Whose Enemy Is Populism?

What? No butterfly? In order to comment on a news item during the "news cycle," this week's Butterfly of the Week has been bumped back to Thursday. 

I found the sound bite from Mike Pence's speech on a site that doesn't deserve a link, anyway...and my reaction grew too long for the link log:

What is populism, anyway? There is no populist party...

Historically, in the late nineteenth century, there was one. The People's or Populist Party was founded by James Baird Weaver and Leonidas L. Polk, and there's a reason why even US citizens usually have to stop and think to recognize their names. The party was, like the recent TEA Parties, a bipartisan movement that worked for useful reforms in both major parties. There was still a lot of old-world snobbery in Victorian America, and the Populists succeeded in laughing some of it to death. Beyond that, such ideas of their own as the Populists had were not viable. The general idea of "power to the people" is not party-specific--it's in our founding documents--but the idea that the people need some orderly system for working out exactly what they want, who represent the majority, what leads to the greatest good for the greatest number, has generally served to check the excesses of populism. 

Both fascism and Marxism got their chance to be tried, and to fail, in Europe in the twentieth century because both appealed to populism. Let that sink in. There needs to be some respect for tradition and authority in a democracy just to keep it a democracy. When too many people--like the fanatical Trump supporters--start saying "This or that is a Problem that only Our Man can solve, and we must let Our Man do whatever it takes to solve the Problem," rather than saying "This is a problem that we all need to address, led by Our Man within the proper limits of his authority," then there's a real danger that Our Man's next move will be to "nationalize" everyone's property at gunpoint, or put all the troublesome minorities in prison camps, or worse. Read some of the rich technocrats' fantasies about "transhumanism" if you want to imagine how much worse, or read some of the more depressing science fiction--it's very much the same sort of thing.

I admire guys like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. I don't venerate them, but I have a lot of respect for them. But if they're allowed to act out the fantasies many of them have verbalized recently, they'd not only take over the world, they'd destroy it.

I don't like Donald Trump but I do respect his achievements as a properly checked and balanced President. He did revive the economy; he did tell the people pushing many bad ideas to go home and stop being silly. But there's a reason why he's most hated in the cities where he's owned property for all these years, and bigotry about the Midwest has nothing to do with it. He never was a good neighbor. He always was easy to hate--even for people who had more money than he had; hate is a different thing from envy. He may have sincerely repented of some of the sins of his youth, and he may be old enough to say no to the temptation to repeat some of them, but that still leaves a lot for him to learn about spirituality and morality and human decency. I still believe that, given his own way, he really, literally would pave Paradise and put in a parking lot. 

I think that's what Mike Pence was getting at in saying that populism "is"--wrong verb tense, Sir--that populism can easily be the enemy of conservatism. 

The American Populist Party merely fell apart, without doing much harm, because the Americans who felt unrepresented by their elected officials were not desperate; they were working people, mostly with some education or at least some appreciation of the benefits of education, mostly Christians or Jews, mostly property owners or at least renters with a clear and realistic plan for becoming property owners. In places like France and Russia, where there was a real class of people who had no other hope of improving their living conditions, populist movements led to "reigns of terror." The French revolutionaries literally invented terrorism. In the name of "the people." 

Even in the United States, in the South and in some parts of the Midwest where people felt more overworked and underpaid than the national average,...the Populist Party was a separate thing, but it was closely aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. The original KKK started out using intimidation when possible, violence when necessary, to keep ex-slaves from getting their own kind of populist movement off the ground. But it spread into places where there weren't a lot of ex-slaves, and functioned to focus bigotry and hostility on whoever the local minorities might be--Catholics, Jews, recent immigrants from Europe who still spoke with the peculiar accents the local property owners' grandparents had lost. It was not a good thing.

Not that the extreme of "conservatism" that forms as a reaction to populism is a good thing either. Some readers (sometimes it's a good thing that this blog is no longer published in Russia) may be picturing me listening to Pence's speech, shuddering and fidgeting with my pearls, and squealing afterward, over the canapes, "Ohhh, Mr. Pence, what a gentleman like yourself must have suffered working every day with that horrible person! Everyone always knew he was from the wrong side of town! How did anyone ever let him in to anywhere? Where have we failed? How can we keep that kind of blue-collar people out of the schools and the governing boards and..." Some people who have not lived in Virginia seem to imagine that that's the way we all carry on. Mercy. 

