Getting Past the Fast Food Decoy

Nails it again

Paul Krugman identifies a fascinating and vexing problem--and that goes to the heart of what passes for "conservatism" in America and what is at the core of contemporary populism. What currently passes for conservatism in America  is a strange alliance between business-oriented voters driven by an aggressive, free-market ideology and those who suffer most from those policies, such as working-class whites. This latter group is guided primarily by fear, anxiety, and resentment that are the result of a (relative) loss of status and accelerated cultural change. Contempory consumer capitalism is one of the least conservative ideologies in the world, perhaps second only to Marxist-Leninism.  And yet so-called "values" voters have--until this past primary season--voted for candidates funded by the Koch brothers and their ideological fellow-travelers. 

When upheavals occur in the economic, political, or cultural spheres, people as a whole become spooked, like herd animals that can sense danger and are moved by a primal fear that can trigger panic. The minority of voters who voted for Donald were willing to place a hell of a big bet that he would do anything worthwhile and that he wouldn't do much greater harm than the status quo. Indeed, an astonishingly high number of Trump voters don't think he'll do a good job according to exit polls. A sense of desperation drove these decisions. 

The Republican Party, for many decades, but especially since the Goldwater insurrection, has served as not just the party of business, but also the party of fear and racial resentment. This trend has accelerated at an astonishing rate. While its ideology remained free-market fundamentalism,  its core of voters are motivated by anger, fear, and resentment. This sense of anger, fear, and resentment, apparent from so long ago, was a part of the reason that I left the Republican Party. I find anger, fear, and resentment are the worst guides to policy and conduct. Fear is intended to serve as a warning system, not as a guidance system; anger is designed to be a tool for dealing with immediate threats, not a permanent mode of perceiving the world,  nursed by repeatedly pushing its on-button. And resentment is the reaction of those who surrender to their reality by nursing grievance instead of taking action. The inferiority complex cultivated by many who want to call themselves conservative is--whatever its original justification--a crutch that has been adopted as a permanent fixture of their reality. 

All of this is not to say that middle America isn't suffering through difficult times. Growing income inequality, declining life expectancy, loss of quality schools and other government services, and the loss of quality jobs are among many problems that are all too real. Democrats know this, but they have been far too passive about these slowly unfolding disasters. However, Republican policies have been disastrous. See, for example, Sam Brownback's Kansas, or how Terry Branstad has presided over the slow, continued decline of Iowa via their pro-business, free-market ideologies that parade as conservative. Contrast these states with the relative prosperity of New York or California. In California, it is the Jesuit seminarian turned life-long Democratic politician, Jerry Brown, who has overseen a resurgence and not the movie star-turned-Republican governor, Arnold Schwartzenager. Somehow that message has been sold in those states, and they've benefited. 

So, we need to get past the fast food decoy and work with those who are alienated from the system to bring them back into the fold for the benefit of all Americans. 

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred by John Lukacs

The past as a lens on our present

I first read John Lukacs’s Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005) in 2006 and then again in 2009. I’ve gone back to it before for some quotes (here, here & here), but for obvious reasons I’ve returned to it again this election season. Lukacs is a sage; not infallible, but certainly wise. There are comments that he makes with which I disagree, but his breadth of knowledge and depth of insight make any disagreements tolerable and call into question my suppositions; a very good thing.

Democracy as a form of rule—rule by the people, or in the name of the people—is a relatively new phenomenon, especially on the scale of the nation-state as it developed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Before this, the people could influence rule by mob actions or rebellions, but they were not granted any formal voice in affairs. Now, as Tocqueville so presciently described, we live in an age of democracy. (And Tocqueville is Lukacs’s most important source on this topic.) Along with the rise of democracy, we see the development of (classical) liberalism and conservatism (or reaction), depending on the temper of the times and individuals. With the French Revolution, we get the idea of Left and Right, which, according to Lukacs, retains more validity than do current classifications of “liberal” or “conservative.” Conservatives today in the Republican Party are those who promote (at least until this election cycle) rampant capitalism and free-market economic ideology and tend to deplore government (military functions excepted). Liberals (Democrats) favor capitalism with a welfare state; capitalism-lite, the unwanted calories being taken out by a social safety net. But with the rise of Trumpism to the national stage in the form of a demagogue with all the markings of a huckster, we have to consider populism. And here is where Lukacs excels. For populism and nationalism have become two of the most common forms of political belief of that marked the 20^th century and now the 21^st.

