Two divergent - but both intelligently arrived at - views of populism

 Consider this a preliminary working-out of a notion I want to explore in an essay for a new publication to which I've been invited to contribute.

Populism is obviously a force to be contended with, but its contours are not distinct beyond a basic juxtaposition against an elite.

I think Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center does a commendable job framing it as a reaction to the limited choices posed to the Western public, much as social democracy was a century ago:

By 1929, labor-backed parties were powerful everywhere they existed. Five Western nations had labor-led governments by then, and many more would join them by 1940. The nineteenth-century debates between liberals seeking constitutional democracies and conservatives resisting their rise had been utterly transformed into the battle between capital and labor that typified twentieth-century politics.

It’s easy in hindsight to see why this happened. Industrialization upset centuries of tradition as millions of people left farms and towns to work in city-based factories. These people came to see themselves as united by class interest, one that sought to limit the private power held by factory owners and traditional moral authorities such as priests and aristocrats. Armed with the vote, they forced their views to the political forefront and set the terms of debate.

Their rise was fueled by the failure of their foes. Non-socialist parties promised peace and prosperity. Instead, the world experienced war and woe. After the World Wars and the Great Depression, voters everywhere wanted calm. They largely granted social democrats the policies that had driven their ancestors to mad opposition in exchange for continued liberal political freedoms and some semblance of private property and markets. The post-1945 social democratic victory was so thorough that even leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could only claw back some of the ground their ancestors had conceded.

He says something similar seems to be presently afoot:

Populist ideas and themes have also infiltrated major parties in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. Donald Trump is a populist par excellence with his overt nationalism and call to smash elites. Britain’s Tories won their 2019 majority under the leadership of the brash Boris Johnson, who promised to deliver the Brexit voters had opted for three years earlier, as well as significant government spending to “level up” left-behind parts of the country. Canada’s new Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, also opts for “us versus them” themes and targets working-class voters with his policies and rhetoric.

This dramatic surge has already left its mark just as the early twentieth-century social democratic jump did. Back then, existing parties began to create rudimentary welfare states in the hope they would prevent “socialism.” Today, existing leaders rush to limit immigration and subsidize domestic manufacturing, two main demands of the populist right. Fiscal consolidation or austerity seems off the table as traditional center-left and center-right parties compete for the support of economically struggling voters and parties who otherwise might back populists.

This alone would mark populism as an important phenomenon. Social democracy’s prior rise from nonentity to dominant force, however, suggests a more fundamental shift is underway. Populists have already imitated their predecessors’ early achievements. Can they go further and become the paradigmatic twenty-first century political force?

He's candid about how populism is being demographically fueled:

Populist parties tend to draw from less educated, poorer men. These are not society’s dregs: they work rather than draw benefits. But the same trend persists regardless of nation. Populist support drops as income and education rise, and it is almost always higher among men than among women. Populism also tends to draw support from those who identify as Christians but do not regularly attend services. This tendency is less often measured, in part because many western nations are so thoroughly secular that pollsters tend not to ask about religious belief and observance. A statistical study I commissioned, however, found that 2017 support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland rose in Bavaria in direct relationship to Catholic church membership, even after controlling for other factors. This would explain why many populist parties and leaders extol Christian values even as they do not pursue explicitly theological policies.

The demographic solidarity among populists means they have a shared identity that fuels their political activity. They are not, as elites have commonly assumed, motivated solely by transitory anger focused on discrete — hence ameliorable — concerns. They have a worldview based on their experience and framework that encompasses the whole of society. This means they can weather the periodic storms that always beset politics and remain firmly on course.

It's a worldview markedly at odds with what Olsen (and a great many other analysts) call the "elite":

. . . populists want a very different type of society than do the educated, affluent elites whom they battle. Elites benefit from the individualistic society they have created, both economically and socially. Globalization and mass immigration mean they can contract with cheaper foreigners for labor at home and abroad, dramatically increasing their purchasing power. Their education also has trained them to value the novel experience over the traditional one, whether it is searching for exciting new foods or engaging with different cultures. The fact that the rapid adoption of these views has unsettled and disadvantaged large numbers of their fellow citizens does not bother them, so sure are they of their merit and virtue.

Where I think Olsen steps onto shaky ground is when he concludes that populism is so inexorably on the rise that elites had better reconsider their presumptions lest they get run over. Let us remember that the "elites" have the technology and the thrall of upcoming generations to their "novel" ideas. Shiny objects and human nature are a volatile mix.

Olsen's view, in more concentrated form, is what motivated a formerly actual conservative, well-respected for his erudition and measured takes, such as Victor Davis Hanson to burn bridges and go all-in for the Very Stable Genius, arguing in a book called The Case for Trump that a hollowed-out national core was fed up with not being listened to, and that a period of upheaval was just the ticket for serving notice to the muckety-mucks.

Daren Jonescu is having none of it. He sees a different kind of dichotomy, and illustrates it using the issue of Ukraine:

The American government’s old guard establishment in both parties wants Ukraine to lose the war, but slowly. The establishment’s upstart wing, comprised mainly of populists of the right, including the farcically-named House Freedom Caucus, wants Russia to win, and quickly. Neither side is quite willing to state its genuine position directly, at least so far, although the loonier puppets of the populist faction, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, are almost there. But the two groups’ respective positions become increasingly obvious and inescapable over time, being the only reasonable explanations for their respective actions and rhetoric. 

Let it be noted, however, that for all the apparent conflict between them on the subject of the war, in the final analysis they are aiming at the same thing, namely the appeasement of Vladimir Putin and the maintenance of the pre-war status quo, with thousands of dead or enslaved victims of tyranny “over there” being regarded by both sides as an insignificant price to pay for the restoration of “stability.” That is, for all the noisy vitriol between the two factions, they are, in the final analysis, basically arguing about optics, not outcomes — such internal conflict over mere methods and rhetoric being a defining mark of establishmentarianism. The “two party system” operating as always, and, as always, dragging a hundred and fifty million lost souls through the crucible of its ignoble lie, the never-ending “binary choice” election cycle.

The same dynamic, with regional variations, may easily be observed in Western Europe, as the traditional democratic allies maintain, at the leadership level, the same ambiguous voice of “supporting Ukraine, but not too much,” while an undercurrent made up of undersecretaries and rival parties speaks more openly of Putin having been “unjustly provoked” by NATO, and of Ukraine having to accept the sacrifice of its territorial sovereignty in the name of peace. 

Is it any wonder the former free world is so unfree today, and so rapidly accelerating into the gutter of self-annihilation? Its establishments are rotting corpses, decaying in the muck of lustful indulgence and hubristic illogic, and increasingly infested with Marxist flies and populist worms, all seeking, in their superficially alternative ways, to cast off all the institutions, principles, and apolitical wonders that were once the wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence, in the name of their own avarice, perpetual power, and sense of entitlement.

Allow me to here let the cat out of the bag and say that I find Jonescu's assessment more resonant. He takes the longer view, speaking of "wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence."

That is what gets short shrift in most of these exchanges. What I'm after is a worldview impervious to compartmentalization. 

Olsen says populists claim a Christian foundation but are not inclined to attend church. That indicates to me that they're also not inclined to do a deep dive into the very kind of thing we all need to dive into. 

I know that the notion of immutable verities shows up in a lot of the bullet-point-ish summarizations of what conservatism (remember that concept?), but we're always tempted to settle for an uneasy peace at which competing social movements or economic paradigms arrive. 

The real quest human beings are on is that for a slop-proof universal ought. 

And I don't think we can embark on a sound analysis on any level short of acknowledging a transcendent order. Anything less ends in a relativity that ultimately resolves nothing.