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Populism, Yeah Yeah



Happy Monday! It's time for a very long post (related to the Politico piece I shared yesterday but will re-share at the bottom) so don't read this until you, like me, have had your coffee (while the ratio of my long posts to having coffee isn't exactly 1:1 it's very very close).

One of the fundamental problems of our body politic (among many!) is the false dichotomy of liberalism and conservatism. It shrinks down a whole range of issues into either-or scenarios. By a lot of metrics, George W Bush was not a conservative. By plenty of other metrics, he was. The list goes on. Generally speaking, liberals want to move the country forward, believe in social equality, high taxes, and big government. Conservatives believe in the opposite things. But again, that's an oversimplified reduction of terms.


So what I want to talk about today is populism and technocracy. Let me start by saying that technocracy isn't a perfect antithesis for populism, but based on my own knowledge and a very quick Google search, it's the best we've got. Populism is essentially a shorthand for rule by the people and isn't inherently liberal or conservative. Donald Trump ran as a populist (though he hasn't governed like one). But so did Teddy Roosevelt. In general it's a "we the people vs big moneyed interests" idea. One of the most famous American populists was Hewey Long, the Louisiana governor during the Depression who was hopelessly corrupt but also a pretty good governor. Anyway, far too often "populist" gets conflated with other terms, and it's a really big problem. Again, populist is mostly agnostic when it comes to our left/right binary system of ideology. Technocracy, which is not a perfect foil, is more or less the belief in letting experts run the government. Sometimes this manifests as policy experts and sometimes as literally technical experts. But it's more of a "let the most knowledgeable people run things" version of government.


Why am I bringing all of this up? Because populism really receded as a governing principle in the US government over the last seventy-ish years (you could argue that LBJ was a populist President - JFK was almost the exact opposite). And in general around the world, populism was losing the fight to technocracy. Governments became bigger, more entrenched, more interwoven, adding layers of bureaucracy and creating supernational organizations like the UN and the EU (arguably technocracy's biggest global achievement). There were people who thought technocratic government would last forever.


But the law of political gravity exists, and the biggest recent example of it we've seen was the 2008 global financial meltdown. All of the erudite technocrats built a world that in a few months was reduced to rubble - the supergovernments collapsed, countries went bankrupt, the whole post-WWII order was shaken to its core. And of course, technocrats made the argument that they were best suited to fix the system they'd created that had failed so fundamentally.


I guess at this point I have to bring up nationalism, which is yet another definition that more-or-less transcends the traditional binary of our politics. Nationalism, in simplest terms, is putting the interests of your country above the interests of the world at large. This can be economic (erecting barriers to trade), military (isolationism), etc. It's why I grumble at people who think Tulsi Gabbard is some Russian spy. She's not. She's just a nationalist. And the less work the US does abroad, the more Putin is able to expand his power. The problem we're running into now is that a lot of American nationalists are ALSO white nationalists, who conflate their perception of American culture with American identity. We put those people in the Tucker Carlson box. You can be a nationalist without being a white nationalist (more on that to follow) but there's a very obvious amount of overlap. Also, the purist definitional alternative to "nationalist" is probably...."globalist," which is ALSO a term used by anti-Semites to conflate the global ruling order of things like the UN and the EU with a secret ruling cabal of Jewish people. So I've started to use internationalist as the opposite to avoid those thorny problems. People like me - internationalists - believe in things like the free flow of PEOPLE in addition to goods and services. When your economy is post-developed (like ours is), but still has jobs that require unskilled labor, it just makes sense to have super lax immigration policies. And as the world moves forward, supernational trading blocs will be the new norm. Not only do I (eventually) support open borders, I want a single North American trading bloc with our own currency. So if you're worried about immigration, it makes sense to oppose internationalist sentiment.


So in the post-WWII era, you had a bunch of international-minded technocrats who built a giant web of interconnected businesses and governments based on the principle that the easiest way to avoid war with another country is supernational governments and free trade (as well as laws against annexation, war crimes, etc). But the system these people ultimately created led to a DIFFERENT type of global catastrophe - the economic crisis of 2008. And just like during the Great Depression, it led to a global rise of nationalist sentiment (insert your jokes here).


Outside of the US, we've seen the rise of nationalist-populist governments on the right (Eastern Europe, the rise of Le Pen in France and AfD in Germany), AND on the left (the recently-collapsed Italian government). Meanwhile, in the US we elected a fake populist (Donald Trump) who ran on traditional populist talking points - that the technocrats were bad, that they created a corrupt and failing system, that they weren't looking out for the "forgotten America." How this asshole that lives in a gilded palace in Manhattan pretends to be a man of the people is a conversation for another day.


So, 2008 happens, a global rise of nationalist-populist governments happen around the world, but the problem with populism (to be reductive because this is already long) is that mobs with pitchforks shockingly don't make effective governments. At a certain point the people best apt to change systems are the people who understand how they work. Politics has crashed straight into culture in a way that we haven't seen in probably a half-century, which is part of the rise in populism - everyone now has an opinion, not just the nerds, and everyone thinks their opinion is valid. But we've seen the breakdowns over and over and over of populist movements, from Occupy to the Women's March to the aforementioned governments in Europe. The genius - on paper - of a representative democratic republic is that the people elect the wonks and then tell the wonks WHAT they want so the wonks can figure out HOW to deliver it. And invariably, someone will come along saying that we need to burn down the house and start over, but once the house is on fire people get skittish and look for the firefighters.


In closing, the role of populism is going to take center stage in the Democratic primary. Joe Biden is about as technocratic as you can get - the dude hasn't had a job outside of Congress since he was 28 years old. Bernie and Liz are running on aggressively populist platforms - Bernie in more of the latter mode of "burn it down and start over," with Liz trying to split the baby and say that she's technocratic enough to achieve populist reform (basically the Teddy Roosevelt approach). But it makes for strange bedfellows. One of my biggest issues with Bernie (in 16 and now) and Liz is their populist overtures. Liz's "economic patriotism" plan is just populist-nationalism. But don't take my word for it! Tucker Carlson called it "Donald Trump on his best day." And I am neither a populist nor a nationalist. Plus, as we've seen in Europe, the people who run on populist-nationalist platforms invariably disappoint their voters because the structures built by people like me - the wonky technocrats - are remarkably resistant to change (by design, we're sneaky that way). So I worry that much like Donald "I Alone can fix it" Trump, if we elect a populist-nationalist from the left, we're going to see the same thing: unfulfilled promises and people fighting systems that were designed to outlast any single President. And then the independents will swing BACK to the more openly nihilistic version of populism and nationalism. Obviously, it's POSSIBLE to be a successful populist President - Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ, they've certainly existed. But we haven't really seen one in the post-WWII era.


In summary: populist and nationalist are not terms that fit easily into the left/right political spectrum. Populism, globally, has been on the rise because of the failures of 2008. It seems like that sentiment is peaking in Europe because the populists failed just as much as the technocrats. I worry about what that means for our body politic heading into the next Presidential election. I don't want to trade one populist for another. Ultimately like Churchill said, we've got the worst form of government...except for all the others we've tried.

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