Senate The rise of populism on the left and right - 1920s part 2?

Which, by extension, is the mob: the demos. And that is who rules twitter. Little twitter mobs. Democracy and populism are intertwined.

And today's technology is facilitating it.

 

I need to go back and read de Tocqueville more - reasonably sure he called out the risk of majority rule and how Americans had a society of equality that shunned learned experts. It's bled out globally, though, this attitude.

"The majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it, not that he stands in fear of an inquisition, but he must face all kinds of unpleasantness in every day persecution. A career in politics is closed to him for he has offended the only power that holds the keys..."

Democracy not only feeds populism; it feeds its own destruction.

lol Marxist

 

deTocqueville was only half right. He wrote as much about republican ideals as realities. We don't live in a Jeffersonian world. We live in Hamilton's world. The global financial system, commercial and military systems are all Hamiltonian.

It's also debatable that our Revolution permanently threw off European style governance as much as the we were told in school. We might have thrown them off during the Revolutionary War, but after our experience under confederation, which just about disintegrated the entire enterprise, we came running back towards a more orderly European-infused system with our Constitution and fiscal-military state.

We just didn't do it precisely and to the degree like France and its professional administrative state. That's what deTocqueville was observing perhaps.

edit:

Speaking of populism and demagogues… someone should mention Huey Long, the so-called Kingfish of Louisiana. Populist and uberdemocratic to the core. Also corrupt and as big a liar as you would ever hear.

 

Shane: I recall an interview of legendary journalist I.F. Stone, in which he stated that upon hearing of Huey Long's assassination, he was elated. While stressing that he normally didn't advocate violence as a political end, he felt that had Long lived, he would eventually have become president, and America's first dictator.

The Kingfish was an endlessly fascinating figure. A Southern politician who never peddled in race-baiting (in fact, he was a hero to many Blacks), who bolstered the lives of the impoverished, who helped drive FDR to the Left...all while being a terribly dangerous man. To this day, he remains America's one and only successful left-wing demagogue.



Also, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi offers a nice rejoinder to the anti-democratic fears expressed in this thread and elsewhere.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...p-another-dangerous-movement-appears-20160630

 

Ineed. All of what you say is what I've found in reading and researching about him. In fact, his demagoguery wasn't just the most successful on the left. I would submit he might be the most successful American political demagogue of the twentieth century. I can't think of someone who matches him on the right.

 

I disagree with the idea that Long could have become president. FDR blocked his path, and then Truman. There's no way FDR would have made him vice president, and FDR looked at him warily at best.

 

grd4, that's kind of the response I'd expect from someone defending the populism of one of the populists mentioned.

The concern is that the voting public is overwhelmed by information they are not trained to process. This is not a radical claim - policy is difficult which is why we have people who obtain university degrees in it.

Going further, we have entire professions - economists - dedicated to the study of the economy. Again, complex.

What we're lamenting is that for people bombarded with information and disaffected by the entire process (largely through seeing their main mechanism for voicing their discontent with policy, the ballot, rendered largely meaningless by the movement to the centre right of all Western parties since the end of the Cold War) are receptive to populists who promise to simply the process, oversimplify it, and do so by suggesting the problems can be attributed to a small circle of elites mistreating the good citizenry.

Tabbibi, in his usual flippant style, fails to recognise this is inherently a flaw in democracy - that an incensed mob can ride roughshod over the institutions set up to protect society and themselves in order to achieve mob justice. This was called out centuries ago by de Tocqueville and should not be disregarded merely because it's convenient to misattribute the motives of people concerned about dangerous demagogues.

 

People have blamed elites, real or imagined(usually the latter), since time immemorial. It's what mobs do.

It is one of the quandaries of an increasingly democratic society: how do you liberalize economically and politically yet still keep it from all flying apart? This Jeffersonian notion of self-government was radical in his time but lionized today, especially by those on the right(although left civil libertarians still cling to this).

It is interesting that the Hamilton play is so successful right now, when people like Jackson and Jefferson, heck the entire American Southern landed gentry, are all on the wane and out of favor. Hamilton and his vision for what the U.S. could become as a commercial and military, republican-imperial power is realized. (Say what? Republican-Imperialism? Yes, that indeed is a real thing).

The danger we might have today is that you now have a very consolidated federal state. Let's face it, most people don't think in terms of states, they think regionally or nationally. They might say "I'm from the midwest" or "the west coast", but they say "I'm a Utahn" or "Californian" much less. States have lost much of their real power and say. It is mostly national and local now. You couple the consolidation with an angry democracy and you might get your demagogue.

