A rare moment of populism in American politics

Folks, this is something about populism I posted on Ricochet–I started thinking about what some of the members were saying there–what’s at stake seems to me to concern the Reagan coalition, how it is falling apart, & what may be done & expected to happen in future. The discussion brought out two important lines of inquiry. (1) The discussion of the electorate, which concentrated on what’s changed such that the party & a crucial part of the electorate are now enemies. (2) The discussion of the principles of the Reagan coalition, which turned on whether the old fiscal conservatism-social conservatism-national security conservatism can bring together constituencies & connect voters to politicians any more.

This distinction between talking about the electorate & talking about the ideology could also be looked at as a distinction within conservatism, between the way of life & the political principles. Conservatism politically is tied to the GOP; the GOP is supposed to persuade a broad coalition of voters that they have enough in common to vote one man into the White House. The president is the guy who’s supposed to show what the different parts of the coaliation can agree on & pursue politically. But there is a great difference between the part of the coalition that takes politics seriously, in the sense of talking principles & policies more or less every day, & the part of the coalition that has no such concern & is only aware of politics when some trouble forces them to pay attention or when a presidential election takes place. Of course, the people interested in politics, whether it’s their job or not, are the few; the people not interested in politics unless something big happens–they are the many.

Now, people have different preferences & loyalties, even though they’re all conservatives, & they disagree about where to start & how to think about the problems conservatism is facing. That makes for factions even in discussions. The faction focused on what’s going on with the electorate I believe will be winning members. They are not committed to populism, but they are attentive to & even respectful of the people they’re talking about–& without that attitude, what hope is there of understanding what’s going on in this year of unpleasant surprises?

This make sense to me, at least, & I bet that if they were to talk it over, they’d have a lot to say about the kind of people who take their experience of life in America to suggest they had better support Mr. Trump this time around–even, or especially, if they’d never before had any thought that that man might be worth one second of their time.

The people who write on Ricochet are given to discussions of principle & policy–but it’s very important to start thinking about what conservatism means to people from the rest of America. I suppose all Americans tend to think about politics in relation to their own experience, but for most people, it cannot be a common experience to be talking or studying politics! So that’s a great difference.

The populism study group, let’s call the people now interested in GOP politics aside from the institution of the party & the old ideological requirements or expectations, they seem to me to start in the right place, with the experiences & self-understanding of the electorate–their way of life, rather than any ideological interpretation of it. The electorate of the GOP is conservative in the sense that they want to conserve a way of life they’ve long known, inherited through the generations, & always thought of as their own. What they know about America they’re mostly ok with & do not want changed. These are not people who think of themselves or want to think of themselves as steeped in the study of American history, governance, or political philosophy! Their conservatism runs deeper than party allegiance or political speeches, but is at the same time suspicious of political science & uneducated.

In the specific case of the current & former working class, moreover, people who want to preserve their way of life are facing its rapid extinction. An unnatural attraction to conservatism as a way of thinking about politics does not figure among the motives impelling these people to vote GOP. What we may suspect within reason to move them is the anger at the massive social changes imposed by crusading liberalism. Then there are the changes brought about by the famous creative destruction of capitalism–it seems that a large minority of the GOP electorate is far more intimately aware of the destruction part than the creative part. You can imagine how talk about the free market future sounds to them: Drop dead, say wealthy politicians to poor people! In 2016, this minority has managed to persuade the majority of the primary electorate to back a guy who is shouting at the wealthy politicians & the wealthy people who back them that they should drop dead instead.

So there is a very rare opportunity for populism in American politics. There is now an electorate that nationally rejects both major party candidates &, I hazard a guess, thinks these candidates reveal the ugly truth about the parties. What would populist politics mean? It would mean a rejection of the moralism of liberalism, of Progress, of the State, & all that. This electorate has no interest in social justice as progressives understand it or shout about it. But this electorate does want social justice of a different kind. This electorate does not like the free market, which sounds like more tax cuts for rich people & more immigration to compete against poor people in a bad job market. Conservative principles often sound to this electorate like rich people flattering each other that they’re not only doing so much better than the poorer people, but that the future’s going to be even greater for them! This electorate is not an enemy of the welfare state, for complicated reasons, but it is not a child or a fanatic of the welfare state either. This electorate would also reject the moralism of Christianity–again, I hazard a guess–because they do not have a personal experience of religion fostering community among them.

So let’s bring back the three-legged stool. Fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, & national security conservatives. In a way, these are real people; in another, these are principles that bring people together. But let’s not forget what the stool is supposed to present to us: A viable electoral coalition. But if you think about the three legs as constituencies or groups of people, you notice that almost everyone would have to be a social conservative. Whether you’re a church-going Christian or not, the warrior classes of America are very small numbers when it comes to the people who vote GOP. Who else is a national-security conservative? I suppose the GOP as a whole is a more warlike party than the Dems as a whole. But when you come to think about American public life or public discourse–it’s a few think tanks & some part of the press that are national security conservatives. There are the warrior classes; & then some of these upper-middle class groups. Fiscal conservatives cannot be quite as few as the warrior classes–but again, upper-middle class businessmen cannot be lots of people. The political program of fiscal conservatism doesn’t seem to me like it would really be that attractive to everybody else who votes GOP. In some strange sense, social conservatism is really all there is to conservatism. Everything else has to be presented in a way tolerable to the social conservatives or the party falls apart.

The social conservatives who might end up voting in 2016 for a guy whose appeal comes from a populist revolt–they are not for populism or for revolt. They are not Christians, either, if that means going to church regularly, say once a month… They are not staunchly anti-abortion either. It’s not clear what criterion could usefully separate them from other groups & begin to make sense of them in terms of classification. Social conservatives are more or less all the people who vote GOP reliably, without needing some kind of elaborate ideology or argument. They might allow a party to build up arguments about tax cuts, about war, or about other things dear to the educated D.C.-based political class that centers in the GOP. But their support cannot be taken for granted or used to push them around …

I would say, aside from the discussion in the PIT, that it’s of great importance to think of conservatism not as beliefs on which you can rely to get people to do what you want in terms of voting or changing policy–but as principles to which you try to gain assent by persuading people, starting from where they actually are. At this point, the party is in crisis. The people who were supposed to show the GOP, too, can be ethnic; or that it can be cool; or that it is confident about the future–they all went down to defeat because they could not persuade anyone. The governors who were supposed to show that the GOP is the party of getting things done, a kind of political version of business–they also showed they have no idea how to talk to the American people or at least the GOP electorate–or at least the primary electorate! I hope 2016 kills the idea that what the GOP needs is better branding or better messaging. This comes down to saying, political science is the same as rhetoric–or PR / marketing, as it’s called today.

I believe, that’s not so. Nobody’s going to budge this electorate that’s making such a fuss this year–they may never again be important or decisive of the fate of the party; they will lose this year–at least the man they support will. But they’re real people & the ideology of conservatism is obviously not doing much to persuade them. Deeper changes have to be considered.