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Watch Out for Populism

I think this is a useful illustration of the problem with populism. Being on the wrong side of “the people” is automatically seen as betrayal, rather than mere disagreement. I’d been bee-bopping and scatting against liberal populism and no one cared; when I was skeptical about an issue conservative populists treasure, I was inundated with […]

I think this is a useful illustration of the problem with populism. Being on the wrong side of “the people” is automatically seen as betrayal, rather than mere disagreement. I’d been bee-bopping and scatting against liberal populism and no one cared; when I was skeptical about an issue conservative populists treasure, I was inundated with pronouncements about the glories of people power.

Second, I’m not trying to say that conservatives who resort to populist arguments are crypto-left-wingers or anything like that. But I do believe that the logic of populism can be corrosive if not held in check. One need only look at Pat Buchanan to see how completely it can eat away classically liberal views. ~Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg

Right away, I should say that few people have less regard for both democracy and populism than I do. One of the reasons I named my blog Eunomia was because I took it as a given that eunomia (good order) was the standard by which a regime should be judged, and by that standard democracy or ochlocracy (which is really what populism of the type we are discussing amounts to) will always be found gravely wanting. Both are deeply flawed and dangerous. Both have accounted for more political disasters in the last 200 years than had occurred in the previous 1000. No one who saw the poisoned atmosphere leading up to the invasion of Iraq, which was only a fairly mild form of populist agitation and demagoguery (to which NR contributed more than a little), can view populism as something tending towards a healthy polity.

But the only time you will hear a modern “movement” apparatchik speak seriously against “the people” and what the people want is when it comes to immigration. Why? This is not particularly because they have some deep abiding fear of mass hysteria or the nationalisation of industry, but because they basically like the idea of mass immigration in principle and want to keep it safe from the masses of Americans who, as citizens, find the current state of affairs profoundly offensive to their understanding of our political system. Even though mass immigration on this scale, particularly when uncontrolled in any real way, is deliterious to the actual well-being of the people–which ought to concern any patriot and conservative more than anyone–in Goldberg’s view the people ought not to have much of a say in decisions (whether on immigration or the ports deal) that affect or may affect the commonwealth in dramatic and irreversible ways.

In the era when Mr. Bush declares that “democracy” is good enough for everyone, the ordinary American finds that the myth of self-government is exploding around him at home. Nothing more clearly reveals the disempowerment of the vast majority of Americans, when it comes to questions of fundamental direction of policy, than the current state of the immigration debate. If the American objects to the demographic revolution being wrought against his country, he is engaging in wild-eyed populist hysteria, he is probably a racist, etc.

In American conservatism, there has long been a tension between Jeffersonian decentralist and proto-populist convictions and the Burkean (and Maistrean?) emphasis on the importance of historically evolved institutions possessed of legitimate authority. Goldberg doesn’t seem to care much for Jeffersonians (which is what the Populists, after their fashion, were, for good or ill), and we know he hates Maistre, which leaves him leaning pretty heavily on Burke, who also happened to denounce precisely the sort of abstract universalism that Goldberg pushes on a regular basis in his slurs against Maistre.

Jefferson warned against the rule of bankers, merchants and, my favourite epithet, stock-jobbers, not so much because they represented “bogeymen” (as Goldberg would have it) but because they represented a contrary and, in many ways, incompatible set of political and even moral values. Populism in most modernising societies often takes up the fight for displaced farmers and artisans, put out by the “reforms” of “classically liberal” minds; these voters historically provided much of the basis for the strength of political Catholicism in Europe. What is most curious about Goldberg’s populism article, however, is not that it serves mainly as a handy way to bash Pat Buchanan a few more times (the message is not hard to get: don’t pay too much attention to the interests of the American people, or we will denounce you the way we denounced him!), but that he assumes that Mr. Buchanan should have remained a “classical liberal” (if he was one) and ceased being a conservative by ceasing to be a classical liberal. This is a common form of confusion on the American right: the belief that to be a conservative in America means that you could have been a good liberal in 19th century Europe. Except that American conservatives affirm our traditional political and constitutional institutions as established, prescribed foundations that have stood the test of the time and proven their value (we used to be able to distinguish between what those institutions were and what their later, corrupt perversions were, but this seems increasingly difficult for the modern “movement”). For the moment, let’s not get into how one’s conservatism is corroded away by commitment to universalist fantasies and ‘propositional’ theories of nationhood.

It seems to me that many American conservatives today are still embarrassed by the label conservative (or perhaps understand it to mean something entirely different from what it has meant in the past), even after all these decades of its gradual acceptance and current (if we are to believe press reports) “ascendancy.” So even as they have dutifully spent the last fifty years energetically abandoning any policy that might be remotely connected with actual classical liberalism, they have also developed the habit of running in terror of any association with any kind of rightist politics that would normally be adamantaly opposed to classical liberal assumptions and schemes. In other words, their commitment to classical liberalism is something of a pose, because they no longer actually possess quite the same faith in laissez-faire or constitutionalism that those liberals did (indeed, with Jonah “Lie for a Just Cause” Goldberg, neither truly unregulated markets nor the limitations of the Constitution on executive power seems to have much meaning for him), but it is something they will cling to so as not to be associated with anything resembling conservatism. It becomes a useful rhetorical strategy: don’t depart from classical liberal principles, whether on political economy, politics or culture, or we will throw you out of the club, as we have done with those who have already “departed” from a classical liberalism to which they never actually subscribed. Nevermind that no traditional conservative normally accepted any classical liberal principles or views in the first place.

To the extent that many American conservatives have accepted these views, “fusionism” and the reliance on specifically libertarian justifications for deregulation and lower taxes are partly to blame among conservative pundits, but more generally it is a function of the mistaken strategy of defining opposition to socialism and welfarism primarily in terms of the individual vs. the state and in terms of the greater efficiency of capitalist production.

This inevitably reduced the more complex conservative conception that free exchange and the right to property were essential to a well-ordered, stable and healthy polity to talking points and slogans about capitalism “delivering the goods” and giving people what they want in a more efficient and effective way. It has been this leftover strain of classical liberalism in “conservative” rhetoric for the past 30 years that presumably convinced entire generations that the reason why capitalism was preferable to socialism was not because it potentially far better respected property rights and the dignity of the human person than a coercive, command economy but because capitalism better served the desires of the self and allowed for faster, cheaper and “better” indulgence by the self.

If Goldberg didn’t want people to come en masse making demands, perhaps the “movement” of the last 25 years shouldn’t have an ethic of self-satisfaction in the ways that conservative pundits and politicians increasingly encouraged habits of consumption and the rhetoric of individualism while distancing themselves from the language of restraint and discipline. Of course, there is a much more direct connection to the problem of mass immigration here: there is the common open borders claim that Americans “need” masses of poor immigrant labourers to enjoy their current standard of living. I tend to doubt the credibility of this claim, but assuming it is true this would mean that encouraging or allowing mass immigration relates to a the sense that appetite and consumption should in some measure define the individual and the satisfaction of his appetites be in some sense a measure of the individual’s well-being.

Disowning their affinities with European conservatives, forced to trot out Burke whenever they are in a corner (but never more often than that), and presently committed to radical foreign policy ideas befitting the people Burke condemned, many American conservatives will claim to identify more readily with the ideas and politics of Bastiat and Gladstone than with those of Metternich and Lord Salisbury. Naturally, these self-professed heirs of 19th century liberals would have more to fear from the interests of the people, since they have been committed to a number of policies that profoundly offend and alienate them, just as the 19th century liberals invoked the hostility of the masses through their exclusionary, elitist and anti-Catholic measures.

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