byplay of norms upheld by force of liberal leadership—norms
that are at once the bedrock foundation of responsible public inquiry
and yet somehow also prone to instantaneous collapse once a billionaire
pseudo-populist and his retinue of goons start whaling away on them.
This
ritualized fetish of norms and rules is but the extension of the habits
of mind exemplified by Davos-style neoliberalism into the sphere of
political morality. The notion that representative democracy best
expresses itself in formalist modes of compromise and mutual disarmament
is the mode of agreement best disposed to bargaining parties whose own
social power is assured and ratified well beforehand. The formalist
dream of government exclusively by rules and norms is a minuet among
privileged arbiters of polite conduct who can afford the luxury of
believing they are “going high” by deigning to enter the public sphere
in the first place. All that’s missing here is a ritual call for greater
“civility” among the surly ranks of Trump resisters—but Mounk completed
his manuscript before that procedural plaint became de rigueur among
right-thinking liberals.
Keep in mind, too, that Mounk lays out
his proceduralist playbook of elite deference as the best response to
the plague of conspiracy thinking on the “populist” left and right. Why,
if you simply increase your transparency, the reasoning goes, your
virtues will become self-evident—as though conspiracy-mongering has
overtaken our common world only because we’ve all needed a firmer
pedagogic hand at our social-media cursors. Among other things, this
sunnily didactic view of truthful-leadership-by-example overlooks the
Obama administration’s commitments to official secrecy, leak
prosecutions, and extralegal drone assaults of all description, despite
its frequent rhetorical invocations of its own exemplary commitments to
“transparency” and plain-dealing. It’s hard to see, in other words, how
assurances of improved probity coming from our leadership class would be
greeted with anything other than a chorus of disbelieving guffaws—or
why they should be.
© Lindsay BallantProductivity for What?
Mounk’s
analysis grows yet more evidence-averse and saucer-eyed when he
addresses what had been the great strength of historical Populist
organizing: the condition of the political economy. He devotes much of
the discussion to the mandate to increase worker productivity, while
also asserting that “the role that inequality has played in the
stagnation of living standards has sometimes been overstated.”
Productivity gains, he insists, are the best hope for the improvement of
economic conditions across the board: “if productivity had grown at the
same rate in the past few decades as it had in the postwar era, the
average American household would now be able to spend $30,000 more per
year.”
Well, duh—the gains in both productivity and income over
the first flush of the American economy’s postwar expansion were without
precedent in human history. (This would be why French economists refer
to the three decades following World War II as the trentes glorieuse.)
But what Mounk isn’t telling his readers is that wages have failed to
keep pace even with more modest productivity increases for American
workers over the past four decades—which is why wages for those workers
have remained essentially stagnant since the mid-1970s. So if you coax
higher productivity numbers out of the U.S. wage economy as it’s
presently configured, that’s the least likely path to improving the lot
of the average worker.
But of course productivity gains are
catnip to neoliberal managers and tech entrepreneurs—the same readers
who’ve elevated Mounk’s tract into Hillbilly Elegy status for the TED
Talk circuit. So once again we’re marched through alarmist talk of the
grievous state of American public education as a training ground for
knowledge workers and the anemic state of STEM funding. Sounding for all
the world like Bill Gates cooing into Mark Zuckerberg’s ear, Mounk
announces that an “ambitious set of educational reforms is needed to
prepare citizens for the world of work they will encounter in the
digital age.” Then it’s on to true gibberish, as Mounk seeks to apply
his stunted apothegms on productivity to the world of work as it now
actually exists. Militantly ignoring the last forty years of American
wage stagnation, Mounk offers this otherworldly snapshot of what an
improved social contract for American workers might look like:
After
all, low productivity and high inequality tend to be mutually
reinforcing. Workers who have low skills don’t have much bargaining
power. This, in turn, depresses their wages, and makes it more likely
that their children will also fail to acquire sufficient skills to
succeed.
The reason that workers lack bargaining power,
regardless of their skill levels, is that most forms of union organizing
have either been outlawed or drastically curtailed under the neoliberal
economic policymaking of the past four decades. And the reason that
wages for all workers have been stagnant for so very long is that our
predatory managerial and owning classes have kept the vast share of
economic gains in this country for themselves. Latest figures from the
Economic Policy Institute show that the pay gap separating CEO salaries
from those of average workers now stands at 312 to 1.
Uber, But for Plutocrats
All
the STEM curricula and Task Rabbit apps in the world won’t set that
imbalance to right. But in lieu of a policy directive along the lines of
organize your workplaces and tax the living shit out of the wealthy,
Mounk again counsels the stately and measured trimming of differences
between workers and rapacious managers—er, excuse me, dynamic
entrepreneurs. And presto: a plan “to structure the world of work in
such a way as to make it possible for people to derive a sense of
identity and belonging from their jobs—and to remind the winners in
globalization of the links they share with their less fortunate
compatriots.” How might this staggering conceptual breakthrough be
coaxed into being? Well, let global laborcrat Yascha Mounk sketch it out
for you:
Take the example of Uber. It seems relatively clear
that governments should neither forbid the service, as some countries
in Europe are proposing, nor allow it to circumnavigate key protections
for their workforce, as most parts of the United States have effectively
done. Rather, they should steer a forward-looking middle
course—celebrating the huge increase in convenience and efficiency that
ride-sharing offers while passing new regulations which ensure that
drivers earn a living wage.
Never
mind that the entire business model of Uber is organized around the
idea of denying its casualized workers a minimum wage (the
median wageof
Uber and Lyft drivers now works out to $3.37 an hour); or that recent
studies indicate that, once vehicle maintenance and gas costs are
factored into the equation, nearly a third of Uber drivers are actually
losing money.
The larger point is that this daft “forward-looking middle course”
mimics in structure and substance alike virtually every misguided
neoliberal policy that has beggared the living conditions of workers and
debtors throughout the world, and sparked the very far-flung rebellions
against globalizing capitalism that Mounk’s book purports to describe.
With selected phrasing substitutions, this Goldilocks-style prescription
of punitively wage-starving policies might have been lifted, say, from
Al Gore’s heroic defense of the NAFTA accords while debating Ross Perot
in 1995, when the former third-party presidential candidate prophesied a
“giant sucking sound” of vanishing American jobs would follow hard on
the new trade deal. Or it could have been taken from any number of
Silicon Valley photo ops for candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, as she
celebrated the “convenience and efficiency” of an economic sector that
doubles as both a wage-suppressing labor cartel and a libertarian cult.
Mounk’s
Third Way policy prescription also echoes an especially distressing
blindspot of neoliberal labor thinking: it’s taken for granted here that
“governments” serving undefined constituencies are the right economic
actors to be shaping the optimal labor relations for the ride-sharing
market, and not, say, drivers themselves. Never mind that New York’s
Taxi Workers Alliance managed under its own organizing steam to get the
number of app-based drivers capped in the nation’s largest market for
ride-sharing—thereby helping secure the livelihoods of a union
membership that’s seen six taxi drivers kill themselves under the
race-to-the-bottom
logic
of rampant ride-sharing. No, re-organizing your productive life in your
own interest is too hopelessly divisive, and could even prove to be
dangerously “populist” over the longer term. So just lie back and let
above-the-fray global bureaucrats manage your working lives on your
behalf, and you can thank us later.
This is, at bottom, the
vision of expert-mediated civic life that the Yascha Mounks of the world
are seeking to repackage as our imperiled tradition of “representative
democracy.” Talk about your giant sucking sounds.