538.com had an interesting article today talking about the recent populist trends that have infected both parties recently, listing key policies that they felt each side would support. I thought it was an interesting take but missed a few points on what drive's each sides populist forces.
While I agree that populism is becoming more popular on both sides of the aisle, I think it is driven mostly by emotion and anger, which is being displaced towards different groups, which is where the two sides differ and I think why they could never come to work together.
Conservative populism seems to be driven towards big government, which they feel is intrusive and elitist at best. Left-leaning populist anger seems to be aired towards what they see as big corporation and extremely wealthy individuals. I think this divide shows why the populist groups could never form a coalition. The left populists solution would be more goverment regulation, perhaps higher taxation, the essential so-called "big government" policies that populist conservatives are currently railing against.
I'd be interested to know what everyone else thinks. Does the populist movement have the potential to become a bridge between the two parties?
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Frank Rich's essay today in the Sunday Times looks at the scarier, violent aspects of the anti-government right, arguing that the story of the week wasn't the Healthcare Battle of the Titans, but the anti-IRS dude who flew his plane into the IRS bldg near Austin, TX. Frank's larger point was that the atmosphere now is like it was right before Tim McVeigh did his thing in Oklahoma City, and the Republicans better watch out. He may have a point. When Tim Pawlenty says we should follow Mrs. Tiger Woods and take a 9-iron to big government the way she did to the Escalade, you have to wonder what the heck is going on.
ReplyDeleteThe so-called expressions of populism are, I'd agree with Justin, flare-ups of frustration and anger the targets of which differ: one singles out government, the other the ubber wealthy. However, there are more and more folks like me who normally target the latter as the source of grief, who are growing increasingly disenchanted with Obama's version of the Democratic Party. If the Republicans have become a party without a head, the Democrats are becoming, under Obama, a party without a heart. Not a good combination.
I feel like populism is just not well-defined as a philosophy. I totally understand the people on the left that rail against corporations being called populist, but I've never considered the tea-party movement to be so.
ReplyDeleteI consider populism to be a philosophy that favors policies on many issues that favor the majority (or too often simply what is seen as the majority). The anti- Wall Street stuff fits right in, but to me populism on the right has always been about being anti-gay marriage, anti-secular type stuff that goes against what conservatives feel is a majority Christian country. According to this, populism is simply the opposite of libertarianism on the spectrum.
I do see populist appeals in the rhetoric of both parties, but I don't think there is much potential to really take down the entrenched interests in Washington. In short, my guess is that the Elites are safe, possibly precisely because the actual philosophical populists are divided between Democrats and Republicans, and I don't see that changing.
To build off of Andrew's comments, the goverenment is really efficient at providing just enough services to prevent populism from gaining momentum.
ReplyDeleteThis means that those with the most never have to face a legitimate threat to their well-being, while those with the least continue to suffer, but go unheard because they lack to resources to get their message out.
We discussed in the policy class how those in the tea party movement are not really affected by the economy, but their opinions are drowning out the one's who are suffering the most right now.
Populism is not a legitimate ideology in the US because its advocates do not suffer because of government, but are simply upset with a few personal items.
For populism to truly materialize it will have to be spearheaded by those who are really at a disadvantage and have legitimate issues with government instead of those who are simply afraid of the government but continue to prosper because of it.
Joe and Andrew make several good points, but I think I have a question for Joe:
ReplyDeleteAs I read his post (and perhaps Andrew's as well), the tea-baggers don't really have a "legitimate" populist gripe because theirs is not the populism of the plains back in the day of William Jennings Bryan. Further, the "new" populists of the right seem to be motivated not by concentrations of wealth and rules that favor those concentrations (the pre-trust busting politics of TR and his ilk), but rather "wedge issues" on the order of gay marriage and the like. But this seems to view "legitimate grievance" from a narrow, bread-and-butter economic interest point of view. Tim McVeigh wasn't angry at the concentrations of wealth or their political power. He was convinced that "the black helicopter crowd" was onto something (i.e., that our government was too powerful because it was being run by liberal pointy heads in cahoots with internationalists in the UN). This is the conspiracy theory of the old John Birch Society. Now, while I think they're crazy -- literally, crazy, as in paranoid-schizophrenic -- they do have quite a few fellow-travellers who truly believe that stuff and who have proven themselves capable of doing huge damage, all in the service of their perverse notion of justice. My point is partly the same as I take Joe and Andrew to be saying: "populism" is an attractive label for lots of different streams of American wing-nuts. I do not want to be seen as defending the crazo-right's anti-government violence; quite the contrary. The media has messed up in my view the reporting of much of the anti-Obama stuff as if it were motivated by above-board differences on policy or principle. It is not, but it is motivated: McVeigh and the dude who flew himself into the IRS bldg were mentally ill. Yet they derived psychic utility from their political actions, as heinous as they were. The notion of "psychic utility" is merely self-interest in a broader and deeper light. Even if we're totally altruistic, we derive benefits from our behavior--a psychic utility, if you will, that gives the super-ego a warm glow. Indeed, the same psychic utility might accompany the behavior of many of us who take great pains to re-cycle and conserve energy!