Populism

Between 1980 and 2008, inclusive, there have been eight presidential elections.  The Republicans have nominated five presidential candidates — Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain.  During the same time, the Democrats have nominated seven presidential candidates — Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.

The middle-class Republican candidates — Reagan and Dole — have been outnumbered by the candidates born into the social elite — the two Bushes and McCain.  George Herbert Walker Bush’s father, and George W.’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a wealthy Connecticut senator, whose own father, Samuel Prescott Bush, was a rich steel and railroad company executive.  John McCain’s father and grandfather were both four-star admirals.

Among Democratic presidential nominees in the same era, only Kerry — related to the wealthy Forbes, Winthrop and Dudley families of the Northeast — could claim anything like the pedigree of the Bushes.  If it takes three generations to make a gentleman, or even two, Al Gore doesn’t qualify as upper class.  His father, who preceded him as a senator from Tennessee, came from a modest background and received his law degree from the Nashville YMCA Night School of Law.  The other Democratic nominees in the 1980-2008 period came from middle-class backgrounds, like Barack Obama, the son of two college professors.  Bill Clinton was born into the lower middle class.

The plot thickens further, when Republican denunciations of government as tyranny are contrasted with the multi-generational commitment to public service on the part of Republican presidential candidates.  Samuel Prescott Bush, who served in the government during World War I, founded a dynasty that has produced a Connecticut senator, Prescott Bush; a Texas congressman and president, George Herbert Walker Bush; a Texas governor and president, George W. Bush; and a Florida governor, Jeb Bush.  John McCain, as we have seen, is the heir to a family tradition of military service.  Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is the son of George Romney, who was governor of Michigan.

So much for pork-rind populism.

The mystery deepens even further.  In the 19th century, the Republican Party was founded by Abraham Lincoln and others, devoted to the Henry Clay’s idea of the “self-made man.”  But in spite of conservative rhetoric about small business, today’s Republican economic orthodoxy does not promote the interests of entrepreneurs or industrial capitalism.  Instead, it promotes the economic interests of rentiers — families with inherited wealth and Wall Street investors — the kind of people who make money in their sleep, in the words of the 19th-century classical liberal economist J.S. Mill, who despised them.

The GOP crusade to abolish the estate tax — the “death tax” — does nothing for American business in general, even as it chiefly benefits the trust fund babies of a few super-rich families.  A lower tax rate for capital gains than for earned income means that the idle rich, and the hedge fund managers who manage their assets and are taxed at the capital gains rate, pay a much lower tax rate on their income than the majority of Americans who depend on wages or professional fees for a living.  Self-made entrepreneurs?  Hardly.

Nor does Republicanomics serve the interests of captains of industry.  If the Republican economic plan were drafted by CEOs of American-based companies that actually make things, rather than rearrange money, it would not necessarily please liberals but it would bear little resemblance to the rentier-friendly plans pushed by the Wall Street right.  The emphasis would be on a permanent R&D tax credit, lower corporate taxes, depreciation allowances, public infrastructure investment, policies to lower the costs of energy and other inputs, dollar devaluation and other policies to promote the inshoring of production in America.  Genuine captains of industry would not assign priority to estate tax relief and low capital gains taxes for the benefit of the trust fund set like the Bushes and Romneys.

The conclusion is inescapable.  The Republican Party is not really a pro-business party at all.  It is a pro-hereditary wealth party.  Its platform serves the interests of those few Americans who are born into wealth and seek to preserve their fortunes, not those who start new companies or invent new technologies.  Naturally, therefore, the party’s presidential candidates are chosen nowadays from among the pedigreed, hereditary social elite who are the chief beneficiaries of its policies.

How is it, then, that the party of old money has succeeded in winning the vote of the white working class since Nixon and Reagan?  To understand how this could occur, we need only look at American history.

