Making Sense of the Populist Present—2
The second part of my conversation with The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg about where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going
Welcome to Part 2 of my sprawling conversation with The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg. Part 1 ran as my last published post, on July 1.
JG: …. That gets me to your actual question. Ross Douthat said in 2016 that both parties were like fully fueled jets sitting on the tarmac just waiting to be hijacked. Bernie Sanders almost succeeded. Trump pulled it off. I would argue, somewhat counter-intuitively, that Sanders failed where Trump succeeded in part because historically the Democratic Party is the more populist party. This is irrefutably true when it comes to economics. From William Jennings Bryan to Father Coughlin (who, I will never stop pointing out, was an FDR supporter until he started attacking Roosevelt from the left), to Huey Long, FDR himself, but also LBJ, Teddy Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, populist economics has always been at the center of Democratic rhetoric (if not always policy). As a result, the Democrats developed mechanisms—political, psychological, and institutional—to channel populism effectively and, when necessary, to check it. It’s not a coincidence Democrats invented “super-delegates.” The GOP, for all of its efforts at tapping into the “silent majority,” never built safeguards like that. So when actual rightwing populism surged, it had no arguments or tools to check it. It is no coincidence, as the Marxists like to say, that as the GOP has gone populist it has moved leftward on economics. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and all sorts of nominally “conservative” institutions are bending to the cruel logic of audience capture.
And I think you are entirely right that this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Barack Obama’s landslide in 2008 was an overdetermined phenomenon (first black president, the Iraq War, etc), but the margins had a lot to do with the financial crisis of 2007-8. I said in my first reply that many of our political problems are American problems that manifest themselves differently on the left and right. The surge in populism fits my thesis perfectly. I think historians will look at Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties as two sides of the same coin. Scholars have done a lot of work on the fact financial crises create populist upheavals that are more acute, broad, sudden, and long lasting than other economic drivers of populism like deindustrialization, outsourcing, etc.
Obama rode the first populist wave after the financial crisis to victory in 2008. Populist protests from the left and right battered his first term, but he managed to tap into it to get reelected. In 2011, he pivoted to pure economic populism. He went to Osawatomie, Kansas, the site where Teddy Roosevelt unveiled his “New Nationalism,” and recycled TR’s raw economic populism. “And we still believe,” Obama concluded, “in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, ‘The fundamental rule of our national life,’ he said, ‘the rule which underlies all others—is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.’” As The Nation observed in an editorial, “The president has started talking like a populist. It took the Occupy movement to make him do it.” (It’s outside our remit here, but this is a small data point in support of my heartfelt contentions that, operationally, nationalism usually ends up being leftwing).
But the financial crisis was not an American event; it was a global one. And we can see its long tail barreling along like the Midgard Serpent circling the globe. Now, all of these effusions of populism are colored by local contingencies and characteristics, but that was true during similar moments of international tumult (1848, 1968, etc). Of course, the financial crisis alone doesn’t explain all of this. It added fuel on myriad fires, burning with varying degrees of intensity. But I think there are other commonalities at play.
Globalization is a major bugaboo on the right these days. But I’m old enough to remember when it was the international left that considered globalization to be the demon spawn of “disaster capitalism.” In 1999, Bill Clinton needed 10,000 policemen to protect him from anti-globalization mobs in Athens. Leftwing French mobs smashed McDonald’s like Luddites raiding the mills. Ralph Nader was as likely to lecture people about “economic patriotism” as Pat Buchanan was, and to bigger and more enthusiastic audiences. There’s still some of that on left, to be sure. But it is the right that has the brightest torches these days. Again, the drivers of such things are in many ways upstream of partisan politics, but the water eventually rushes into partisan tributaries.
I want to be clear about something. I think economic factors play a hugely important role in motivating populist movements at scale. But those movements are deeply colored by cultural and psychological forces. Economic dislocations can ignite populist bonfires, but they can also add fuel to long simmering cultural grievances. What scholars used to call Romantic Nationalism, was born in Germany as a rebellion against the impositions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. The demographic transitions of urbanization, industrialization, is what made large populations receptive to it. The populist backlashes to immigration have an obvious economic component to them, but there’s obviously other important stuff at play. Status-class anxiety is a bitch. And nostalgia is a drug.