 

Can you perhaps couch democracy in terms that don't apply to one country out of many?

 

No.

 

And the fear of "the elites" rears its head, this time in an Op-Ed written by an American for the Guardian:

The writer laments the rise of elitism in the American democracy party. Is her fear justified? Is it imagined? Is it a potential huge disaster as she claims?

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ion-voter-issues-donald-trump-hillary-clinton

 

She ought be commended for conflating two issues she fails to understand.

 

It's not just that though. She doesn't ever provide evidence of an elitism overtaking the democratic party that is her actual headline. I mean, I could guess what she means: Goldman Sachs, corporate influence, big money donors, etc. The question I have is: was FDR an elitist then? LBJ? Jack Kennedy? These people all had some big money donors and support. They all had the party machine in some of the big cities.

So is the party actually becoming more elitist? Or is the economic situation creating scapegoats and the things we don't understand: liberal economics, etc are the ones who take the brunt of the hits?

 

If there's one area of expertise in which experts besmirched the word "expert" , it's economics. Biggest recession in most people's lifetimes, and hardly any expert saw it coming. Hardly any expert knew how to deal with it. I don't think it's far-fetched to say that trust in experts by the general populace got quite a dent there and then.

 

Sorry, economists would predict a collapse in finance markets why?

 

Look, observation =/= agreement. I just think the recession has made people more wary of experts, not how much that's justified.
I'd be the last one to discount knowledge.

 

They're not fortune tellers. But sure there are many professions drawing fire from the working and middle classes, deserved or not.

 

Well therein lies the problem. Economists can only forecast what they know, and given the Ratings agencies - Fitch, S&P, Moody's et al - were complicit in the high risk derivatives being issued without signalling concern to the market, they can't forsee the extent of the debt collapse. Remember, debt in America is ridiculously cheap and it stems from their failure as a nation to have a properly regulated, independent central bank. The governor of the Federal Reserve spends a lot of time trying to work with government; they should have put the rates up 2 or 3 times during the Bush years.

That people don't know this (not you Watto, I mean the slob on the street rejecting authority) worries me.

 

ShaneP: If you have a piqued interest in the growing elitism within the Democratic Party, I'd recommend reading Thomas Frank's newest tome, Listen Liberal! It chronicles the party's slow shift, beginning in the 70s, from an emphasis on economic justice to that of identity politics. It's as fine a summation as any on how and why the New Deal/Great Society party lost its heart and soul.

Here's a link to one of many interviews:

http://billmoyers.com/story/author-...rnie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/

 

Thanks I will look into it. I have a formidable to-read stack right now but am always acquiring new ones.

Have you read Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America? She presents the idea that the Great Society programs enabled the national government to impact local programs to such a degree that they dovetailed straight into the Nixonian war on crime. I haven't read it yet but have it to read. I'm currently reading First Family by Joe Ellis. That's his John and Abigail Adams book.

edit: Sounds like Frank approaches his book from a class perspective so it should be interesting. One thing I agree with him on is Obama's failure to address rising inequality.

 

ShaneP: I'll have to read the Hinton book--it's right up my alley.

The single, finest book I've read this year was David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government. It chronicles how men like Dulles sabotaged FDR's post-war, anti-colonialist vision and pursued the course of Empire, by way of heightening already volatile American-Soviet tensions and, throughout the Eisenhower years, waging cloak-and-dagger operations on nationalist movements/governments around the world (e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo).

It's absolutely chilling, and goes a long way in explaining why America is feared and hated by so many. (For a more tempered read on this subject, check out Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War.)

 

Heh…there are a few really good books on the United Fruit CIA backed coup in Guatemala alone. The Dulles' meddling abroad was a shift away from the FDR and, to a lesser extent, Truman policies in third world nations. I love all of that eras findings.

edit: okay franks book is in my queue.

 

Did you know that war with Japan was partly due to Dean Acheson? FDR allowed oil to be sold to Japan, and then he went away (I think to meet with Churchill, or something along those lines) for a week or two. During that time, Acheson unilaterally made the decision to stop all oil sales to Japan. After he returned, FDR didn't want to reverse such a major decision and left it in place. We probably still would have gotten into direct conflict with Japan, but it became inevitable at that time. Japan felt it had no choice but to conquer more territory for itself.

Acheson was a meddling fool.