Populism

I have been giving the dichotomy between populism and elitism some thought of late, and I'm still not sure I have come to terms with it.   David Ignatius has written a column titled "Clinton should stop pretending she’s not elite," which falls into the category of unsolicited advice to the candidate, and like most unsolicited advice, it may be good, but it may not be the best for the candidate herself.  Ignatius' advice comes in the wake of numerous stories touting Clinton's "populist tone."  CNN, for example, reported that "Hillary Clinton used the first major rally of her second run for the White House Saturday to make a populist case for her presidential campaign, declaring that the goal of her presidency would be to tip the nation's economic scales back toward the middle class's favor."  There are any number of assumptions behind this that may well be true, but are certainly questionable -- that the majority of American's are middle class, that their will reflects the "popular" will, et cetera -- but I will leave those questions behind for a moment and focus on the basic dichotomy, and what I believe to be a false choice, between populism and elitism.  

First of all, a confession.  Though I'm not sure what label to attach to myself, beyond generally "liberal." I am not a "populist."  Although I would like to believe that I favor political policies and stances that would represent a "good" for the vast majority of people, and that I have their best interests at heart, I am also absolutely convinced that the vast majority of people have little idea what is in their best interests.  The Trump candidacy is a case in point.  Although he has run his campaign as a "populist" he is, in the classic sense of the word, merely a self-seeking demagogue running a sales scam on the American people.  His funneling of campaign funds back into his various business enterprises should be sufficient evidence of that, but there is also the growing disgrace of the Trump University lawsuit to provide even more evidence.  The overwhelming appearance that he "bought off" the Florida attorney general with campaign donations earns a shoulder shrug, while the mere possibility that donors to the Clinton Foundation might maybe possibly have earned a "meeting" with the Secretary of State creates outrage.  It is, one supposes, the invidious moral distinction between being the "buyer" and being "bought" with a "more power to you" attitude toward anyone with sufficient where-with-all to be the "buyer."  Indeed, Trump has bragged about "buying" politicians, suggesting that "I've got to give to them, because when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass." One wonders if the American public has been a captive of the monied interests for so long that they exhibit some form of Stockholm syndrome?

Perhaps, perhaps not, but Trump is exactly what he seems to be, an opportunistic demagogue with little or nothing really to offer the American people except an overweening personality formed in extreme privilege and the dubious distinction of being an "outsider" to what many feel is a corrupt system.   He has posed little in the way of specific policy recommendations to purge the system.  Aside from his xenophobic rants, which are more popular among "the people" than we would care to admit, where he has posed more or less specific policies, they do next to nothing for the people.  The Tax Policy Center analysis his tax "policies" reveal that "his proposals would cut taxes at all income levels," which of course is always popular with the people, but "the largest benefits, in dollars and percentage terms, would go the highest income households."  The plan would improve incentives to "work, save, and invest," but the benefit from those incentives would be offset by a reduction of 9.5 trillion in federal revenues, which "could increase the national debt to 80 percent of gross national product by 2036."  It is, as the New York Times characterized it, "a boon for the wealthy," among whom Trump finds his place.  To pay for it, of course, there will need to be dramatic cuts to social safety net programs, which will hardly benefit the people, or cuts to the military.  The latter is unlikely insofar as he has already proposed increases in military spending.  While a kick ass military might serve to bolster national pride in the way that a kick ass football team bolsters university pride, the sorts of foreign adventurism we've engaged across both republican and democratic administrations has done little to bolster, and much to disrupt, our own and the European west's actual "homeland security."  We have become inured to the profits of military contractors and the continuing jingoism those profits promote in the much the same way that we have become inured to the salaries of coaches and the accompanying athletic spending at our universities, which, don't kid yourself, diverts money from actual education.  It has come to seem almost "necessary, given the threat of terrorism, never mind that one could convincingly argue that the greatest recruitment tool of "radical islam," or for that matter any other terrorist threat (to include the more home grown "radical christian" threats) is the US military, the increasingly "militarized" police, and the willingness to use both.  Go team.

I'd hate to think of myself as an elitist, but no matter how much I resist, I am swayed by the board argument of Andrew Sullivan and others who have argued for the Washington elite.  While there is always an argument to be made for democratic checks on the excesses of power and in many respects we need those checks now more than ever, it nevertheless strikes me that our federal government has grown beyond the committed amateur.  Part of the growth in government is no doubt unnecessary bloat, and a rational conservative party that believes in limited government is one of the necessary checks to the countervailing liberal notion that government can solve every problem.  Eisenhower's warnings about the military industrial complex came from a rational conservative ideology worried about the adverse effects of an over-weening military encouraging bloat among defense contractors.  When Mann and Ornstein can proclaim "it's even worse than it looks," and provide a convincing argument that "Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime," we no longer really have a rational conservative ideology or party.   We have what the fictional Will McAvoy called the "American Taliban."  

It is unconscionable, however, on so many levels, that we now have a Republican presidential candidate who is, if one takes him at his word, not only ideologically extreme, but contemptuous of even the barest hints of actual policy beyond his own whim.  His wife was accused of plagiarism during her convention speech, but Trump seems to get a pass.  As Politico reports, "his proposals on reforming the nation’s tax code and improving services for veterans appear to have been lifted almost verbatim from those of primary rival Jeb Bush."   It, of course, gets worse. Politico goes on to point out that on "NBC News’ “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on Wednesday night, Trump told moderator Matt Lauer that he has his own policy to defeat the Islamic State even though he will not say what it is and said recently that he plans to ask his generals to devise a policy in the first 30 days of his term (in the same forum, he asserted that the country’s generals “have been reduced to rubble” and hinted that he might replace most of them)."  That the moderator, Matt Lauer, the likable guy from the morning show, didn't call him out on this astonishing line of bullshit is itself unconscionable and he deserves the backlash he's getting, but it is perhaps even worse than it looks.   If the first step in a Putinesque putsch is to eviscerate the press, which the mainstream media seems to have cooperative done to themselves by treating Trump as a legitimate candidate for office, the second step is to secure the "loyalty" of those who have the monopoly of force, the military and the police.  

Of course, it is unthinkable that Trump, under the sway of someone like Bannon, might want to stage a Putinesque putsch.  It is just too reminiscent of all those conspiracy theories that have swirled around Obama -- literally unthinkable for most of us, but it seems those same republicans have, as they say, "thunk about it a lot."  As reported on MSNBC, Jade Helm 15 "officially consists of a series of training drills throughout the Southwest for about 1,200 special operations personnel, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs," but "conspiracy theorists operating on the fringes of the conservative blogosphere, however, have other ideas about what the exercise ... is intended to do – such as implement martial law, seize Americans’ guns, and imprison political dissidents."  Ted Cruz gave it sufficient credence that he felt it necessary to contact the Pentagon, and TPM reported that "the speculation reached such a fever pitch that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Tuesday asked the State Guard to monitor the exercise so that "that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed."  OK, so we have a state government's military monitoring the federal government's military in much the same way that we monitored the soviets during their military exercises.  It would be unthinkable, except that it wasn't so unthinkable for two prominent government officials, and here one has to suspect that there is more than a bit of projection going on -- that is to say projecting "their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others."

OK, so, we need institutional democratic checks on power more than ever, but then perhaps there is too much of a good thing.  That a significant portion of the American people could bring themselves to vote for the likes of Trump reveals why we may be suffering, as Sullivan would have it, from an excess of democracy.   The mainstream media is complicit.   Part of it is simply "reporting the conflict," the statements each candidate makes about the other with no follow-on obligation to the validity of the opposing claims.  On the upcoming debates, as CNN reports, "over the years, many presidential debate moderators have chosen to simply ask questions and let the candidates fact-check one another, believing it is the responsibility of the politicians to challenge their competitors.  Wallace has already said that he won't fact-check candidates because 'it's not my job to be a truth squad.'" If not the press corps and the media, then whom?  The American people?   They are very unlikely to read the follow up "fact checks" and are left with no more than "he said/she said." In the end, it would seem the prize goes to the more audacious, the more accomplished liar.   Or, to be a bit more charitable, on the presumption that both candidates are audacious, accomplished liars -- a narrative re-enforced by a media that must report "one bad thing" about each of the candidates for the sake of balance -- the prize goes to neither or both.  It leaves the people right where they began, entrenching their support for the candidate that affirms their pre-existing bias with nothing to pop their bubble.  

There is a meme common throughout discussions of Trump, that he has set the bar so low for himself that anything remotely resembling a legitimate candidate gets a sigh of relief that he's pivoting, that he's becoming more "presidential" because, for example, he can read prepared remarks off a teleprompter.  As Chauncy Devaga put it for Salon, "the 24/7 cable news cycle and the media’s corporate culture have fueled an obsession with creating a 'horse race' and a willingness to massage, distort and misrepresent events in order to sustain that narrative. For example, the media continues to manufacture 'scandals' about Clinton’s emails while ignoring or underplaying Trump’s misdeeds, from the buying of political influence and various documented acts of political corruption to his encouragement of election tampering by a foreign power, his questionable business practices and other instances of unethical behavior."  He goes on to say, "in all, this amounts to grading on a curve. Hillary Clinton is an A student being held to an impossibly high standard and punished for minor mistakes. Donald Trump is a D student, at best, who is being marked up to an A minus because the teacher is afraid of his parents." And that isn't a bias?

