The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

314 Pages·2020·3.286 MB·English

by  Thomas Frank

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Who shall speak for the people?
Who knows the works from A to Z
         so he can say, “I know what the
         people want”? Who is this phenom?
         where did he come from?
When have the people been half as rotten
         as what the panderers to the people
         dangle before crowds?
—from “The People, Yes” by Carl Sandburg

INTRODUCTION
The Cure for the Common Man
Just a few short years ago we Americans knew what we were doing in the
world. We were going to make the planet into one big likeness of ourselves.
We had the experts; we knew how it was done. Our policy operatives would
de-radicalize here and regime-change there; our economists would float
billions to the good guys and slap sanctions on the bad; and pretty soon the
whole world was going to be stately and neat, a place that was safe for debt
instruments and empowerment seminars; for hors d’oeuvres in the embassy
garden and taxis we hailed with our smartphone. Democracy! Of thee we
sang.
Now we stand chastened, humiliated, bewildered. Democracy? We
tremble to think of what it might do next.
“Government of the people”? When we open the door to ordinary
people—let them actually influence what goes on—they will insist we
make bigotry and persecution into our great national causes.
“Government by the people”? When we let the people have their say—
unmanaged, uncurated—some large part of them will choose the biggest
blowhard on TV to be our leader. And then they will cheer for him as he
destroys the environment and cracks down on migrant families.
Heed the voice of the plain people and all the levees of taste and
learning will immediately be swamped. Half of them will demand that
minorities be consigned to the back of the bus; the other half will try to
confiscate the hard-won wealth of society’s greatest innovators.
SO GOES THE wail of the American leadership class as they endure another
year of panic over where our system is dragging them. They know on some
level that what has happened in Washington isn’t due to majority rule at all,
but to money and gerrymandering and the electoral college and decades of
TV programming decisions. But the anxiety cannot be dislodged; it is
beyond the reach of reason: the people are out of control.
“Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the
highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire like
this. Populism is the name they give to the avalanche crashing over the
Alpine wonderland of Davos. Populism is what they call the mutiny that
may well turn the supercarrier America into a foundering wreck. Populism,
for them, is a one-word evocation of the logic of the mob; it is the people as
a great rampaging beast.
What has happened, the thinkers of the Beltway and the C-Suite tell us,
is that the common folk have declared independence from experts and along
the way from reality itself. And so they have come together to rescue
civilization: political scientists, policy advisers, economists, technologists,
CEOs, joining as one to save our social order. To save it from populism.
This imagined struggle of expert versus populist has a fundamental,
almost biblical flavor to it. It is a battle of order against chaos, education
against ignorance, mind against appetite, enlightenment against bigotry,
health against disease. From TED talk and red carpet, the call rings forth:
democracy must be controlled … before it ruins our democratic way of life.
In attacking populism, the object is not merely to resist President
Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times
some grand showdown of Left and Right. Questions like that, they tell us,
were settled long ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. No, the political
face-off of today is something different: it pits the center against the
periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this
conflict, the side of right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are
agitated, everyone knows this, but the ones whose well-being must concern
us most are the elites whom the people threaten to topple.
This is the core assumption of what I call the Democracy Scare. If the
people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because
something has gone wrong with the people themselves. As Jonathan Rauch,
a senior fellow at Brookings and a contributing editor to the Atlantic, put it
in the summer of 2016: “Our most pressing political problem today is that
the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”1
DENUNCIATIONS OF POPULISM have been commonplace for years; they only
flowered into a full-blown panic in 2016, when commentators identified
populism as the secret weapon behind the unlikely presidential bid of the
TV billionaire Donald Trump. Populism was also said to be the mysterious
force that had permitted the self-identified “outsider” Bernie Sanders to do
so well in the Democratic primaries. Populism was also the name of the
mass delusion that had foisted Brexit on the United Kingdom. Indeed, once
you started looking, unauthorized troublemakers could be seen trouncing
ruling classes in countries all around the world. Populists were misleading
people about globalization. Populists were saying mean things about elites.
Populists were subverting traditional institutions of government. And
populists were winning.
In basing our civilization on the consent of the plain people, it suddenly
seemed that our ancestors had built on a foundation of sand. “Democracies
End When They Are Too Democratic” blared the title of a much-discussed
2016 essay by Andrew Sullivan. An article in Foreign Policy expressed it
more archly: “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant
Masses.”
Then came the unthinkable: the ignorant demagogue Trump was elected
to the most powerful office in the world. Trump’s victory that November
only happened thanks to the Electoral College, an anti-populist instrument
from long ago, but that irony quickly receded into the background. Instead,
the Democracy Scare developed into a kind of hysteria. Across the world
there were panels and convenings and academic projects dedicated to
analyzing and theorizing and worrying about this thing called populism.
The 2017 “global report” for Human Rights Watch was titled, simply,
“The Dangerous Rise of Populism.”2 In March of that year, former British
prime minister Tony Blair rang the alarm with a New York Times essay
titled, “How to Stop Populism’s Carnage.” At about the same time he
founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, an organization whose
website announces that populists “can pose a real threat to democracy
itself.”
Sober citizens were worrying about populism at the Aspen Ideas
Festival. Scholarly types were moaning about it at the annual Prague
Populism Conference. High-net-worth individuals reviled it at the World
Economic Forum in Switzerland. The cool kids deplored it on the plains of
Texas—at SXSW, a festival that originated as a punk rock gathering. In the
Netherlands, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation sponsored another
convening on the subject; the proceedings were described like this:
Populism has become a wide spread phenomenon throughout the world. The danger of their
backward-looking nostalgia for an idealized past, half-truths and fake news stories pose a
threat for free and open societies.
At Brigham Young University a squad of experts on this dangerous
phenomenon were ready to go even before 2016; “Team Populism” (as it
called itself) swung into action with a flurry of policy memos and
innovative statistical techniques. At Stanford, the “Global Populisms
Project,” which is co-chaired by a prominent former member of the Obama
administration, declared as follows on its website: “Populist parties are a
threat to liberal democracy.”
The Democracy Scare was impressively pan-partisan. The liberal Center
for American Progress came together in 2018 with its Beltway nemesis, the
conservative American Enterprise Institute, to issue a report on “the threat
of authoritarian populism” and to outline “the task facing America’s
political elites” as they went about beating it down.
The National Endowment for Democracy, supposedly a nonpartisan
foundation, hosted a launch party for two books dedicated to pumping up
the fear. Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy was
one of them; in it political scientist William Galston announced that
“Populists damage democracy as such.” The People vs. Democracy was the
other; in it political scientist Yascha Mounk wrote that populism is a
“disease.”
And the disease was spreading; it was in fact an epidemic. “There can
no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment,”