For instance, expanded freedom sounds great, but it arouses resentment when it feels like it comes at the expense of social status. The emancipation of the slaves or the repeal of Jim Crow didn’t cost most white people in the south anything concrete, but it was a shocking blow to their perception of their own status and their understanding of the social order generally. All of those studies that show people are happier receiving a small raise if they’re elevated above their peers, than getting a larger pay bump if everyone gets one tells you something sad about human nature. Most of the rhetoric about inequality isn’t actually about fighting poverty, it’s about fighting “excessive” wealth. Trump’s populism is shot through with moral panic about lost status and a lost social order—and so is Bernie Sanders’. Envy isn’t strictly an economic phenomenon. “If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished,” Montesquieu observed. “But we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
Anyway, I’m just speculating here but I think that perhaps the best way to think about how this stuff plays out is not to ask who is left or right, but who is inside and who is outside the halls of power. Populists have always been better at the “speak truth to power” bullshit than intellectuals, in part because populists have the numbers. The intellectuals who prattle about “speaking truth to power” don’t have troops (have you caught on that I think “speak truth to power” is a garbage mantra?). As I mentioned in my first reply, the holders of political, cultural, and institutional power are decidedly of the left. What flavor of left we can debate another day. But that is the perception. And so the populists who get most riled up tend to be of the right. Where the right is in power, the populists in the street tend to be on the left (but because thanks to generations of biased framing from the Adorno and Hofstadter crowd, left-leaning elites tend not to fret about populism when it comes from the left. Rightwing mobs are terrifying, leftwing mobs are “mostly peaceful.” I just don’t like mobs, full stop).
Add in the fact that claiming outsider status is a business and marketing strategy, while claiming to be an insider is a dead end, and you can see how populism has become a kind of racket. Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz—two rich, highly credentialled, U.S. Senators(!)—love to claim they are outsiders fighting the elites. Every day I see a new outfit raising money off claims they’ve been censored.
The insider-outsider frame is useful at scale, too. A lot of the nationalism stuff is a kind of geopolitical version of the same thinking at the local level. Domestically, what drives populist outrage is the sense that powerful and unaccountable forces are rigging the system, enriching themselves at your expense, imposing their values on people who don’t share them. Intellectuals explained the left’s anti-globalism craze of the 1990s and early 2000s mostly in economic terms, rich in Marxist terminology. But on the ground, it was expressed as cultural resentment over America’s cultural hegemony, in the same way German nationalists like Fichte and Herder were rebelling against French cultural hegemony. Some of the rightwing populist nationalism has a strong strain of anti-Americanism, but an even stronger strain of anti-EUism. We don’t have to debate Brexit, to see that the EU project plays a role in fostering nationalism, benign or otherwise. If bureaucrats in Brussels are handling the big stuff, why should, say, Catalonians stay in Spain if they can go it alone? Ditto the Flemish, Walloons, Scots, etc. The logic of superstates supports the logic of ethnically and culturally homogenous ministates.
Of course, other factors are at play. Russia gets a great return on its investment in rightwing goon squads. Iran gets a similar return on anti-Israel goon squads. The sclerotic bureaucratic, syndicalist, welfare states of Europe are almost designed to breed disaffected un- or under-employed youth.
And, I should at least nod once again at mass media, including social media. Nationalism and the reformation, whether inevitable or not, were as a historical matter fruits of the printing press. The populism of the 1930s—in Europe and America—was fueled by radio. In 1968, the masses of protestors, everywhere from Mexico City, Washington DC, and Paris, were at least partly attributable to the television age. And we all remember the Twitter revolutions and the Arab Spring. Modern communication is really, really good at tricking people into thinking they are parts of mass movements. And once tricked, the trickery often becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m going to skip the last part of your question, if that’s okay. Partly because I have a whole spiel on the parties and our government dysfunction that I can’t go into now without making this unforgivably longwinded (if I haven’t already). But also because I want to make another point that fits here.
