The Uses of Populism

Spread the love

Loading

VDH:

Populism of the center (as opposed to Bernie Sanders’s socialist populism) has received a bad media rap — given that it was stained in the past by xenophobic and chauvinistic currents. Who wishes to emulate all the agendas of William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, or Ross Perot? Yet there were some elements of Trump’s populist agenda — mostly concern for redeveloping the industrial and manufacturing base of the American heartland, and with it creating better-paying jobs for globalism’s losers — that were not only overdue but salutary for the Republican party. His idea that broad-based prosperity could diminish tribalism and racial fault lines sought to erode traditional Democratic support.

Populism is certainly identified with lots of grassroots movements, from far left through the center to far right. The common tie is that ordinary voters feel estranged from an elite class in politics, government, the media, and entertainment — a phenomenon that dates from the Solonian crisis at Athens and the Gracchi of Rome to Ross Perot, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.

Often prairie-fire outrage manifests in emotional responses to existing affronts rather than carefully crafted policies designed to remedy perceived grievances. (One can remember Al Gore’s 1993 pompous but undeniable evisceration on CNN of a stuttering, ill-informed populist Ross Perot, on the NAFTA treaty.).

All that said, these periodic uprisings in consensual societies are needed to disabuse an insular governing class of its sense of entitlement and privilege.

The spark that ignites populist movements is not so much disparities in wealth and status (they are not always French Revolution or Bolshevik-like class-driven attempts to grab power) as rank hypocrisies: Elites condescendingly prescribe nostrums to hoi polloi, but always on the dual premise that those who are dictating will be immune from the ramifications of their own sometimes burdensome edicts, and those who are dictated to are supposedly too dense to know what is good for them. (Think Steven Chu, the former energy secretary, who either did not commute by car or had a short drive to work, while he hoped that gas prices for the nation’s clueless drivers might climb to European levels of $9–$10 a gallon.)

We’ve already seen Trump’s anti-doctrinaire approach to jobs, trade, and the economy: his notion that the free-market in reality can often became a rhetorical construct, not a two-way street when it comes to trading blocs. Free-market purists might see the outsourcing of jobs and unbridled importation of foreign subsidized products as a way to toughen up the competitiveness of American companies and trim off their fat; but people who take this view are usually the ones who benefit from globalism and who are in little danger of having their own job downsized, eliminated, or shipped overseas. Few of us often ask whether full professors are very productive, whether op-ed writers are industrious and cogent, whether Hollywood actors are worth millions per picture, whether politicians are improving the nation’s lot, or whether journalists are disinterested and competent. Instead, we assume that because they all have well-compensated jobs, they are qualified, essential, and invaluable to the economy.

If Trump avoids ruinous tariffs and subsidies for inefficient companies, then his economic populism, combined with tax and regulation reform, might spark some job creation and undermine the foundations of the Democratic party. But there are lot of applications of populist approach in other areas that need commensurate reform and that would yield political advantage. Take academia. Right now, the campus is plagued by several interrelated pathologies: staggering student debt and costs, administrative bloat (often in conjunction with the vast investment in race/class/gender politics), an increasing absence of free speech and due process, and a shallow and therapeutic curriculum that does not guarantee the indebted students even basic literacy upon graduation.

Trump could announce that he was returning academic emphases away from administrators and professors to the student. That might entail reconfiguring student loans by calibrating them to cost containment on the part of universities (make ineligible for loans any institution whose costs increased beyond the rate of inflation). Truth-in-lending statements would provide students with a breakdown of university income and outlay. Trump could cap tax-free donations to university endowments above $1 billion and provide entering students with estimates of their approximate debt incurred upon graduation, the costs of serving that debt, and the employment prospects of particular majors.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments