On populism, elections, & parties
If a party of the right or left seems crazy, it's because they're winning
Always read my friend Henry Olsen on elections! He’s got a very good piece on the warning signs for conservatives, across Europe, with some examples from Asia & South America, too. Of course, this piece on 2021 elections should be followed by one on countries that have elections in 2022, which wold offer more evidence that the center is cracking up—not that it’s been destroyed or is collapsing very quickly, but that it’s not recovering its strength anywhere, after at least five years of populist attacks. Populists may keep losing, but they are destroying the credibility of the major parties & ideologies, just as surely as they have destroyed their reputation for inevitability or invincibility. This is how a serious man talks about political coalitions:
Americans often wonder why their traditional party system seems to be dissolving into a fractious ungovernable mess. The answer is simple: The entire developed world is experiencing the end of the stable party systems built to answer the political questions posed by the ends of WW2 & the Cold War. New political questions always lead to new political coalitions, & neither the United States nor the rest of the world is nearing the end of this global political realignment.
Henry might not be able to write on future elections—the need to have plausible, short-term polls means one cannot, as a professional, talk about the future. But the evidence he gives of realignment is as much about the past as it is about the future: Great changes have already taken place in society, the economy, foreign affairs, &c., events are unfolding, leading to political changes. We are free to ignore reality, but not to escape events. Should we decide to face events, we would learn that we are not free, however, to choose what we will, precisely because we are to a significant extent compelled by the electoral & party systems we have, by the habits of mind of peoples & elites, & by these great social changes. The key to educating politicians now is to point out the avenues for victory opened up by populism; the avenues for a career opened up by the cracks in the governing consensus of the elites, elected, appointed, & self-appointed. From now on, to be conservative is to speak for the poorer majority, not for the richer minority, which is everywhere liberal.
The key to educating opinion, as opposed to improving electoral tactics in specific cases, is to point out the vast surge in democratic unrest. The unhappiness, the loss of tranquility is something I’ve not seen in my lifetime—I think only the Nixon re-election is comparable in terms of popular hatred of elites. This time, however, the popular mood, though dark & uncertain, is bipartisan—not even the vast increases in turnout in the 2020 elections could make the difference, because the party system & the electoral system in America are working at cross purposes. Liberals claim America is undemocratic because the Senate gives the GOP control of many more underpopulated states, that is, places liberals would hate to live; further, this means the GOP gets more electoral votes, too, by adding up small states, each of which brings two electoral votes simply because they have Senators. This is a reminder that the Constitutional arrangement hangs together, but cannot be made neutral to partisanship, since the country-city or center-periphery strife is as old as politics, which in America is usually known as coastal elites v. heartland patriots. Conservatives reply that liberals only complain about these things when they lose; true, but not likely to matter without a neutral arbiter of hypocrisy. Indeed, people who complain about hypocrisy tend to be losers, for obvious reasons—only if you are lying for advantage can such complaints get the necessary support, publicity, & money to matter. Conservatives who care about the Constitutional arrangement, however, should learn that the problem is not the Senate—it’s the extra-constitutional electoral system, with primaries, & then TV advertisement replacing politics. The Constitutional arrangement cannot be restored without fixing this problem. If conservatives turn out to be silly cowards, we will learn that the Constitution is much easier to change than the technologies we use & the prejudices of our elites; if conservatives wish to be brave & clever, they must restore the primacy of the Constitution over these extra-legal arrangements, which would mean, inter alia, breaking the hold of the lawyers over the Constitution. We will be forced to this decision, because primaries do enough damage to the party elite so that it cannot control elections, but not enough so that the people in a community simply replace the party for nomination purposes, which woul leave the party only the job of managing the general elections. Instead, our inbetween situation has the weaknesses of both factions, but the strenghts of neither, & the conflict between people & party is simply arbitered by money, advertising, & such things as celebrity. Neither side is satisfied, whatever the result, & the consequence is a paralyzing hatred, neither side willing to help the other to a victory it would experience as a humiliation, both sides preferring a defeat that can save their reputation; the GOP is apolitical because that’s the only possible compromise between elites & populists who hate each other; doing nothing is not a long-term solution, but there is no long-term solution that’s at all attractive now. It’s much easier, accordingly, to imagine the party being officially destroyed than restored. Shocks like Trump using TV to bypass the party elite are not decisive; the party elite’s sabotage of Trump proves that, but also proves its own weakness. So the GOP is stuck in a situation where neither primary elections nor party elite selection decisions have much to do with their own electorate. As partisan factions who hate each other, they even end up not caring about or resenting the majority of the electorate, which is rather indifferent to their squabbles while being altogether in a rebellious mood. Only by taking control of the polling & TV middlemen in political communications can conservatives break the paralysis—until then, the official citizens of America cannot really be citizens at all…
We are in the process of learning that the politicians we have are fake & that the parties we have are incredibly weak, however arrogant. They are neither capable of preventing populist attacks nor of integrating populism in their elite structures. This is first a problem of recruitment, which is as old as an oligarchy or aristocracy marrying their daughters to aspiring achievers who lack pedigree &, therefore, authority. Party elite behavior in the GOP in 2016 & in the Democratic party in 2020 revealed that failure of recruitment—we are going through a period where neither victory nor defeat can produce new politicians; this decadence was just as obvious, if in an opposite way, in the shameless ambition of various non-entities cluttering up the stage out of contempt for party, electorate, & the presidential office. Both dynasty, cabal, & institutional education have failed as recruitment strategies in both parties, again revealing the national problem. You can find billionaires in America, but not politicians! The parties, unfortunately, are weak & corrupt beyond this problem of perpetuation—their inability to persuade voters that they have something to offer is only a consequence of an inability to persuade party officials & their staffs to take their jobs seriously. Without coherence at the top, the parties are finding it impossible to get their minions to do anything worthwhile; indeed, only systemic failure can guarantee their existence, since it prevents replacement. This is the second & worse problem, the parties now lack knowledge of politics, which is necessary to put together all the different jobs involved in dealing with elites & electorates. Liberals rely instead of the Democratic party on their reliable control of the most important institutions in America, but this has hardly prevented catastrophes in strongholds like New York & California—they’ve lost one governor already, may lose the other, too, both of whom were national celebrities last year & are now too contemptible for words. Worse, liberals threw out politics for the sake of expert control of the population through the courts, where their control has also been paralyzed. Liberals understand partisan war, but not politics, but neither do conservatives, who seem to leave it to liberal humiliations to create a national rhetoric of hatred of elites, bypassing, strangely enough, their only hold on the electorate—a few big states like Florida & Texas, which have a great reputation, but do little for the GOP, for the middle classes, or for America. As for the obvious political idea, to put together the Supreme Court & federal judiciary with these states on issues that humiliate & cripple liberals, that’s about as difficult for conservatives to understand as the political thought of the Founders.
So in America, as elsewhere, we have elites that are too strong to throw off, because the people still believe them to be in charge; & populists who are too strong to be censored or harrassed, expropriated, arrested. Politics is accordingly paralyzed, but this doesn’t mean events are merciful or even patient. We are ruled by chance.
This, then, is what democracy & liberalism were like when the epidemic came. The discrediting of conservatism was proved by a double incompetence in government—conservatives were first defeated by the liberal principle “Follow the science!”, a bold declaration of slavery, but slavery of a possibly noble kind, slavery to necessity; or to human power. Conservatives were then defeated a second time by failure to govern in those countries where they were in power or to mount an opposition in the other cases. Neither their principles nor their practice gained much public support; liberalism ruined freedom in so many places, which created great resentment, but it accordingly became more powerful—conservatism, on the other hand, discredited itself by failure to be democratic, which in turn created impotence. What must come in the order of things is a madness of the young, who have nothing to tie them to conservatives, but cannot yet reconcile themselves to liberal despotism. This is the price to pay for not having real politicians & competent parties.
The prejudice of our times is liberals. People who say they are populists or conservatives or most anything else are not free of that prejudice & might indeed spend an entire career enslaving themselves to it or assuring its victory out of envy. But we no longer have any reason to believe liberals can be educated concerning politics.
Henry & I have talked a couple of times about the major mistakes people on the right make in not anticipating these political changes that have become so obvious they are fields of sociological study abundant in data. Of course, however, wonks have no idea about politics & politicians simply are too confused to have the daring to learn what they could do. Here are our podcasts on demographic changes in American elections:
& also on Henry’s early prediction that 2020 would see vastly increased turnout—popular anger was a reaction to elite corruption & incompetence, but as we now know, this vast democratic surge changed nothing. We also talked about how incompetent the GOP is in preparing for a high-turnout election, with all the bureaucracy & management involved in so many complicated local arrangements… So there you go—the facts are not enough, voting is not enough, thinking clearly about politics & showing politicians which way to go is also necessary, if we’re going to achieve anything worthwhile:
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There's a lot of nuggets in here! And the Olsen piece is an impressive collection of info. But from my perspective there are some problems, in terms of a) a not-adequately acknowledged shift from the American to the international in Titus's piece, and b) in terms of common vocab used by both Olsen and Techera which, IMHO, is becoming outdated. (Outdated at least with me, myself and I!) In this comment let me address a).
Titus's first six paragraphs contain many insights about the American situation, and I'm particularly struck by the one about our "elites being too strong to throw off." I am in basic agreement all through that, and learning a thing or two. The problematic shift from the American to the across-the-board occurs in this sentence, where official nation-by-nation definitions of what "conservatives" are in various European or Latin American nations are applied to what conservatives are up to in America: "Conservatives were then defeated a second time by failure to govern in those countries where they were in power or to mount an opposition in the other cases. Neither their principles nor their practice gained much public support; liberalism ruined freedom in so many places, which created great resentment, but it accordingly became more powerful—conservatism, on the other hand, discredited itself by failure to be democratic, which in turn created impotence." That's a kind of broad statement that anyone familiar with the difficulties of comparative politics and cross-borders political-trend analysis ought to be very wary of making. I mean, apply that statement to the Trump admin, which was staffed, after all, with quite a few real and putative conservatives. Or apply it to DeSantis in FLA. Does it work? Did Titus mean to suggest its application to those cases? Or is the category "conservative" here only meant to apply to party-creatures like McConnel? But even in that case, isn't that yesterday's party? Olsen is even more inclined to apply cross-borders definitions of "conservatives." The CDU and Merkel are conservatives by his usage. Or, he'll resort to "traditional conservatives," which doesn't signify traditionalist social conservativism, but rather, the party that has traditionally been identified as the conservative one in such-a-such a nation for the Post-WWII period. And he'll call their opponents to the right "right-wing populists." But...what if they are the true conservatives? At least the conservative-populist groups that remain dedicated to democracy and natural rights? How to distinguish them from groups and figures (such as Duterte in the Philippines) that are in some sense populist and yet clearly-despotic and clearly-illiberal? ( A task that won't be helped by the way all the supposed authorities, such as Democracy House, confidently insisting that Orban and PiS are illiberal, despotic, etc.?)
Carl, you are a careful reader! I hope people pay attention to your objections. Some I can answer: If you ask me, was the Trump administration impotent during COVID? Yes! He ended up ruled by Fauci more than ruling...