Worthy of Tocqueville, Burkhardt & Huizinga

Lukacs draws upon his vast knowledge of 20^th-century history, to distinguish different political movements. The nationalist socialism of Adolf Hitler was the most important and nearly triumphed in Europe. Lukacs explains the difference between nationalism and patriotism (not at all alike) (quote), and he essays the implications of ideas about popular sovereignty, public and popular opinion, snobbery, class distinctions, and the difference between fear and hatred that allow us to appreciate these phenomena.

Here I’ll stop and let Lukacs speak. His sentences, even in the midst of paragraphs, pages, and chapters, have aphoristic quality to them that beg for consideration on a sentence-by-sentence basis:

Is democracy the rule of the people, or, more precisely: rule by the people? No: because it is, really and actually, rule in the name of the people. (5) 

[P]erspective is an inevitable component of reality; and all perspective is, at least to some extent, historical, just as all knowledge depends on memory. (7)  

The “Right,” by and large, feared and rejected the principle of popular sovereignty. The “Left” advocated or supported or at least would propose democracy. It still does. The “Right,” for a long time, was not populist. But now often it is – which is perhaps a main argument of this book. (18)  

Hitler, for one, was an idealist not a materialist: an idealist of a dreadfully German and frightfully deterministic variety, and a believer in the power of ideas over matter. These men know how to appeal to the masses – something that would have filled Maistre with horror. They knew (as did Proudhon but not Marx) that people are moved by (and at times even worship) evidences of power, rather than propositions of social contracts. (24)  

Marx and Marxism failed well before 1989 – not in 1956 and not in 1919 but in 1914. For it was then that internationalism and class consciousness melted away in the heat of nationalist emotions and beliefs. (43)  

[Marx] entirely failed to understand what nationalism (beginning to rise all around him) was. His heavy, clumsy prose droned and thundered against Capitalism and against the State. Hardly a word about the Nation; and, of course, not even the slightest inkling (true, alas, of most political scientists even now) that State and Nation are not the same things. (43)  

This brings us to what is perhaps the fundamental Marxist (and also economic; and often liberal) misreading of human nature. This is the – alas, still near-universally prevalent – belief that the world and its human beings consist of matter, and what the latter think and believe is but the superstructure of material “reality.” But the opposite is true. (45)  

What a governs the world (and especially in the Democratic age) is not the accumulation of money, or even of goods, but the accumulation of opinions. “Opinion governs the world”: a profound truth, uttered by Pascal, more than three hundred and fifty years ago, in the age of the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV. (45)  

That opinions can be molded, formed, falsified, inflated has always been true. But it is the accumulation of opinions the governs the history of states and of nations and of democracies as well as dictatorships in the age of popular sovereignty. (46)  

Every human event has multiple causes; and the cause-effect relationship in human events does not accord with the cause-effect relations in mechanical causality. And it is really not enough to ascertain the pathogenesis of events (as, too, in the case of physical illness); we must now attempt to find something about their etiology. (78)  

[T]he history of ideas (indeed of all human thought) is inseparable from the history of words. (117)  

Freedom and freedoms; restrictions of freedoms, the wish – or appetite – for freedom, indifference to freedoms – these are difficult and problematic matters, and perhaps especially during the democratic epoch. To regard freedom simply as an emancipation from chains, as an absence of restrictions is of course insufficient. Aristotle knew that it is more difficult to be free than not to be free. That political freedom does not exhaust the meaning of freedom ought also to be obvious. (129-130)  

That there were, after all, only a small minority of communists worldwide is but one proof of the melancholy human condition: the unwillingness of most people to change their minds, even within the site of clear and definite evidence. (133)  

I put “conservatism” within quotation marks – because there was (and still is) so much in American “conservatism” that it was (and is) not conservative at all. (151)  

As the former liberal meaning of democracy devolves toward populism, the danger of tyranny by the majority arises. . .. The majority is not inherently right for having been a properly elected majority; a majority, like an aristocratic minority, or like a monarch, may be right or wrong; and when it is wrong, to change it or its consequences may be long, arduous, while seeming hopeless. (176)  

[T]he term “P.R.” has become a part of the American vocabulary – and soon a part of many other languages. Ever since then the functioning and the “measuring” of “public opinion” and of its simulation, or manufacture, began to overlap – as in more than one instance the purposes of public relations agents and the pollsters: the generating of publicness, even more than that of “opinion.” Thus the second transportation transformation of the American political system, from popularity contests to publicity contests, had begun. (187)  

In the life of man the decline of his powers in old age more often results in his reversion to infantile habits, to a weakening of physical, and sometimes mental, controls. There may be something similar in the devolution of a people. Again the wisdom of Johan Huizinga, the worthy successor of Tocqueville and of Burkhardt is telling. “Puerileism,” he wrote in the 1920s, is “the attitude of the community whose behavior is more immature than the state of its intellectual and critical faculties would warrant, which instead of making the boy into a man adopts the conduct of that of the adolescent age.” Lamentably enough this is not an imprecise description of recent American presidents – and then some. (191)  