In the 19th century the Jacksonian coalition, then identified with the Democrats beginning with Andrew Jackson, was, like the Republican Party today, based on an alliance of white Southerners and Southwesterners with working-class whites in the North.  Like today’s neo-Jacksonian Republicans, the original Jacksonians posed as the champions of the common man, denouncing government tyranny and privilege.

But Jacksonian common-man rhetoric was a camouflage for the interests of the most parasitic rentier elite in American history: the Southern slaveowners, including Andrew Jackson himself.  The rentiers of the plantation South were allied with Northern crony capitalists — businessmen and bankers who sought to loot the public domain by means of what today would be called “privatization.”  That is why the Jackson administration destroyed the Bank of the United States, a quasi-public agency that was the largest corporation in the country, and distributed its financial assets to “pet banks” allied with Jackson and his cronies.  The modern equivalent would be the privatization of Social Security and Medicare and the diversion of their vast revenues into private hands, which, of course, is the centerpiece of the Republican economic agenda for America.

Old or new, Jacksonianism has always combined the pretense of egalitarian rebellion against privilege with the reality of domination by upper-class rentiers and crony capitalists.  In the 21st century as in the 19th, the Jacksonian oligarchs divert the attention of their yeoman followers from what is going on by means of military jingoism (Jackson bellowed at France, today’s Republicans threaten Iran).  Central to the Jacksonian tradition is the exploitation of paranoid fears of federal tyranny, combined with dark undercurrents of racism (witness Ron Paul’s recent denunciation of the Civil Rights Act and the blacks-on-welfare trope cynically deployed by Gingrich and Santorum).

Can the Jacksonian trick of enlisting the white working class in the service of hereditary wealth and crony capitalism work again?  Why not?  It has worked before.

The changes that do take place are often the opposite of those that majorities of Americans want. Most Americans want Social Security to be strengthened and American manufacturing protected. But the conversation among elites inside the Beltway-New York bubble is about cutting Social Security and more one-sided “free trade” deals with mercantilist nations that, unlike the U.S., protect and promote their domestic industries.

Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.

This situation is not the result of a sinister conspiracy by a single, unitary, all-powerful and diabolical elite. The origins of the disconnect are structural. The mass membership organizations that once represented ordinary Americans at the state and national level have been replaced by elite organizations that raise their money from a small number of billionaires rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of dues-paying members.

Compare the United States of 1950 with the United States of 2010. In 1950, many regular Americans belonged to the political parties, which were still federations of city, county and state parties. A third of the private sector workforce belonged to private sector unions, which were also organized as federations.

Mass membership organizations were important in the nonprofit sector as well. Local chapters of organizations like the United Way were part of state and national federations.

In the last half-century, as scholars like Robert Putnam have shown, these civic armies have more or less collapsed and have been replaced by small, elite organizations that specialize in raising money from a shrinking number of Americans who monopolize a growing share of the gains from national economic growth. This is as true on the political left as on the political right.

The national parties have long since ceased to be healthy mass membership federations. The national and state parties have been reduced to shells. Most Democratic and Republican politicians are independent entrepreneurs, raising as much money as they can on their own. Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, they go to where the money is. It is more efficient to get a few big checks from billionaires and industry lobbies than lots of little donations.

The parties don’t even bother to recruit non-plutocratic members anymore. I have been contacted by the Democratic Party precisely once in my life. Twenty years ago I received an invitation to buy a seat at a fundraiser for $1,500. Clearly the invitation was a mistake, and I have never received any direct mail or phone calls from the Democratic Party again. I have never received any solicitations from the Republican Party, either. Clearly I don’t make enough money to be of interest to the two parties.

The unions, like the parties, were once mass membership organizations that transmitted the demands of ordinary Americans upward to national elites. No longer. Government and business working together since Reagan have crushed organized labor in the U.S. Fewer than 10 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions. Most union members are public-sector employees, who make easy targets for the faux populists of the right.

Mass membership charities, too, seem to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Do any children still collect money for UNICEF on Halloween? The siphoning of more and more national wealth to ever fewer people makes that kind of approach anachronistic. Why bother with a March of Dimes-style campaign, when you could get the same amount from one check by Bill Gates or Warren Buffett?