Beyond the assertions of character, however, Clinton has "expertise," developed through years of "experience" in how to govern.  Anyone who has been in the public eye for 30 years will have a mountain of history for critique, and one should critique it, but the obsessive concern with her email is not a critique, despite the fact that the approximately 14 million invested with no smoking gun, and  the equally obsessive concern with the Clinton Foundation is not a critique, which likewise has not uncovered a smoking gun.  It is a witch hunt, with all the sexist implications of "witch" intact.  If the smoking gun turns up, then OK, but the on-going narrative that the surfacing of additional emails might, maybe, could perhaps possibly reveal that smoking gun, but the notion that one might, maybe, could perhaps possibly get a whiff of spent gunpowder does not mean there was "corruption" at any level.  In the meantime, there is her "record" as a NY state senator, as the Secretary of State, and one should critique both, but the point being, there has been little or no discussion of her record even though there is a record of governance to critique.  

For Trump, there is no record.  He has no experiential expertise in "governance."  On the one hand, in the popular mind that may well be a "good thing," because experience in governance is experience in corruption, but it also assumes that running our country, with the complex structures of our government, is an "entry-level" position -- no experience required.  On the other hand, if one points to his successful business experience, then we should beware.  Being good at one thing does not mean one will be good at everything -- being an excellent mechanic does not mean one is automatically a successful neurosurgeon.  Nevertheless, it  actually is highly likely that he will lead the country the way he leads his business, and there have been plenty of exposes of his actual business record, to include the 2500 lawsuits over his failure to pay sub-contractors among no doubt other things, to bring that into question.  As Heather Digby Parton has more recently pointed out, his "business practices" have extended into his campaign practices.  His policy staff quit,  she writes, in part because he simply ignored them, preferring to plagiarize other republican policy positions, but in larger part because "it turns out that Trump," after making them "sign non-disclosure agreements but didn’t bother to pay them."  Moreover, "these folks are not alone.  Last week Huffington Post reported that Trump hasn’t paid his top staffers either. And some of them are resigning as well.  But frankly, these people only have themselves to blame. Anyone who reads the newspapers should know by now that Trump routinely doesn’t pay people who work for him.  He’s been sued literally thousands of times for non-payment. And nobody should gripe that he’s reimbursing his own [businesses and his own] children tens of thousands of dollars in campaign expenses either.  In every business venture, large and small, Trump gets his 'expenses off the top.'"

This post feels a bit like I'm ranting in the desert, but OMG!  There is a part of me that wonders why the people aren't outraged by Trump.  There is perhaps a reason why Trump holds large scale "rallies."  One cannot doubt that his narcissism needs the affirmation of an adoring crowd, but there is more to it than that.  He needs the mob mentality.  It is core to his success, and why he can seem "statesman-like" when speaking the President of Mexico, but a rabid bat when addressing a crowd in Arizona.  At the risk of being a pop psychologist, his rallies prey upon the characteristics of the "deindividuation" of the mob, and as Tamara Avant put it, "When people deindividuate, they are less likely to follow normal restraints and inhibitions and more likely to lose their sense of individual identity."   She points to behavior at sporting events, or concerts, as benign examples, but the mobs at Trump rallies always seem to be teetering at the edge of violence.  As a comment to her site put it, "I think that the truth of "violent mob" lies not in the cohesiveness of the group but in the anonymity that the group offers. But also the lure of the "mob" is from a sense of individual animus that has found it's common cause in the group."  There is no doubt that his rallies tap into an "animus."  Much has been made of the "disaffected, under-educated, white voter," and "the louder and more conspiratorial the propaganda of the mob for 'individual rights'" -- or perhaps more precisely the perceived loss of one's  "individual right" to racial and economic privilege -- the more it attracts those with an aggrieved sense of a stolen self, a set of grievances that find personal affirmation within the anonymity of a "like minded mob" that can target its scapegoats with impunity, particularly its scapegoat in chief, Hillary Clinton.  We are re-writing the preamble to the constitution to read, in effect, "we the mob, in order to form a more perfect animus, enact revenge, insure domestic division, provide for a common defense against the other among us, promote the welfare of the rich, and secure the blessings of liberty for only our kind and our posterity, do ordain ..."   That is why I'm not a populist, and support an elitist for the presidency.