In our times (I wrote for than 20 years ago), toward the end of the Modern Age, the difference – indeed, the increased discrepancy – between frame and honor has become so large that in the characters of presidents and in those of most public figures in all kinds of occupation, the passion for fame has just about obliterated the now remote and ancient sense of honor. (192)  

[A]ll thinking, including imagination, involves and depends on reconstruction; because perception inevitably depends on memory; because all cognition involves, and depends on, recognition. “We live forward; but we can only think backward” (Kierkegaard). (197) 
We have seen that, among other things, “conservative” and “liberal” have lost much, almost all, of their meanings. But “Right” and “Left,” in their widest and deepest sense, still remain with us, especially at their extremes. And now let me state something that may be startling. One of the fundamental differences between extremes of Right and Left is this: in most instances hatred moves the former; fear the latter. (203)  

We have seen that sometime after 1870 that came a change. Nationalism was replacing the older forms of patriotism, and it proved to be an even stronger and more lasting bond for masses people than their consciousness about the struggle of classes. It’s extreme representations and incarnations involve more than a dislike of foreigners. It included a contemptuous hatred of people within their own countries whom such nationalists saw as being insufficiently or even treasonably nonnationalist. This is no longer an aristocratic or even a conservative phenomenon but a populist one. It appeared in a great variety of nations and states; it attracted many revolutionary young; and their opponents soon clear learned to fear them. (204) 
But while hatred amounts to a moral weakness, it can be, alas, often, and at least in the short run, a source of strength. Hence the advantage of the Right over the Left – especially in an age of democratic populism. (209)  

Bernanos: “In the spirit of revolt there is a principle of hatred or contempt for mankind. I’m afraid that the rebel will never be capable of bearing as much love for those he loves as he bears hatred for those he hates.” (As true of elements of the Left is of the Right.) (209)

I’ll stop here, although there’s much more that I could add. But the better course is for you to read the book.

David Brooks: Sort of Right But Doesn't Want to Fight

"My conservative friend"

David Brooks has recently written two consecutive columns that address the social, economic, and political problems of inequality and social dysfunction in contemporary America. As is often the case, I find a lot to agree with Brooks and some to disagree with, and these two columns placed side-by-side provide a perfect opportunity to get a sense of sources of agreement and disagreement.

In the first column, “The Temptation of Hillary”, Brooks decries what he believes is the possible shift in the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton from an emphasis on what he calls “human capital progressivism” to “redistributionist progressivism”. He argues that the problems identified with the decline of middle-class wages and earnings arise from differences in education and educational opportunities. Accordingly, he believes that a continued emphasis on education should continue, while he decries the possibility of shaping political remedies to our growing inequality.

Brooks ignores the secular stagnation hypothesis of Larry Summers and The Great Stagnation of Tyler Cowen, to name but a couple of those who have identified and considered long-term structural problems going back to the 1970s. Brooks wants to limit the focus to the Great Recession of 2008 or shortly before and claim that wage and earning inequality is not an endemic problem. Indeed, as we read in the next essay, Brooks prefers to consider the problem as one of norms and morals. While I don't disagree that norms and morals are fundamental component of the problem, Brooks wants to continue thinking about remedies that avoid issues of political economy.

The more I consider issues of macroeconomics, the more I believe that the late 19th century divorce between political economy and economics was a mistake. Policies of governments made through political institutions; i.e., through non-market decision-making processes such as elections, legislative bodies, and lobbying, are of paramount importance in determining market outcomes. Political decisions that shaped the American economy in the immediate post-World War II era of the 1950s and 1960s began changing in the 1970s for a variety of reasons. Since that time, a market ideology has been dominant in American politics. This ideology reduced the role of government in addressing the shortcomings of the market. (I believe that perfect markets work perfectly and that perfect markets are as common as a perfect democracy or a perfect circle in nature. Or, to paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about democracy, a market economy is the worst type of economic system except when compared to all the others that have been tried from time to time.) I give credit for to Brooks for stating that the choice between what he terms “human capital progressivism” with its emphasis on education and “redistributionist progressivism” that he believes involves a redistribution of wealth, is not an absolute divide but one of measured differences. This is certainly true, and I don't support any type of full-scale redistributionist scheme. I’ve every sympathy for Brooks in what he seems to argue tacitly:  redistributionist politics are the toughest political fights and could harm the nation as a whole, especially in a time when we are already extremely divided. (Although I believe that much of the divides is already a surrogate redistributionist battle.) I also believe (along with Brooks?) that the politics of envy is the worst politics of all. (This is not something that I recall his having written or addressed directly, but I discern it is an undertone of much of his on-going commentary.)