The nonprofit advocacy sector is bigger than ever, but it is chiefly funded by rich individuals in a few coastal cities as well as large donor foundations. Progressives complain that the Tea Party movement is an “astroturf” movement — that is, a simulacrum of a genuine grass-roots movement. But practically all progressive environmental or social campaigns are astroturf movements, too. They may do work in Albuquerque or Oshkosh, but if their money is coming from New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles rather than from local membership dues, they are pure astroturf.

We should not idealize the mass membership movements of the past. The old party machines were notoriously corrupt. Unions were often racist and in league with organized crime. And local civic organizations were often snobbish and clique-ridden.

The point is that the existence of these mass membership organizations, along with dues-paying charitable organizations, served as transmission belts bringing demands and values up from ordinary people in local communities to politicians and policymakers at the state and local level. These institutions complemented elections and made electoral democracy work.

If you keep elections but get rid of mass membership organizations, then democracy breaks down, as it has in the U.S. Contemporary American politicians interact with ordinary Americans only at the polls. The politicians do not need the money of ordinary people, as it is easier to raise large sums from rich people and lobbies. And between elections, the advocacy groups of the left and right that meet with politicians and their staffs are usually funded by the rich and large foundations, rather than dues-paying members.

In this new institutional environment, it is only natural that more and more elected officials should pay attention to the rich few who pay for their campaigns and for the advocacy groups that present them with proposals and platforms. Campaigning for office becomes an exercise in telling ordinary voters of the left, right or center what they want to hear and then ignoring them until the next campaign.

Having lost the old mass membership organizations that once represented them in state and national politics, alienated Americans in recent years have found leaders among preachers and media demagogues. This explains why the influence of African-American preachers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and white evangelical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell rose in the 1980s and 1990s, even as religious belief in the U.S. population steadily declined. The churches were, and are, the last mass membership organizations in the U.S. And politicized local congregations have taken it upon themselves to get their members to the polls — a function once performed by local party machines who ensured that the party faithful would vote “early and often.”

The renaissance of the churches in politics, however, appears to be over, perhaps because regular church attendance is dropping, even among Americans who claim religious beliefs. The preachers are being replaced by media figures. The grandchildren of the Americans of 1950, who took their cues from local politicians or local union officials or civic leaders, now look for guidance to Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart. But the flash mobs that Beck and Stewart produced on the Mall in Washington are no substitute for member-based organizations. Politicians have no incentive to pay any attention to one-off media events that replace sustained campaigns.

If this analysis is correct, then the crisis of American politics is not a matter of finding this or that philosopher-king to run for office. In the present environment of organizational weakness and plutocratic power, it is not clear that leaders as great as Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt would be able to get things done.

If America is to be rescued, the American people must be mobilized. But in today’s America, the money is mobilized and the people are not.

The different ethno-regional bases of the two parties explain their different attitudes toward populism and statism. The Republican Party’s combination of hostility to the federal government with the rhetoric of populism is a revival of the Jacksonian synthesis of the 1820s and 1830s. From the perspective of Jacksonian Democrats or neo-Jacksonian Republicans, anti-statist populism is a rational strategy.

The Jacksonian Democrats of the 19th century, like the neo-Jacksonian Republicans of the 21st century, have believed, not without reason, that wealthy, educated Northeastern elites will always dominate a powerful federal government and sacrifice the interests of the Northern white working class and white Southerners and Westerners. This fear on the part of Jacksonians, past and present, produces a combination of folksy populism with support for state and local governments, which are less likely to be captured by metropolitan elites who look down on Irish and Italian Catholics in the North and the Scots-Irish in the South.

The strategy of today’s Democratic base is equally rational, given its core constituencies. The post-’60s coalition of minorities that forms the Democratic base naturally favors a strong federal government to protect the civil rights of its members from the bigotry of local racial and religious majorities.

