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Populism And Policy

Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today.  First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer” remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as […]

Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today.  First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer” remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as a matter of policy.  These are the “nihilists” he denounced earlier this month for opposing an absolutely indefensible bailout (which now appears all the more indefensible for its inadequacy and its outrageous nature).  It should go without saying that after the last few years of technocrats and experts getting so many things so magnificently wrong that this is an unusually poor time to declare the return of a technocratic establishment and the bankruptcy of populism, but this gets at the main problem of populism that is defined as little more than a style or a reflex rather than a more or less coherent set of policies.  The basic truth behind the populist skepticism of experts, or at least self-declared, well-placed experts, is that there is no accountability for most of them, which consequently results in the sort of long-term poor performance that a lack of accountability will create.  To the degree that failed or compromised oversight was responsible for much of this calamity–in Congress, at the SEC and elsewhere in government–the basic populist demand for oversight and accountability seems more important than ever.  The glorification of Palin’s lack of policy knowledge in some quarters should not excuse the failures of all those people in positions of authority and power who should have understood the situation and did not.  Here’s the thing–it helps the establishment remain unaccountable if it can label as populist any politician that uses lifestyle and cultural cues as a substitute for policy arguments.  As I hope to explain, Palin’s lack of policy knowledge is clear evidence that she is not just a bad populist, but rather not a populist in any meaningful sense at all.       

Even in his digs against Mr. Bush’s visceral decisionmaking, his prizing of instincts over intellect, Brooks feels compelled to attack such “populist excesses” as “the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism.”  The latter would come as news to those of us who are usually branded as “isolationist,” since it has never been clear when this “excess” was threatening to dominate anything.  Certainly no one looking back on the Republican Party of the last eight or ten years could have perceived an excess of isolationism.  Indeed, I think most people would be hard-pressed today to understand why a rather more “isolationist,” or rather America First, foreign policy would be either dangerous or excessive.  Certainly a foreign policy that recognizes the limits of American power and does not try to overreach with ludicrous security pledges and declarations of Sakartvelian solidarity seems much more appropriate to our present predicament.  

It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess” of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform” championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans.  The alienation of the GOP leadership from its constituents over immigration demonstrates how empty and meaningless Mr. Bush’s quasi-populist poses have always been.  Palin does represent a continuation down the path charted by Mr. Bush, which is the substitution of symbolic lifestyle politics for policies that will serve the constituencies that support the party.  In our debased political discourse, what Palin does on the stump is defined as populism.  Meanwhile, she serves as the running mate for an establishment fixture who has opposed every so-called “populist excess” that would have served his constituents and the national interest.  Everyone criticizes or praises Palin’s “populism” in terms that stress the absolute absence of policy substance, but this is rather like saying that you can have religion without worship or science without knowledge. 

Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism.  To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions.  It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose.  It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated.  The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess.  Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the “successes” of our managerial democracy around the world.

Rod also has a long post on the question of class warfare and anti-intellectualism on the right that is worth reading.

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