I think the decline of religion and civil society generally plays an enormous role in all of this. I despised Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning” crap, in large part because I saw it as a symptom of the crisis of meaning not, as she believed, a solution to it. But she was onto something nonetheless. A healthy society is like a vibrant ecosystem. It has countless niches and nooks for people to find a sense of belonging, meaning, happiness, and fulfilment (eudaimonia). The pursuit of happiness is an individual right, but its realization is always found in groups, little platoons as Burke would say. The decay and dissolution of local communities, institutions, friendships, faiths, and of course the family should be seen as a loss of crucial habitat for flourishing. We experience evermore of our life through screens, which both literally and figuratively flattens life into a kind of 2-dimesional space. This is not nourishing. It leaves us hungry for meaning. It tears holes in our souls and breeds men without chests, desperate to be part of something bigger.
A lot of people try to fill those holes with pornography, drugs, doomscrolling, politics, consumerism, whatever. It doesn’t work in the same way narcotics don’t work. The addiction may be temporarily satisfied but the cravings return. Whenever I see massive crowds at Trump rallies or at anti-Trump protests, and virtually every other mass demonstration, mob, or riot, I think of an insight from the minister Eugene Peterson:
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Crowds are intoxicating. Elias Canetti observes in Crowds and Power that inside the crowd, “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” “But,” Canetti adds, “the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it…. Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens.” Crowds are a narcotic, and crowd addiction—real and virtual—drives so much of our politics these days. There’s a reason why populism is so historically intertwined with conspiratorialism. What gets people out in the streets in the first place is a theory—occasionally with merit—that there is a conspiracy afoot. Powerful forces—capitalists, bankers, the British, the Jews, the globalists, the Egg Council—are manipulating events for their own benefit. But the initial reason to form a mob loses its salience for the crowd-addict, what is required is the need to keep the mob going, to swell its ranks, to keep people angry. Heroin addicts usually run through their own savings before stealing from friends and family to pay for it. Similarly, crowd addicts run out of good reasons to stay angry—sorry, mobilized—and start casting about for new outrages to keep the party going. When you read the biographies of some crowd addicts it’s amazing how much of their lives was spent chasing a movable feast of protest or rebellion. If we solved climate change tomorrow, the Greta Thurnbergs will switch en masse to some other Cause (heck, she already has, embracing anti-Zionism because that’s where the crowds are and she must go with them).
I was always keenly aware of this tendency on the left. And sociologically and psychologically, it made sense to me that it would historically manifest itself more in leftwing politics. Simply by virtue of being conservative—or by virtue of the things that make people conservative—conservatives had greater stockpiles of social and financial capital to draw down. When the status quo seems right and is fulfilling there’s no need to grab the pitchfork (another way of saying this is that when life is fulfilling, the status quo seems right). People dissatisfied with existing arrangements are more apt to try to overturn them. People craving to be part of a movement, and especially people who want to be a leader of a movement, have remarkably little difficulty switching their ideological commitments in order to stay relevant (there is a lot of that on the right these days). Populism is often a gateway drug to pure radicalism, because radicalism throws off the pretense of any constructive goal and embraces the idea that just tearing it all down is self-justifying.
The fetishization, even worship, of unity, mass protest, manning the ramparts, class consciousness, people-powered movements—aka populism—always rankled me. And when I criticized it from the right few conservatives objected, because they saw such forces as a threat to a status quo that served them. But now, the right for some good reasons and many bad ones, sees itself as the force for radicalism, for overturning the applecart. And the same social forces that led the left to worship at the church of collective action is now doing likewise on the right. But when I offer the same objections to the same sort of politics, I am the villain, the traitor, the sell-out, the buzzkill party-pooper who says the bar is closed and the crowd-addicts should go home.
Again, the problems facing the right and the left are different facets of the same American—or modern—problems.
DL: Thanks for all of that, Jonah. There’s so much here, and so many directions in which the conversation could go. But in the interests of bringing this colloquy to some kind of conclusion, I think I’ll start thinking in terms of how each of us responds to the drift of things over the past couple of decades.
It’s clear from your last round that you dislike populism no matter how or where it manifests itself—whether it’s the northeastern white-ethnic or rural-state populism of the right, or the college-town/Bernie Bro populism of the left. I get that. I don’t much like any of it either. I worry about mobs and distrust demagogues who whip up the hoi polloi into a frenzy of resentment against elites, the establishment, the powers that be, and so forth. I remain a temperamental conservative in my opposition to any political movement that seeks to tear down “the system,” an impulse that invariably disregards the core human truths that it’s easier to destroy than to create, and that things can always get worse.
But that doesn’t really tell us how one should respond to a surge in populism.
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