But the same logic that leads the Democratic base to favor a strong central government leads it to oppose the kind of nationalism and populism that, in other democracies, as well as in the United States of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, have been invoked to justify strong, activist national government. Jews, blacks and Latinos, as well as other pro-Democratic minorities like gays and lesbians and secularists, fear that the populism of the white Christian majority, if unleashed, would quickly become xenophobic, intolerant and oppressive. Even an inclusive, non-racist, liberal “melting pot” nationalism is viewed as a threat by those members of minority groups who don’t want their groups to melt away because of intermarriage or assimilation.

This strategic logic explains the apparent paradox that many of the same progressives who call continually for strengthening the central government of the American nation-state also denounce populism and nationalism in America. The interests of the Democratic voter base, rather than philosophical consistency, explain why the same Democrats who favor universal, national social insurance policies also support non-universal civil rights policies like affirmative action and minority redistricting.

Ever since the present party system took shape three decades ago, there have been ephemeral movements that do not fit into the modern Republican pattern of anti-statist populism and the modern Democratic pattern of anti-populist statism. In different ways, Ross Perot and Lou Dobbs represented a third alternative — the combination of populism with a more statist approach to economics. The reward of these mavericks was to be denounced by Republicans for being too statist and to be viewed with suspicion by Democrats because of their populism.

Indeed, the two parties agree that any combination of populism and statism other than their own two patented variants is “fascism.” It is acceptable to be against big government and for big business, or to be against big business and for big government. But consistent populists who oppose both big business and big government are potential Hitlers, according to anti-populist statists on the left and anti-statist populists on the right.

The reactions of both parties to the Great Recession can be explained in part by the strategic calculations of their respective ethnic and regional constituencies. Consider the debate over infrastructure. Progressive Keynesians are quite right that massive public spending is necessary to compensate for reduced private consumption — and that investment in infrastructure would be among the best uses of otherwise idle funds. Most progressive Democrats insist on inter-city high-speed rail as the centerpiece of their infrastructure plans, even though costly, highly subsidized passenger rail would be at the bottom of any rational list of transportation priorities, compared to repairing and expanding the nation’s highways, bridges, freight rail network and inland waterways and modernizing the electric grid.

The chief beneficiaries of high-speed rail would be urban real estate interests, big city governments and the elite members of the disproportionately urban Democratic base who could afford the expensive tickets. There would be little or no benefit to the white working class in Northern suburbs or sprawling Sun Belt cities. It is small wonder, therefore, that today’s neo-Jacksonians reject high-speed rail as vehemently as the original Jacksonians rejected ambitious federal programs of “internal improvements” in the 1830s. Nor is it coincidence that Republicans prefer the present system of highway funding, dominated by members of Congress from small-population states in the hinterland, and tend to oppose the idea of an infrastructure bank that might be staffed by members of the Atlantic seaboard elite.

Then there is the debate over healthcare. Because their base includes the black and Latino working poor, who are disproportionately likely to be uninsured, the Democrats naturally made universal coverage the basis of their approach to healthcare, rather than cost containment, which was a secondary consideration. However, most members of the white working class and middle class have coverage through their employers. Their main concern is with the rising costs of drugs, hospital stays and doctors’ visits. It was therefore relatively easy for conservative Republican strategists to portray Democratic healthcare reform as a plot to raise taxes and cut healthcare spending for white working-class and middle-class Americans in order to subsidize poor black and brown outsiders, including illegal immigrants.

In this year’s midterm elections, Democrats who favor greater federal government activism but are wary of invoking what they view as a potentially dangerous and xenophobic populism are going to lose congressional seats and possibly one or both houses of Congress to Republicans who, in true Jacksonian fashion, combine unapologetic populism with hostility to a federal government that they view as being dominated by racial, regional and religious outsiders. At some point the present party system will give way to another pattern. But in the near future, conservatives who celebrate the people and oppose the central state will be found in one party, and progressives who favor the federal government but fear the dark side of populism will be found in the other.