No such. I like Abraham Lincoln. I like Ben Carson. I like the idea that people with utterly negative "backgrounds" can choose to study, pass objective examinations, work in responsible jobs, and be recognized as being just as competent to lead anything as the oldest of old-line aristocrats. 

I think, yes, the President of the United States should spend some time--not necessarily as much as Trump on Twitter--reading, as well as posting to, completely uncensored social media. I think all of our government officials should. I think they should be able to tell the difference between things posted as jokes, or as the ideas of people who were very young and stupid even when sober and who weren't sober when they posted these things, and things posted as the considered opinions of intelligent people, whether those people are in private life bank presidents or students in ghetto schools. That's an idea the more reactionary old-school conservatives might have feared as "populism," yes indeed.

I also think that the people should have some sense of responsibility. Having spent time among Seventh-Day Adventists, whose interpretation of the Bible is that one generation of sincere Christians will live through a few years of horrific persecution not unlike the Left Behind novels, I'm not spooked when people say things like "The Last Days may be upon us" and "Time to head for the hills," but I do think people should be careful about posting such things on the Internet. You never know when some stupid kid will read a cliche you invoked to express concern and take it as literal instructions.

(One year my high school football team hosted, in the playoffs, a Nowhere Land team form something called Narrows High School. Someone put a sign in a store window saying "Show them the narrow road home"...and I didn't even go to the game, but I heard, for years whenever anyone heard I was from Gate City, how some people with no sense of sportsmanship sneaked around the stadium, during the game, and cut their bus tires. We need to be very careful what we let the extremely young and stupid hear or read us saying.)

It is crucial that there be no "gatekeepers" to prevent people from speaking and being heard, writing and being read, assembling and associating, encouraging one another, gaining popularity by being likable rather than by accident of birth. It is also crucial that there be gatekeepers to ensure that neither the richest nor the roughest group of people form a pattern of bullying and oppressing the others. We have not done enough to prevent richer capitalists from blocking other people's access to the free market and allowing a free-market economy to correct its own errors. We've got by for a long time without the old Cherokee rule that the most influential people in society be required to marry people from the lowest level of society, often foreigners, to prevent snobbery, but we do need to keep the system that guarantees that Ben Carson has as much chance of being President as Robert Kennedy has. 

The ultimate expression of populism would be what Maryland cartoonist William L. Brown caricatured in "randomocracy." In a series of weekly cartoons, Brown fantasized that a national lottery was held to give everyone (over the minimum age) an equal chance to be President, and he'd won it. Brown was not a fan of President Bush; most of his friends and neighbors had also voted for Dukakis, so it was easy for them to generate exaggerated fantasies of how they'd (over)correct his policy mistakes. Among other things they fantasized about prison camps for the Moral Majority:

"Line up here for smallpox shots."

"But we don't believe in vaccines."

"Who said they were vaccines?"

Er. Um. Yes. We want people like Brown to start out in life with an equal opportunity to be President if that is what they seriously want. In Brown's case obviously it wasn't. We also want a thorough process for making sure that people who want to be President are able, as well as willing, to serve in that capacity--including deferring to the decisions of Congress when that's what the Constitution requires, rather than trying to overrule congressional decisions, or evade the process of waiting for them, with "executive orders." In real life, no matter how hypocritical we used to think Senator Helms was, blathering about every fetus's right to be exposed to enough dioxin from bleached-paper cigarette smoke to start cancers growing before it was born, or whatever the bleep he wanted...no, we don't want to send people like him to concentration camps. Though it was an entertaining fantasy, at the time, when some people's jobs required them to sit through the Senator's speeches.

Populism has its place in a democracy but it can get out of bounds and become an enemy, not only to conservatism, but to common decency, whenever some people demand some benefit to themselves at other people's expense.. We will always need at least a two-party system, with room for more than the two parties when, like the current Democratic Party, party leaders totally lose touch with the people they claim to represent. We will always need to make changing federal policy a lengthy, expensive process; we will always need to make any amendments to the Constitution by ones, and make each one take ten years or longer.