The second essay, "The Costs of Relativism" is a review and commentary on Robert Putnam's recent work, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In that book, Putnam and his colleagues look at the differences between the children of educated Americans versus those of less educated Americans. The differential is staggering. However, what neither Putnam nor Brooks discuss sufficiently (per a review of Putnam here, as I haven’t read the book) is that education is a direct correlation not only of future earnings, but most likely of past (parental) earnings and wealth. Indeed, one critic of the book noted the irony that Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, fails to address the public policies and political decisions that have led to the increasingly gross distortions in the lives of children brought about by differences in wealth and education. Brooks also (largely) ignores the political and public policy aspects and ramifications of the problems and instead focuses on norms and morals.

I don't disagree with Brooks in that norms and morals play a huge role. Indeed, one useful dividing line between political outlooks can be drawn between those who focus on the individual and the individual’s personal attributes as defined by their morals, norms, and character, and those who focus on these society-wide political and economic systems that shape the environment in which individuals live. I accept both perspectives as different ways to look at the same problem. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but to believe that one need only be a Horatio Alger or positive thinker to get ahead and overcome a lack of education or opportunity is the grossest kind of deceit.

Brooks acknowledges that better policy and application of greater resources (money) have some role to play, but norms and morals are the most important aspect. He laments what he perceives as a lack of judgment by those who fail, and again I have some sympathy for this. A degree of tough love is appropriate when people are transgressing boundaries, but the widespread breakdown in marital and family standards are often exacerbated by the economic pressures that wage stagnation and a decline in public institutions (like public schools and colleges) are enforcing upon families. The simple matter is that marriages are more likely to be successful and happy if they're not under constant attack because of money problems. The degree that a lack of money and resources can be blamed on the bad choices that individuals and families make and the degree of blame that we can attribute to the economic and political system varies greatly. But when the pattern is as extensive and widespread as we find in America today, then we are justified in  giving greater weight to the economic and political forces shaping the our environment. In Iowa, since the 1970s, most Iowans know of the personal and family costs of economic decline and dislocation. I used to joke – although it's not really a laughing matter – that my my hometown declined (in population, economics, and social welfare) after I left for college in 1971. Of course, it had nothing to do with my leaving and everything to do with a wider pattern of economic decline and dislocation found among the mostly white middle-class in rural and small-town America. The vice-grip of economic dislocation is the source of the populist anger and Tea Party irrationality that erupted on the American scene and that now governs the Republican Party. It’s no coincidence that Iowa’s newest U.S. Senator is from Red Oak (very near my home town), located in rural, white middle America that’s experienced such a decline. It’s ironic (and sad) that her election was paid for in large measure by the Koch Brothers and their ilk with an agenda that will do no favors for the vast majority of her supporters. Elections like the last one are a lashing out. As David Frum his written, the divide of populism in America is not so much between wealth and poverty as it is between the educated and the (relatively) uneducated. ("American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education: Jon Stewart’s America versus Bill O’Reilly’s, Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin.")

If it was as easy as Brooks implies that by merely enunciating and enforcing renewed social norms and morals we would mend the current rents in the American social fabric, that would be great. But while I believe this effort worthwhile, it needs a complimentary boost from changes in our political economy. Capitalism as a social and economic system is one driven by incessant change and the clear logic of personal (or corporate) profit. The capitalist system is terribly new measured against the whole of human history and which has been amped-up by industrialization and improving technologies over the course of less than three centuries. It needs repair. 

We are mortal, incarnated humans whose rationality is limited. We humans are not homo economus. We need social norms, we need markets, we need political deliberation. We need strong families. We need love. There is no magic bullet, but neither is there any source of change that we should ignore. Brooks tries to ignore the political economic aspects of necessary changes because it gets messy, but we can't afford to avoid those tough decisions.

Lukacs on Patriotism & Nationalism

Today I offer quotes on an insight that John Lukacs has provided many times before. It's not new to me from reading Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred (2005), but the distinction he makes bears repeating, especially in light of what so many so-proclaimed "conservative" commentators want people to think. I happily consider myself a patriot, but a nationalist? No. Nationalism, as much or more than any misguided Marxism, was the bane of the 20th century.

When . . . Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even thought that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism, and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people’s minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a “superpatriot” what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) (35-36).

. . . . 

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people”, justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at time and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in anther sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too. (36).